Chapter 56 FRENCH CONJUGATIONS — PART TWO
POV: PIPER
What she realized afterward, sitting with her knees pulled up under a paint-stained drop cloth, was that she had made a choice.
Every moment of it had been a choice. That was the part she hadn’t expected. She thought she’d feel swept away, overwhelmed, like it just happened to her the way things did in the stories her mama warned her about.
But it hadn’t just happened.
She had chosen it. Each moment, she chose the next one.
The studio smelled like turpentine and the warm closeness of two people sharing a small space. Her French conjugations were scattered on the floor where her workbook had slid off the table. She hadn’t even cared when it fell.
She had been warm. For that time, she felt like a person living fully in her own skin, not just pretending for someone else’s sake. She had felt real. That was the hardest thing to admit because it made everything after it so much more complicated.
George was beside her, shirt open, one arm resting over his face.
“I should go,” she said.
“You could,” he said without moving. “Not yet though.”
She looked down at the French conjugations spread on the floor.
Je suis. I am.
She wasn’t sure who she was right now.
Her phone buzzed on the table above them.
She reached for it automatically but he was faster, the reflexes of someone who’d always been quicker than the people around him, sharpened by years of sports and being trained to move before others even finished thinking.
He had her phone.
She watched him read Omar’s text.
Can’t sleep. Keep thinking about fall formal in two weeks. Can’t wait to show off my beautiful girl. Sweet dreams, angel.
“Don’t,” she said.
She said it clearly, looking straight at him.
His thumbs moved across the screen.
She lunged for the phone but he turned just enough to press send before she could grab it.
She grabbed the phone and looked at what he’d typed.
Missing you too, baby. Fall formal will be perfect. Sweet dreams.
A heart emoji.
She stared at the screen.
The studio was completely quiet. The kind of quiet that means something irreversible just settled into the air around them.
This was not what had happened in the greenhouse or the language lab. This was different. This was her voice used without her permission to speak to the person she loved. It sat in her chest like something she didn’t have a word for yet. Something between anger and grief and the pure horror of watching someone else be you while you watched.
She looked at him.
His face changed for a second.
Not regret exactly. Not guilt. Something younger and less controlled. The look of someone who acted before thinking and was now standing in the aftermath without the usual armor of planning.
Then his smile returned.
“Better to keep things smooth,” he said. “For both of you.”
“You had no right.” Her voice shook. She let it shake.
“I told myself I’d leave you alone after the greenhouse,” he said. The act dropped just a little, the way it did for a second in the language lab and a second tonight. “Saw how scared you were and thought I’d be generous. Let you keep that careful little life.” His eyes stayed on her face. “But you came here tonight, Piper. And I realized you were never going to stay his. Not really. Not the real you.”
“I made a mistake,” she said.
“You made a choice.” He said it simply. “The first real one you’ve made in your whole perfectly arranged life.”
Footsteps in the stairwell.
Heavy and steady. The security guard making rounds.
They both froze.
The same stillness, at the same time, without saying a word. She could feel him holding his breath next to her. She didn’t breathe either. The footsteps grew louder, slowed outside the art studio door, and for three long seconds they were just two people in the dark waiting to find out if they’d been caught.
The footsteps moved on.
Down the hall. Fading. Gone.
The silence that followed felt enormous.
She and George looked at each other in the dark.
In his face, she saw something that had nothing to do with the act or the calculation or the wolf smile. Just two people who had been dangerously close to something and hadn’t been caught, now sitting in the quiet intimacy of a secret that almost turned into disaster.
It was the most honest thing that had happened between them all night.
Then she started gathering her things.
She found her cardigan. Her French workbook. Her phone with Omar’s unanswered texts still glowing on the screen.
“Wouldn’t want the golden couple falling apart before midterms,” George said, the performance fully back.
She didn’t answer.
She walked to the door, opened it, and stepped into the hallway without looking back.
The walk back to the dorm was long and quiet. The building was dark except for the red glow of emergency exit signs at the ends of the halls. Her feet made no sound on the Persian runners.
Halfway back she noticed it.
His cologne.
Still on her sweatshirt. The dark, cedar scent with something deeper underneath, soaked into the fabric she’d been wearing.
She didn’t stop walking.
She didn’t take it off.
She just carried it with her the rest of the way to her room, where Omar’s photos smiled at her from every surface, where the mirror showed a face she was still trying to understand, where the French workbook’s conjugations were still scattered somewhere on a studio floor behind her.
Je suis.
I am.
She sat on her bed in the dark.
Figured out who.