“Ugh, you’re such party poopers,” April grumbled. But she seemed to accept defeat and began gathering up the cards as Hugh started hunting around for his socks and phone.
“I guess I’ll call it a day too,” Hannah said, rather diffidently. She stood up and reached for her top, holding it against herself like a protective shield. “Night, everyone.” April didn’t respond, she just shrugged, rather sulkily.
It was Will who looked up. “Night, Hannah.”
“Yes, good night, Hannah,” Hugh said rather awkwardly. “And thank you, April, I had a great time.”
April snorted at that.
“Like fuck you did. You looked like I was pulling out your nipple hairs one by one.”
Hugh flushed, as if he didn’t quite know what to say.
“Are you coming, Will?” he asked, after a short pause.
“In a sec,” Will said. He was buckling his jeans. “You head over. I won’t be long.”
“Night, April,” Hannah said. There was a slightly pleading note in her voice which she instantly despised but did not know how to change. She picked up the cards nearest her and held them out.
April took them. “Night,” she said, rather crossly, shoving them into the pack, and Hannah turned and walked into her room.
As her bedroom door closed behind her, Hannah allowed herself a shuddering sigh of relief, thankful that she hadn’t had to be the one to take a stand and incur April’s wrath, and equally grateful that Emily had stepped in before someone lost their last layer.
Now, as she stood there, her head spinning a little from the champagne she had drunk, she had the strangest feeling—almost as if she were surveying herself from a distance, marveling at the fact that she—Hannah Jones—had found herself surrounded by these exotic, clever, glamorous creatures. For a moment she had a piercing flashback to Dodsworth—to the kids who hung around the off-license in the town square, trying to buy cider with fake IDs and smoking Marlboro Lights behind the bus station. Maybe there were kids at their school who drank champagne and played strip poker, but if they existed, they weren’t part of the crowd Hannah hung around with. She had never been one of the girls who went to parties, applied mascara in the school bathroom, or had their boyfriends pick them up at the end of the day in a car. The closest Hannah had come to breaking the rules was deliberately failing to return a school library book she needed for her exams.
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.