Page 41 of Oar Than Friends

I was struggling to follow this line of conversation, even though Imogen was looking at us like it was crystal clear. ‘What’s that got to do with our meeting tonight?’

She held her finger in the air for a second, then tapped it against the side of her nose. ‘I don’t know, but it’ll be linked. I guarantee it.’

Hannah tutted with a deep eye roll. ‘There’s not going to be a full crew meeting because Brett Rogers has a black eye. This is a mandatory meeting for every member of themen’s and women’s rowing clubs. Why would Coach Stephens care about Brett Rogers having a black eye?’

Imogen shrugged, but it was clear she was firm in her belief that this meeting had something to do with Brett Rogers and his eye.

‘Well, whatever it is, we need to get there now. I want a good seat.’ She pushed her seat back. ‘Eat up.’

Hannah and I followed her, leaving our dirty dinner trays by the kitchen hatch, and hurried into the cold air to where our bikes were stored. The clocks had just changed and we were on the icy slope to winter; today had been the first training session conducted entirely in the dark for both morning and evening.

I got my phone out and switched on the flashlight, as even with the lampposts all blazing light along the footpaths it was still hard to immediately find a black bike among the twenty other black bikes.

The three of us sped along and cut left through the break in the hedgerows which brought us out just a little way up along the River Cam. The lights of the boathouse ahead bounced off the water, its ebony gloss rolling in gentle waves as the wind blew over the surface.

The bike rack was already full, which likely meant we wouldn’t get a seat anywhere near the front.

‘Why is the Oxford bus here?’

I looked over to Hannah to find her pointing towards a large bus painted navy blue, with the Oxford crest printed on the side. It hadn’t been immediately obvious because it was parked in the shadows, but the second I saw it my entire Monday fell into place.

You know how sometimes you wake up and there’s atingle in the pit of your belly? It’s something, but it’s also nothing. You try to ignore it, perhaps put it down to too much coffee, you pretend it doesn’t exist and maybe even manage to forget it’s there, but then something happens and the feeling of dread you’ve been carrying about all day makes sense.

It gets worse.

It’s real.

This morning I woke up and I knew something was going to happen.

Just like I knew it would involve a six-foot-three rower with pale blue eyes, muscles for days, and a mouth so perfectly formed it was impossible not to stare. It was the something I hadn’t stopped thinking about since the day I met him, made harder with every message he’d sent. Fourteen in total over the past month.

‘Asters, why have you stopped walking? Come on!’ Imogen gestured me to the door where she was standing, while I was still by my bike, my legs too heavy to move.

‘Are you okay?’ asked Hannah. ‘You’ve gone really pale.’

I rubbed my nervous stomach, ‘Yeah, probably ate too fast.’

I did my best to ignore the nerves using my insides as a race track, and jogged to catch up with them.

It was dumb, I was being dumb. I had nothing to be nervous about. It was no big deal the president of the Oxford Rowing Club had sent me a stream of messages which I’d left unanswered.

‘Shit, this looks serious,’ muttered Imogen, as we followed the low rumble of voices down the hallway and stepped into the large break room.

We were fifteen minutes early but everyone else had been earlier, clearly as desperate as we were to figure out what this meeting was for. The usually comfy looking space had been stripped of all furniture, only to be replaced by rows and rows of chairs, and everyone was squashed together. Like the first hour of a high-school dance full of awkward teenagers, the senior light blues were huddled along one wall while the senior dark blues were against the other. In the middle were all the first years who’d been relegated to sitting near their rivals.

A cold wave of panic washed over me as I imagined being squashed next to Oz, and tugged the girls toward the benches by the back wall which was as far away from Oz as we could get in this confined space.

I’d spotted him almost the second we walked in.

He wasn’t the tallest, and he wasn’t the broadest, but even from a distance you could see he was set apart from the rest. He pulled you in, your eyes were automatically drawn to the way each of his friends was leaning into whatever he was saying: listening, paying attention, laughing.

I wasn’t the only one staring at them.

‘Look at the guy next to A.O.-C.,’ whispered Hannah, ‘he looks like he’s been in a fight. What’s his name? The French one.’

‘François something,’ hissed back Imogen, nodding over to where the Cambridge boys were huddled against the wall. ‘And look at Brett Rogers. That eye seems way worse in this light. I’m right, I’m telling you.’

My eyes were flicking between the Cambridge and Oxford men’s first teams. ‘Look at them all. Brett andFrançois aren’t the only ones with black eyes. Tubbs looks pretty banged up too.’

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