Page 6

“I’m not odd. I’m delightful,” I say, and keep typing, because the case summaries genuinely do need doing and I refuse to let Sebastian’s need to be important distract from my actual work.

He tries twice more, smaller jabs. Something about whether I ever learned to use a smartphone properly. Something about whether the cult had a leader everyone worshipped. I deflect each one with the same easy cheer.

“You must have missed out on so much, though,” he says, when the jokes stop landing the way he wants. “Normal school. Normal friends. Bet you didn’t even know what half the stuff on telly was when you finally left.”

“I caught up fine,” I say, and it’s true, mostly, though there was a strange stretch of my first few months in Bristol where I genuinely didn’t understand why everyone kept quoting strange phrases at each other like it meant something. Once I saw the TV shows and movies they were from, everything made sense again. “People adapt. It’s not the tragedy you’re clearly worried it is.”

“I’m not worried about anything,” Sebastian says, almost offended by me giving him the benefit of the doubt. “Just saying. Must be nice, being this cheerful about it. Bit unsettling, honestly. Like you’re hiding something.”

That one lands a little closer than the others, close enough that I have to work slightly harder to keep my smile easy, though I don’t think anyone at the table clocks quite how much effort it takes. Freddie and Hugo, who might be Rufus, are grinning at each other now, sensing blood. Waiting to see if this is the moment I finally crack properly and give them the reaction they’ve been fishing for.

I don’t give it to them. That’s not who I am, and I’m not about to change for Sebastian and his rowing team energy.

I feel the room get colder.

Properly this time, not the small precise chill from before, something heavier, something that presses at the edges of the air like a held breath about to be let out all at once. The lights overhead flicker, once, twice, and Hugo, who might be Rufus, glances up at them with a small frown before deciding it’s not worth mentioning.

I don’t turn around. I don’t need to. I know exactly what that particular cold means, and I know exactly who it belongs to, and for the first time since I’ve known him, I think he might actually be properly, seriously furious.

“Don’t,” I murmur, so quietly that nobody at the table hears it over their own chatter, “hurt him. He’s just a silly boy.”

The cold doesn’t fully leave, but it eases, reluctantly. The lights steady themselves overhead, like something’s decided, grudgingly, to master itself for my sake rather than its own.

Sebastian, oblivious to how close he just came to something truly horrifying, spends the rest of the session in reasonably good spirits, apparently satisfied he’s landed enough small jabs to call the afternoon a win. I finish the case summaries. I do them properly, thoroughly, better than anyone else’s section if I’m honest, because setting a good example is a wonderful motivator and I’ve never seen the harm in letting it be useful.

When we finally pack up, the uni is busy, the corridor outside the little study room packed with students filtering out of afternoon lectures. Sebastian leads the way, Freddie and Hugo who might be Rufus trailing behind him, still laughing about something. Probably me.

I feel something happen before I properly see it. A faint brush of cold at my side, quick, deliberate, gone again in an instant, the sort of thing you’d miss entirely if you weren’t already accustomed to it.

And then Sebastian’s trousers and underwear hit his ankles in the middle of the crowded corridor.

There’s a beat of pure, stunned silence, the kind that only exists for half a second before everyone around him processes what they’re actually looking at. Then the corridor erupts. Laughter from every direction, phones already coming out of pockets, Sebastian scrambling, red faced, grabbing for underwear and trousers that have apparently decided to abandon him entirely. The elastic of his boxers is completely gone. His belt lies uselessly on the floor beside him, cut clean through in a way that will take him a very long time to explain to himself satisfactorily.

He goes down trying to pull them back up, seemingly catching his own foot where his shadow is a little darker than it should be. He lands flat on his front in the middle of the corridor, his surprisingly hairy bare backside on full display to what feels like the entire law faculty.

Freddie and Hugo, who might be Rufus, are laughing too hard to help him up. Somewhere further back, a lecturer I don’t recognise is trying to shepherd people past while visibly fighting the urge to laugh herself. And a girl near the noticeboard is narrating something to whoever’s on the other end of her phone in a delighted whisper.

Everyone around me is looking at Sebastian. Every single person in that corridor, phones raised, laughter ringing off the ceiling, eyes fixed on the one spectacle in the room.

I look for the shadows instead.

There’s a narrow gap between the noticeboard and the fire door, barely wide enough to hide anything at all, and it’s there I find him, more visible than I’ve ever seen him in a crowd like this, like he’s stopped bothering to hide properly, too pleased with himself to manage it. Amber eyes glow in the gloom, and his mouth, that mouth I’ve hardly ever seen do anything but be quiet and solemn, is curved into something wide and unmistakable and entirely delighted.

A grin. A proper one. Not the faint amusement I’ve caught glimpses of before, not the quiet smugness he wears when he’s pleased with himself, but something wide open and unguarded, like he’s forgotten, just for a moment, that he’s meant to be a monster.

I clap a hand over my mouth, not quick enough to stop the giggle that escapes before I manage it.

“You,” I whisper, delighted, scandalised, trying and failing to arrange my face into something more appropriate, “are an absolute menace.”

The grin doesn’t fade one bit.

Sebastian scrambles upright, hauling his trousers into some semblance of decency, face the colour of a very ripe tomato. He doesn’t look at me once. Not because he suspects anything, I don’t think he suspects anything at all, just because he’s too busy trying to escape the single most humiliating moment of his university career so far.

Smugness radiates off my shadow in waves.

“You are going to get us into so much trouble one day.” I half sigh, half giggle.

The amusement radiating off him doesn’t so much as flicker. He really doesn’t seem remotely concerned about that prospect.