It was, more than anything, a feeling of being in over my head. Of racing toward a future I wasn’t wholly ready for.
All the ambition, but perhaps not the resolve. I could feel it all slipping, running through my fingers and out of my grasp.
I left the bathroom, my mind reeling. I couldn’t leave, but I couldn’t return to the party.
There was a sign for a rooftop bar, and I found myself following it, hoping that maybe this is what I needed: a reminder of the life I was chasing. I wanted the glimpse beyond the veil, at the future I was carving for myself, where all this was necessary and rooftop bars at members’ clubs would be an ordinary night.
I wanted it to realign everything, to reassure myself that I had three years at CADS to get over whatever my problem was.
Unless, of course, I wasn’t invited back. This might be all the time I had before I was churned up and thrown out, ready or not, into the waiting vortex.
Oh god, I was going to be sick.
“Well now, you’re not supposed to be up here.”
I jumped, apologies ready, but it wasn’t a bouncer. It was Lewis Stamper, leaning against the bar, nursing a bourbon that he now raised in cheers. “Are you avoiding my birthday too, Heywood?”
“Oh no, I’ve just tired of it,” I said quickly, trying to snap myself into the facade of being alright. “There’s only so often you can hear about why Morocco is the new haven of filming.”
“Ah, so you’ve met Uncle Alistair?”
I froze. “God, sorry, I didn’t mean—”
But he was already laughing me off and beckoning me to thebar. I had a few classes with Lewis, someone I firmly placed in the Shakespearean thespian category of students. He spoke like every word mattered, would wait for conversation to still around him before he participated, like he could only address an expectant audience. But his energy was different tonight, reckless and off-kilter, which was probably the alcohol, and it was probably the alcohol in me too that responded to it. That thoughtYes, why not?when it came to having a drink with an attractive man on a rooftop with a view of a city that only ever felt like it was briefly tolerating you.
This was what I wanted, right? To become the sort of girl who did a thing like this?
He reached across the bar for a menu so that the purple-blue light fell across the slanted planes of his face. I was used to beauty, but this was different—not a continuous appreciation but a moment so arresting I wanted to chase it again. Lewis barely glanced at the list before ordering us both Negronis and nodding at the windows. “There’s a swimming pool out there. I’m tempted.”
“It’s freezing. If you’re so desperate for discomfort, go chat with Uncle Alistair.”
He considered that. “He’s not actually that bad. None of them are.”
“No, I had quite a good time down there.”
“I just don’t like crowds, not like that. Give me an audience with a barrier, not a cluster in a room.”
“Right,” I said, oddly touched that someone else felt it too, like it was easier to be myself when seen only from afar. “That distance is freeing.”
Lewis nodded. “Up close it feels disingenuous. Even this feels odd, Heywood. You aren’t someone to touch.”
“What do you mean?”
“You can just feel it sometimes, can’t you? Even when we’re across from you on a stage, you feel contained, like we only ever get the parts of you that you deign to share—”
“Excuse me?” I demanded, withdrawing a hand I hadn’t realized had floated across the bar toward him, had lain near his glass like an open question.
His low chuckle rolled like the mists along the hillsides back in Yorkshire, a slow and indulgent thing that calmed me but also made me wistful, a feeling of yearning that latched onto the deep blue eyes watching me. “Relax, Heywood. I’m not insulting your performance. Quite the opposite. It’s like you’re already out of our orbit.”
“Oh,” I said, and then I thought of becoming the sort of person who could truly chase what they wanted.
I thought of becoming Harper.
So, emboldened, I added: “I’m not out of your grasp, though. And I’m certainly not untouchable.”
It was only that night. The next morning when he asked if I wanted to “go for a drink sometime,” I refused. I didn’t need a distraction, just some fun, just part of the whole evening of experimenting with all the people I was capable of being.
In class, Lewis and I were cordial, perhaps even friendly, but there certainly wasn’t anything between us, not even lingering tension.
