I avoided the university side of the grounds for three weeks. I told myself it was practical, the long way round the oval kept me away from mud, and not that I was avoiding a boy twelve years my junior because he’d made my pulse do something undignified.
It didn’t matter. Glenfrost was a small town, and the school and the college shared a canteen, a hall, and a habit of asking parents to help with everything from bake sales to the winter charity fun-run. I could not, it turned out, avoid Damian Ashworth by avoiding a basketball court, because he seemed to be everywhere, helping set up trestle tables for the sausage sizzle, hauling boxes of raffle prizes into the hall, standing at the edge of things with that same too-attentive gaze that found me across a crowded room without seeming to look for me at all.
And then there was the matter of the stairs.
It was a Thursday, raining the particular horizontal Otago rain that turns umbrellas into liabilities, and I was hurrying down the external staircase from the school hall with a box of unsold sponge cakes balanced against my hip, and my foot came down wrong on a step slick with water, and the world tipped sideways.
I remember the box leaving my hands. I remember the sick lurch of my stomach as gravity took over. I do not remember hitting the ground, because I didn’t, an arm caught me around the waist, solid as a rail, and set me upright as though I weighed nothing at all.
“You have a habit of nearly falling into things,” Damian said, close to my ear, and when I turned my head, his face was inches from mine, rain beaded in his lashes, that same unnatural cool radiating from him even through his jacket.
“You have a habit of appearing,” I managed.
“I was helping Coach Reddy carry the trophy cabinet.” He nodded toward the hall, though I hadn’t seen him there moments before, hadn’t heard him approach at all across gravel and rain. “Good thing I was on this side of the building.”
Good thing. Twice now, in three weeks. And a fortnight after that, when I stepped off the kerb outside the dairy without checking properly and a delivery van came around the corner too fast, it was Damian’s hand that closed around my arm and hauled me back onto the footpath before I’d even fully registered the danger, before the horn had finished blaring.
Three near-misses. Three times he was simply there, faster than any reasonable person had a right to be.
I told myself it was coincidence. Small towns are small; everyone crosses everyone’s path eventually. But some nights, lying awake in the too-large bed I’d shared with Michael, I found myself wondering how a boy could move like that, like the air itself made way for him, and I did not like how much I wanted to find out.