Chapter 3 First Dinner

Avery's POV

Footsteps hit the stairs at six on the dot.

I closed my laptop and sat still, listening. A door opened somewhere down the hall. His voice below, low, asking his mother something I couldn't make out. I stood up because hiding on night one would only make morning one worse.

He was already in the kitchen when I came down. Practice clothes, hair still damp. Phone in one hand, fridge door open with the other. He looked up when I walked in.

"You actually moved in."

"Apparently."

He looked back at his phone. "Thought my mother was joking."

"She wasn't."

My mother was already at the stove with Mrs. Ryder. The two of them talked easy, laughed at something I'd missed. Comfortable in a way that made something in my chest twist sideways. I pulled out a stool at the island.

Jaxon set his phone face down.

"You're in the east wing."

"Yes."

"My gym is in the east wing."

"I'll try not to bother your gym."

"I'm up at 5."

"I'm up at 4:30." I opened my laptop. "So we're fine."

He didn't answer. Dinner was set a few minutes later. Mrs. Ryder carried the conversation. My mother filled the gaps. Jaxon moved food around his plate and stared at the table. I kept my eyes on my own side and said nothing that wasn't asked directly.

"Avery, your mother mentioned you build video games," Mrs. Ryder said. "That's remarkable."

"It's mostly still in progress."

"What kind of game?"

"A narrative one. Choices matter. Nothing gets undone." I glanced up. "It's harder to build than it sounds."

"I'd love to see it sometime."

Jaxon looked up at that. Just for a second. I couldn't read what was behind it, and I didn't try.

The rest of dinner went the way I expected. Polite questions, careful answers, the sound of forks against plates filling the space where conversation ran out. My mother told a story about a mix-up at the grocery store, the kind she always had ready when a room needed lightening. Mrs. Ryder laughed for real.

Jaxon didn't laugh at all.

When it ended, I helped clear plates because it felt wrong not to, even though nobody had asked me to. Jaxon carried his own plate to the sink and rinsed it without a word to anyone.

Jaxon lingered by the sink a second longer than he needed to.

"You're not going to eat the rest of that?" He nodded at my plate.

"I'm done."

"You barely touched it."

"I eat when I'm hungry. Not on a schedule." I closed my laptop. "Is that a problem?"

"No." He dried his hands. "Just an observation."

"Keep them to yourself."

He almost smiled. I caught the edge of it before he turned away, and I didn't know what to do with that, so I ignored it.

"Thank you for dinner." I looked at Mrs. Ryder.

"Of course. This is your home now too."

It wasn't. We both knew it wasn't. But I let the sentence stand because arguing with kindness felt worse than accepting a lie.

I went upstairs and got through half a problem set before my phone lit up. A notification from an account I didn't recognize.

The picture was a still from the party video. My face, red and cornered, blown up into a circle. The account name was @avengeAveryBennett. It already had four hundred followers. Someone was running a whole page off my worst moment. The comments split between people defending me and people picking apart my body like I wasn't attached to it.

I closed the app and sat in the quiet.

Down the hall, Jaxon's door clicked shut.

Twenty feet from the boy who called me an inconvenience two nights ago. In a house I didn't belong in. With a video still climbing and now a whole page turning my humiliation into content for strangers.

I thought about the version of myself that existed online now. Nothing like the version sitting on this bed. Nobody scrolling past that account knew I could debug three hundred lines of code before breakfast. They only knew the ninety seconds Madison had given them.

I put my headphones on and pulled up my project files. The narrative engine had a branch I still hadn't fixed, the one where the player chose silence over confrontation and the game looped them back to the start like silence had never been an option.

I worked on it until my eyes burned. It was the one thing I still knew how to control.

At some point I heard water running down the hall. A shower, probably. The house had a rhythm already, even on the first night, and I wasn't part of it. I was just occupying a room inside it.

I shut my laptop a little after midnight. I lay back and stared at a ceiling that wasn't mine, in a bed that was too soft for how unsettled I felt.

Four hundred followers by dinner. I didn't want to know the number by morning.

Somewhere below me, a door opened and closed again. Footsteps crossed the hall, slow, then stopped outside my door. I held still and waited.

Nothing. Just the house settling. I told myself that twice before I believed it.

Somewhere further off, a clock chimed the half hour, faint through the walls. I counted the notes without meaning to, an old habit from smaller apartments where sound traveled through everything. This house swallowed noise instead. I wasn't used to that kind of quiet yet.