~~~~~ Emery’s Pov ~~~~~
My alarm rang the next morning, dragging me out of a sleep that had felt too short even by my usual standards.
I sat up, stretched my arms overhead until something in my shoulder popped, and yawned wide enough that my jaw ached before I finally forced myself out of bed.
I walked to the bathroom on autopilot, brushed my teeth, and took a quick shower.
The hot water did more to wake me up than the alarm had managed.
I dressed in a black hoodie and jeans, tied my hair up into a high ponytail, and grabbed my laptop off the desk, sliding it into my bag along with my phone before heading out of my room.
My mother was already in the kitchen, the smell of eggs and toast filling the small space, sunlight cutting thin gold lines across the counter through the half-open blinds.
“Good morning, Mom,” I said the second I saw her.
“Morning, baby.
Hope you slept well?” she said, looking up at me with a smile that still carried some of the softness from the night before.
“Yes, Mom.” I walked toward the door, sliding my feet into my sneakers, and turned back to her.
“Won’t you have breakfast?” she asked, frowning slightly at how quickly I was moving, clearly not missing the fact that I hadn’t so much as glanced at the stove.
“No, Mom.
I’m good.
Bye.” I opened the door, stepped outside, and pulled it shut behind me.
The morning cold hit me immediately, sharp enough to sting the exposed skin of my face, my breath fogging out in front of me in a thin white cloud.
The sidewalk was still slick with the last of the overnight frost, and somewhere down the block a dog barked twice at nothing in particular.
I tucked my chin into the collar of my hoodie, wishing I had grabbed a heavier jacket, and started the walk toward the bus stop.
My sneakers crunched softly against patches of frozen grass poking through the cracks in the pavement.
I walked quietly, mostly still waking up, my mind drifting somewhere between the essay I still needed to finish and the leftover warmth of last night’s conversation with my mother.
My phone buzzed in my pocket, and I glanced down at the screen without breaking stride.
Calloway.
I smiled before I even opened it, that same small, involuntary reaction I still hadn’t figured out how to stop happening every time her name appeared on my screen.
*Emery: Anything important?*
*Calloway: Yes.*
*Emery: Okay, but where?*
*Calloway: At where we met before I told you about my dad.*
*Emery: Okay then.*
I locked my phone with a smile still tugging at the corner of my mouth, adjusting the strap of my bag as I picked up my pace.
The cold suddenly felt a little less biting than it had a minute ago.
Then I stopped smiling and pinched myself, hard, right through my sleeve.
“Get it together, Emery.
This is just fake dating.”
Except it wasn’t, not anymore, and some traitorous, giddy part of my chest knew that better than the rest of me apparently did, no matter how many times I tried to talk myself back into pretending otherwise on the walk to a bus stop on an ordinary Monday morning.
The bus arrived a few minutes later, mostly empty at that hour, and I took my usual seat near the back, watching the city slide past the frost-fogged window while I turned Calloway’s text over in my head.
*At where we met before I told you about my dad.*
The rink.
The side entrance, tucked behind the dumpsters and the chain-link fence, where she had waited for me, arms crossed against the cold, her jaw tight, and twelve minutes into her father’s fury over a photo neither of us had asked to have taken.
It wasn’t a place either of us had been back to since.
I wondered, watching the bus’s fogged reflection of my own face, whether she had chosen it on purpose.
Some kind of quiet symmetry, closing a loop that had opened with dread and might, this time, close with something else entirely.
I spent the rest of the ride running through possibilities, half of them reasonable—grades, the next tutoring session, some new detail about her father’s continued involvement—and half of them wildly, embarrassingly hopeful, the kind of thoughts I usually kept firmly locked down until I was alone in my own room, not sitting on a public bus with my face doing something I couldn’t fully control.
By the time I got off near campus, the cold had worked its way properly into my hands despite my pockets, and I hurried the last two blocks to my first lecture, sliding into my seat just as the professor started calling roll.
My mind was only half present for the entire hour, already three steps ahead into an afternoon I hadn’t even reached yet.
Priya caught my eye halfway through the lecture, mouthing *what’s wrong with your face* with an exaggerated, concerned expression, and I just shook my head, biting back a smile I apparently hadn’t managed to hide as well as I thought.
I didn’t have an answer for that yet.
I wasn’t entirely sure I had one for myself either.
Just a text, a place, and a feeling in my chest that had stopped listening to reason somewhere around the third week of a job I’d only ever taken for the money.
The rest of the morning passed in that particular blur of half-attention I always fell into when something bigger was waiting on the other side of the day. Visit novelping dot com for the full chapter.
Notes were taken on autopilot, a lab report I skimmed more than I actually read, a conversation with a classmate about the upcoming midterm that I responded to on a two-second delay.
Jordan found me between classes, falling into step beside me with her usual easy energy, her phone already half out of her pocket in case anything worth documenting happened.
“You’ve had that look all morning,” she said.
“The one where you’re technically present, but your brain checked out somewhere around seven a.m.”
“I don’t have a look.”
“You absolutely have a look.
Priya texted me about it during lecture.
We have a whole group chat dedicated to cataloging your looks at this point.
It’s very scientific.”
“That’s deeply concerning.”
“It’s affectionate concern,” Jordan said, entirely unbothered.
“So, what’s the look about?
Chemistry test?
Or something else with a certain hockey captain?”
“I plead the fifth.”
“Noted for the record.” She grinned, peeling off toward her own building with a wave.
“Text us if it’s the second one.
We’ll want details.”
I promised nothing, mostly because I didn’t have anything solid to promise yet, just a place and a time and the particular, dangerous kind of hope I hadn’t let myself fully feel in longer than I could remember, not since long before rent numbers and tutoring stipends had taken over most of my waking thoughts.
By the time my last class let out, the cold had eased slightly with the sun higher in the sky, and I found myself walking faster than necessary toward the athletic complex.
My bag felt heavier than usual with a laptop I hadn’t touched all day and an essay still sitting half-finished from the night before.
The campus had thinned out by then, most people already gone for the afternoon, just a scattering of students crossing the quad in twos and threes, their breath fogging in the thin winter light.
Whatever Calloway wanted to tell me, important enough to specify a place instead of just texting it outright, I had the distinct, unsettling feeling that whatever it was, it mattered a great deal more than a chemistry worksheet ever had.