SOME KIND OF DISASTER ─ oliver wood

[ 036 ] in through the out door

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
in through the out door

MAYBE HER FRIENDS were more perceptive than she'd initially given them credit for.

Something had shifted between Oliver and Sawyer, a palpable casting-off of pretences. They went about things as per normal, which, come to think of it, in retrospect, meant they'd been pretty much doing everything people in relationships did even before they'd confirmed that there was something that could come out of their prior arrangement, something far deeper, and the way they oriented themselves around each other started feeling less performative and more natural.

Each night Quinn awoke from a nightmare or couldn't seem to fall asleep no matter what she did, she crawled into Sawyer's bed and nested under the covers like Sawyer was one fleshy talisman warding off whatever curse had been plaguing her.

Those nights, they shared everything under the protective umbrage of Sawyer's blanket, which Quinn had christened the cone of truth. Sawyer learnt everything about Quinn's secret obsession with miniature gardens, how she'd wanted a pony since she was seven until she'd nearly been murdered in cold blood by one—psychopaths, I tell you, she'd said, with an acrid vengeance, you can see it in their beady eyes—and suddenly every pony had become her arch-nemesis, and how she felt about Nick Carraway (whoever that was) and the new book she was reading by some philosophical guy Quinn happened to really like who'd written a book of literature essays titled What Would Your Verse Be? which Sawyer thought was stunningly pretentious. Dreams, they consecrated in the dark, too, both good and bad and the lucid in-between. That last category had Quinn swearing she was psychic. And in moments of raw honesty, the more vulnerable, softer moments, she learnt about Jeremy and the inside of his gilded heart through Quinn's eyes.

In those moments, she thought about telling Quinn about Oliver, too, just to even out their score. But then she realised that she wanted to live in the bubble of privacy a little longer, a bubble where nobody else had to be involved. Of course, complete secrecy until graduation was a pipe dream, and neither Oliver nor Sawyer were moronic enough to believe they could hide everything from their friends.

When the blood-orange dawn sun flooded the sky in flames, drowning the oil spill of clouds in saturated heat, Sawyer found herself on her back in the grass, Oliver's shoulder just inches from her face. It'd finally stopped raining for a week, and they were able to resume their morning routine, coming down to a Quidditch pitch that wasn't waterlogged.

"Rio knows," Sawyer said, twining her finger around the string of her sweatshirt, "I never told any of them, but Rio knows. It's strange, kind of like an omen, the way he always knows."

In hindsight, perhaps he'd known all along.

"You have a creepy friend," Oliver said.

Pulling a fistful of grass out, Sawyer hummed. It was undeniable that their friends had begun to notice something's changed, even though they didn't say anything. They learnt not to ask. Sawyer learnt that Oliver was pretty secretive with his friends, too, who merely bet they were—quote, unquote—"hate-fucking". To her surprise, he wasn't the type to tell them a lot outright. Even Wyatt, who's been his best friend since they were old enough to grasp the concept of object permanence, and finally stopped crying each time they saw each other as babies. Maybe they were holding out on them just to see how far they'd let it run before they started interrogating them. In their world, nothing was private, yet everything was. And then, yesterday: It was a small action. Nothing flash, nothing that should've invoked a commotion. Oliver had walked her to the library to meet up with her friends. As he was leaving, he'd bumped his knuckles against the back of her hand, lingering long enough for her to feel it. They weren't big on public displays of affection, and that subtle brushing of hands should've safely flown under the radar.