The It Girl(15)

And now here she was. At one of the most sought-after colleges in Oxford. Surrounded by people she would barely have had the courage to say hello to, were it not for her luck in finding April.

As she stood there, peeling off her underwear and shoving her arms into the kimono she used as a makeshift dressing gown, she felt a sudden wash of… not gratitude, exactly. But a kind of wonder at the miracle of what had just happened. She was here. At Oxford. Sharing a room with a girl so infinitely cool and glamorous that she might have stepped out of the pages of a magazine.

She, Hannah, could reinvent herself here. Okay, she wasn’t as spiky or witty as Emily, or as cheeky and sarcastic as Ryan. But she could be someone else. Someone new. Maybe… and here she swallowed, a shiver of longing running across her bare skin beneath the kimono. Maybe she could even be a girl that someone like Will would look twice at.

Will.

Will, who had sat across the circle from her, watching her, with that slow, lazy smile.

Will, who had stayed back at the end of the night, when he could have returned to Cloade’s with his friend Hugh.

Will, who—and then Hannah paused, with a sudden, clear picture of the cards she had picked up at the end of the evening. She had turned them faceup at she passed them to April, and now she realized something—the cards weren’t her hand. There had been five of them—a single ten, and four queens. Four of a kind.

Not just a good hand, but the winning one.

Not her hand. But Will’s.

Hannah took a step towards the door, and stopped, her hand on the knob, trying to figure it out.

Will had saved her. He had taken the hit himself, rather than force her to take off her clothes. But why? Was he just being nice? Was it pity for her obvious desperation? Or was it—she remembered his eyes meeting hers, the little prickle that had passed between them—was it something more?

Whichever it was, it might not be too late to find out.

Will had hung back. And perhaps he had done so for a reason.

Hannah licked her lips, pushed her long hair behind her ears. The mirror on the back of the door showed a girl with a wide, full mouth, huge dark eyes dilated with terror, cheeks flushed with excitement.

Please don’t be gone, she whispered under her breath. Please don’t be gone.

Her stomach was knotting with a mixture of nerves and desire, but she’d had enough champagne to know that she could do this, and that glance across the circle had meant something, she knew it. She had felt something travel between them in that moment, the acknowledgment of an attraction so strong it had to be mutual—didn’t it?

She tightened the belt of her gown, then turned the handle and counted to three.

Please don’t be gone.

The door opened.

He wasn’t gone.

He was standing on the far side of the room, still shirtless, but he didn’t turn as Hannah’s door opened.

He and April were locked in each other’s arms.

Neither of them seemed to notice Hannah standing frozen in the doorway. Instead, she watched as April led Will backwards across the little room, her lips against his, one hand in his hair, the other at his belt. At her bedroom door she paused, groped behind her for the handle, twisting it blindly, and then the latch gave, and the pair of them stumbled through the open doorway and into the darkness of April’s room.

Then the door closed behind them, and Hannah was left alone.





AFTER


When Hannah wakes up, it’s with the feeling that something is different.

It’s not the fact that the bed is empty. That happens every Wednesday—Hannah’s day off, in lieu of working Saturdays in the shop. On Wednesday Will puts his phone under his pillow so that his alarm doesn’t disturb her, and tiptoes out of bed before she wakes.

It’s not just the fact that she’s pregnant and the strange feelings that go with that—the odd morning stiffness, the heaviness in her body, the feeling of queasiness that she has never quite gotten under control, in spite of what the books say about when it’s supposed to end.

No, it’s something else. She knows that, even in the dazed aftermath of sleep, before the events of yesterday come rushing back to her. Now she lies there, staring at the ceiling, trying to work out how she feels. Wednesdays are usually a treat—a chance to catch up on errands, call into town, or, increasingly as her pregnancy has progressed, just spend the day lolling around their sunny mews flat, doing nothing, in a kind of lazy trance.

But today the thought of sitting by herself in the empty flat, Will at work, nothing but the news and the yawning Google search bar to distract her, is intolerable.

It’s not that there isn’t stuff she could be doing—she could be researching prams, or building the flat-pack crib that has been sitting propped in the corner of their bedroom for the last six weeks. But somehow she can’t bring herself to slit open the cardboard boxes. It feels like tempting fate, a presumptuous taking for granted of a future she has learned the hard way not to rely on.

But she can’t lie there, thinking like that. Instead she gets up, pulls on her dressing gown, and goes through to the kitchen, rubbing the sleep from the corners of her eyes as she makes the one coffee she allows herself these days.

Will has left the radio on, as he often does when running out to catch an early meeting. She hasn’t really been paying attention, but now something the newscaster is saying snags at her—and she leans across the counter to turn up the volume.