---
David
I wouldn't say the second half of that university year went fast. I think it went at a normal pace. Student life had a way of keeping itself interesting. Time could fly, but there'd be all those bumps and hurdles to slow it down.
My chemistry professor had a long talk with me and convinced me not to drop the subject. If I could at least complete two years, I'd get something out of it. If I didn't even complete the first year it'd be a complete waste of everyone's time. I wanted to tell her how much I didn't care, but kept myself in check. Getting frustrated and snappy would just be immature, right? It wasn't her fault.
Then she did the most unexpected thing. She started talking about my family's company.
"Woah woah," I interrupted. "You were on the phone to my mum?"
"Yes, she rang me up the other day, wanting to know about the course."
My face screwed up behind my hand, and the professor laughed.
"So she warned you about me coming in here, huh?" I asked.
"She did say you'd been struggling."
God. Cheers, Mum. I was supposed to be an adult and she was still doing these things. It could be endearing and absolutely infuriating at the same time.
"It turned into quite a conversation," the professor continued. She went on and on, telling me about it while I listened and nodded.
Of course. I should've known. In certain areas, my mum's name was quite renowned. Wherever Darren had shyed away from the media, Mum had been there to cover him. Her voice had been on the radio a few times, she'd participated in a couple of interviews on TV. If my chemistry professor was someone who kept up with these sorts of things, she might've felt like she'd talked to a bit of a celebrity down the phone.
"So I guess it was always quite techy for you at home?" she asked.
I smirked and shrugged. "Well, if the PC or PlayStation broke, Mum was always there to fix it."
She smiled, but then looked down at her desk. "It's a shame the war monopolised things."
I didn't know how to have this conversation. Stuff about the company had been there, all my life. I'd forever been surrounded by it. And yet, I didn't have an opinion on it. I guess over-exposure chips away at novelty. Mum and Dad were always busy, sometimes travelling over the country. Darren spent a lot of time talking to people, other big names in the corporate world. Tyler spent days locked up underground in labs, getting all excited over things he couldn't talk about.
People usually thought it was a bigger deal than it was. I'd been around the company complex a lot. I'd seen everything. It wasn't that special.
"I heard the government bought you out," my professor said.
'You'. She was associating me with the company, when in reality, I had nothing to do with it.
"No," I said.
"Your family does still own it?"
"Yes."
The whole thing was still privately owned, even if there were shares, despite whatever rumours said. Darren wasn't some fucking greedy sell-out. I wasn't saying these things, even if the conversation irritated me. I stayed polite.
My mood didn't improve much. I went into that office with the intent of dropping a course, but walked out convinced to continue, and had to endure a weirdly personal and private conversation. I'm sure the professor didn't mean anything by it, was just trying to make some sort of connection with one of her students. Perhaps I was supposed to talk about this stuff a lot, and was just a weirdo that I didn't.
*
Bad moods were burnt out by the cold night air and Violet's footsteps reminding me that she could still outrun me.
It wasn't only running. She wanted to strengthen me up in all other ways, too. The parkour was a full body workout.
She tried very hard to beat me at push-ups, but she couldn't. So she resorted to spitefully sitting on my back to make it more difficult for me. And making me laugh. And tickling me if all else failed.
"Come on," she said, laying on her stomach opposite me in my room, chin resting on clasped hands. "Ten more."
I glared at her, letting out a low growl as I tried to meet her demand. She giggled and her hands pattered the floor.
"So sexy."
"Yeah?" I growled again.
She was enjoying every single grunt of exertion that escaped my throat. "You're so fucking manly."
I cracked up. I couldn't do any more. She rolled onto her back, tilting her head and grinning at me, so cute and cheeky. She was wearing one of those semi-transparent tank tops. My eyes slid from her face, to the colours of her bra, to the hands clasped on her stomach, to her slightly crossed legs, one foot swinging in the air.
"You're very, erm, womanly?"
She laughed as well, and sat up. "Holy shit. What is that?"
"What?"
"What is 'womanly'?"
"Erm. Having tits?"
She let out another yelp of laughter. "Okay. I think I barely make that."
"Pfft. You've also got this amazing arse." I reached over to grab it but she rolled away.
"Yeah, okay. And a tight pussy?"
"Yeah, that too."
I stalked after her while she kept crawling away. Once backed up against the wall she made a wild leap for the bed, jumping on it one way and another to dodge me, mattress springs making an unhappy sound and frame thudding against the wall. She tried to leap off again when I lunged, but the duvet betrayed her, sliding out from beneath her foot and fucking up her jump.
She hit the desk chair, knocked it over, and faceplanted the floor with a crashing thud.
I shouldn't laugh at her misfortune, but I did. She let out some pained chuckling in return.
Melissa's fist banged against the wall from the room next door, followed by her muffled voice. "What are you
doing
in there?"
Training for parkour, apparently.
What Vi did manage to beat me at, was pull-ups. We found somewhere under building work, covered in scaffolding, and to Violet, that was simply an over-sized climbing frame. She complained that I wasn't scaling it fast enough, so she challenged me to a series of pull-ups on one of the bars.
When I had to stop before her she laughed, completely revelling in her victory, and still managed to do a few more to prove her point.
"Holy shit," she said, dropping down.
I grunted and stretched my arms. "I'm heavier than you."
"Yeah, and you also got bigger arms. No excuse."
"Pfft."
"I'm stronger than you."
"No you're fucking not."
She dodged me again and started to climb, so I chased. Since she was shorter than me, I could know that anywhere she went, it was safe for me to follow. But this time I chose my own path, seeing if I could beat her to the top. I don't know if it was because of the dark putting me into some concentrated tunnel vision, or if having fun made me forget that I was doing something dangerous, but at one point I looked down and finally just realised I was holding onto a metal scaffolding bar thirty feet off the ground. Nothing but solid concrete below.
Holy shit.
And I just kept climbing higher.
She did beat me to the top, but only just. The air was so cold, we had to keep moving to keep warm. We traced along the wooden planking, through draped plastic sheets. A window of the building had no glass, but Vi peered inside and decided it was uninteresting. We went to the roof instead.
"Think you can make this jump?" she asked, gesturing to the slightly lower roof of a neighbour building.
How wide was the gap? Ten feet? Twelve feet?
"I'll try," I said.
"Okay. Don't hurt yourself." She backed up, broke into a sprint, and covered the jump with a practised confidence, landing with a roll and standing straight with a short stagger the other side.
I copied her without allowing myself to think about it. She ran again when she saw I would land fine, and springing up with the momentum from my own roll, I didn't try to stop. I just kept going. We covered a jump to a second building, then a third. But the fourth was different. The roof was higher. Ahead of me Violet once again threw herself across the gap, and grabbed hold of the ledge.
I didn't have time to hesitate. I jumped and my hands hit the edge, arms and fingers taking the full weight of my body. I was now hanging from a building's roof, however many feet in the air. Fuck me. The soles of my trainers had just enough grip on the bricks to help in lifting myself up.
Violet was waiting for me with an open grin, breathing through light pants. "Awesome," she said.
Blood was pounding in my ears. This was my first time doing anything off the ground. My training was getting somewhere. And it did feel awesome.
She walked around the roof, peering over the edge, looking for a way down. I trailed her, watching her.
I had another problem building up. It was like all this time we'd only been messing around. Like we took the piss out of everything. Like we weren't taking ourselves seriously. I wasn't sure how it had started. Perhaps simply by the way Violet was - that deflective shell that you wouldn't realise was there until you tried to push through it. If something got a bit deep, she'd turn it into a joke, or brush it off and move on to something else.
She could easily manipulate a conversation, changing subject, until ten minutes later I'd wonder how something got derailed. And I was spotting it happening more and more.
I felt I might be making it impossible for myself, putting it off for too long, like how I'd kept staring at Vi across physics instead of approaching and talking. But I wasn't going to do that again.
What I was feeling was so intense I was sure it couldn't be wrong. And even if she was never going to say it back, I was going to get it off my chest. She might be someone who wanted to keep things locked up in her head, but I could never be like that.
I'd just been running and jumping across the rooves of buildings. Right then, I had all the guts in the world.
She had found wherever we were about to climb down, but I grabbed her sleeve and pulled her back. She let out a nonchalant giggle when I kissed her - it wasn't like I was doing something unusual - but when she tried to pull away again I didn't let go.
"Vi. At what point am I allowed to tell you that I love you?"
She stared at me in silence.
"Because I do. I really, really fucking love you."
The pause stretched even longer. She pulled her sleeve out of my grip and I let her go. I had braced myself for it to be unrequited. It's not like I had any idea how she could
not
love me, but there were strange ways her mind worked and I didn't understand it.
She looked close to panicked, as if she would bolt off and start jumping rooves again to escape me. Her eyes made a few darting movements, but it didn't happen. Instead she focused back on climbing down and didn't say a word.
I don't know why I wasn't hurt. Guess I'd braced myself well. I was more... curious, than anything. Why was it affecting her so much? Was she scared of the commitment? She'd promised me at the very start of this, 'no screwing around'.
She started running once we were on the ground, and I kept beside her in silence. Not a word was said the whole way home. We came to the corner by the campus gates and she looked over her shoulder at me.
"I'm going to go back to my room," she said. A completely emotionless tone.
"Okay."
I leant in to kiss her, and she kissed me back, but walked off towards the campus halls without saying anything else. I headed down the street for my flat. It still wasn't hurting, but I was getting a weird feeling in the pit of my stomach.
I went straight to my room and considered messaging her, to apologise if I'd been too intense, or something. But no, fuck it. I'd be lying. I wasn't sorry for saying it. If she had problems with it then they were exactly that - her problems. Not mine. Some gut emotional intelligence was telling me to give her space.
I was in bed when she messaged me. It's not like I'd been anywhere close to falling asleep and I checked the screen.
"I love you too."
A little childish voice in my head said 'score', and I wanted to smack myself, but the whole thing just made me grin. I typed a response. "You needed some time to think about that, huh?"
"Sorry," she replied.
Then it started vibrating with a string of messages.
"I don't know why I freaked out.
I'm sorry.
You know what.
