Chapter 17: I will get it.

Cian slept through the whole class.

There was something about a lecture hall in autumn that knocked you out cold, and he woke up feeling better rested than he had in weeks, save for a stiff neck.

The bell had already gone but Eoin hadn’t budged from the podium. A cluster of students with notebooks still pressed around him, wanting last-minute explanations before finals.

He worked through each question patiently, writing notes in his clean, precise hand. Cian sat with his chin on his fist and watched, waiting for the crowd to clear.

It took a while. Twenty minutes, in fact. At one point Eoin’s pen slowed and he shot a quick glance at Cian, as if bracing for impatience.

In fairness, it would have been a reasonable thing to brace for. The young Mr. Fitzgerald was not known for waiting on anyone.

Cian, though, was perfectly content. He was daydreaming, quietly putting the TV remote and other bits back into his bag, in no rush whatsoever.

He still had to drag Eoin out of the room in front of people. That was the last thing on the list.

At Trinity, Eoin had a kind of quiet legend about him. Undergraduates talked about him with real respect, this aloof senior who’d grown up with nothing, held down part-time work, looked after his Nana, and still swept the academic prizes every single year. He wasn’t warm, exactly, but that only seemed to add to it.

And the whole point of this scene was to take a wrecking ball to all of that.

The original Cian had been a dedicated waster. Drinking, gambling, staying out, never cracking a book. He had a particular distaste for the diligent type, the ones who carried themselves as though hard work made them better than everyone else. Seeing Eoin surrounded by admiring students had apparently been more than he could stomach. He’d hauled him out mid-session, rough and abrupt, nearly sending him off his feet in the process.

And the gossip that followed had done the rest. Rumours that had been circulating quietly on the subreddit suddenly had weight behind them. Eoin’s supervisor, a rigid old traditionalist who cared enormously about appearances, had quietly started leaving him off things. Not officially. Just gradually. Until Eoin found himself on the outside of his own lab.

The stragglers at the front were finally thinning out. The system nudged Cian. "Are you going to make a move or not?"

Cian kept his eyes on the podium. "Give it another minute."

"In front of everyone" was what the novel said, but it didn’t put a number on everyone. Two or three still counted, surely.

He was so focused on watching Eoin that he completely missed what was happening in the front row.

Aoife had her textbook held up at face level, which might have looked like studying if her eyes hadn’t been fixed squarely on Cian.

She was one of the teaching assistants for the course, marking papers and keeping things running for Eoin. She had clocked Cian the second he walked in. Tall, very good-looking, the kind of face you noticed, and the Bentley outside hadn’t exactly helped him blend in either.

But it was the scarf that had really got her attention.

It was a quality piece, soft and expensive, from one of those boutique labels that didn’t advertise their prices. And it was, she was almost completely certain, identical to the one currently around Eoin’s neck.

Eoin could never have bought something like that for himself. Which meant someone had bought it for both of them.

Behind her textbook, Aoife’s thumbs were flying.

"Niall. Niall!! You know that gorgeous fella from the Bentley? The one who dried Eoin’s hair that time in the car park? He’s HERE. At college. In our lecture."

"I thought he looked good from a distance but up close he’s even better, I’m not joking."

"Also he and Eoin are wearing MATCHING SCARVES."

"And he just sat through an entire pharmacokinetics lecture. The whole thing. Without leaving."

That last point was perhaps the most remarkable. The course had a reputation for emptying rooms. Trinity students, who were not generally known for skipping, avoided it with unusual dedication. At one point earlier in the semester the register had shown four hundred enrolled and fewer than a hundred present. The only reason anyone was here today was the looming final exam.

"The lads on the subreddit are saying sugar daddy situation," Aoife typed. "But there is no way. No chance."

She had seen enough films to know how that sort of arrangement worked. Kept well out of sight. Separate entrances. Certainly no colour-coordinated accessories worn in public. And definitely not an afternoon spent sitting voluntarily in one of the driest lectures on the timetable.

She typed her conclusion with great confidence. "This is LOVE."

The last few students were drifting away from the front. Eoin was at the board now, gathering chalk, wiping things down. Aoife glanced at Cian one more time, satisfied he wasn’t looking her way, then sidled closer to Eoin and dropped her voice. "Is that fella in the back waiting for you?"

Eoin’s hand slowed on the board. "Why?"

Which was, more or less, a yes.

Aoife pressed her advantage, angling her textbook to shield her face from the back row. "Your scarf," she whispered. "It’s the same as his. That’s not a coincidence, is it, because the odds of that would be"

She didn’t finish.

Cian’s gaze had shifted, and it had landed on her.

"Move now," the system said. "There’s hardly anyone left."

Something moved in Cian’s chest that he couldn’t quite account for. It arrived without warning and without an obvious cause. He pushed back his chair and stood.

The arrangement was the arrangement. It wasn’t something to be explained to curious juniors. At the podium, Eoin was already turning away from Aoife, eyes down, voice carefully flat. "Probably just a coincidence, I think"

His wrist was caught.

Cian was there, hair still pushed up at odd angles from sleeping on his arm, expression a shade darker than usual, and he simply started walking, taking Eoin with him.

Eoin scrambled to keep up, half a step behind, managing to look both baffled and resigned at the same time.

"Outstanding," the system said warmly. "The expression, the grip, the whole energy. Textbook."

It ran through its checklist with quiet satisfaction. The mood, the action, the heir’s casual entitlement, Eoin’s stumbling steps and helpless face. Every box ticked.

"Full marks," it declared.

Aoife stood at the front of the room with her textbook still raised and her mouth slightly open.

She watched her senior disappear through the door, towed along by the stranger from the Bentley. After a moment she let out a long breath through her nose.

"Absolutely no manners," she muttered. "Grabbing someone like that. In a lecture hall. In front of people."

Some people, honestly.

Outside the building, Eoin found his footing once Cian let go and thought back over the last thirty seconds. Aoife had been on the far side of him. The textbook had been in the way. From where Cian had been sitting, the angle would have been all wrong.

"Cian." He caught the sleeve of his coat. "It wasn’t what it looked"

He stopped.

Cian’s profile was half lit by the light filtering through the beech trees, the shadows shifting across the line of his nose. Eoin felt something tighten in his chest that he didn’t have a name for.

Whatever the agreement said, from Cian’s perspective it had looked like his end of it was being compromised. That was a problem.

Cian, of course, already knew it wasn’t. Aoife turned up later in the novel as one of the people who quietly covered Eoin’s hospital costs, and the book was clear that her type ran to cheerful, straightforward lads, which put Eoin about as far from her preferences as it was possible to get.

"I know," he said, stopping and turning around with a mildly put-upon look. "You just took forever and I’m starving."

It had been well over forty minutes since the bell.

There was a bite in his voice, but it was the ordinary kind.

Before, Eoin would have felt that familiar clench of dread at any edge in Cian’s tone. Now he just paused, reached into his coat pocket, and pulled out his student card with a slightly awkward expression. "Let me buy you something to eat. Least I can do."

Cian pulled his hands out of his pockets. "Fine."

He’d never been to university properly himself and had only the vaguest memory of canteen food. He was genuinely a little curious what a top university’s version looked like.

Trinity’s main canteen was well regarded, and deservedly. It sat beside the teaching block, three floors, big windows, good light, the kind of place that felt busier than it was. Students could get something hot between lectures without going too far out of their way.

The prices matched the reputation. A basic plate of fried rice pushed twenty euro on a good day, which was why Eoin tended to eat elsewhere.

He led Cian inside, looked along the counters, and tried to keep the nerves off his face. "What do you fancy?"

The lunch rush was long over and the room was quiet. A fair few of the counters were already shut for the afternoon. Cian scanned what was open and said, "The grilled fish looks good."

There was a counter for it right in the middle of the room.

Eoin looked at the menu board, did a quick calculation, and gave a small nod. "All right."

Since Eoin was paying, Cian ordered. Eoin stood at the counter, picked out a meal for two, quietly confirmed the balance on his card would stretch to it, and felt a small wash of relief before handing it over.

Cian glanced at the order. "That enough for both of us? Anything else you want?"

Eoin shook his head, a little too quickly.

Cian looked at the menu again. "We should get some macaroni cheese as well."

The colour drained from Eoin’s face. "Actually, wait"

The card beeped.

"Insufficient balance. Please top up your account."

The woman behind the counter slid the card back across without comment, the practised indifference of someone who had seen this a thousand times. To her it probably looked like a student who’d simply forgotten to reload.

Eoin took the card back and turned around, already forming the sentence. "Sorry, I’ll just go and top it up, won’t be a minute"

His feet didn’t move.

Cian’s hand came down on his shoulder. With his other hand he lifted the card cleanly out of Eoin’s fingers, glanced at it briefly, and looked up.

"Leave it," he said. "I’ll get it."