Chapter 3 —Cracks In The Armor

• Brienne's POV
• The next morning came with the particular quiet that only existed before Avalon High fully woke up.
• Hallways half empty. Lockers clicking open and shut. The distant sound of skates cutting across the rink from the east wing where the hockey team always grabbed early ice before first period.
• I liked this version of the school. Before the noise, before the crowd, before it became the place I spent most of my energy navigating.
• Nora handed me a coffee the moment I reached my locker.
• "You look like you slept badly," she said.
• "I slept fine."
• She gave me the look that meant she didn't believe me but wasn't going to push it yet.
• I took the coffee and reached for my textbook, and that was when the hallway did the thing it always did when Landon walked in. That quiet ripple, heads turning, energy shifting without anyone meaning for it to.
• I did not look up.
• "Hey."
• "No," I said, eyes on my locker.
• "I haven't said anything yet."
• "You were about to apologize." I pulled my textbook out. "I don't want it."
• "Brienne."
• I turned around slowly. He was standing closer than I expected, hands in his pockets, jaw set, looking at me with something that didn't fit the version of him I had decided on.
• "I was wrong," he said. "What I said was wrong and I'm not dressing it up. I'm sorry."
• I held his gaze for a moment, then looked away. "Okay."
• "Okay?" He sounded genuinely thrown. "That's it?"
• "Apology noted." I shut my locker. "We're done."
• I walked away before he could say anything else and told myself the warmth creeping up my neck was annoyance.
• It was definitely annoyance.
• ***
• Forty minutes later Mr. Chad read out project partners and paired me with Landon Cole, and that was how I ended up sitting across from him in the library after school with three feet of tension and a project brief between us.
• He divided the sections. I agreed without looking at him. We worked in silence for twenty minutes before he shifted in his seat and said, "You're doing that thing again."
• "What thing."
• "Where you look at the page like it personally offended you."
• "I'm concentrating."
• "You've been on the same paragraph for ten minutes."
• I looked up. He was watching me with that almost-expression he had, not quite a smile, just something sitting at the edge of one. I looked back at my page.
• "Methodology needs both of us," I said. "Can we just focus."
• He let it go. But he was almost smiling for the rest of the session and I pretended not to notice.
• The sessions after that were different.
• The second one, he showed up with two coffees. Set one in front of me without saying anything. No sugar. I looked at it, then at him.
• "How did you know."
• "I pay attention." He opened his notebook. "Methodology section?"
• I didn't say anything else about it. But something about that single cup sitting in front of me, quietly right, made the wall drop an inch without my permission.
• By the third session we were actually talking. Not about the project. He said something offhand about the upcoming away game and I made a comment back and somehow twenty minutes disappeared into a conversation I hadn't planned on having.
• He had a way of listening that I wasn't prepared for. Not the performative kind, where someone waited for their turn to talk. He actually listened, eyes on me, responding to the specific thing I said instead of something adjacent to it.
• At one point I made a comment about the project structure that I thought was fairly ordinary and he laughed. Not a polite laugh. A real one, quick and genuine, like I had caught him off guard with it. I looked down at my notebook because I didn't know what to do with that.
• It was disarming in a way I resented slightly.
• The fourth session was where the wall took its first real hit.
• We were going over the final report draft and I had my hair down, which I almost never did at school, but I had been running late that morning and didn't have time to tie it up.
• I was leaning over the page when he reached across and moved a strand of hair away from my face before it fell across the text.
• Just like that. Casual, without thinking.
• I went completely still.
• He seemed to realize what he had done about a half second after doing it, and he pulled his hand back and looked at the page like the sentence he was reading was suddenly very interesting.
• "Sorry," he said quietly.
• I didn't answer. My heart was doing something unreasonable in my chest and I needed it to stop immediately.
• "Your hair," he said, still looking at the page. "It's nice. When it's down."
• I stared at the report.
• "Thanks," I said, which was the smallest and most useless word I could have chosen, but it was the only one I had.
• We finished the session without looking directly at each other and I walked out of the library into the cool corridor air and stood there for a second just breathing.
• Nora was waiting by the entrance. She took one look at my face.
• "What happened?"
• "Nothing."
• "Brienne."
• "Nothing happened. Let's go." I started walking and she fell into step beside me, watching me with that careful look she used when she was deciding how hard to push.
• She didn't push. She just looped her arm through mine and stayed quiet, which was somehow worse, because Nora being quiet meant she had already seen everything she needed to see.
• I told myself it meant nothing. A strand of hair. A throwaway compliment. These were not things that mattered.
• But I was still thinking about it when I got home. Still thinking about the specific way he said it, the half second before he pulled his hand back.
• And that was the problem.
• Because Landon Cole did that with everyone. That was literally who he was. The guy who made you feel like the only person in the room, then turned around and made the next girl feel the exact same way.
• Half of Avalon High had a crush on him and the other half was lying about it. Girls smarter than me, prettier than me, more his type in every measurable way had felt exactly this and it had ended the same way every single time.
• He was a playboy. The whole school knew it and accepted it anyway because he was Landon Cole and he was electric on the ice and apparently that was enough.
• I was not those girls.
• The hair thing meant nothing. The coffee meant nothing. I was a project partner and when the project ended I would go back to being the girl he didn't know existed.
• I was not falling for Landon Cole.