Chapter 8: Chapter 8
Sam waved him bye and disappeared around the bookshelves. Leaving Denis alone at their small table, looking after the bushy-haired girl with a frown. She was quite different, wasn’t she? She simply didn’t hide anything at all, wore her emotions on her sleeve, and her head held high despite crying in front of a virtual stranger. If it had been Denis, he would never have recovered emotionally from the defeat.
At the same time, he couldn’t help but find it refreshing. Their interaction had been so genuine it sort of made him sick, but in a good way. He wondered how different he’d be if he’d grown up like Sam; unashamed of having human emotions, being totally fine with not brushing his hair every day. It felt like a simpler life, perhaps?
In the next class, Denis sat down next to Ravi since both spots around Sam were already taken. “Be my lab partner,” Denis pleaded unashamedly.
Ravi looked at him with wide eyes, almost as if he was a bit afraid of being spoken to by Denis. It was ridiculous because Ravi was twice as wide as Denis and had scrapes indicating he was mauling people on the regular, yet Denis knew what he saw; he saw a nervous rugby player named Ravi.
“Ehm, your lab partner?” Ravi sounded panicked as he threw a glance towards Sam and the redhead sitting to the right of him. “I don’t know-” he began with a slow voice.
Sam looked at Ravi with wide eyes before slamming her left elbow into his side. “We talked about this,” she told Ravi. Denis could tell that they actually had not talked about this. “Sebastian and I will do the labs, and you’ll partner with Denis.”
Ravi looked at Denis with wide eyes. “Right,” he said, confirming to Denis that Sam had just thrown her giant dark-haired friend under the bus.
“Weren't the three of us supposed to...” the redhead began talking just to get interrupted by Sam hitting his arm hard.
Denis felt awkward. “Oh,” he sank into his chair, noting the professor's call for attention. “I mean, I don’t want to break you guys apart.”
Sam flushed. “No, Denis, you’re not.”
Even Ravi jumped in. “I actually want to work with you. Sebastian types slowly.”
The redhead glared at Ravi as the raven-haired boy had just thrown him under the bus. Perhaps he, in a way, had. Denis glanced up at Ravi curiously, cool silvery eyes meeting unreadable green. Ravi was handsome in that rugged sense most boys their age weren’t. He seemed to belong to another time with his head of dark locks, square jaw, and fine stubble. Students nowadays don’t get muscles like Ravi and the redhead, no matter how often they go to the gym. Rugby players seemed to be of a different breed altogether. Denis had never quite seen a man with so many curves.
“You’re funny,” Denis offered, shooting him a crooked smile. Ravi averted his eyes, an odd way of accepting the compliment. Denis felt his smile stiffen, falter, and die. The strange boy was a riddle; he seemed aloof, but at the same time, he had at least two friends he seemed quite comfortable. He didn’t say very much, but it wasn’t because he was stoic; he seemed scared to say the wrong thing, or perhaps he simply found it unnecessary to speak. The thought was foreign to Denis; if you didn’t speak, how else were you supposed to get anywhere in the world? Nobody had become anybody by listening.
“The lecture is starting,” Ravi pointed out after two beats of tense silence, ending their conversation that hadn’t really begun at all. Denis could hear how the redhead was whispering something furiously on the other side of Ravi. But the large boy was like a barrier of flesh, making the words muffled as Sam and the scrappy red-haired boy seemed to have a hushed, full-blown argument. Ravi shifted beside him, whether it was because he was uncomfortable with the fight or the chair was unclear.
Denis was uncomfortable, both with the fight, which he suspected was about him, and the chair that was Spartan at best.
It didn’t quite matter how ruggedly handsome Ravi was, Denis thought as he glanced at the rugby player next to him. The blonde feared that he’d doomed himself to be trapped in a limbo of silence and awkwardness by agreeing to partner with Ravi. The labs were scheduled for four hours per week, and that was just the scheduled part. If you didn’t finish the labs, you’d have to spend time outside of the schedule to finish and submit them each week. It would be a nightmare. And if there was something Denis strongly believed, it was that not even ruggedly handsome looks could make up for stilted interactions.
Well, fuck.
Augustine had laughed and laughed and laughed as Denis had whined his complaints later that night.
“So what if he’s awkward?”
“You don’t get it,” Denis had pouted as they were getting ready for the high-pub. There were three pubs students went to on Wednesday pub nights: the low, the mid, and the high pub. The low-pub was fun if you wanted cheap beer, a dirty bar, blacked-out students, and vomit-smeared floors. The mid-pub was regular in all senses of the world. It could still get rowdy, but it was placed close to campus and with carefully scrubbed floors and a brightly lit bar. The glasses used to serve up beer might have been used for about two decades, but there was not a speck of dirt on them. The high pub, on the other hand, was expensive. Denis, Greg, and Sherlock usually went to the mid-pub during pub nights, but today Augustine and Renea had dragged them along to the finer part of campus, to the high-pub, The Green Snake.
The pub was filled with an all too familiar crowd. Denis could name most of the students milling about by their last name. Denis didn’t really like being at the high-pub, something with the dark oak decoration and the polished wood reminded him too much of home. But Augustine and Renea were a bit too skeptical of the warm light of the mid-pub, so here they were, surrounded by students whose parents regularly attended festivities at the Arnold manor. Denis hated the way all the students knew who he was. He was sure it would have been worse had he attended Oxford like his father so desperately had wanted him to, but this was bad enough in his book.