He got thrown out for that, she remembers.
“Next time I’ll ban you for life, you fucking layabout student!” the landlord had roared as he slung Ryan out into the street, the others tumbling, giggling after him. “Fellow workers my arse, you lazy little shit!”
Now she wonders how he is, and feels more ashamed than ever of the way she cut him off after college.
Beside her, Will stirs, and she looks over at him, and feels her love for him clutch at her insides with a force that is almost painful. She has always loved him best when she is watching him unawares. Awake, he is self-possessed, polished, still very much the perfectly mannered private-school boy who offered her a seat in the dining hall at Pelham that first night—and some part of her feels she has never really gotten to know him better than she did that first evening.
But asleep, or in his unguarded moments, he is Will. Her Will. And she knows and loves the very bones of him.
He seems to be dreaming, emotions chasing across his face, his eyes moving uneasily behind closed lids. She wonders what he is thinking—as she does so often. Will she ever learn to read him, to see the real depths of feeling that he hides behind his mild, amused manner? But perhaps that is why she loves him so much—the unattainability of him, the rare flashes of vulnerability that he reserves for her alone.
Only once has she seen him cry—and that was after April’s death, as they held each other and wept and wept for what they had both lost, but also what they had found in each other.
BEFORE
When Hannah returned to Oxford after the Christmas break, it was with a sense of coming home.
“Why is it called Hilary term?” her mother asked in the car on the way to the station, and Hannah answered, without even thinking, “Because the feast of Saint Hilary of Poitiers falls in the middle,” and then wanted to laugh at herself, at who she had become. How did she know this stuff after just one term? It didn’t matter. She knew it, just like she knew how one acquired a blue, and what you wore for your collections.
Collections. Even the word gave her a squirmy feeling in her stomach. Three little syllables, not much to feel nervous about, but she did.
“They’re not prelims,” she had told her puzzled mother. “You take those at the end of the first year. Collections are done at the start of every term, and cover what you learned the term before.”
“So they’re just tests? They don’t mean anything?”
The thing is, her mother was right—but also so, so wrong. Collections didn’t count towards your degree class, or really anything as far as Hannah could make out—and yet everyone was in a flat spin about them, even the second-years, who had sat through the ordeal several times already.
What’s the point of an 8 week term, Will had texted her on Boxing Day, when they just make us do the rest of the work in the holidays? Is it just so the tutors get time to write their books? I can’t believe all my mates are out getting pissed and I’m stuck here revising.
Hannah had to admit he had a point.
It wasn’t just the collections giving her an uneasy feeling, though. Seeing the text from Will had triggered a sharp rush of pleasure, followed by an equally sharp stab of guilt. It was ridiculous—that just his name coming up on her phone should make her grin like an idiot. He was April’s boyfriend. Completely off-limits. But the problem was that while her head knew that, her heart didn’t seem to be able to remember it.
Before the holidays she had half hoped that her crush on Will was wearing off—and surely six weeks’ absence would give her plenty of time to forget his wry grin, the shape of his long, slim hands, and the way he looked at her across the crowded JCR with a smile that made her heart light up. But that one single text had shown that was not true. She still liked him. A lot. Which made her officially the worst best friend in the world.
Instead of replying to Will, she’d typed out a text to April, trying to assuage her guilt.
How are you? Merry Christmas! Hope you had a lovely day.
thanks, April texted back. it was fucking awful tho i did get a balenciaga tote so every cloud
Pause.
how was urs?
Pretty okay, Hannah typed back, though no balenciaga tote so every silver lining.
ha ha! April texted, with a picture of a laughing frog.
Now, as the train drew into Oxford station, Hannah had a rush not of homesickness, but of whatever the opposite was. Homecoming, maybe. The thought of Pelham, and April, and their little room high in the rafters made her smile with a happiness that even the prospect of collections couldn’t dim.