The change in his face was immediate, though not dramatic. His eyebrows lifted, his mouth opened slightly, and he straightened as if the space between them had shifted by an inch and he needed to adjust to it.
He glanced at her, then down the corridor, then back again. Aiva knew that look. She had seen versions of it before, the moment when someone stopped treating a conversation as casual and began wondering whether it might mean something.
She moved a loose section of hair behind her ear and let the silence last just long enough for him to decide how to answer.
"Oh," he said. "Well. I'm not doing anything else for the holiday, really."
"Good. Then you can tell me more about your very questionable snowboard."
They found a bench along the hallway and sat. Aiva turned toward him rather than facing straight ahead, resting one hand on the seat between them. She asked about the design, and Brandon asked what she planned to do over the break.
She answered honestly, telling him she wanted to catch up on reading and get some work done before the next term. He asked what she liked to read, and she told him. She asked about his favorite part of the printing process, and he explained it in enough detail that she had to ask him to slow down once.
It wasn't difficult to listen to him. That was the trouble. His excitement was sincere, his questions weren't rehearsed, and when she laughed he looked pleased in a way that made her want to keep him talking. She was interested in him in a way.
She was also watching the small shifts in his expression, measuring when to ask and when to leave space, keeping the original question waiting behind everything else. Both things were true, and neither one made the other disappear.
"I still don't understand how Bryce could break up with someone like you," Brandon said eventually.
Aiva felt warmth spread across her cheeks before she could stop it. The compliment landed because she wanted to believe it, and because it came from someone who seemed to mean it without expecting anything in return.
Being flattered by him should have felt simple. Instead, she became acutely aware of how she had positioned herself on the bench, how steadily she'd held his gaze, how easily she'd made him feel that she was interested in everything he had to say.
"Maybe he found someone better," she said lightly.
"He didn't."
The answer came out too quickly. Brandon seemed to hear himself at the same moment she did, his mouth closing as his gaze slipped away.
Aiva kept her voice gentle. "What do you mean?"
"Nothing. I just..." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I probably shouldn't say."
She had the thread now. She could feel how little pressure it would take to draw the next answer out of him, and the knowledge brought a small, sour twist beneath her ribs. She moved her hand from the bench and rested it on his arm.
A deliberate move as her fingers passed lightly against his sleeve.
"Hey, it's okay." She held his gaze. "You don't have to tell me if you don't trust me."
Brandon looked at her hand, then at her face. She didn't move it. She leaned toward him slightly, close enough that he had to make a decision about whether to look away. His eyes flicked aside, returned to hers, and stayed there.
"It's not about trust," he said.
"Okay."
He hesitated. "Promise you won't tell anyone I said anything?"
Aiva held out her pinky, a small smirk touching her mouth. "Promise."
He hooked his pinky around hers and gave it a quick shake. The gesture was almost childish, and it made him laugh under his breath. Aiva smiled with him, keeping her hand there a moment longer before letting go.
"Besides," she added, "Bryce is my ex. Why should I care what he does on his free time?"
Brandon's laugh turned nervous. "You might not have the same opinion after."
Aiva waited.
"He went out on a date today."
For a moment, nothing changed. She kept her shoulders loose and her expression open, giving herself the same small, practiced pause she used when someone told her something unexpected in a meeting.
A man could go out with whoever he wanted.
She and Bryce weren't together.
There was no rule he had broken, no betrayal she could reasonably accuse him of, nothing she could point to and call unfair. She arranged the facts neatly in her head, as if putting them in the right order would make them feel the way they ought to.
"I mean, the man can date whoever he wants," she said.
"Yeah. I guess so."
"So, who's the girl?"
Brandon paused. He looked at her, and something in his expression suggested he was reconsidering whether the promise had been a good idea. Then he answered.
"Amber."
Aiva's composure held for a fraction of a second longer than it needed to. Then the muscles around her mouth loosened, and her fingers, resting on the bench, curled against the wood.
Amber Thorne. Pink hair, sharp edges, chaos worn like a favorite jacket. That Amber?
The thought surfaced.
Amber, who can turn a quiet room into an argument just by entering it, who seems to meet every ordinary situation with the possibility of violence.
Aiva couldn't make the name fit the picture she had of Bryce. She tried to rearrange the pieces, to find some explanation that would make the pairing sensible, and found nothing that held.
The failure itself unsettled her. She hadn't realized how much of her understanding of Bryce still depended on the assumption that she could predict what made sense to him.
"Are you okay?" Brandon asked.
"What makes you think I'm not okay?" Aiva asked.
The words came out correctly. Her tone didn't quite match them. She could hear the thinness in her own voice, the slight delay before the sentence settled into place, and she knew Brandon could hear it too.
He looked at her with an uncertainty that hadn't been there a moment ago, watching her as if the conversation had taken a turn he couldn't see and he was trying to work out where it had gone.
"No i'm not saying you're not okay it's just..." Brandon tried defending, "Nevermind. I mean we cold change the subject if you want?"
"I'm sorry," she said, already standing. "But I think I have to go."
"Oh... Sure."
She didn't know what else to give him.
Aiva walked away before he could ask another question, keeping her pace controlled even as the corridor seemed to stretch in front of her. She didn't run. She needed a door between herself and the rest of the school before her face did something she couldn't explain away.
Behind her, Brandon remained on the bench. When she glanced back once, he was still sitting where she'd left him, his hands resting on his knees and his attention fixed on the empty space beside him.
He looked confused, and a little wounded, as though the conversation had become something real for it only to end before he could understand what had happened. Aiva turned away before she could see any more.
The girls' bathroom was quiet when she entered. She crossed to the sinks and stopped in front of the mirror, both hands settling on the edge of the counter. The girl looking back at her had the same warm complexion, the same hazel eyes, the same long, wavy hair falling around her shoulders.
Her clothes were soft and casual, chosen that morning without much thought. Nothing about her looked different. Aiva wasn't examining her face, though. She was looking at the person wearing it, the person who had sat beside Brandon and touched his arm and offered him a little piece of trust she hadn't intended to honor.
She had gone looking for Bryce, found an answer, and made the lives of two people more complicated in the process.
The first hurt was Bryce and Amber.
Aiva had loved him well. She knew that with the same certainty she knew her own name. She had been patient, she had listened, she had given him space and filled it carefully when he came back. She had not been perfect, and nobody was but she had been honest, and when she ran the memory looking for the moment she had failed him, she came back empty.
And he chose Amber.
She caught herself. That thought: the chose Amber thought, had a shape she did not like. It assumed she was the alternative. It assumed she was competing. It had a specific, ugly texture to it that she recognized because she had felt it before in smaller doses and had always managed to put it down before it became something she had to look at.
She looked at it now.
Amber is... what, exactly?
The thought arrived before she could stop it.
I mean I can't think of anything she would surpass me in. Even in a fight I'd obviously win... Of course, Bryce wouldn't know that.
She pressed her palms flat against the sink and stopped.
No... Thinking like this is wrong.
She hated that she had gotten here. She hated it with a specific, pointed shame that came from knowing better and arriving anyway.
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you're better. You're not even in the conversation.
But that was the thing she couldn't make herself believe. Because if she wasn't in the conversation, if the logic didn't lead from Aiva to Bryce to what went wrong, then it wasn't about her at all? And if it wasn't about her, she had no reason to feel this. And she felt it. She felt it loudly and specifically and she did not know where to put it.
He's allowed to date whoever he wants.
She said it out loud, just to hear how it landed. It did not land well.
The second thing came quieter, the way the worse things usually did.
Brandon.
She had seen the way he sat up when she smiled at him. She had used that. She knew, she had always known, the effect that a certain kind of attention could have, warm and focused and direct, and she had calibrated it deliberately, the positioning, the eye contact, the hair, the hand on his arm at exactly the right moment.
She had felt him open up the way a person opens when they believe they are seen, and she had leaned into it.
I wasn't pretending to like him.
That part was true to a degree. She had liked hearing about the snowboard. She had liked his humor.
And I used him anyway.
That was the part she couldn't dress up as something smaller. She had made him feel safe enough to tell her something he had not planned to tell her, and the moment she had what she needed, she had stood up and walked away and left him sitting on a bench with an expression she had not stayed long enough to answer.
She had done this before. In smaller ways, with smaller stakes, she had promised herself she would stop. She had not stopped.
And the answer she had taken from him, the answer that had cost him something he didn't even know he'd given, had only confirmed that something was over in a way she couldn't soften anymore with uncertainty. She had not gained anything. She had just removed the last comfortable lie.
The nausea arrived without warning.
It moved from the center of her chest downward and she recognized it before it fully arrived and turned toward the nearest stall. The door, the lock, her knees hitting the floor, her hands on the seat, it was over quickly and left her kneeling on cold tile, one hand braced against the porcelain, the other pressed flat against her mouth even though there was nothing left.
She stayed like that.
The fluorescent light hummed. Somewhere outside the bathroom, a door opened and closed. Ordinary Saturday.
Aiva exhaled slowly through her nose and closed her eyes.