His presence

The walk back to her room felt longer than it was.

That was the only way she could describe it. The staircase was the same staircase it had always been, narrow and poorly lit and faintly cold at this hour, but tonight it felt like something she had to earn, step by step, with him behind her and the silence pressing in from every direction.

She was aware of him the way you are aware of the weather.

Not looking. Just knowing.

She pushed open her door and stepped inside. He followed. The room, which had always felt adequately sized for one person living carefully, suddenly felt like it had lost half its air.

She set her bag down and turned around. He was closer than she had accounted for.

Before she could speak, his arms came around her from behind, and he held on, not aggressively, not with demand, just held, the way people hold things they are not ready to name yet. She felt his exhale at the back of her neck.

"I don't know," he said quietly, "why you have this effect on me."

She stopped breathing.

Not a decision. Just a fact.

She turned slowly within his hold until she was facing him and he stepped back just enough, his hands finding the wall on either side of her shoulders, and looked at her the way he had been looking at her for weeks now, with that focused, unresolved attention that she had no safe place to put.

"James," he said. Then again, lower. "James."

Like he was trying the name out. Like it didn't quite fit what he was looking at.

"What did I do?" she said. Flat. Careful.

"You know what you did."

"I don't."

"You feel this." It was not a question. "Tell me you don't feel this."

She inhaled slowly through her nose. Exhaled through her mouth. Kept her face exactly where she needed it to be.

"I asked you before," she said. "Are you into boys?"

He made a sound that was almost a laugh. "No."

"You're sure?"

"I have never," he said, with a precision that suggested he had already asked himself this question several times before tonight, "been attracted to a man. Not once. Not before you."

His eyes stayed on hers.

“Think about what you just said,” she told him quietly.

"Think about what your father would say. His lineage. The pack. Everything he has built."

Something moved behind his eyes.

"They won't know," he said.

"Justin."

"They won't." He stepped back and ran a hand through his hair, the brown catching the low light of the room.

"It can just be us. Something quiet. Something that doesn't have to be explained to anyone."

She watched him do it. Watched him construct the logic of it in real time, building a private world where this made sense and no one had to be told and nothing had to be reconciled. He almost made it sound simple.

She looked at him properly for the first time that evening. Really looked.

His eyes were grey. Not the flat grey of overcast skies but something deeper, shot through with blue, the kind of colour that changed depending on what light was available. She had not noticed that before. She filed it away before she could think about why she was filing it.

He was still talking about Patterson.

She blinked back into the conversation.

"His father won't push it through," Justin was saying, settled now on the edge of her bed with the easy comfort of someone who had decided to stay. "The former school pioneers won't allow it. Blue House and White House both. They know the difference between politics and strategy and they won't let the coach embarrass them with a bad appointment. He's new. He'll learn."

He looked at her.

"You're not losing your spot."

She looked at him sitting on her bed in her room in the middle of the night talking about hockey appointments like this was a normal thing that normal people did and felt something she did not have a word for move through her chest and settle somewhere it had no business settling.

"You should go," she said.

He tilted his head. "Probably."

He didn't move.

She crossed her arms.

He almost smiled.

Then he lay back on her bed, one arm folded behind his head, watching the ceiling with the comfort of a man who owned the room. But the comfort didn't last. The mood curdled.

He wanted her to watch.

He began to touch himself, his eyes locked onto hers in a cold, hard stare. When she tried to blink, to vanish into the safety of the dark, his voice cut through her.

"James," he rasped. "Look at me. Don't look away. Look at me."

The air felt thick, like he was stealing all the oxygen. She stayed frozen. A strange, terrifying tension coiled in her gut, but she dared not move. One mistake, one sound, and they would be caught.

She kept swallowing, her throat dry, as his voice cut through the silence.

Eventually, he fell into a deep sleep.

The silence that followed was worse. She lay there, her body shaking.

She didn’t want him there. She stared at the ceiling, her mind already racing, desperate for a plan to get him out the second the sun came up.