Hornet's Nest Ch. 05

---

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 youdoingin 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 couldnotlove 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.

I'm stupid.

I'm gonna come over yours, is that ok?"

"Of course."

I got straight out of bed and got dressed, back into the cold air outside, meeting her halfway down the road. I ran into her, scooped her up, and kissed her. She giggled, legs wrapping around my waist.

"I love you," she said. "I do. I'm sorry."

"It's fine."

"It's just that I-"

I kissed her again to shut her up. I didn't really care what her hang-ups were, so long as they weren't getting between us. Sometimes actions could be more refreshingly straight-forward than words.

*

In late February I got another email from the landlord. Adrian was behind on rent, again. And since it was the second time in a few months, the landlord was pretty pissed. It was supposed to be an automatic payment.

I went and knocked on his door. And had to knock again, louder, before I got a response. He opened it with headphones around his neck, pulling his frustrated face that I had interrupted whatever he was doing.

"What?"

"Mate," I said. "Rent?"

"Oh, for fuck sake." He stepped back into his room and I followed him in.

"Just set up an automatic payment, like you're supposed to, if you're gonna keep forgetting it."

"No, it's not that. Fuck sake."

"What is it?"

"My fucking parents. We had a fall out and they haven't put the money in my rent account."

I raked my fingers through my hair. "I thought you sorted things with them over Christmas."

"Yeah, well, it happened again. It's my fucking step-dad, man. Proper wanker."

"Well, you gotta sort something."

He paced a bit then walked out, heading down the hallway for the lounge and kitchen. I trailed him.

"Adrian, seriously. Just tell them you need the fucking money."

"Man Ican't."

"Can't or just don't want to?"

"David."

We were now going to have this discussion in front of four other flatmates. Was that what he intended by leaving his room, hoping it would deter me somehow? What the fuck did he expect me to do? He couldn't just leave the rent unpaid.

"I'll point the landlord towards them, if you want," I continued. "Just give me details."

"No, the rent account is in my name. It'll just make it worse. Don't do it, man."

"You've got to pay."

"Ican't."

"You don't have the money in your personal account?"

"No." He pulled out his phone and flicked through it, then showed me the screen, with bank details. "Look. This is fucking everything I got right now."

"What's going on?" Melissa asked.

"My fuckin' parents want me kicked out on the street," Adrian replied.

I shook my head. It seemed so ridiculous to me. "Adrian, look. I'll pay this month for you, but you have got to get that money, and pay me back."

His eyes snapped to me in surprise. "David, don't worry about it, man."

"Landlord doesn't have any patience for this and I'm not seeing you on the street."

"I don't know if I'll manage to get them to give me any money. I need a job."

"Stop being a little prick and sort things out with them. You're not fourteen any more."

He rolled his eyes. "Fuck. I have two step-dads."

The funny thing is, I actually took it as a compliment. He disappeared back to his room and I was about to head for mine, but Claire gave me a look.

"What?" I asked.

"You shouldn't do that for him."

"And why not?"

"He's never going to grow up and learn. Skipping rent isn't like skipping detention. He isn't going to pay you back."

"Yes he fucking will."

I must have had enough of a growl in my voice because Myles let out a chuckle. I stayed there by the kitchen, sorting the payment on my phone, and he brushed past me, jogging my arm. He probably didn't mean to do it, it was just his typical mannerisms that annoyed me. Call me crazy, but sometimes I thought he was trying to be 'dominant'.

I was smiling to myself and typing a reply to a message from Violet when Myles stopped by me on his way back to the lounge, looking at my face, then my phone.

"That Vi, huh?"

"Yup."

"Still going good, then?"

"Yeah."

He chuckled again. "Man, you're so whipped."

Yeah, Myles was a dick. I really, really didn't like the guy. Claire was annoying, too, but it was mostly because she was snobby and ignorant. Myles was just an outright prick.

It was like he fucking jynxed things, though.

A few days after that, Violet got really moody about something. All I knew was that it happened after some phonecall. She got snappy about it, and wouldn't tell me what the problem was.

I got snappy back.

"For fuck sake, what is your problem?"

"Nothing. Just leave it, David."

"What was the phonecall about?"

Her eyes shot up from her laptop and she gave me a full glare. "I said leave it."

"No. Not when you're being like this. Talk to me."

She was trying to stare me down, but I wasn't fazed by her.

"It was Romain," she finally said.

"Right, okay. And what did he say?"

"He wants me to do some stuff, and I said no, so he started getting pissy at me."

"What stuff?"

"Just stuff."

"Vi."

Her gaze moved back to her laptop screen. "Fucking leave it, David."

I did leave it. And a few hours later she was mostly back to normal, taking out whatever lingered of her bad mood with some pretty rough and amazing sex. But it had bothered me, because it made me realise that she couldn't keep these things from me forever.

At some point, she would have to start talking.

She was hiding things, and they were bothering her. And they were going to keep bothering her. She still didn't fucking trust me, to talk to me about whatever her problems were.

A few days later again, she was scowling at her phone as she typed out a message. I didn't know if it was to Romain, or someone else, but she was obviously super pissed, once again. I was tempted to look through her phone while she slept that night, to see what it was, but I didn't. I didn't want to be that sort of person.

I guess in some strange way I was starting to realise that something was wrong. With her. Cracks in her facade were beginning to show. I wanted to help.

The problem is, it's hard to fix something when you don't know what's broken.

She had to start talking to me.

I hadn't realised my patience was so short.

It was really fucking bothering me. Enough so that Wesley picked up on it. He came into my room while Violet was in the shower, and the look he gave me was an instant warning of the grilling to come.

"What's going on?"

"What?"

"Don't fucking 'what' me, you're like a bad storm the past couple of days. Is it Vi? Is everything okay?"

I leant back in my chair and forced out a sigh. "She won't talk to me."

"About what?"

"About herself. I don't know what it is. There's something going on with her. She just won't open up."

Wesley perched on the end of my bed, scratching at unshaven stubble on his chin. "Mate, you know how many years it took me to tell you some stuff."

I studied him. "Do you know something? 'Cause Wes I fucking swear-"

"No, mate. She hasn't told me shit. But I did warn you about this, way back. Someone like her comes with baggage."

I shook my head. I didn't like the way he phrased that. "What should I do?"

"You're just gonna have to be patient."

"I want to help her."

"I know, like me, huh? Which is why I'm saying, be patient."

I didn't want to be patient, for fuck sake.

As luck would have it, something came along to blow everything up.

I was walking out of my chemistry class, across campus, when I noticed commotion. It reminded me of how kids behaved in school, when there was a fight on the playground. How everyone rushed in crowds like sheep, and usually got there too late to see anything, but hung around the area for ages anyway, asking questions, spreading rumours.