, Krista swung open her door, eyes wide with shock.

Her disbelieving gaze trailed up and down my decolletage while I casually strode forward into her room.

Krista cackled at me in amusement by way of greeting. "Viv! I know you've got a healthy sex life going on, but that's really excessive. It's going to take so much concealer to cover that."

Jamie and I hadn't spoken since our heated encounter five days ago. Neither would we speak much, I suspected, from now on. Not in the way that mattered.

That didn't change the litany of marks he'd left on my lower neck and collarbones, which needed covering ASAP. He must have been aggressive, more forceful than usual, because the purple splotches—once maroon, now lilac—still hadn't faded from my tan skin.

"I know." I smiled begrudgingly. "I'm not even going to try concealer. Can I borrow that yellow, sleeveless turtleneck singlet of yours?"

The Foxhole was hosting a football defeat party—celebrating the Halston Foxes' seventh-place, without-bowl-eligibility end to the season—which likely would turn into a bar crawl all the way to town. I disliked contributing to the football hype, but my modus operandi was to get irrefutably wasted at every opportunity, no matter the reason.

I'd done my makeup heavy on the eyes and easy on the lips, in case I ended up kissing someone tonight. Not Jamie, because we were still ignoring each other, but I wouldn't complain if I made out with some budding philanthrocapitalist hopelessly trying to solve world issues with his start-up business. Nor would I complain if Jamie saw us, got jealous, and pulled me away like that night at Topaz...

But I wasn't doing the chasing. Ew.

My arms were already slipping out of the sleeves of my pistachio-coloured t-shirt, pre-empting Krista's generosity. On the bottom, I wore a mockery of a tennis skirt, the pale fabric pleated and hemmed shorted. The only thing left to do was to cover up the traces of last night.

"Of course." Krista jerked her head towards her closet as she shimmied into a tight, faux-leather skirt. "It's somewhere in the second drawer. Just have a look for it."

"Thanks, babe."

"Hey, Viv—"

Riley came in from the bathroom just as I stripped off my shirt, standing in front of Krista's wardrobe in my bra. Her eyes widened as she noted the bruises on me.

"Oh, my God. Yikes. Jamie's a freaky bitch."

My vision went yellow as I pulled the form-fitting singlet over my head, then my skull popped through the neck-hole. I saw Riley, dark hair curled to perfection and cheeks blushed coral, staring amusedly at me.

"Why do you assume it was Jamie that did this?" I grumbled.

Sure, my friends were clever, and they certainly noticed that things weren't completely innocent between Jamie and me. But I could have been sleeping with many men at present. Jamie wasn't a permanent fixture in my sex life. I refused to let him be.

"Hm," Riley hummed, not looking convinced in the least. "Fair."

When a message alert came on Krista's phone, her face cracked into a sunny smile. Riley and I smirked at each other.

Quentin.

"Quen's here! I'm going down to the ground floor to let him in," Krista chirped happily, out the door before she finished speaking. "See you two real soon."

"See you," Riley and I called.

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

The football defeat was the last party before the winter holidays.

I intended to send my liver into such a state that recovery would require every single day of the break. Halston's beloved Foxhole was packed like a sardine can, the sweaty, jumping bodies of countless students roiling with every movement. Each step I took came with the risk of setting off a domino effect of movement.

I danced with Riley and Sophie, and some girl named Joelle whom Krista had left with us for safekeeping. Apparently, she was an emotional drunk. Quentin and Krista had drifted slightly away for privacy, plastered to each other like two magnets. Inseparable. The way his arm looped around her shoulders from behind as they danced nearly made me want to gag, but I concentrated on the flashing lights above.

I pretended I didn't notice my sickeningly in-love best friend. I pretended Jamie wasn't at the other end of the dance floor, his height placing his head perpetually in my peripheral vision. I pretended the tug in my stomach, an urge to go to him, did not exist.

My stomach didn't exist. I didn't exist. I was just a ray of blue light, swirling around the room.

A group of ladies thoroughly surrounded Jamie and his football friends, dressed to the nines like everyone else. A thought occurred to me; the converse of my petty, half-baked plan to get back at him.

What if Jamie slept with a girl tonight?

A bolt of jealousy struck me, but I bit down on the inside of my cheek to force it away. So what if he did? I couldn't control that irrational, possessive feeling I got, but I could control my behaviour. I wouldn't question and pry how he had. I wouldn't force an ultimatum on him and make him choose a committed relationship or no friendship at all.

I would handle it way better than he had.

Krista joined me at the water station. Her forehead was sweaty, but she still looked stunning.

"How's Quentin?" I asked her, glancing over to her boyfriend of two days. Literally.

He'd officially asked her on Thursday, but the two of them had been skirting around each other for months before. Long time coming type of love.

"Pretty good." Krista panted for breath, gulping down a glass of water. "We're going on our second date this Sunday. He's taking me ice-skating."

"The second date after you've already screwed each other's brains out," I smirked. "How quaint."

"Isn't it just?" Krista quipped dryly. Her eyes darted back to Quentin with glaring affection. "To be honest, I think he's trying really hard to do the conventional boyfriend thing, even though it's months late and unnecessary. I love him just the way he is."

I followed her eyes. Riley, Sophie, and Quentin were quite the trio—all high school friends—swaying in the crowd. None of them were dancers, but they all possessed rhythm and an oblivious enjoyment that only came to some if they got drunk out of their minds.

I admired that, though I scoffed and said, "Oblivious as hell?" I couldn't like Quentin too much, just for the months of heartache he put Krista through.

"Yeah." Krista purposefully played up the lovesickness in her voice to piss me off. "He still thinks I'm out of his league, would you believe?"

"Yeah, I would believe it. Not that it matters. You're happy together, and that's what's important."

"We are," Krista hummed. Love was an odd thing. Krista was the definition of an introvert and homebody. I couldn't imagine Quentin would be much better, otherwise, she wouldn't like him so much.

And yet when she was with him, she came out of her shell with none of the prompting and theatrics she required from me. She was a geek; he was a geek, and yet they made a total ABG-meets-Kevin-Nguyen pair. They looked like it, at least.

In reality, their personalities were the furthest thing from ravers. Maybe it was a case of two negatives multiplying to make a positive.

At length, after I drank another glass of ice-cold water, she wondered, "Are you happy with Jamie?"

My shoulders stiffened. I answered with clipped words, "I'm not with him, actually. And when I am in the physical sense, I'm merely satisfied."

"Fuck," Krista cursed. "I owe Jake fifty bucks."

My eyebrows hitched up. "What was the bet?"

Friendly wagers between our core friend group were not unheard of. Before Quentin came along, Riley and I had maintained a long-running bet: how many months it would take for Krista to break her extensive sexual dry spell. Riley won.

Jamie, Jake and I currently had one on who would be the last to get married out of the three of us—the winner was yet to be confirmed. We all picked ourselves because we each thought we could just hold out for however long it took to win.

"If you're dating on the down-low or just screwing each other. I totally thought the former."

I laughed incredulously. "Why?"

"All the puppy eyes Jamie gives you. The way he looks after you, especially when the floor drinks." Krista shrugged. "But I must have misread."

I bit my lip. Should I tell Kris? It's not like I ever hid my internal conflicts from my friends—I just had none to report. My life was completely routine—organised chaos—until Jameson freaking Tanner royally screwed it up, but part of me was still hoping I could salvage my peace of mind if I pretended it never happened. He'd never happened.

But that would be lying, and Vivian Sok wasn't a liar.

"You didn't," I eventually settled on saying. "He caught feelings, and he's crap at hiding it."

Krista nodded, peering at me curiously. "Is that all you have to say on the topic?"

I rolled my eyes. "What else would there be?"

Alright, I wasn't a liar. But I was an occasional omitter of truths.

Krista fell silent next to me. I glanced her way when it got overbearing, only to see her shaking her head softly, smiling knowingly. "Such a heartbreaker, Viv."

"Can't help it."

In a manner of speaking, that was true. Khan, Max, Carey, Johannes, Sung-seo, Bryson and Eric—seven ex-boyfriends, countless more flings and all I'd learnt from it was how great I was at breaking hearts. Including my own.

I pushed off the barstool and lost myself in the crowd.

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

"Six-thousand dollars?"

Attempting to pitch a budget funding application whilst hungover was perhaps the most ambitious move of my college career. In three-inch business pumps no less.

Halston University had two-hundred thousand dollars to give away each year in club funding. There were several rounds of small-scale applications, for which the maximum allotment was one grand. Then there were two large-scale applications per academic year, at the end of every semester, for larger applications or increases in funding from the previous year.

Guess which one the WISA executive committee sent me in to bat for?

Understandably, my position as treasurer probably made me the most qualified to talk figures and money, but dragging myself out of bed on a Sunday morning to trudge through a snow-covered campus was not really in my volunteer job description.

Did I mention while wearing heels? Yes. Yes, I did.

"Six-thousand dollars," I nodded somberly, confirming the hefty asking amount.

I barrelled on before the panel could mentally reject my offer, pulling up the third slide in my presentation. "On the right is our current mid-year review, and on the left are the same statistics from last year. We've had a fifteen percent increase in new members, who have all entered our database and mailing list. It's interesting to note that about thirty percent of our new members are men, which is up from the last five years."

That gem was the most pleasing result after analysing our registration data—especially because our promotion team had made no significant changes to their marketing tactics. They couldn't name any stronger social media activity or campus advertising that explained the small but statistically significant boost in turnout, but we weren't complaining. So long as the trend didn't swerve in the opposite direction, each board member was happy.

I gestured to the middle bulletin of the slide. "We've also had an eight percent increase in the number of attendees at our onsite events. What this proves is that there is a growing demand for the educational and intersectional events WISA runs. I've asked for a twenty percent increase from the last annual budget allotment in rough proportion to the increase in our membership and attendance rates."

A balding, barrel-chested man on the funding panel stifled a yawn. His portly stomach stretched the buttons of his pressed shirt, and a single curlicue hair peeked out. Ugh. Look, buddy, neither one of us wants to be here. But at least I took the effort to act on the contrary.

I tapped the spacebar of my laptop, shifting to a new slide of block-lettered, coherent, condensed statistics. "I've also pulled up the enrolment trends for Halston University and found that the majority—fifty-four percent—of new enrolments are filtering to either the Faculty of Business or the Faculty of Science. This is another reason funding WISA can better serve our student body." I clicked the spacebar once more. "Here are three of many proposed events we will either continue or introduce in the next academic year. First, we will continue our mentorship programme that connects senior WISA members to younger ones."

Four out of five of the members of the funding panel were men. I knew they were trying their best to engage with my presentation, but something wasn't clicking. Maybe it was because it was the weekend. Or because it was the morning. Or because I was a woman of colour talking at them about the scintillating topic of club budgets.

Whatever the reason, they were dead behind the eyes. Irises like glass marbles.

I turned my gaze to the woman, who gave me a comforting smile.

"Some of the feedback we've received from the most recent graduating class of WISA execs suggests we need more emphasis on retaining women in STEM after graduation," I said emphatically. "Women love STEM, and there's more than enough passion here. But there's still a lack of leading women experts in all scientific fields."

I felt the back of my neck warm as I spoke. No matter how hungover, tired or out of my depth I felt, nothing would ever dull the flame I had for this club. This campus. Panel rooms, decision-making spaces, were where I deserved to be—never mind whether I enjoyed it at the moment. Writing budgets was a job for the gritty, and it sucked, but demanding better was what I did best.

Yes, I was a cynic, a pessimist, judgmental—those were my superpowers. I knew how to concentrate and target my dissatisfaction with people, environments and attitudes. No person ever made a change by being happy with where they stood.

"Studies have shown that systemic stressors—like short maternity leave periods, lacking misconduct procedures and biased hiring processes—are preserving inequalities in the higher echelons of scientific employment," I explained, gesturing to the journal article titles on the projector screen.

I shifted to a new slide. "So, part of the increased budget will go towards networking events that bring in women experts to give women STEM majors tangible education and employment advice. Also, exposing our undergrads to an extensive network of established women makes it more likely they will have the support and resources they need for graduate study and finding work."

The woman nodded happily, perhaps subconsciously. Even two of the men had perked up, no longer slumping back into their seats. Life returned to their glassy eyes.

Confidence filled me as I brought up the last few slides; it wrapped around my spine, prodding my posture taller and stabler. "Lastly, rounding back to the growth in Science and Business majors. The Faculty of Business' feminist club—WIBA—and WISA have bounced ideas with each other. Entrepreneurship and start-up companies are filling the voids in many markets today, and we envision events where we can partner the revolutionary technologies of STEM with the logistical handling of business and finance."

Now that I wasn't simply talking numbers and studies, my voice came alive.

"Imagine you want to start a business and make an app, but you need someone to handle the backend and code-writing. Or you have a great idea for making more sustainable clothing material, but you're—pardon my French—shit at applying for grants and funding. WISA and WIBA want to make those connections early on, right here at Halston."

For all my complaining about late nights and early mornings, I was grateful for WISA. I was glad they had given me the platform to make a positive change over the years. I met some pretty kick-ass people through this club and honed my own kick-ass-ness. When I was a freshman, my peer mentor had guided me—the way I did for a fresher girl this semester.

Doing this budget pitch was one of my last gifts to the club before I graduated in a semester's time, in return for all the gifts it gave me.

"A portion of our budget will get pooled to cover the venue hire, security and catering fees for these sorts of events. The rest will fund the events aforementioned and listed on the third page of the report, which I've printed out for you." I slid a stack of five budget reports over to the panel. "The detailed budget breakdown is on the seventh page."

Of course, I could always drop by occasionally and bug the new members whenever I came through Halston in the future. But till then, this would be the last mark I left on WISA for a while.

The slideshow moved to the last slide; a thank you for your time.

I squared my stance and crossed my arms confidently. "Any questions?"

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

a.k.a. a plug for Nightlife. ;)

Kris and Quen are super wholesome, I swear, Viv is just doing her best friend duties and staying wary of him.

I think I've said this before, but I love writing Viv's POV. She's so 3D - with memories and strong hobbies and several flaws and her own awareness of that - that I never have to think long about what would she do here? She almost just tells me (in a very sassy voice).

Aimee x