Georgia
He noticed me before I made it through the door.
Mandi’s idea, obviously, this hockey house party, delivered Friday afternoon more like a decree than an invitation. "You need to leave the dorm at some point that isn’t for class," she announces, already yanking outfit options from her closet as though the decision has been made for both of us. "It’s a whole social ecosystem you’re missing out on." I hadn’t argued much. There didn’t seem to be a version of the conversation where I won.
The hockey house sits at the edge of campus, close enough to the tree line that I catch the forest breathing behind it even over the music spilling through the open windows. The porch light flickers, moths orbiting it in lazy, drunken loops, and for a moment I consider turning back, telling Mandi I’ve changed my mind, that some quiet excuse about homework would suffice. But she’s already climbing the steps, and some stubborn thread of curiosity keeps my feet moving after her. Inside, the air is loud and crowded and warm in that particular way a house gets when it holds more bodies than it was built for. String lights loop along the ceiling, half of them burned out, giving the room a patchy, uneven glow. Someone’s playlist blasts from a speaker balanced precariously on a bookshelf, the bass rattling a stack of red cups every time it drops.
I’m one step through the doorway, Mandi already peeling off toward a cluster of people she knows, when the pull hits me. The same current from the dining hall, unmistakable now that I’ve felt it once before, some invisible thread running straight through the noise and the crowd to land directly on me. My stomach tightens instinctively, some old animal part of me recognizing the sensation before my mind catches up to name it.
I follow it and find him across the room.
Puck stands near the kitchen doorway, a girl I don’t recognize draped against his side, her hand splayed against his chest, her head tilted up toward him like she’s mid-story and waiting for a reaction. She laughs at something, tossing her hair back, entirely absorbed in whatever version of him she thinks she’s talking to. He isn’t looking at her. He’s looking at the front door.
At me.
His head had already turned before I was fully through the doorway, before there was any possible way he could have seen me arrive through the crowd and the noise and the wall of bodies between us. Like he heard me. Or smelled me. Like something in him clocked my presence before his eyes ever confirmed it. The thought unsettles me more than it should, a shiver working its way down my spine despite the warmth of the crowded room.
Something sharp and unwelcome twists behind my ribs at the sight of her hand on his chest. I hate that it’s there at all, hate that some small, unreasonable part of me cares who touches him or how close she stands. I don’t know him. Not really. Not beyond a broken pencil and burning skin and an argument over a book neither of us has finished. And yet my body seems to have already decided he belongs to some private category I haven’t given myself permission to name.
"Georgia!" Mandi’s voice slices through my focus, cheerful and insistent, and I turn to find her waving me toward the kitchen, a cup already thrust in my direction. "Come meet everyone before you just stand there staring." I force a laugh, grateful for the distraction, and let her tug me forward.
I let the crowd pull me in, trading names I’ll probably forget by tomorrow, laughing at jokes I only half hear. Someone hands me a drink I don’t remember agreeing to; another person insists I try some game involving a ping-pong ball and too many rules to follow. The whole time, some thread of my attention stays tethered to that spot near the kitchen doorway even as my feet carry me farther from it, as if some part of me refuses to fully leave him behind. When the crowd shifts and opens a gap toward the far wall, I choose it on purpose, angling myself into the space rather than letting the current decide for me, some reckless impulse wanting to know if he’ll track the movement.
He does.
The girl keeps talking, her fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt now, some claim staked in the gesture. "You’re not even listening to me," she says, laughing like it’s a game, pressing up onto her toes like she means to win his attention back with proximity alone. His gaze drops to her for half a second, polite, distant, and then slides straight past her shoulder, back across the room, back to me, like she’d never spoken at all. I catch glimpses of her over the heads of the crowd, her free hand gesturing animatedly, her whole body angled toward him as though he’s the only interesting thing in the entire party. He still isn’t looking at her. His attention keeps sliding, again and again, back across the room, back toward wherever I’ve drifted, like a compass needle that refuses to settle on any direction but one. I wonder, briefly, if she notices. I wonder if it would bother her the way it bothers me to imagine it.
It should feel flattering. Instead, my skin prickles, the sensation of being watched by something that hasn’t yet decided whether I’m safe. There’s no comfort in it, only a low hum of awareness that makes it hard to focus on anything else, no matter how hard I try to busy myself with the noise around me.
I make my way toward the drink table eventually, choosing the direction myself this time, weaving through clusters of conversation, murmuring polite excuses as I go, and that’s when I catch him fully, over the girl’s shoulder, close enough now that there’s no mistaking what I’m seeing. He looks at me directly, no attempt to hide it, no polite half-glance he could pass off as accidental if I called him on it.
The look is raw. Unfiltered. My pulse stutters, and the noise of the party seems to drop away for a second, the music and the laughter and the clinking cups fading into some distant hum while the space between us sharpens into focus, the same way it did in the dining hall. My fingers tighten around the cup in my hand, some grounding instinct kicking in even as the rest of me feels like it’s floating.
When our eyes lock, the floor seems to tilt beneath me, some subtle shift in gravity that has no business happening in a crowded house full of teenagers and cheap speakers. Just enough that I feel it low in my stomach, like the first drop of a jump I haven’t fully committed to yet. My breath catches somewhere between my ribs, and for a moment I forget entirely about the girl, the party, the cup sweating in my hand.
I look away first, and I hate myself for it.