Chapter 2 Public Humiliation

I spent the morning pretending everything was fine.

I went to my nine o'clock lecture. I took notes I would never read. I sat in the third row because I always sat in the third row, and I watched the clock, and I told myself Sienna was bluffing. She would hold this over me. She would enjoy the power of it. She was not actually going to.

She was standing in the hallway outside the lecture hall when I walked out.

My laptop was under her arm.

Two of her new friends flanked her like decoration. She had the same expression she used to wear in the hallway at school — not quite a smile, not quite a threat, something balanced precisely between both.

"There she is," Sienna said, loud. The kind of loud that is a choice.

Heads turned. Someone stepped out of the flow of foot traffic to see what was happening.

"Sienna." My voice was level. Barely. "Give me my laptop."

"In a second." She flipped it open. The document was still up she must have kept it that way, kept the screen lit, carried it here deliberately. "I just thought people should know what kind of writer you are."

More people stopped. The hallway thickened.

She cleared her throat and raised her voice another notch and started reading.

The words were mine. I recognized them. They sounded completely different coming from her mouth in a crowded hallway on a Tuesday morning bigger, uglier, stripped of every context that had made them feel safe when I wrote them alone at midnight. Someone laughed. Someone whistled. A phone went up.

"Stop." I stepped forward. My hands were shaking. I did not care anymore if anyone noticed. "Sienna. Stop."

She kept reading.

I was aware of the crowd spreading around us in the way that crowds do when they sense something worth watching, that particular expansion that meant the video was already rolling on multiple phones and would survive long past this moment into every group chat on this campus. I was aware that my face was burning and my chest felt like something was sitting on it and I could not — I could not just stand here and let her

"Enough."

The word landed flat and hard, like something dropped from a height.

Knox Ryder came through the crowd from the left. Hockey bag on his shoulder, black hoodie, expression like a closed door. People moved. They always moved for Knox not out of affection but out of something more instinctive, the social equivalent of stepping back from a lit match.

He walked directly to Sienna and stopped. He did not rush it. He stood close enough that she had to look up, and he held out one hand, and he said nothing else.

Sienna recovered faster than I expected. "This doesn't concern you."

"Hand it over."

"She's your teammate's stepsister, Knox. Don't you think Mason deserves to know what she's been —"

Knox took the laptop from her hands. Not rough, not dramatic just took it, the way you take something that was never supposed to leave the shelf. He closed it and tucked it under his arm and turned to face the crowd.

For a moment he just looked at them. Then his arm came around me.

Not gently. Firmly. His hand at my waist, pulling me against his side until there was no space between us, until I could feel the warmth of him and the steadiness of him and the absolute certainty with which he held me.

"Lila's my girlfriend," he said. His voice carried without effort. "Has been for a few weeks now. We were keeping it quiet while we figured things out, but —" He looked at Sienna with an expression like a door closing. "— apparently that's no longer an option."

The hallway went quiet the way it does when something shifts and no one has yet figured out how to react to the new reality.

"You're lying," Sienna said.

Knox's thumb traced a slow arc against my hip. He was not looking at her anymore.

"Anyone else?" he said to the crowd, mildly. "Or are we done?"

Phones went down. The crowd broke apart slowly, the way crowds do when the spectacle resolves without the promised explosion. Sienna stood there for three seconds I counted and then she turned and walked away, her friends shuffling after her.

Knox's arm stayed where it was.

When the last of the bystanders had peeled away, I looked up at him. My heart was hammering. I felt vaguely like I was going to be sick and also like I had just been pulled off a ledge by someone I did not expect to be standing there.

"Why did you do that?"

He looked down at me. His eyes were dark and still and there was something in them that was not quite the cool indifference he usually wore something sharper, something that had been waiting under it.

"Because I've been watching her treat you like a moving target," he said quietly. "And I'm done watching."

He passed me the laptop.

"Also," he added, the corner of his mouth pulling up just slightly, "I need you to play along. Starting now. Because she's going to go straight to Mason, and this only works if you don't blink first."

"This." I stared at him. "This being the part where you told a hallway full of people I'm your girlfriend."

"That's the part, yeah."

"Knox."

"Bennett." He tilted his head, just slightly. "I can explain. But not here. Walk with me."

He did not wait to see if I would follow. He started moving, unhurried, hands in his pockets, like the last five minutes had been nothing more than a minor inconvenience to route around.

I followed him. I was not sure I had another option.

I was not sure, somewhere underneath the panic and the residual humiliation and the wild improbability of the last ten minutes, that I entirely minded.