Chapter 3: Second Task

At seven-eighteen in the morning his eyes opened, and he was not the one who did it.

He’d learned the difference in Port Sterling. Yesterday the hand had gone first — at the corner table, mid-reach, the palm turning up into the air — and after that he had sat inside himself all day and watched the body walk him back to the room he rented by the week, make his coffee, put him to bed, and turn off the light.

This morning it was the eyes, and then the ceiling, and then the whole flat gray room.

Then the voice.

THE SYSTEM

SECOND TASK.

PLEASE PROCEED TO JULIAN PRESCOTT’S DORMITORY ROOM AND CONFESS YOUR LOVE TO HIM.

He lay still and gave it a second, in case there was more.

There was more.

Then the other thing started. He’d seen it once before, on the morning this began, and he knew its shape by now: lines coming up on the inside of his eyelids in a font nobody had asked him about, one at a time, at reading speed.

I only need a few minutes. That’s all I’m asking for.

I’ve liked you for a long time. I know I’m not the kind of person you’d pick.

But you said it yourself once — that if two people really meant it, secondary gender wouldn’t be the thing that decided it for you.

He had read those. Lying in a rented room three hours from everything, that was the part he couldn’t get past: he had read these lines before, on his phone, in bed, in a life where they were supposed to be someone’s work.

“System,” he said, out loud, at the ceiling.

Nothing.

“I’m not him.” He kept his voice level. “You’ve got the wrong person. If you want me to do this, give me a reason.”

The words went up and stayed up. No block, no line, no font.

His body sat up without him.

It did the morning. Bathroom, water, the towel he didn’t reach for, two shirts folded into the bag, the charger rolled and pocketed, the toothbrush he’d bought at a drugstore on his second day in Port Sterling because he’d left Bellhaven with nothing but what was in his hands.

Then the phone. The thumb did things. The screen came up with a receipt for one seat on the 9:55 to Bellhaven.

The coffee-shop receipt stayed on the table, list side up. Money. An address that wasn’t rented by the week. A job. Somewhere to be on a Monday. The door closed on it.

He rode along inside it the whole way. Airport, gate, window seat, three hours with a tray table in his lap and a kid behind him crying in shifts. He stopped trying to find a finger of it somewhere around the drink service and started keeping score instead.

Two days of score, and it came to this. A hand, once, in a coffee shop. A body that had dressed him, packed him, bought a ticket, boarded a plane, and not for one second handed him anything back. A voice that answered nothing.

The next thing he had was a sidewalk.

Bellhaven University, third week of the semester: brick, elms, bike racks, a kid on a longboard with a phone in each hand, wet leaves, the dining hall vent pushing warm grease-smell across the quad. Light came off the library’s glass front and went nowhere.

He was on campus. The first thing he did there was the first thing he did everywhere now. He checked the tip of his right index finger against the inside seam of his pocket. The toe of his left foot. The small muscle above his knee. Everything from the calf up belonged to whatever had signed the lease.

A finger and part of a foot. Those were the terms.

It walked him along the path toward the residence halls, and he used the walk the only way available to him, which was to watch.

“Elliot?”

His feet stopped.

He had not stopped them. There had been no stumble, no catch in the stride — one step the body was going, and the next step it wasn’t, and between those two things he had contributed nothing at all. Then his head turned. That wasn’t his either.

Sam Renner was standing on the path with a coffee and a hoodie and the look of a man who had been carrying something around for a week and had just found the person he was supposed to hand it to. Beta, roommate, careful in the specific way people get after they’ve decided to keep an eye on somebody.

“Hey.” Sam came off the grass edge, tucking the cup against his chest so it wouldn’t slosh. “Hey — Elliot. Where’ve you been? I’ve texted you like six—“ He stopped, reset, said it smaller. “Are you okay?”

“You need something?”

It was his voice. He heard it from the inside, the way he heard everything now, and it was his voice with the temperature wrong.

Sam’s mouth went tight. “Did you get the thing with your family sorted out?”

He didn’t answer that.

He felt the question sit there, and he left it where it was. Nothing in him even started the sentence.

“Where’s Julian Prescott,” his mouth said.

Sam’s face did something complicated and settled.

“Okay,” he said. “So we’re doing this again.”

“Which floor is he on.”

“He’s not interested.” Sam stepped in and dropped his voice, for all the good it did on an open path. “He’s told you that. I’ve told you that. It doesn’t get truer because you say it again.” A pause. “Finish the year, Elliot. Get through May. Whatever else is going on with you, do that part first.”

He wanted to say yes. He was saying yes, in there, behind his own teeth, nodding so hard where nobody could see it that it made him tired. What he wanted to ask for was one thing, and it wasn’t a floor number. Hold on to me. Put your hand on my arm and stand in front of that building and don’t let go until this is over, and I don’t care what you decide it meant afterward.

What came out was, “Which floor.”

Sam looked at him for a long moment. Then: “Come eat something. You look like you haven’t slept in a—“

There.

The walkway four feet ahead had a seam where the slabs had shrugged apart and the near one sat a quarter inch proud of the other. He had the toe of his left shoe and maybe a second’s worth of intention, and the only useful thing in the world right now was a reason for Sam Renner’s hands to be on him.

He put his toe down on the edge of the slab and let the rest of his weight keep going.

He went down onto both palms and one knee. The bag slid off his shoulder and landed in front of him, and the sound was exactly as loud as he needed it to be, and Sam said “Whoa — hey,” and dropped the coffee on the ground without looking at it, and went down to one knee, and got a hand under Elliot’s arm.

“You’re good. You’re good, I’ve got you—“

Elliot’s right hand closed around Sam Renner’s wrist.

He did that part. The fingers answered all the way down for once — grip, knuckles, the whole hand — and he held on, and he counted.

One. Two. Three.

A sophomore came around the corner of the bike racks, looked, and kept going. The coffee spread in the brick.

Four. Five.

“Elliot. Hey. You with me?”

Six.

His fingers opened.

They opened the way they had closed, from the tips inward, slow and deliberate, and set Sam’s wrist down in the air between them.

“You don’t have to worry about me,” his mouth said. His legs brought him back upright and turned him around and walked him up the hill.

Sam said something after him. He didn’t get to keep it.

He tried, going up, to make something out of it that he could use.

Last time it had worked. That was the part that wouldn’t lie flat. Last time he’d been in a hotel room in Bellhaven with his whole body shut, and something had come back to him, and the only variable he had been able to find in the entire night was the man in that room.

He didn’t know the man’s name. He had arranged that — he’d left the card on the hotel counter downstairs without looking at the name on it, so that there was nothing in his hands to look up and no reason to go looking.

He turned it over a few ways and the answer came out the same every time. Both of Sam Renner’s hands had been on him and he’d come back no further than one hand. So it wasn’t touching. Or it wasn’t Sam. Or it wasn’t a body at all — it was one man, in one room, in one city he had just spent two days’ rent getting away from.

And Sam had said his name, and the body had stopped.

He filed that one where he kept the other things that were true and useless.

Five floors of residence hall stairs, unhurried the whole way. At the top the hallway smelled like carpet shampoo and somebody’s microwave and somebody else’s laundry, and his hand knocked on the last door on the left.

It opened eight inches and stopped.

The face in the gap took one look at him and did not open it any further.

“You know you’re not welcome here.”

The body put a hand into the gap before the door could close on it. Not fast, not hard, just steadily, and the gap went from eight inches to two feet, and the person behind it gave up on the door and put his shoulder in the space instead. The body went through anyway. Past him. Four steps into the room, and stopped.

There were three of them in there. He didn’t register the other two.

Julian Prescott was standing at the desk with his laptop open and a forearm braced against the wall above it, and he looked the way the book had spent a hundred pages promising its alpha lead would look. Tall. Settled inside his own body. Dark hair, an open face, good-looking in the specific pre-approved manner of a first page.

Elliot knew him already, the way you know a person you’ve only ever read.

Julian looked at him for a second and a half, then turned his head aside and set his jaw and said nothing at all. He wasn’t going to make it ugly if he could help it.

Then Elliot’s mouth opened.

“Julian. Do you have a minute?”

Nothing.

“I know I’m a beta.” The voice was reasonable. It was likable. It was the worst voice he had ever heard in his life. “But you said once that if two people really meant it, secondary gender wouldn’t be the thing that decided it for you. I came here to say it again. Everything I’ve said to you, and everything I’ve done — I meant all of it. If there’s something about me that doesn’t work, tell me and I’ll fix it.”

“Dude.” One of the roommates, off to the left. “Do you hear yourself right now?”

Both roommates were watching. He counted them the way he counted everything now, and neither of them was laughing, which was worse.

Julian straightened off the wall.

“I’m sorry.” His voice was even and he didn’t raise it, and he was looking at a point slightly to the left of Elliot’s face. “I’ve never thought about you like that. And I need you to stop coming here.”

“Why not?” Pleasant, and unhurried, as if he had all year. “Is there somebody else?”

“I don’t think I owe you that answer.”

“I knew it.” The body let the pause do its work. “The omega in the other hall. Whatever it is you like about him, I can learn it.”

Julian’s face closed all the way. He didn’t answer that one either. He lifted one arm and pointed at the door — one clean gesture, no theater, the way you’d point out a fire exit.

“Please leave my room.”

“I’m not leaving.”

His hand came up and reached for Julian’s.

That was the body’s idea. His arm extending into the space between them, and he watched the last inch of it happen and did not do one part of it. Julian’s arm snapped back fast and clean, out of range, and then he was a step to the side, and then the two of them came off the wall, and there was a body between Elliot and the door and a body between Elliot and Julian, and neither of them was being careful.

His face was hot. He was ashamed in a flat, total way, and there was nowhere in this body to put it.

“Julian—“ past the shoulder in front of him, mild and hopeful, the voice the book kept for the end of an episode. “I really like you. Can’t you just give me one chance? Let’s try it.”

Nobody in the room answered him.

“Let’s just try it first.”