Page 17

She paused. On the table, his fingers were furled into his palms, and a splash of red coloured his cheeks. Had she actually affected him?

A shred of guilt fluttered in her chest, but it soon dissolved. Maybe shewasa little snide, but he was worse. He would always be worse after what he did.

She was over this. Over him. At least for today. She stood up, drink in hand and fatigue on her shoulders despite the caffeine humming through her. ‘Let’s just do some research over the weekend then try again on Monday. We’re not getting anywhere with this.’

‘No shit,’ he spat out.

When she stormed out of the café, she was just proud that her iced coffee remained intact, rather than dunked on his head and staining his white tee. She could imagine it, brown fabric clinging to his pecs and tongue jutting out to catch the droplets. The shock as his lips parted, hair flopping into his eyes.

She’d expected to feel the heat in her chest at the fantasy, but it bloomed further south, an invisible string tugging between her gut and her core.Stop. Just stop.

But it felt pointless to even try. She was learning that nothing she did would snuff out this thing with Aiden, whether it was anger or something more. He was unavoidable – inevitable, it sometimes felt like.

Still, she couldn’t let him win.

Not like he had last time.

9

Energetic pop music was already blaring when Aiden and Luc turned onto Cartwright Gardens, strobe lights flashing from Tom’s house and painting the rain-slick path green and purple so that nobody could mistake which house the party was taking place at.

‘Yikes. Is everybody at RACA rich?’ Luc asked. In the end, Aiden had managed to convince them to come, although they’d complained about it the whole walk here. Luc lived on campus, and since they didn’t know their way around London, Aiden had met up with them beforehand to grab pizza. A far cry from student accommodation, the houses along this street bore elegant Georgian facades with creamy white panelling on the ground floor and brown brick above. The black arched doors were flanked by lanterns on either side, and potted plants with pink petals and lush green leaves draped from the first-floor balconies. Aiden didn’t dare admit that, thanks to his maternal aunt owning some of the most sought-after properties in the area, he rented the ground floor flat a few doors down at number 47.

Instead, he answered cautiously, ‘Not everybody.’

A mangled noise of amusement left Luc’s throat, and they nudged him with a sharp elbow as the two of them continued down the crescent-shaped lane. ‘Just you and Tom?’

He didn’t exactly know how to reply to that. Money wasn’t something he’d ever had to give thought to, which he knew was a mark of his privilege, but it also meant he wasn’t sure how to react when people brought it up. Sometimes, he preferred how Juniper handled it: bluntly, without skirting around their differences. He didn’t mind being the rich arsehole as long as he knew it. It would be far worse to be judged as only that, or have friends reduce him to it behind his back, which had happened often at Elmington.

Juniper. He could only assume she’d be here tonight, ready and waiting with some more insults up her sleeve. Maybe he liked that about her, too, even if they were becoming a little too personal for his liking. She was the only person who didn’t feign niceties to get close to Aiden. The only person whose intentions were abundantly clear – even if they were to murder him in his sleep.

‘Have you and Amir decided what your project will be?’ he asked Luc, absently tearing a leaf from its branch through the wrought iron fencing. His fingers never resisted that drive to keep busy. Without a paintbrush or a lump of clay, they were destructive, forever tearing at paper or wearing down the etchings of his thumb ring, or else picking at calluses on his hands until the skin bled.

‘Avoiding the subject.’ Luc tutted, but was gracious enough to move on. ‘No, we are meeting on Tuesday. How about you and Juniper?’ They waggled their brows.‘I am imagining your exhibition to be rather angry and erotic.’

He let out a ‘Ha!’, though his stomach burned at the words. Angry and erotic weren’t too far from the truth, at least for him. Those venomous scoffs she loved to give him made his cock twitch, her glare pierced right into his flesh. It probably made him a masochist.

She was testing his patience now, though. If they had to do this project together, he wouldn’t sit and take all the insults much longer. The way she presumed all sorts of terrible things about him, the way she implied that he didn’ttry…

Yes, definitely erotic, and also definitely angry. He just didn’t know how to change her opinion of him, nor what he’d done to deserve it.

Luckily, the noise of the party was enough to make him forget as they passed through the gate of the liveliest house. They skipped up the low steps, and eagerness hummed through Aiden. Eagerness, and something with a far more serrated edge. Something that left him stopping for just a moment. The last party he’d gone to had been at Elmington, and he’d been miserable in a sea of people who couldn’t see it, didn’t care enough to, at least not until he’d gotten bladdered enough to puke all over the carpet mid-panic attack. What if he lost himself again here?

‘Are you okay?’ Luc asked, blotting the dark lipstick from their mouth and leaving it to stain the pads of their fingers.

Aiden nodded. Swallowed. It wouldn’t be like that again. He didn’t drink to forget anymore. He was finally where he wanted to be, not caught pursuing a degree just to make his dad proud.There was no one else to let down but himself, and that made him freer than ever. ‘Yep. All good.’

He didn’t bother knocking on the door, instead heading straight into a hallway crammed with people. The bitter smell of beer and mingling aftershaves hit him like a wave, and he found himself high-fiving and shaking hands with people he’d never seen before in his life.

And then his name was yelled over the electronic beat of the music: ‘Fuck yeah, Whittaker!’

Tom stood on the stairs, pumping his arms as though he’d known Aiden for years rather than days.

‘Yikes,’ Luc whispered again, and tactfully disappeared into the first door, which Aiden assumed was the living room.

Since he’d been spotted, he smiled and waited for an already stumbling Tom to make it down the stairs.

‘All right, Timmy Tom?’ Aiden teased. Chris’s nicknames for them all seemed to be sticking. Aiden was sometimes referred to asAlby the lads as a tribute to his new name, Alex.