Chapter 6: The Party Night

## Emily

October 14th, 2021

Five days after the bathroom floor, I was alive.

Not metaphorically. Not in the poetic, aspirational, self-help-book sense of "alive." I mean literally, medically, irritatingly alive, which was a state I was still adjusting to, the way you adjust to a new pair of shoes — aware that they fit, suspicious of the comfort.

Grey had kept me at his apartment for two days. Two days of sleeping on his couch while Sirius purred against my ribs and paper roses accumulated on every flat surface like origami mushrooms after a rain. Two days of eating toast and soup because my stomach had declared war on anything more ambitious. Two days of him checking my pupils every three hours with a penlight he produced from a drawer that also contained, as far as I could tell, three handguns, a passport in a name that wasn't his, and a novel by Dostoevsky.

I didn't ask about the guns. Some questions were better left unasked, at least until you were confident the answer wouldn't change everything.

On the third day, he drove me back to campus. Not to Jordan's apartment — to the student housing office, where Jeremy Holt, the department secretary who apparently moonlighted as some kind of logistical wizard, had arranged an emergency room transfer citing "unsafe living conditions" backed by documentation I hadn't provided and signatures I hadn't signed.

"How?" I'd asked.

"Don't worry about how," Grey had said. "Worry about eating lunch."

I was now in a temporary dorm room on the north side of campus. Single occupancy. Lock on the door. No Jordan. No whiskey bottles. No holes in the walls. Just a narrow bed, a desk, a window that overlooked the quad, and the suffocating, disorienting silence of a space where nobody was going to hit me.

The silence was the hardest part. Not because I missed the noise — I didn't. But because the noise had been my compass. I'd organized my entire life around avoiding Jordan's rage: when to come home, when to eat, when to breathe, when to disappear. Without it, I was a ship that had lost its storm, and the calm was so unfamiliar it felt like its own kind of danger.

Ash had noticed the change. Of course she had.

"You look different," she said, studying me across the cafeteria table with the intensity of a jeweler examining a suspect diamond. "Like, your eyes are doing a thing."

"My eyes are always doing a thing."

"No. Your eyes are usually doing a dead thing. Today they're doing a slightly-less-dead thing. Syn, back me up."

Syn looked up from her biology textbook with the patient smile of a woman who had learned long ago to pick her battles with Ash. "You do look a little brighter, Em."

"I moved out of Jordan's," I said.

Ash's fork stopped halfway to her mouth. She set it down. Her eyes went wide, then narrow, then wide again, cycling through emotions like a slot machine until it landed on furious relief. "When?"

"This week. Emergency housing. I'm in the north dorms."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"I'm telling you now."

"Emily." She reached across the table and grabbed my hand. Hard. Her dimple piercings caught the cafeteria light. "I've been trying to get you out of there for two years. Two years. I've offered you my couch, my floor, Syn's grandmother's spare room. You always said no."

"I know."

"What changed?"

Grey. Grey changed it. Grey carried me out of a bathroom at 3 AM and installed me in a dorm room with a lock on the door and paper roses on the nightstand and the quiet, unshakable promise that Jordan Glass would never touch me again.

But I couldn't say that. Not yet. Not to Ash, who would have questions I couldn't answer, about a man I couldn't explain, in a relationship that didn't have a name.

"I just... reached a point," I said. Which was true. The floor of a bathroom with blood on your arm and pills in your stomach was certainly a point.

Ash squeezed my hand. Her eyes were bright. Not crying — Ash didn't cry in public, she considered it a tactical vulnerability — but close. "I'm glad," she said. "I'm so fucking glad, Em."

"Me too."

"Can I see the room?"

"It's tiny."

"I don't care if it's a closet. I want to see where you're sleeping. I want to know you're safe."

"I'm safe."

She studied me for another long moment, searching for the lie, the deflection, the performance. She must not have found it, because her grip loosened and her expression softened into something that looked almost like peace. "Okay. Movie tonight? Syn found a horror movie that's supposed to be actually scary."

"Every horror movie Syn picks is 'actually scary' and every one of them is about a haunted house and somebody's grandmother."

"This one's about a haunted asylum."

"Sold."

---

The movie night happened at Ash's off-campus apartment — a two-bedroom she shared with Syn that was small, cluttered, warm, and smelled permanently of Syn's lavender candles and Ash's leather jacket. I arrived at eight with a bag of gummy worms and a six-pack of Redbull, which Syn confiscated immediately.

"You're not drinking four Redbulls before bed," Syn said, her brown eyes gentle but immovable. "You can have one."

"I'll die."

"You'll sleep. Novel concept."

Ash was in the kitchen, attempting to make popcorn in a pot because she didn't own a microwave and considered microwaves to be "corporate propaganda." The result was a fifty-fifty split between perfectly popped kernels and charcoal briquettes, which she dumped into a bowl with the confidence of a Michelin-star chef.

"Masterpiece," she announced.

"It's literally burnt," Syn said.

"It's rustic."

I settled into the couch with my gummy worms and my single permitted Redbull and felt, for the first time in weeks, something approximating normal. Not happy — I wasn't there yet, might never be — but normal. The couch was soft. The apartment was warm. Ash and Syn were arguing about popcorn with the comfortable ferocity of people who loved each other enough to fight about nothing.

My phone buzzed.

Unknown Number: How are you feeling?

Grey. He'd been texting me from a different number than the one on the card — "precaution," he'd said, without elaborating. His texts were always brief, always specific, always at exactly the right moment.

Emily: alive. movie night with Ash and Syn

Grey: What movie?

Emily: haunted asylum. Syn's pick. I give it 20 minutes before someone's grandmother appears

Grey: 15.

I smiled at my phone. Small. Private. The kind of smile that happens before you're aware of it, that your face commits to before your brain gives permission.

"Who are you texting?" Ash asked, dropping onto the couch beside me with the burnt popcorn.

"No one."

"Your face says otherwise. Your face is doing the slightly-less-dead thing again."

"I have a crush on the haunted asylum," I said, pocketing my phone.

Ash narrowed her eyes but let it go. For now. Ash always let things go for now, which was her way of saying she was building a case.

The movie was terrible. Syn loved it. Ash fell asleep twenty minutes in, her head on Syn's shoulder, snoring softly. I watched the screen without seeing it, my mind somewhere else entirely — in an alcove with stained-glass light, on a bathroom floor with blood on my arm, in the passenger seat of a car at 3 AM with a man who smelled like smoke and made paper roses and saw collapsing stars where everyone else saw wreckage.

Emily: the grandmother appeared at minute 17. you were closer

Grey: I'm always close.

I stared at that text for a long time.

Then I turned off my phone and watched the rest of the movie and ate gummy worms until my tongue was raw and let the warmth of Ash's apartment and Syn's candles and the predictable stupidity of horror movie characters soak into my skin like sunlight after a long winter.

---

October 15th, 2021 — 1:12 AM

It was past midnight when Ash's phone rang.

I was still awake — I was always awake at this hour, my brain didn't understand the concept of voluntary unconsciousness — sitting on the couch in the dark with a blanket around my shoulders and Ash's cat, a tabby named Ripley who was arguably more feral than Sirius, asleep on my feet.

Ash stumbled out of the bedroom, phone in hand, hair a disaster. "Hello?" A pause. "Now? Are you serious? It's 1 AM." Another pause. "Fine. Yeah. We'll be there."

She hung up and looked at me with the expression of someone who had just been invited to do something stupid and was already committed. "Remi's throwing a thing. At the music hall on campus. She says it's a 'creative expression gathering.'"

"It's a party."

"It's a party. Cam and Katelyn are already there. She wants us to come."

"I don't want to go."

"I know. But you've been on this couch for five hours and I'm worried about the indentation you're making in the cushion."

"I'm comfortable."

"You're hiding."

I opened my mouth to argue and closed it because she was right. I was hiding. I'd been hiding for three years, and the only thing that had changed in the last five days was the location. Different couch, same impulse.

"Thirty minutes," Ash said. "If it sucks, we leave."

"It's going to suck."

"Then we leave in thirty minutes. Come on, Em. For me."

Syn appeared in the bedroom doorway, already dressed because Syn was the kind of person who could go from asleep to presentable in four minutes flat. "I think it could be fun," she said, which coming from Syn was the equivalent of a ringing endorsement.

I looked at Ripley. Ripley looked at me. Neither of us wanted to move.

"Fine," I said. "Thirty minutes."

---

The music hall was not a music hall tonight. Tonight it was a dimly lit cavern of bass-heavy music, coloured lights, and the specific energy of college students who had convinced themselves that 1 AM on a Thursday was a reasonable time to make life decisions.

Remi was at the centre of it, of course. Blonde hair loose, wearing something that was technically a dress in the same way that a postage stamp was technically mail. She spotted us immediately and materialized with drinks.

"Emily! You came!" She air-kissed my cheek, her perfume cloying and aggressive. "I was hoping you would. Professor Navarro might stop by."

My stomach dropped. "What?"

"Jeremy mentioned he was working late in the East Wing. I told Jeremy to invite him. I think he's interested." She flipped her hair. "In the event, I mean."

In you, I thought. She thinks he's interested in her.

The thought produced an emotion I wasn't prepared for. Not jealousy — I didn't have the right to be jealous, I was his student and he was my professor and whatever existed between us was undefined and undefinable and certainly not something that entitled me to feelings about who else might be circling him.

But the emotion was there anyway. Hot. Sharp. Unwelcome.

"I need a drink," I told Ash.

"No alcohol. You're on medication."

"Gummy worms, then."

"You ate them all."

"Then I need to leave."

"It's been four minutes."

The music was too loud. The lights were too bright. There were too many people and not enough walls and I could feel the panic building under my skin — the familiar electric hum that preceded the shutdown, the moment when my brain decided it had processed enough stimuli and began closing doors one by one until I was standing in a room full of people and feeling absolutely nothing.

I pushed through to the back of the hall. Past the speakers, past the clusters of students swaying to music I couldn't hear anymore, past Cam and Katelyn who were doing something with their phones that might have been dancing, to the corridor that led to the East Wing.

The door was unlocked. Of course it was.

The alcove was dark. The stained-glass window was black without the sun behind it, and the radiator ticked quietly, and the windowsill was empty except for a single paper rose that hadn't been there yesterday.

I sat on the windowsill. Drew my knees up to my chest. Pressed my forehead against them and breathed.

In. Out. In. Out.

The wire hummed.

"You left the party."

His voice. Behind me. In the doorway.

I didn't look up. "It wasn't a party. It was an assault on my senses wrapped in bad music."

Footsteps. That deliberate, careful walk. He sat on the floor against the opposite wall — our usual positions, our usual distance, five feet of stone and shared silence.

"Jeremy told me Remi invited you," he said.

"Remi invited you too."

"Remi invites everyone. It's a strategy, not hospitality."

I lifted my head. He was a shadow against the wall, his face half-lit by the distant glow of the party bleeding through the windows. He'd loosened his tie. His sleeves were rolled up. He looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.

"Why are you here?" I asked.

"I work here."

"At 1 AM?"

"Time is a construct."

"That's not an answer."

He was quiet for a moment. The music from the party was a distant pulse, a heartbeat in another room. "I came because Jeremy said you were here. And because Remi has been getting closer to certain people on campus that I'm watching, and I wanted to make sure you weren't one of them."

"One of who?"

"Not tonight, Emily. That conversation requires daylight and significantly more context than I'm prepared to give right now."

I didn't push. I was learning that about Grey — he gave you information in doses, like medicine, precisely calibrated, never too much, never too fast. You could trust the dosage even when you couldn't see the full prescription.

"How are you sleeping?" he asked.

"I'm not."

"The dorm room is safe."

"I know it's safe. That's the problem. My body is used to being scared. Take the fear away and it doesn't know what to do, so it just... stays awake. Waiting."

He nodded. Not with sympathy — with understanding. The kind that came from experience rather than empathy. He knew what it was like to sleep with one eye open. He knew what it was like to be so accustomed to danger that safety felt like a trap.

"It takes time," he said. "The body has to learn that the absence of threat is not the same as the presence of danger. They feel identical at first. But eventually, the nervous system recalibrates."

"How long?"

"Depends on the person. Weeks. Months. Sometimes years."

"Great. That's very encouraging."

"I didn't say it was encouraging. I said it was true."

The silence stretched. Comfortable. Warm. The radiator ticked. Outside, someone laughed — bright and careless, the laugh of a person who had never been hit.

"Can I tell you something?" I said.

"Always."

"I haven't cut since that night. Five days. That's the longest I've gone in two years."

The silence that followed was different from the others. Heavier. More deliberate. Like he was choosing not just his words but the space between them.

"I'm proud of you," he said. Simply. No fanfare. No "that's great" or "keep it up" or any of the emptily enthusiastic responses that therapists used like currency. Just: I'm proud of you.

Three words. They hit me like a wave.

"Thank you," I whispered.

He stood. Crossed the room. Sat on the windowsill beside me — not touching, but close enough that I could feel the warmth of him, that dark cologne cutting through the dust and stone.

"Look up," he said.

I looked up. Through the stained-glass window, past the dark shapes of the woman and her book, I could see the sky. Clear. Stars. A universe of burning, dying, burning-again lights that most people mistook for permanence.

"The Sirius star," he said, pointing. "There. The brightest one."

I found it. A steady white point in the chaos. "I see it."

"In ancient Egypt, Sirius was called the 'Dog Star.' Its appearance marked the flooding of the Nile, which was both destructive and essential — the floods destroyed everything on the banks, but the silt they left behind made the soil fertile. Without the destruction, nothing could grow."

"You're doing the collapsing stars thing again."

"I'm doing the truth thing. The same truth. That destruction precedes growth. That the flood has to come before the harvest." He turned to look at me, and in the starlight that filtered through the stained glass, his eyes were gold. Pure gold. "Five days, Emily. That's your flood receding."

I looked at him. At this man who was all contradictions — gentle hands that I suspected had done violent things, a poet's vocabulary in a soldier's body, a professor who carried guns and folded paper roses and named his cat after the brightest star in the sky.

"Halfway out of the dark," I said. Not a question. A recognition.

His expression shifted. Surprise. Not at the words — at the fact that I'd found them on my own. "Where did you hear that?"

"Doctor Who. Season seven, Christmas special. The Doctor says it to a woman who's lost her family. He says, 'We're halfway out of the dark.' It means... the worst part is over. Or maybe it means the worst part is behind you even if you can't see the light yet. I'm not sure. I've watched it a hundred times and I'm still not sure."

He smiled.

Not the almost-smile. Not the fractional loosening I'd been cataloguing for weeks. A real, actual, unmistakable smile that transformed his face from sharp and guarded to something that looked like joy and took ten years off his age.

"Halfway out of the dark," he repeated. "I like that."

"It's the truest thing I know."

He looked at me for a long time. The smile faded, but what replaced it was better — a steadiness, a warmth, a promise made without words.

Then he said, "Goodnight, Snowflake," and stood, and walked to the door, and paused with his hand on the frame.

"Emily."

"Yeah?"

"Write that. 'Halfway out of the dark.' That's your title."

He left.

I sat in the alcove for another hour, staring at the stars through stained glass, Sirius burning steady above me, and I opened my laptop and typed:

Halfway Out of the Dark

Chapter One

She died on a Tuesday. And Wednesday came, and everything was exactly the same except she was gone and I was still here and I didn't understand why and I kept breathing even though I'd forgotten the reason.

Two sentences.

Then a third.

Then a fourth.

By the time I left the alcove at 3 AM, I had four pages. They were raw and ugly and real and they were the best thing I'd ever written.

The paper rose was in my pocket. Number nine.

The wire in my chest was humming.

And somewhere above me, Sirius was burning.