Roommates - Not in Bangkok anymore [completed]

Chapter 31

Tin's POV

It had been three weeks since Can's birthday and the two of them making their relationship public.

As had become his habit recently, Tin was sitting at his desk in their room, hunched over his laptop looking through the vast amount of accounting and other data he had gotten from Mr. Yaxley.

There was definitely something hidden in there, something big.

Since his relationship with Can had become known, Tin had had an additional motivation to work on Mr. Yaxley's task.

On the day after Can's birthday, Tin had been cited to the headmistress' office. She had tried to guilt him into giving up their shared room despite his contract, on the grounds that school rules forbade spending the night in other dorm rooms – and two roommates openly dating kind of violated the spirit of this rule. She had tried to plead with him to think of the school's reputation – already strained with many of their more traditionally-minded sponsors for their open stance on dating and queer lifestyles.

The argument that had finally broken her resistance was Tin telling her he had found some curious anomalies in the accounting data already and that if his hunch was correct, there was a much bigger scandal hidden in plain sight than two roommates cuddling up to each other.

It had been partly a bluff back then. He had found anomalies, but he hadn't been able to make much sense of them and at that time it might still have turned out to be just freaky coincidences.

He was way past that now. He had been exchanging information with Mr. Yaxley and his team of investigative journalists regularly in the past few days – inconspicuously via USB sticks passed on by either McNeil or the headmistress herself.

Tin had bought a frame for the signed poster of Liverpool F.C. that Can had received as a birthday present from one of his teammates. Can didn't know that behind the frame Tin had started to put up sticky notes written in Thai for additional secrecy and printouts of information he tried to connect together in an attempt to unravel the mystery.

He got up from his desk to take down the picture and lay it out on the spare bed they weren't using anymore since they had started dating. He studied the words, numbers, names and established connections again, hoping to finally complete this weird puzzle.

Sometimes he wondered whether it was a sign of him slowly losing his mind like one of these mentally ill geniuses on tv.

The thing was... even though he still hadn't really managed to connect all the dots, he had the sinking feeling that the things that had been happening to him, his brother's attacks on him, the sometimes inexplicably passionate hostility of some of his classmates towards him, his string of seemingly endless bad luck until recently... were connected to whatever he was trying to uncover now.

One of the strongest indicators that something bigger was going on was the fact that Tin's family was still maintaining radio silence. Tin could safely assume that Tul knew about his relationship by now. His parents might still be in the dark, though, they had never shown much interest in him.

Regardless, Tul hadn't used this information to his advantage, yet – meaning that he was probably waiting for a bigger opportunity around the corner.

It had turned out that the picture of him buying lube had been taken by Maria Bennet – who had had a falling out with Diana not long after Can had arrived in England.

The reason for their sudden feud was still somewhat fuzzy in Tin's mind. It seemed that nerdy, snarky, somewhat misfit Maria had been approached by Phoebe Rutherford out of the blue, in a strangely similar way to Can.