Chapter 4 She Knows

The thing about pretending to date someone famous was that everyone suddenly had opinions about your life.

Not subtle opinions either — the loud, uninvited kind that arrived before you'd had your morning tea and stayed longer than they were welcome. By Friday morning I had received fourteen unsaved numbers in my contact list from people whose names I didn't know, three girls had introduced themselves to me in the bathroom like we were already friends and this was a reunion rather than a first meeting, and my roommate Denise had sat up in bed at seven am with the energy of someone who had been holding something in all night and had finally decided sleep was less important than answers.

"Are you actually dating Zane Carter?"

I had told her it was complicated.

She had screamed into her pillow for a full ten seconds.

I envied her ability to express herself so freely and without apparent self-consciousness. I had never once in my life screamed into a pillow. I wasn't sure I was built for it.

Zane and I had developed a routine by that point — which felt strange to acknowledge after less than a week, but there it was. He'd fall into step beside me on the way to BIO 215 every morning without announcement, we'd sit together in the third row, he'd occasionally lean over to point something out in my notes with the ease of someone who had done this a hundred times, and to anyone watching from the outside it looked completely effortless.

It was not effortless.

Every time he leaned close I had to consciously remind myself — transaction. Tutoring for pretending. A clearly negotiated arrangement with terms agreed upon in a car park. Nothing more, nothing less, nothing that existed outside those specific parameters.

My brain understood this perfectly.

My pulse had not received the memo and showed no signs of doing so.

Keira found me alone on Friday afternoon.

I was sitting outside the science block with a meat pie and the reading for next week's lecture — getting ahead, the way I always did, because being ahead meant never being caught off guard — when her shadow fell across my page. I looked up slowly.

She was even more intimidating up close than she had been around the corner from the library. Tall, polished, the specific kind of put-together that suggested nothing in her life happened accidentally. She was smiling but it didn't reach her eyes — the smile that was really just the face that preceded the actual thing someone had come to say.

"You're Ava," she said. Not a question.

"Last time I checked," I said, and closed my book slowly.

She sat down beside me without being invited, which told me everything I needed to know about how this conversation was going to go and who had decided on its terms before arriving.

"I just want to talk," she said, in the particular tone people used when they wanted considerably more than just talking and considered talking the polite pretense that made the rest of it acceptable. "Girl to girl."

"Okay," I said.

She folded her hands in her lap with the composed deliberateness of someone who had practiced being composed. "How long have you and Zane been a thing?"

I took a bite of my meat pie and chewed slowly — mostly to buy myself time, partly because it was good and I wasn't going to let her ruin it. "A few weeks," I said.

"Because I've never seen you together before this week."

"We kept it quiet."

She smiled tightly. "Zane doesn't do quiet."

She had a point. I kept my face entirely neutral and gave her nothing. "There's a lot you don't know about Zane," I said.

Something flickered in her eyes — annoyance, maybe, or something sharper than annoyance, the specific displeasure of someone who was used to being the most informed person in any given situation and had just encountered an obstacle to that. She looked at me for a long moment, the way people looked when they were searching for the crack in a story.

I looked back at her steadily.

I had sat through enough difficult practical vivas to know how to hold eye contact under sustained pressure without blinking first. Keira Hanson was not a viva panel. She was manageable.

"He'll get bored," she said finally. Softly — almost gently, the way you said things you wanted to sound like kindness when they were really something else entirely. "He always does. And when he does—" she stood up, smoothing her skirt with one clean motion, "—don't say nobody warned you."

She walked away without waiting for a response.

I sat there for a moment. Meat pie halfway to my mouth. The Friday afternoon going on around me like nothing had happened.

Then I took out my phone.

Your ex just threatened me with a meat pie in hand. You owe me.

His reply came in less than a minute.

She threatened you or you threatened her?

I stared at the message.

Why does that matter?

Because knowing you, it could genuinely go either way.

I locked my phone before I could smile at that. Put it face down on the bench. Finished my meat pie with more focus than it required.

He found me after his last lecture.

Fell into step beside me on the path back to the hostels with the ease of someone who had agreed to meet me there, which he hadn't — I hadn't texted him a location, hadn't said anything beyond the meat pie message — but he found me anyway, the way he kept finding me, like it required no particular effort on his part.

"She talked to you," he said. Not a question.

"She did."

"What did she say?"

"That you get bored easily and I should prepare myself for the inevitable heartbreak." I kept walking, eyes ahead. "Very dramatic. Well delivered. I almost applauded."

He was quiet for a moment — the thinking kind of quiet, not the uncomfortable kind. "She's not entirely wrong," he said. "About the getting bored part."

I glanced at him. He was looking ahead, jaw slightly set, something moving under the surface of the usual composure.

"I'm not actually your girlfriend," I reminded him. "So it doesn't really matter either way."

"I know." A pause that stretched slightly longer than necessary. "I just didn't want you to think—" He stopped. Recalibrated. Started again more carefully. "I'm not trying to mess with your head. This is what you agreed to. The terms are what they are. Nothing more."

It was the second time in a week he had said something honest when he didn't have to. When the easier thing would have been to say nothing or deflect or let it pass.

It was starting to become a pattern and I wasn't sure what to do with that.

"I know what I agreed to," I said quietly.

We walked the rest of the way in silence — but it was a comfortable silence, the kind that had no jagged edges, the kind that didn't need filling with words to justify its existence.

Which was, somehow, more unsettling than anything Keira had said.