Chapter 5 Not Supposed To Feel Like This

The first time we had to actually act like a couple — like properly, in front of people who were watching and would form opinions based on what they saw — was at Bello's birthday get together on Saturday night.

I hadn't planned to go.

Zane had texted me at four pm with the energy of someone who considered the matter already settled.

Bello's thing tonight. Need you there. 8pm.

I had stared at that message for longer than it deserved.

Then I typed back: That's not a request, that's a summons.

Please. A pause that lasted just long enough to feel deliberate. Then: Ava.

I didn't know why him using my name did anything to me. It was just my name. People used it every day — lecturers, the woman at the cafeteria counter, Denise approximately forty times before noon. It was just a name. It shouldn't have done anything.

I went at eight pm.

Denise spent forty-five minutes on my appearance, which I protested for the first twenty and then quietly surrendered to because she had a vision and there was simply no negotiating with Denise when she had a vision. She approached it with the focused energy of someone who considered this a professional obligation.

"You're going to a party with Zane Carter," she said, like this was a matter of national significance that required appropriate ceremony. "You're not showing up in your lecture clothes."

"I show up everywhere in my lecture clothes."

"Not tonight you don't."

I ended up in a black dress I'd forgotten I owned — it had been living at the back of my wardrobe since the beginning of first year, waiting for an occasion I'd never found — and earrings Denise lent me that were slightly too fancy for a student house party but she insisted were exactly right and I had run out of the energy required to argue.

When I stepped outside and saw Zane leaning against the wall waiting for me, hands in his pockets, looking at his phone with the unhurried ease of someone who had been there long enough to be comfortable — I told myself the thing my stomach did was hunger. I hadn't eaten properly since the meat pie incident and that was a perfectly reasonable explanation that required no further examination.

He looked up when he heard me.

Looked at me for a second without saying anything — a full beat of silence that I had no idea what to do with.

Then: "You look different."

"Good different or bad different?"

"Just different." He pushed off the wall and we started walking. "Good."

I didn't say anything to that.

I should have said something to that. A deflection, a joke, anything to move the conversation past the moment. Instead I said nothing and we walked and the compliment sat in the air between us doing exactly what I didn't want it to do.

Bello's place was loud and warm and packed with people who all seemed to know each other and the full history of each other's lives except me, the one person who had arrived as a supporting character in someone else's story and was trying to play the part convincingly.

The music was good though — the kind that got into your bones without asking permission and made the room feel smaller and warmer than it actually was.

Zane kept a hand on my back as we moved through the crowd. Practical, mostly — it was genuinely difficult to navigate without losing each other in the press of people — but practical didn't explain why I was so specifically aware of exactly where his hand was at every moment. The warmth of it. The weight of it. The way it moved slightly when the crowd shifted, adjusting without drawing attention to the adjustment.

Transaction, I reminded myself firmly. Tutoring for pretending. Clearly negotiated terms.

His hand stayed warm against my back and my brain stayed very busy ignoring what that felt like.

We found a spot near the wall with Zane's friends — Bello himself, who was the specific kind of person a party naturally organized itself around; a tall guy named Kofi who laughed at everything with his whole body and made it impossible not to laugh with him; and a quiet girl called Serena who I liked immediately because she was also clearly there under some form of social obligation and we recognized that in each other within the first thirty seconds and bonded over it without needing to say so out loud.

Zane stayed close all evening. Not suffocatingly close — not the performative closeness of someone making a point. Just present. Checking in with a look occasionally. Making sure I had a drink without making it obvious he was making sure. Once leaning down to say something quietly in my ear just because Kofi had said something ridiculous and he'd wanted to make sure I hadn't missed it.

It felt natural in a way that made me deeply, specifically uncomfortable.

Around ten Keira arrived.

I felt the shift in Zane before I saw her — something in his posture, subtle and quick, like a door closing somewhere inside him. He straightened slightly. His hand, which had been resting loosely near my shoulder, moved. Found mine. His fingers laced through mine with the ease of something practiced, like this was just what hands did when they were near each other.

It was not nothing.

It was very specifically not nothing.

"Breathe," he said quietly, looking straight ahead at the room.

"I am breathing."

"You stopped for a second."

I had. I was aware that I had. I chose not to confirm it.

Keira's eyes found us across the room — the specific efficiency of someone who had walked in looking for something and found it immediately. She looked at our hands. Something moved across her face, quick and controlled, the expression of a person who had decided in advance not to react and was executing that decision. Then she looked away and laughed at something her friend said like she hadn't seen us at all.

Zane's hand didn't loosen.

Neither did mine.

We walked back at half eleven.

The night air was cool and sharp after the warmth of the party — the campus quiet around us, the specific late-night stillness of a place that had sent most of its people to bed. Our hands had separated somewhere between leaving the house and reaching the main road without either of us acknowledging the separation, but I could still feel the ghost of it. The specific warmth of where his fingers had been.

I hated that I could still feel it.

"You did well tonight," he said.

"I didn't do anything."

"You stayed. You smiled at the right times. You talked to Serena for forty minutes about plants apparently."

"She's doing botany," I said. "It was genuinely interesting."

He glanced at me sideways — the quick look, something in it I didn't examine. "You're the only person I know who goes to a party and makes a real friend."

"Is that a bad thing?"

"No." Something quieter in his voice than usual. "It's really not."

We stopped at the fork — the same spot, same yellow light, same distant sounds from the hostels — and stood in the particular way of two people at the end of an evening that had asked more of them than they'd planned for.

"Zane," I said.

He looked at me.

"When Keira moves on—" I started.

"Yeah."

"This ends. Right?"

He held my gaze for a moment that went on just slightly longer than the question required. Something in his expression that I couldn't fully read and told myself I wasn't trying to.

"Right," he said.

I nodded. Turned to go.

"Ava."

I looked back.

He opened his mouth. Closed it. Shook his head slightly — the small movement of someone who had decided against something at the last moment. "Nothing. Goodnight."

I went inside.

Lay in the dark for a long time with Denise's steady breathing across the room and the ceiling above me and the specific quiet of a night that had too many things in it to sleep easily.

When Keira moves on, this ends.

I'd said it to remind myself. To draw the line clearly in the dark where no one could see it and hold it there.

So why did it feel less like a relief and more like something quietly breaking?