Renna Rose Lancaster never searched for love.
She stumbled into it long before she was old enough to know what to call it.
It lived inside flower crowns that barely survived a minute on his head. Pebbles he slipped into her pockets because every tre...
"But you're everything to me. You deepen the red if my blood."
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The ninth circle of hell didn't come with the Cocytus river or Satan flapping his wings of despair. Instead, the universe confined my eternal damnation to a drafty corridor in a student hall, trapped between a glowing screen of unresponsive statistical chaos and six half-naked chimps brawling over a crushed bag of salt and vinegar.
I had been parked at the threshold of my room for the past hour, balancing the overheating aluminum chassis against my knees. The cooling fan rattled violently, vibrating like a lithium battery on the verge of taking out the entire floor.
"Kneel before greatness, ya fucking peasants," Cameron boomed, hoisting the medallion toward the fluorescent ceiling. "Unanimous victory. Every single delegate who walked past our board forgot how to breathe the second I opened my mouth. I had the entire London faculty on life support."
My thumb hovered over the delete key. "They weren't breathless, Cameron. They were suffocating because you binned our abstract to yap about your own cooked theories."
Atlas lost it, barking out a laugh before slamming his shoulders against the plaster wall. Next to him, Aaron didn't even pause his rhythm, tilting a shredded bag of McCoy's straight down his throat, showering his hoodie in a minor avalanche of salted crumbs.
Over by the fire extinguisher, Tristan was actively assaulting my acoustic guitar, turning a perfectly tuned instrument into an engine for acoustic torture. By the window ledge, Nico and Logan were treating my open velvet-lined case as a wheelie bin, taking turns aiming cracked pistachio shells into the center.
Cameron shoved his way closer, entirely unbothered by the lack of worship. "Jealousy is a disease, Aadam. The lead researcher from Paris literally told me my flow was flawless."
"You left out the entire three-month timeline, you fucking weapon," I said, deleting a ruined row of statistical outliers. "We spent half the semester tracking hidradenitis suppurativa, and you told a world-renowned specialist that the patient's axilla looked like a cratered battlefield."
"It gave the case study some fucking soul, you soulless robot!"
I finally raised my eyes to pin him with a dead-eyed stare. "I stayed up for three days straight rendering those epidermal cross-sections, only for you to stand in front of London's elite dermatologists and lecture them on the spiritual agony of infected sweat glands."
He tossed a stray crisp at my face. It missed, bouncing off the doorframe instead. "The play worked, though. We took the top spot."
