Nik had been in the bar the night before his first exam. “If I don’t know it now,” he’d said, “I’ll never know it.” I tried to do the same but my nerve broke after one pint of Guinness, and I fled to my room.
I had some vague intention of cramming, but, God, where did I start? I picked up a copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare and then put it down again, feeling jumpy and sick and unable to remember what happened in Timon of Athens.
Was it the one with the incest? Or the one with the financial mismanagement in Greece?
Fuckfuckfuckfuck.
I was going to fail Oxford. Which was basically the same as failing life.
And I could have avoided it at any point if I’d just done some work.
At Nik’s prompting, I’d gone to the Careers Service a couple of days ago, where I’d read a lot of leaflets that had essentially confirmed I was unqualified for everything. I’d also spoken to a nice lady, who was apparently a careers advisor, but since my opening gambit had been “Hello, I’d like a career, please,” she hadn’t really been able to do much advising. She suggested I put together some ideas about what I wanted to do and slipped me a Those That Can Teach! brochure. We’d talked about things I liked and was good at (clue: not teaching) but all I’d been able to come up with was the Bog Sheet. Which had led to a slightly bemused lecture about how journalism was an incredibly difficult field to break into, even with a degree from Oxford, and how I should have been applying for internships last October.
In short: things were not looking good.
I was actually pretty talented at emotional procrastination, but I’d run out of distractions and excuses. And now I was on my own in my room, the night before my first exam, not quite drunk and not quite sober, and absolutely fucking terrified. Tomorrow I would have to put on a suit and a bow tie and my crappy commoner’s gown and walk all the way down to the Examination Schools. Stand amidst the marble and gilt. And probably burst into tears the moment someone put a paper in front of me.
Twenty questions, half of which would be random quotes from people I inevitably hadn’t read, occasionally appended by a somber “discuss.” I’d been feeling brave enough to check out a past paper a few days back.
Big mistake. Huge.
The first question my eye had alighted on had read: “Happy the man whose wish and care / A few paternal acres bound […]” And that was it.
What did it mean?
How the fuck was I supposed to do any of this?
I suddenly couldn’t breathe. I scrambled over my bed and threw open the window. It was right on the turn: that moment between evening and night, suspended in a golden haze. The air moved sluggishly. Tasted sticky. I rested my head against the edge of the casement.
Too hot. Too cold. Too fucked.
People were moving to and fro across the quad like incidentals in a T. S. Eliot poem. Friends and lovers scattered under the trees in the fading light.
And I’d never felt so fucking alone.
Rationally I could just about locate a non-panic-saturated part of my brain that believed I would definitely maybe sort of be okay. Yes, the next few weeks weren’t going to be very pleasant, and I wasn’t likely to do brilliantly, but it probably wasn’t going to be a complete disaster either. I was relatively clever, though not half as clever as I’d thought I was before I’d come to Oxford. I’d read quite a lot of books. And I’d been dashing off my essays since my second term, so producing semiplausible drivel on demand was a skill I’d accidentally nurtured.
Maybe I did have a future in journalism.
Oh God. I was doomed.
In a moment of absolute mindless lonely terror, I rang the Samaritans. But hung up again when the man I spoke to sounded terribly disappointed I wasn’t suicidal.
Then I made another attempt to do some last-minute revision.
Cried instead.
Got into bed and pulled the duvet over my head.
Got out of bed again. Made sure I had the right clothes for tomorrow. Tested my pens to make sure they…y’know…wrote.
Nearly threw up in the wastepaper basket.
Checked my phone to make sure I’d set an alarm for tomorrow.
Got back into bed.
Thought about calling home but didn’t see any reason to worry the shit out of my family.
Lay in the semidark. Heart beating too fast. Tears gathering but not falling. Stuck somewhere.
I was going to be exhausted for my first exam.
My brain already felt like toffee.
Then my phone rang. I scrabbled for it and answered without even checking the caller ID.
“Yeah?”
“Arden, it’s—”
I sat up so fast I practically hit my head on the shelf over my bed. “Caspian.” God, I’d never expected…why was he…“How did you get this number?”
“I put my considerable resources to the task.”
“You can do that?” I snuffled discreetly into sleeve of my T-shirt. Of course, he couldn’t see me but I had my pride. “I feel like I’m living in some kind of cyberpunk dystopia ruled by megacorps.”
“It’s on your Facebook page.”
“Oh.” He’d looked? And then he’d called me? As if you got to do that after you’d had someone chauffeured out of your life. I knew I should have been furious but I was too messed up right then, and some part of me was desperately, desperately happy to hear his voice again.
Even if he was telling me rather sternly that I had absolutely no sense of online security.
I tried to gather my thoughts. “Well, you grant things power if you try to hide them. Like there’s this…kind of public privacy, you know? If something is right there, chances are, nobody’ll think it’s worth caring about.”
“How very twenty-first century of you.”
“Hey, it works. Nobody has ever rung me randomly off the Internet before.” And then, because I was confused and stressed to buggery and afraid of blurting out something gauche like What the fuck are you doing? or I’m scared or Please help me, I stretched out like a Restoration rake and drawled, “To what do I owe the unexpected pleasure?”
There was a silence. Maybe he’d noticed this was weird and awkward. “I wanted to wish you luck with your exams.”
My stomach did an awful flippy thing. Worry and disappointment and generic insecurity. He’d been pretty certain he didn’t want me when I was relatively put together. How very, very heartbreakingly, self-esteem destroyingly certain would he be if he could see me now? Wrecked and hopeless and pathetic. “Um, thanks.”
Another silence.
“Arden, are you all right?”
“Yes,” I said tightly, “I’m fine.”
“You don’t sound fine.”
“And what’s it to you how I sound?” Eeesh. Way to come across like a petulant child.
“It matters.” His voice dropped into its lower register, the thrilling, growly one, except right now it felt oddly soothing. Tiger balm to my pulled-tight nerves. “Now answer me.”
“I’m…I’m really scared.”
“What are you scared of?”
“Um, slugs, growing old, all my hair falling out, enclosed spaces, relationships, my finals for fuck’s sake. And if you tell me everybody feels this way I swear to God I will punch myself in the face.”
“I’d rather you didn’t punch yourself in the face. But it’s very natural to be apprehensive—”
“I’m not apprehensive. I’m fucking terrified and overwhelmed and…” Whatever else I was vanished into a hiccoughy sob.
“Arden, Arden”—God, now gentleness—“you’ll be fine.”
I knew the right thing to do was nod bravely, stiffen my upper lip, and say something like Of course. Apologize for having made an arse out of myself. Let him feel he’d helped with his entirely generic consolation.
But I just didn’t feel capable of being gracious or strong or polite. It was some combination of closeness and distance. Residual trust left from when I’d let him push his cock into the deep, vulnerable places of my throat and the sense of not really having much to lose with the relative stranger who had already told me no.
So my mouth just kept babbling truths, panicky, ugly, embarrassing truths. It was almost a relief, the same way vomiting can be sometimes, when you’re seriously Bad Drunk. “I won’t be fine. I haven’t done enough to be fine. And even if I am fine, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do afterward.”
“It’s not important. When was the last time somebody asked you about your GCSEs or your A-level results?”
“Um, my university did. And presumably my future employer—whoever they may be—will be vaguely interested in how I spent the last three years.”
“Yes, most likely. But unless you want to be an academic—”
I made a strangled noise.
“—which it seems you don’t, your degree classification will be as relevant to your actual life as the number of A’s you got at GCSE.”
“You got a first, didn’t you.” Not really a question.
He cleared his throat. I wondered what he was doing. Where he was. In his office, leaning back in his chair, surrounded by dark glass and a glittering city? “Yes, but how did you know?”
“Because things only don’t matter if you’ve already got them.”
“I got a first, because I did nothing else, had nothing else. Do you understand?” He sounded a little strange, and not for the first time, I wished I could see him. Not that he tended to give much away, but at least I’d have more to go on than an unfamiliar note in his voice. “That’s all ambition is. A fire that burns in empty places.”
“That’s an odd thing for a super-successful billionaire to be telling me.”
“Not one who has some understanding of your capacity for happiness.”
Capacity for happiness? There was something at once alienating and fascinating in getting glimpses of yourself through someone else’s eyes. Nobody had ever said that about me before. Or if they had, they’d put it less kindly. Shallow, for example, had come my way more than once. Fickle too. “I’m not sure that’s a very useful characteristic,” I mumbled. “Job descriptions aren’t like ‘the ideal candidate will be a good team player, show good attention to detail, and have a deep capacity for happiness.’”
His soft laugh. “Probably not. But that isn’t the only indicator of value. And there’s no point worrying about whether you’re suited to something until you’ve decided if it suits you.”
“Except I don’t know what I want to do.” God, it was depressing, talking to someone who had probably never failed at anything his entire life. I abandoned the insouciant pose he couldn’t see anyway and huddled up at the top my bed, knees tucked under my chin. “I always thought I’d be a journalist, I mean a magazine journalist not a reporter for the Financial Times. But apparently I was supposed to have sorted this out in October and now I’ll have to live in a cardboard box under a bridge. Or go back to Kinlochbervie.”
“Sorry, where?”
“Kinlochbervie. Where my family is. It’s the last bit of Scotland before you fall into the sea.”
“Must be quite a view.”
He surprised a giggle out of me. “Yeah, it really is, if you don’t mind living without shops or a cinema or mobile phone coverage.”
“I wouldn’t last ten minutes.”
“Well, then you could scenically drown yourself in the Loch.”
There was a brief pause, and then he went on. “I didn’t realize you were from Scotland. You don’t have an accent.”
“I’m not Scottish. We moved there when I was eight.”
I nearly told him about that long drive. The dreamy caterpillar of the motorway in the dark taking me from one world to another. And that was when I remembered how fucking weird it was that we were having this conversation at all. Why the hell did he care where I came from? But then he’d also managed to calm me down. Somehow made things…normal again. For a little while, anyway. An odd sort of power for the most remarkable man I’d ever met to possess.
“Look,” I said quickly, “I get it, but you don’t have to do this. Thanks for…thinking of me, or whatever.”
“Are you going to be all right?”
“Are you aware that you ask a lot of questions?”
“Yes.”
Damn him. I wasn’t sure whether I was amused or annoyed. “Well, will you answer one for me?”
A moment of hesitation. “You mean another one?”
“Hah.” A pause of my own, preparing for the taste of his name in my mouth. “Caspian, why did you call me? Really?”
I tried to imagine his expression. Stern, most likely, his eyes betraying his secrets. “I…oh I don’t know. I don’t make sensible decisions as far as you’re concerned. I was…I wanted to hear your voice again.”
Complicated way of putting it but I wriggled with pleasure anyway. “I missed you too.”
Strange to admit it aloud, but I had. A kind of backward nostalgia—missing a man I barely knew and something that could have been.
He was quiet for so long, I thought he might have hung up on me. I wouldn’t have been entirely surprised. It was basically the long-distance equivalent of stuffing me in a car and going back to his meeting.
“Um. Hello?”
“Arden, if you’re interested in journalism, I know some—”
“No way. Nepotism is icky.”
“If you’re concerned about nepotism, you’ve attended the wrong university.”
He had a point. “Yeah, well, that still doesn’t mean I want donations for blow jobs or to only have what I have because I knew somebody who knew somebody.” He made a noise I couldn’t quite interpret. “What are you fnuh-ing about?”
“I think you’re being naive.”
It’s my life rose hysterically to my lips, but I held it back. There were no circumstances under which saying that was ever the right thing to do. I’d shouted it at my family once at breakfast—couldn’t remember why, something that had seemed world-crushingly important at the age of thirteen—and they’d all burst out laughing. Called me CAPSLOCK!ARDY for weeks. “Maybe. But not thinking exactly like you do isn’t necessarily a deficiency in my worldview, y’know.”
“Ouch.”
That had come out way more insulting than I’d intended. I should have stuck to It’s my life. “Fuck, sorry.”
“No, it’s fine. And you’re right, of course. It’s just”—a very faint sigh, almost if he was embarrassed—“I don’t like to think of you being upset or afraid.”
I swallowed. Not quite sure what to make of that. My stupid-arse heart uncurling like a cat hopeful for caresses. I knew it would be safest to make a joke (“Good job you weren’t there for the final episode of London Spy, then”) but in the end I just shrugged—even though he couldn’t see it—and said as lightly as I could, “That’s nice, but it’s not your problem.”
Another of his hesitations. “No, but if it was. If you were…”
“If I was what?”
“If you were mine.”
Now it was my turn to freeze, the distance between us solidifying in the silence. I knew how I should answer: But I’m not. And then say my goodbyes, try to sleep, face my exams with some pretense of courage or fortitude.
“What if I was?” Why was I was whispering for no particular reason? I tried to sound confident and flirty instead. “What would you do to me?”
I’d been expecting something sexy back: Bend you over the nearest piece of furniture and make you scream, would have done nicely.
“I’d want to make you feel safe,” he said. “And I’d make sure you never forget the extraordinary man you are.”