By the time we got back from Edinburgh it was nine in the evening, and the sky glittered with white-silver stars. Pulling up the oak-lined drive towards Carvell, tiredness dragged at my eyelids. Was it really only two nights ago that I’d performed the ritual and gauged vicious cuts into myself? The freshness of the wounds confirmed it, although the sheer length of the days made time feel warped and unreliable.
Saying goodbye to Hafsah outside her dorm in Foxglove Hall was strangely emotional. Despite the horrific circumstances under which we’d come together, something in me glowed at the thought that I might have a friend. A friend who would never judge me for my darkest impulses and urges, because she shared them too.
Lottie and I, on the other hand, climbed the two flights of stairs to our dorm in silence. There was so much hanging between us that idle chit-chat seemed absurd. I had no idea how I was supposed to feel in her presence now. Guarded and defensive, knowing that she was likely still investigating me? Grateful and humbled that she’d saved me? Embarrassed, or ashamed? Whenever I thought of her hands on my bare stomach, heat spread across my cheeks. And yet despite the circumstances, I’d laughed more today than I had all year.
Either way, there was the clear sense that we were no longer just background characters in each other’s lives, passing through the periphery with mutual disdain. Our roots had suddenly and irrevocably knotted together.
As ever, the dorm room was an utter mess. I lay down my briefcase on one of the few remaining bare patches of carpet and got to work changing my bloody bedsheets. Wordlessly, Lottie helped me stuff pillows into their covers and fluffed them up before laying them on my bed. I struggled to fight the wincing as I worked. The pain in my stomach wasn’t fading; if anything it was growing hotter and sharper.
‘Let me see,’ Lottie said sternly.
‘I’m fine.’
‘You’re not. Don’t be a twat.’ She laid a hand on my shoulder and pushed me down into my desk chair. I whimpered involuntarily on impact, and she softened. ‘Sorry. I’ll be gentle.’
The intimacy of lifting the hem of my shirt was as raw as the wounds beneath. As she started to dab at them with another antibacterial wipe, I sucked the air between my teeth. Her head was so close to mine that I could smell her green apple shampoo.
After examining and dabbing for a few more painful minutes, she pulled away again. The air where she’d been felt instantly cooler. ‘I’m not sure. They’re looking very angry. We should really go to the hospital.’
We.
A simple word, but it meant more than I could say.
‘I’m not going to the hospital,’ I said in a low voice. ‘How would I even explain it? It’s fine. Time heals all wounds.’
Lottie looked at me like I was a prize idiot. ‘But not the ones you leave infected.’
This chimed with a deeper resonance than she likely expected – something poignant about anger and forgiveness – but I didn’t want to look at the revelation head-on. Not yet, when I already felt so fragile.
I groaned as she cleaned the cuts and applied new bandages, then dropped the hem of my shirt with relief. I shivered at the thought of how the cuts got there in the first place. I had dragged a knife across my own skin, filled with such all-consuming rage that I would destroy anything in my path. Even myself.
Without warning, Lottie unfastened her jeans and dropped them to her ankles, kicking them away and grabbing her pyjama shorts off the side of her bunk. I averted my gaze quickly, but not before I caught a glimpse of fuchsia underwear and long, muscular legs. She had a tattoo I’d never seen before; a black Celtic ring wrapping around her upper thigh. I swallowed hard. Being a woman attracted to other women was confusing; a constant game of comparison and lust. You never quite knew whether you were jealous of their body or just jealous of the person who got to touch it.
After I’d gotten changed into my own pyjamas in the small bathroom down the hall – I still hadn’t plucked up the courage to undress my own curvy pale body in front of Lottie – I came back through to find she was in bed reading a book. The main light had been switched off, and she lay in a pool of golden lamplight that illuminated the frizz of her hair like a halo.
I followed suit and climbed gingerly into my freshly made bed, picking upThe Conscious Mindto flip through, but my eyes were too heavy and trying to focus made them sting. I closed them instead, hoping for the sweet respite of sleep, but my mind was still racing from the events of the last few days. I tossed and turned, unable to get comfortable.
Noticing my restlessness, Lottie threw the duvet over the edge of her bunk and sat up, shoving her new copy ofShot in the Heartdown the side of the mattress in a manner I found very disrespectful to literature as a whole.
‘Have a drink with me,’ she said simply.
The freshly ritualised heart in my chest told me I should oblige, because it would make her happy and I owed her that much, at least, but every bone in my body ached at the prospect. I shook my head and rubbed my eyes. ‘I’m too tired. Sorry, I’m not trying to be a dick for once. It’s just . . . I can’t stand the Refectory. All that noise and the sweat and . . . it’s just not me. I’m sorry.’
‘Who said anything about the Refectory?’ She hopped lightly off her bunk and crossed to the window, which she grabbed by the bottom of the frame and hauled all the way up to the top. As she stretched up on her tiptoes, a strip of toned stomach appeared over the crinkled band of her plaid pyjama shorts. She was always too warm. ‘Let’s drink here.’
The sill jutting out of the stone wall was wide and deep and smattered with yellow-green moss. She perched herself barelegged on the lip of it, then reached back into the room to grab the bottle of wine off her desk. She took a deep, thirsty swig and gestured for me to join her.
Stiffly clambering out, I tried not to look down. We were only on the second floor, but I was deathly afraid of heights. She handed me the bottle, and I shook my head automatically. ‘I don’t drink white.’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t drink red. And last I checked, you were all out.’
I took a reluctant sip, the mouth of the bottle wet from Lottie’s lips, and begrudgingly admitted that it tasted pretty good. Lighter and drier than my beloved Merlot; fresher, somehow. Citrusy sharp.
Despite the cold night air, I sighed into the gentle burn down my gullet, then handed the bottle back to her. The uncertainty was still there between us, a rocky terrain of fundamental mistrust, but I found myself wanting to chart a path across it.
Lottie spoke first, quietly and clearly into the night. ‘Why did you do it?’
‘The ritual?’