chapter 5 :- GASOLINE AND MATCHES

## AUSTINE'S POV

It had been eleven days.

I knew because I'd stopped counting on day three and started again on day five and given up pretending I wasn't counting somewhere around day eight. Eleven days since the corridor outside registration. Eleven days of the same campus, different orbits — catching the edge of a dark brown head across a lecture hall, hearing a voice in a corridor and knowing it before I turned around, the particular awareness of someone's presence that you couldn't logic your way out of no matter how many times you told yourself it was nothing.

It wasn't nothing.

I knew it wasn't nothing.

I was managing it.

Luca had opinions.

Luca always had opinions — it was his primary personality trait and the reason I'd been friends with him since we were twelve, because at least his opinions were usually correct even when they were inconvenient.

*"You watch him,"* Luca said on day nine, over breakfast in the campus cafe that I'd chosen specifically because it had good sight lines to the main courtyard and then refused to examine why that mattered.

*"I don't,"* I said.

*"You've looked at the door four times in the last ten minutes."*

*"I'm watching the room."*

*"You're watching one specific part of the room that faces the path Autumn Brown takes between his nine o'clock and his eleven o'clock."*

I looked at Luca.

Luca looked back at me with the expression of someone who had known me for six years and was completely out of patience for my fictions.

*"How do you know his schedule,"* I said.

*"Because,"* Luca said, picking up his coffee, *"you told me his schedule. Three days ago. While claiming not to care."*

I returned to my breakfast.

Luca said nothing else.

This was one of his better qualities — he made his point and then he let it sit. He didn't push and prod and require a response. He just put the thing in the room and let it exist there until I was ready to look at it directly.

I was not ready.

I ate my breakfast and watched the door and didn't say anything and Luca drank his coffee and didn't smile, which I appreciated.

The fight happened on day eleven.

It was a Tuesday. The kind of Tuesday that had no particular reason to be significant and became significant anyway — the way most things happened, quietly and all at once.

It started in the main corridor outside the lecture hall for the eleven o'clock humanities block. A wide corridor, always busy at this hour — the eleven o'clock rush, students from three different departments all moving through the same space, the kind of crowd that had its own momentum and didn't leave much room for individual navigation.

I was coming from the east stairwell.

He was coming from the library.

We met in the middle of the corridor the way opposing weather systems met — not planned, not chosen, just the natural consequence of two things moving toward the same point.

I saw him at the same moment he saw me.

Both of us slowed.

Just slightly. Just for a fraction of a second — the automatic response of recognising something your body had opinions about before your brain finished processing.

Then we both kept walking.

The corridor was narrow at this point — a pinch point where the old building met the new extension and the architects had failed to fully account for peak hour foot traffic. There was room for two people to pass if they were willing to make room.

Neither of us made room.

I don't know what I was thinking.

I don't know if I was thinking.

We reached the narrow point at the same moment and stopped, facing each other, eighteen centimetres apart, and the crowd parted around us the way water parted around two rocks that had decided to be in the same place.

*"Some of us have places to be,"* Autumn said.

His voice was flat. Not heated — flat, which was worse. The flatness of someone managing something.

*"So move,"* I said.

*"I was here first."*

*"You weren't."*

*"I was walking this corridor before you came down those stairs—"*

*"And yet here we both are."*

He looked at me. Those green eyes level and cool and doing the thing they did where they looked at you and you felt it through your whole chest. *"Move, Kingstone."*

*"No,"* I said.

Simple. Clean. I watched something shift in his expression — the flatness cracking slightly, something warmer and sharper underneath it.

*"You're unbelievable,"* he said.

*"You've said that before."*

*"Because it keeps being true."*

*"Move around me,"* I said. *"The corridor is wide enough."*

*"The corridor is wide enough for you to move."*

*"I'm not moving."*

*"Neither am I."*

We stared at each other.

The crowd had thinned — people moving around us, some of them slowing, some of them pretending not to notice and absolutely noticing. I was aware of the audience the way I was always aware of rooms — peripherally, catalogued, not particularly relevant.

What was relevant was the eighteen centimetres between us and the fact that up close like this I could see the exact shade of green his eyes went when he was angry, which was — deeper. Darker. The green of deep water instead of sunlight through leaves.

I filed that away and hated myself for it.

*"This is childish,"* Autumn said.

*"Agreed. Move."*

*"I'm not—"* He stopped. Exhaled. Something that was not quite a laugh, was the opposite of a laugh. *"Do you do this with everyone or is it specifically calibrated for me?"*

*"I have no idea what you're talking about."*

*"The thing,"* he said, and his voice had shifted — still flat but with an edge in it now, something personal underneath the performance of irritation. *"Where you just — stand there and make everything harder than it needs to be. Do you do that with everyone or is it—"*

*"Is it what,"* I said quietly.

He stopped.

Something moved between us. Something that wasn't about the corridor.

*"Nothing,"* he said.

*"Finish the sentence."*

*"I said nothing—"*

*"You started a sentence, Autumn. Finish it."*

The use of his name — his actual name, not Brown, not the last name I'd been using as a wall — landed differently. I saw it land. Something moved through his eyes.

*"Don't,"* he said. Lower now. Just for me.

*"Don't what."*

*"Don't use my name like that."*

*"Like what."*

*"Like you—"* He stopped again. His jaw tightened. The chin came up — that specific angle, that locked-door angle. *"You don't get to do that. You lost that."*

The words hit something.

I kept my face still.

*"Did I,"* I said.

*"Yes,"* he said. Certain. Final. The voice of someone who had decided something a long time ago and was not reopening the discussion. *"You did."*

I looked at him.

I looked at him and I thought about eleven days of corridors and eight days of pretending not to count and six years before that of a silence that had its own specific weight and shape, and something in my chest did something I didn't have a name for.

*"Fine,"* I said.

I stepped to the left.

Just enough. Just the minimum amount of space required for him to pass.

He looked at the space. Looked at me.

Then he walked through it.

His shoulder didn't touch mine.

It came close.

It came close enough that I felt the air shift and something in my jaw tightened and I stood there and looked at the wall ahead of me and breathed through it.

Behind me I heard his footsteps continue down the corridor.

Getting quieter.

I stood there for three more seconds.

Then I walked on.

Luca was waiting at the end of the corridor.

He had seen everything. I knew he'd seen everything because he had the expression he wore when he was being very careful not to have an expression.

*"Not a word,"* I said.

*"I wasn't going to say anything."*

*"Good."*

We walked.

Thirty seconds of silence.

*"You said his name,"* Luca said.

*"Luca."*

*"You said it like—"*

*"I will change my wifi password and you'll never find out what it is."*

*"You said it like it cost you something,"* Luca finished, unbothered. *"That's all I'm saying. One observation. I'm done."*

I walked.

I said nothing.

He was right and we both knew it and that was the end of that conversation.

## AUTUMN'S POV

I made it to the end of the corridor.

That was my victory. That was what I had. I made it to the end of the corridor and around the corner and into the stairwell and I stood there against the wall in the cold concrete quiet of it and I breathed.

In.

Out.

*You're fine.*

The wall was cold through my jacket. I focused on that. The specific temperature of it. The solidity.

I was fine.

I was completely fine and the thing happening in my chest right now was just — adrenaline. The physiological response to conflict. Nothing personal. Nothing that had anything to do with the way he'd said my name or the look in those blue eyes in the last three seconds before he moved or the fact that somehow being that close to him felt like—

I pushed off the wall.

Started climbing the stairs.

*Stop it,* I told myself. *Stop it right now.*

The fight had started from nothing.

That was what I kept coming back to, turning it over. It had started from a corridor and a narrow point and two people who were both too stubborn to step aside and it should have been — thirty seconds. An inconvenience. The kind of thing you forgot by the time you reached your next class.

It had not been thirty seconds.

It had been something else entirely and we'd both known it and neither of us had said it, which was maybe the most Austine-and-Autumn thing that had ever happened.

*You lost that,* I'd said.

*Did I,* he'd said.

Two words. Quiet. Direct in the way he was always direct — no performance, no deflection, just the question sitting there in the space between us asking to be answered.

I hadn't answered it.

I'd walked away instead.

I was good at walking away from Austine Kingstone. I'd had years of practice.

I found a seat in the back corner of the lecture hall and put my bag down and took out my notebook and was completely normal about everything.

The girl from the registration queue — Seo — was three rows ahead. She turned around, saw me, waved with the easy warmth of someone who'd decided we were friends and wasn't going to ask permission about it.

I waved back.

Normalcy. Good. This was good.

The lecture started. I wrote notes. I concentrated. I was a person attending a university lecture and not someone whose chest was still doing something inconvenient because a boy with blue eyes had said his name like it cost him something.

*Like it cost him something.*

I pressed my pen harder against the paper.

*He doesn't get to do that.*

He didn't get to show up here after six years of nothing and stand in corridors and look at me with those eyes and say my name in that voice like — like something. Like we were still something.

We weren't.

We'd been something.

We weren't anymore.

That was his fault.

Or it was Callum's fault. Or it was mine. The fault had been distributed so long ago across so many people that it had lost its original shape and I'd long since stopped trying to map it. What I knew was the result — six years of silence and then my parents' accident and disappearing and surviving alone and becoming this, *this version of myself,* the one who got up at five-thirty and worked three jobs and kept everything tight and managed and under control because control was the only thing that couldn't be taken away.

Austine Kingstone standing in a corridor looking at me like that was not control.

Austine Kingstone saying my name like that was the opposite of control.

I wasn't doing it.

After the lecture Seo fell into step beside me in the corridor with the naturalness of someone who'd decided on proximity and was comfortable with that decision.

*"You looked very intense in there,"* she said.

*"I was concentrating."*

*"You broke your pen."*

I looked at my hand. The pen had a crack down one side where I'd been holding it too hard. Ink on my fingers, faint and blue.

*"Cheap pen,"* I said.

Seo looked at me sideways. *"I saw what happened. In the main corridor before lecture."*

I kept walking. *"Nothing happened."*

*"Austine Kingstone,"* she said, and her voice had the tone of someone reporting on a natural disaster, *"stood in the middle of a corridor for four minutes and refused to move and the whole building knew about it within ten minutes."*

*"It wasn't four minutes."*

*"People are already talking about it."*

*"People can talk about whatever they want."*

*"They're saying you two have history."*

I stopped.

Seo stopped.

I looked at her. She looked back — bright-eyed, not unkind, genuinely curious in the way that some people were curious before they'd learned to pretend they weren't.

*"We don't have history,"* I said. Careful and clean. *"We grew up in the same area. We went to the same school for a bit. That's all."*

Seo looked at me for a moment.

*"Okay,"* she said, in the tone of someone who didn't believe a single word of that and was politely choosing not to say so.

We started walking again.

*"He's very good-looking,"* she offered, conversationally.

*"Seo."*

*"Objectively. Just as a fact."*

*"I'm aware of what he looks like."*

*"Are you."* She said it lightly. Innocently. Like the two words weren't doing exactly what they were doing.

I gave her a look.

She smiled at the corridor ahead.

I hated that she wasn't wrong and I wasn't going to give her the satisfaction of confirming it.

That evening I was at my dorm desk with my notes spread out and my second-hand laptop open and the window cracked for air because the heating in this building was either off or aggressively on and currently it had chosen aggressively on.

My phone showed eleven-forty-seven.

I had a six o'clock start tomorrow. Cafe shift before university, because Thursdays were busy and they'd asked and I'd said yes because I needed the hours.

I should have been asleep an hour ago.

I was staring at my notes and not reading them.

*You lost that.*

I'd said it so certainly. Like it was settled. Like it was a decision I'd made in full possession of all the information and was completely at peace with.

I pressed my palms flat against the desk.

He'd stepped aside.

At the end. He'd stepped aside — just enough, the minimum amount, still infuriating, still so completely *him* — and I'd walked through the space he made and I'd felt the air shift as I passed him and I'd kept walking.

I'd kept walking.

That was the right thing.

That was the only thing.

I closed my laptop.

Got up. Stood at the window and looked out at the campus in the dark — the lights along the paths, the library still lit on the upper floors, the quiet of it.

Somewhere on this campus Austine Kingstone was — doing something. Being somewhere. Existing in the same square kilometres as me and somehow making that feel like more than geography.

I hated it.

I hated that he could still do that.

I hated that eleven days and one corridor and four minutes of standing too close had managed to undo something I'd spent a very long time and considerable effort constructing.

I closed the window.

Got into bed.

Stared at the ceiling in the dark of my small dorm room with the photo of my parents on the desk I couldn't see from here but knew was there.

*I'm fine,* I told them. The way I always did. The quiet habit of it, the grief made manageable by routine. *I'm handling it.*

I closed my eyes.

Somewhere across campus a boy with blue eyes was probably sleeping perfectly, undisturbed, controlled even in unconsciousness.

I was going to be fine.

I was going to keep being fine.

The ceiling offered no opinion.

I stared at it for a long time before sleep came.

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