Lauren

Wellness

Wellness Month had taken over the whole campus by the second week of April, with banners strung between the lampposts outside the student union, a step-count board in the dining hall that nobody actually looked at, and posters on every stairwell telling people to stretch more and sit less. Lauren had stopped noticing most of it by Tuesday. Dean had apparently decided it was the funniest thing to happen to Castellon University all semester, which was saying something, because the semester so far had mostly been rain and a broken coffee machine in the library.

They were in her dorm room, which was the usual place, because his roommate treated the common area like a gym and hers at least had a couch that did not smell of protein powder. Books were open between them. She had a highlighter cap lost somewhere in the cushion. His page had not been turned in twenty minutes. The Wellness Month poster on her wall was curling at one corner where the tape had given up, and every so often the corner lifted and settled again in the draft from the window.

‘You’re doing the thing again,’ he said, from the other end of the couch, nodding at her legs tucked up underneath her.

‘What thing?’

‘The thing where you sit on your own foot for two hours and then complain it’s gone numb.’

‘My foot is fine.’

‘Your foot is not fine. You do this every single time we study together. It’s been happening since freshman year.’ He said it with the easy, familiar exasperation of someone who had, in fact, been complaining about this exact habit for three years, and had never once managed to change it.

Lauren uncurled her legs anyway, because arguing from a folded position felt like losing, and stretched them out along the couch. They were long for her height, which was not saying she was short, only that the legs took more of her than the rest did. At five foot nine she was mostly leg, and she had stopped being self-conscious about that some time in her first year at Castellon. They were tanned a deep, even gold from every free afternoon of the spring spent on the roof of the science block with a textbook she did not read, and the colour ran all the way from her hips down to the tops of her feet without a single line in it. Her thighs were slim but firm, toned from three years of walking everywhere because she refused to learn the bus timetable, with a soft curve on the outside where they met her hips. Her knees were small and neat. Her calves were long and smooth and tapered down into ankles so slim that Sasha had once closed a finger and thumb around one just to prove a point. Her feet were narrow, with a high arch. She kept the whole length of them smooth because she had never been able to stand the feel of anything on them once the weather turned.

She was in the daisy-duke shorts she wore when she was not going anywhere, faded and cut high enough that the hems sat well up her thighs once she straightened out, and the couch cushion was cool against the backs of them. Her flip-flops lay where she had kicked them off when she sat down, one upside down on the rug and the other half under the couch, and her bare feet rested on the cushion near his knee, coral polish on the toenails from the pedicure she had done the night before, the same soft colour as the polish on her fingers.

‘You’re very invested in my circulation,’ she said.

‘I’m very invested in not watching you limp to your eight a.m. because you cut off blood flow to your own foot for an evening of highlighting a textbook.’

‘Noted. I’ll take it under advisement.’

‘You won’t.’

‘I definitely won’t.’

He laughed, and she laughed too, and for a minute it was just an ordinary Tuesday night, the two of them and the books and the poster lifting in the draft. Dean was the person she studied with because he did not perform being clever, and because he noticed when she had not eaten, and because three years of that had turned into a friendship she did not have a neat word for. People assumed things. Sasha assumed things. Lauren had got very good at saying there was nothing to assume. Sitting with her legs out like this, him at the other end of the couch not quite looking at the textbook, she was aware of the assumption and refused to feed it.

It was Dean who brought it back around, nodding at the poster itself.

‘You know they want everyone to do a thirty-day wellness pledge. Steps, stretching, all of it.’

‘I saw. I’m not doing a pledge.’

‘You should let someone enforce it for you. You’re terrible at keeping your own rules.’

‘I’m excellent at keeping my own rules.’

‘You own four yoga mats, and you’ve used exactly one of them, once, to move a couch.’

Lauren opened her mouth to argue and found she did not actually have a counter for that one, which was, infuriatingly, accurate. The mats were still in the closet, rolled, with the tags on three of them. She had bought them in a week when she had decided she was going to become a person who stretched. She had remained the person who sat on one foot all evening.

‘Fine. Hypothetically. Who’s supposed to enforce this?’

‘Obviously me,’ Dean said, like it was the most reasonable sentence in the world. ‘I could be your discipline master for the month. Your legs specifically, since that’s the thing I apparently spend an unreasonable amount of my life policing anyway.’

‘My discipline master.’

‘Your words would probably be nicer. I’m just going with the dramatic version.’

‘That’s not a real job.’

‘It could be, for thirty days. Posture. Stretching. General leg-related nonsense. I set the rules, you follow them, we both get to see if you survive a month without sitting on your own foot.’

Lauren looked at him for a long moment, the particular look she had perfected over three years of friendship, the one that meant she thought he had lost his mind and was about to go along with it anyway. He was not smiling in the joke way. He was smiling in the way he smiled when he had already decided and was waiting to see if she would catch up. His eyes had gone to her legs once, while she was deciding, and come back to her face so quickly she almost missed it. She did not miss it. She filed it under him being pleased with himself, which was safer.

‘You’re serious.’

‘I’m bored, it’s Wellness Month, and you just admitted you own four unused yoga mats. I’d call that serious enough.’

‘Fine,’ she said, before she had fully decided to say it. ‘One month. Discipline master. Try not to let it go to your head.’

‘It’s already there,’ Dean said, grinning. ‘Little late for that request.’

Neither of them moved to take it back that night, which was, in its own way, the actual beginning of it. Not the dare itself, but the specific moment where neither one wanted to be the first to admit it had just been a joke. Lauren put her feet back up on the cushion after he left, the coral polish catching the lamp briefly, and she told herself she had agreed because it was funny. The poster lifted once more and settled. She did not take the yoga mats out of the closet.

The Denial

It was two days later, over coffee in the dining hall, that Lauren finally said the thing she had apparently been turning over since the dare got made. The hall was loud in the late-morning way, trays and the smell of the grill, Wellness Month flyers still taped to the napkin dispensers. She had her legs crossed under the table, one flip-flop dangling, and she had already caught herself sitting on her foot once and uncrossed on purpose, which annoyed her more than the original habit.

‘Can I tell you something, and you have to not be weird about it?’

‘I make no promises but go on.’

‘I genuinely cannot understand people who have a thing for legs.’ She said it with the specific, slightly baffled honesty of someone confessing a real gap in her understanding of the world. ‘Like, I’ve had these my whole life. I never think about them. They’re just legs. I walk on them. I cannot see what there is to even notice.’

Dean looked at her over his coffee, something carefully neutral settling into his expression. Under the table her calf was bare where the shorts ended, which was most of it, and the coral on her toes was the same as Tuesday. He did not look down. That was the part she noticed, afterwards, and misread.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It’s a strange thing to be interested in.’

‘Thank you. Finally, someone sane.’

‘Completely strange,’ he agreed, and something in the easy way he said it, the total lack of friction, should have told her more than it did.

‘So, the discipline thing,’ she went on, apparently satisfied that the point had landed, ‘what’s the actual plan? Like what am I agreeing to here?’

‘Improvement,’ Dean said. ‘You could genuinely look a lot better than you do right now. More toned, better posture, that sort of thing. That’s the whole project.’

She glanced down at her legs, which had never once failed her at a party or a set of stairs, and felt the small sting of that, and decided he meant the sitting, not the legs themselves. ‘Improvement. Right. Not because you’ve got some specific interest in legs or anything.’

‘God, no,’ Dean said, with an ease that was, if she had been paying closer attention, almost too smooth. ‘Not legs specifically. Not yours, not anyone’s. I just think you’d benefit from actual structure for once in your life.’

It was, by any honest accounting, a complete lie, and Lauren did not catch a single thread of it. What she caught was the structure part, which annoyed her in a familiar way, because he had always been the one who finished the reading, and she had always been the one who finished the night. If he wanted a month of telling her how to sit, she could survive that. She had survived worse dares for less reason. She took a sip of coffee and uncrossed her legs because they had almost gone back to the old fold without her noticing, and she refused to give him the satisfaction of seeing it.

‘If this turns into you timing my stretches, I’m quitting.’

‘I’m not timing anything yet.’

‘Yet.’

‘You said the month. I’m allowed a yet.’

She let him have it. Across the hall a guy from her statistics section waved, and she waved back with the cup, and Dean watched the wave and then watched her put the cup down, and neither of them said anything about the fact that his eyes had gone to the length of her under the table for the second it took her to settle her feet flat on the floor.

The First Rule

He showed up at her dorm that evening with a small paper bag from somewhere off campus, the kind of casual confidence that meant he had already decided this was happening regardless of what she said about it. Sasha was out. The room smelled like the candle Lauren was not supposed to burn in the dorm and burned anyway. She was on the couch again, shorts, flip-flops, a textbook she had opened in order to look busy when he knocked.

‘What is that?’

‘Rule one.’ He pulled out a thin gold anklet, a small row of tiny bells strung along it, delicate-looking in a way that did not match the slightly too-purposeful look on his face. The chain was fine. The bells were not costume-loud. They were the kind that would speak if she moved and shut up if she stayed still, which she understood at once and did not say. ‘You wear this for the month. Discipline marker. Everyone needs a physical reminder they’ve signed up for something.’

‘That’s not a rule, that’s jewellery.’

‘It’s both. Give me your foot.’

She stuck her leg out, more out of curiosity than actual compliance, and the shorts rode another inch with the movement, the hem cutting across the top of her thigh. Held straight out toward him like that, the whole length of it was on show, from the coral toes and the slim ankle up the long smooth line of the calf, over the knee, and along the golden stretch of thigh to where the frayed denim had pulled tight. The leg opening of the shorts had gapped at the side with the angle, and a small strip of black cotton showed in the gap, the edge of the tiny pair of panties she had put on that morning without a second thought. She did not notice. She was watching his hands. Her foot was still in the flip-flop. He took the flip-flop off without asking, set down on the floor, and she felt the odd small exposure of that, one bare foot in his hand, coral polish, the arch he had no business being careful with.

He knelt. From down there his eyes went up the length of her leg once, slowly, and stopped somewhere near the top before they came back to her ankle. She took it for him judging where the anklet should sit and thought nothing of it. She watched him fasten the anklet around her ankle with more care than the object probably warranted. He pulled it snug, checked the clasp, then tightened it one notch further before she had even registered he had done it the first time. The gold sat against the bone. His thumb stayed on the clasp a second longer than a clasp required, and she felt the heat of his hand under her heel, the whole bare foot held up between them like something he had been allowed to inspect.

The bells gave one small bright sound against his knuckle.

‘That’s too tight.’

‘It’s supposed to stay put. You’ll forget it’s there if it’s loose.’

‘I’m not going to forget it’s there, Dean, I can feel it digging into my ankle bone right now.’

‘You’ll adjust.’

‘I will not adjust; this is genuinely uncomfortable.’ She tugged at it, testing the give, found almost none at all, and looked up at him with the specific betrayed expression of someone who fully intended to make him suffer for this decision. The gold sat in a line against the bone. When she flexed, the bells answered, quiet and ridiculous in a room that had been an ordinary Tuesday a minute ago. ‘This is ridiculous. You’re ridiculous.’

‘Probably,’ he agreed, entirely unbothered.

She kept complaining about it for the better part of ten minutes, too tight, too much, a genuinely unreasonable choice for someone who claimed this was about wellness and not anything more specific and made no actual move at any point to take it off. The bells gave a small, quiet sound every time she shifted her foot, bright and a little absurd against the ordinary hum of her dorm room, and some small, private part of her already knew exactly why she was not reaching for the clasp herself. She told herself it was because taking it off in the first hour would be losing. She was good at stories that let her stay.

‘You’re staring at my ankle.’

‘I’m checking the fit.’

‘You’ve checked the fit four times.’

‘Quality control,’ Dean said, and did not look away nearly as quickly as the excuse should have required.

His hand was still near the clasp. Not holding. Near. She could feel the warmth of it against the bone the anklet was already annoying, and she pulled her foot back before she had decided to, which made the bells speak again. Lauren let the staring go, mostly because she did not have a good argument ready and tucked her foot back up onto the couch cushion. The daisy-duke shorts rode up another inch with the movement. Bare legs in the lamplight, one ankle belled, one ankle not, flip-flop on the rug where he had put it. Neither of them said anything else about it for a while. She highlighted a paragraph she did not read. He watched the bells settle.

‘If this is you enjoying a power trip, you can just say that,’ she said, eventually, to the textbook. ‘I get power trips. I do not get legs. You already agreed legs are strange.’

‘I did agree.’

‘So this is the control thing.’

‘This is the marker,’ he said. ‘You can call it whatever lets you keep it on.’

She hated that he had said the keeping-on part out loud. She hated more that he was right. The anklet was uncomfortable in a precise way, a pressure she could not stop noticing, and every time she told herself she would undo it after he left, she pictured the walk to the clasp and did not start it.

The Stretch

He did not let the first night end on the couch.

‘Wall,’ he said, when the ten minutes of complaint had run out and she still had not touched the clasp. ‘If this is posture, you do the posture before you walk it anywhere. Hands flat on the wall. Up on your toes. Thirty seconds. That’s the whole first correction.’

‘I am not doing a wellness poster in my room.’

‘You own four mats you’ve never unrolled. The wall is free. Thirty seconds, or the month was a sentence you liked the sound of.’

Lauren stood up, because the alternative was admitting the dare had been a joke, and she was not going to be the one who blinked. She kicked off her flip-flops, one and then the other, and sent them skidding under the desk. Then she walked to the wall beside the poster, barefoot, the bells at her ankle chiming with every step, and put both palms flat on the paint at shoulder height.

‘Toes,’ said Dean.

She rose up onto her toes.

It changed everything at once. Her heels lifted off the carpet, her calves went tight and round, and her whole body grew longer, from her coral toenails pressed into the floor all the way up to her fingertips on the wall. Her legs, golden from all those afternoons on the science-block roof, ran up smooth and bare from the anklet to the frayed hem of the daisy dukes, and the backs of her thighs tightened with the effort, and the tiny shorts, which had barely been covering her on the couch, rode up the moment she stretched. She felt the hem climb. She felt the air on the undercurve of her ass, on both sides, where the denim had simply given up.

‘Higher,’ said Dean, from behind her. He did not sound like a person discussing circulation.

She went higher, right up onto the balls of her feet, and the anklet slid down against the bone and gave one bright chime and went still.

‘Happy?’ she said to the wall. ‘Is this what you wanted? Me on tiptoe with my face against the paint so you can take notes?’

‘I’m checking your balance.’

‘You’re checking something.’ She didn’t turn round. ‘Go on, then. Tell me what you see. In detail. For the compliance file.’

He didn’t answer. She grinned at the poster.

‘Thought so.’

Then she heard him move. She heard the creak of his knees as he crouched down behind her, low, close to the floor.

‘What are you doing down there?’

‘Checking the anklet,’ said Dean. ‘It’s slipping.’

‘It is not slipping. It’s never slipped. It’s practically welded on.’

But he stayed crouched, and she knew exactly what he could see from down there, because she could feel it. Looking up from the floor, past the anklet, past her tight calves and the long golden backs of her thighs, up to where the shorts ended, the frayed denim had ridden so high that between her thighs, right at the top, there was a thin stretch of black lace, just a strip, showing where the denim no longer reached.

Her face went hot against the cool wall. She stayed exactly where she was, on her toes, and did not tug anything down.

‘How’s the anklet looking?’ she asked sweetly.

‘Secure.’

‘Really? You’re sure? Maybe you need to get closer. Maybe you need a torch.’

‘Lauren.’

‘I’m only asking. You seem very thorough tonight.’ She shifted her weight, just slightly, from one foot to the other, and the bells chimed, and she heard him breathe out. ‘Twenty seconds. Still checking?’

‘Still checking.’

‘Course you are.’

At twenty-five her calves had started a fine shake she could not hide, and the bells shivered with them. At thirty she stayed up for an extra five, because stopping exactly on the number felt like asking permission. Then she came down off her toes, turned round fast, and found him standing up again, too quickly, by the desk, looking at her face as if he had never been anywhere else.

She looked at him for a long moment, then down at the carpet where he had been crouching, then back up at him.

‘Eyes up, compliance officer,’ she said. ‘If this is wellness, wellness is not the view from the floor.’

‘I was checking the anklet.’

‘From down there.’

‘It’s where the anklet is.’

‘You have a sentence for everything. None of them are getting better.’

Her face was still warm. Her calves were still humming. The anklet had left the beginning of a pale line that she could already feel. She did not take it off.

The Walk

He did not let her stay in the room with it.

‘Dining hall,’ he said. ‘You’ve got it on. Now you wear it somewhere that isn’t this room. That’s the rule, not the jewellery.’

‘It’s nine. I’ve eaten.’

‘You can have a tea. I’m not asking you to perform a workout. I’m asking you to walk across the quad with the marker on, so you find out whether you’re actually doing this or whether you only do it when nobody can hear you.’

Lauren looked at the flip-flops, then at the anklet, then at him. The sensible answer was no. The answer that would end the joke before it became a month was no. She put the flip-flops back on, because going in bare feet would have been a different dare, and the left one sat wrong against the bells for a second until she shifted the strap down. The sound when she stood was small and bright and completely unlike her.

‘If anyone asks, this was your idea.’

‘It was my idea.’

‘And if I hate it, I’m taking it off at the door.’

‘You can try.’

They went down the dorm stairs because the lift was broken again, which felt, in the moment, like the building taking his side. The stairwell was concrete and echoed. Every step chimed. Not loud enough to be a fire alarm. Loud enough that a woman coming up with a laundry basket looked at Lauren’s feet before she looked at her face, clocked the gold, and smiled in the way people smile when they have been given a small free gift of someone else’s business. Lauren felt the look land on the anklet, then on the bare length of leg between the flip-flop and the shorts and kept her chin level because looking down would have made it a confession.

‘Stop it,’ she said, to Dean, who was half a step behind her.

‘I’m not saying anything.’

‘You’re walking behind me on purpose.’

‘The stairs are narrow.’

‘The stairs are not that narrow.’

He did not move up beside her. With every step up, the shorts rode and pulled at the back, and from half a step below he had a clear view up the long backs of her thighs to where the denim cut across the bottom curve of her ass, and each time she lifted a foot to the next step, the narrow black edge of her panties showed at the frayed hem. Lauren felt the shorts move. She tugged the back down once, which did nothing at all, and this time she did think about what it looked like from below, and the thought made her face hotter, and she still did not turn around, because turning around would have been admitting she cared what the back of her looked like to him.

At the landing she stopped, which made the bells stop, and turned. He was looking at the anklet. Not at her face. At the place the gold met the bone, and at the coral polish just under the strap of the flip-flop, and at the way the step had pulled the muscle tight in her calf. She saw him see it. He saw her see him. For a second neither of them did the usual rescue of a joke.

‘Eyes up,’ she said. ‘If this is wellness, wellness is not down there.’

‘Checking it hasn’t slipped.’

‘It hasn’t slipped. You made sure of that.’

She went on. The quad was cool and not empty. Wellness Month banners moved in the wind between the lamps, and under them people were still crossing from the library to the hall, hoodies, phones, the ordinary traffic of a weeknight. Lauren heard herself before she saw anyone look. The bells marked her steps in a bright little line, and because the flip-flops slapped as well, the two sounds together made a person turn. A guy she did not know, coming the other way with a takeaway cup, slowed before he reached her.

‘I heard you from the path,’ he said, not unkind, curious in the way campus was curious. ‘Thought it was a phone. It’s on your ankle.’

‘Wellness Month,’ Lauren said, which was already becoming the sentence she hid in. ‘It’s a pledge. Leave it.’

‘Didn’t say anything.’ He glanced at Dean, then back at the anklet, then, because the shorts did not give him much else to misunderstand, at the leg the anklet was on, the long gold line of it from the frayed hem to the coral toes. ‘Cute, though. Loud. You know you’re loud, right?’

‘I’m aware.’

He went. Dean, still half a step behind, made a sound that was not quite a laugh. Lauren did not give him the satisfaction of turning again. Her face was warm. The anklet bit when she put her weight wrong, a small mean press against the bone, and the bells told the path exactly where she was. She could have stopped, unclasped it, put it in her pocket, and walked the rest of the way as herself. She did not. Stopping would have been the thing the guy looked back to see, and she was not going to be the woman who took the bells off because a stranger had heard them.

The dining hall doors were glass. She saw herself in them before she went through: shorts, long bare legs, flip-flops, one ankle gold and noisy, Dean behind her like a person who had brought her. In the dark glass her legs looked even longer than they were, tanned and smooth from the frayed denim all the way down, the shorts barely covering the curve where her ass met the tops of her thighs, then the long slim calves, the narrow ankles, and the one gold line at the bottom that would not stop announcing her. She pushed the door anyway.

Inside, the late service was thin. A few tables, the grill shuttered, tea and the sad fruit. Inside, the bells rang off the tiled walls in a way they had not on the path. A woman at the napkin station looked up, found the sound, found the ankle, and looked away too late to be polite. Lauren felt the look on the back of her calf. She got a tea she did not want because leaving immediately would have been obvious and stood at the counter with her weight on the belled foot, then off it, then on it again, because both were worse. Dean paid, which she allowed, and did not touch her, which she also allowed, and watched the anklet when she shifted, which she pretended not to notice.

They were almost at a table when the woman from the napkins caught up, not unkind, the way campus was not unkind when it wanted a story.

‘Sorry. My roommate bet me it was a phone charm. Can I hear it properly? Just once. I’ll leave you alone.’

Lauren looked at Dean. Dean looked at the tea. The rule, which had been a private joke twenty minutes ago, was suddenly a stranger’s request in a room with tile floors.

‘Once,’ Lauren said, because refusing would have made it larger. She put her left foot on the low rail of the nearest chair, the way you show a shoe, and the shorts rode with the lift, and the bells spoke when she flexed. The woman leaned in. From that height she had the anklet, the coral, the long bare calf, and the hem that had climbed to the top of Lauren’s thigh. She smiled like she had been given something.

‘Okay, that’s actually pretty. Loud, but pretty. Wellness thing?’

‘Pledge,’ Lauren said, and took her foot down, and felt the flush sit on her cheekbones where she could not rub it off without looking like she was rubbing it off.

‘Happy?’ she said, low, when they were at a table by the window and the tea was too hot and the woman had gone back to the napkins still smiling.

‘It’s on. You walked it here. You showed it. That’s the rule working.’

‘A guy on the path heard me before he saw me. A woman just made me put my foot on a chair. That’s not wellness. That’s a cat collar.’

‘You didn’t take it off.’

‘I am not taking it off in a dining hall like I’ve been caught.’ She turned the cup. Under the table her feet were flat, the flip-flop straps against the polish, the bells quiet only because she was forcing them quiet. The pale pressure of the chain was already a fact against the bone. ‘If you are getting something out of the control, fine. Say control. Do not stand behind me on the stairs and call it circulation.’

‘I was checking the fit.’

‘You have used that sentence twice. It is not getting better.’

He smiled into his own cup, and she hated the smile, and she did not reach for the clasp. They stayed until the tea was drinkable. On the way out the same woman at the napkins watched the bells start again, and Lauren kept her eyes on the door. The walk back was the same sound in reverse. At the dorm steps she stopped, finally, and looked at him in the lamp.

‘I’m keeping it on tonight because taking it off now means you win the argument about whether I can finish a rule. Not because I like it. Not because you like looking. You do not. You said you do not.’

‘I said it was strange.’

‘Good. Stay strange.’ She went up. The stairwell announced her all the way to the second landing. She did not look back to see if he was still at the bottom, listening. In her room she stood in front of the mirror longer than she meant to, one ankle gold, the shorts still a little wrong from the wall, the flush still in her face, and she did not undo the clasp. The month had a sound now. She was the one wearing it.

The Video Call

Dean called her two nights later, ostensibly about a problem set neither of them had actually started.

Lauren was lying on her bed on her side, facing the wall, in her daisy dukes and an old grey T-shirt. She had propped the phone on the pillow in front of her face, leaning against the wall, so that the screen showed him her face and her shoulder and not much else. Her legs ran away down the bed behind the phone, out of the picture, one stretched long toward the footboard, the other bent at the knee.

The anklet had not come off. She had showered with it on, sworn at it, dried around it, and put the flip-flops back on over it to go to the bathroom down the hall, where a woman in a towel had said festive and Lauren had said pledge and neither of them had believed her. The pale line above the chain was a real mark now, a narrow band of lighter skin against the tan, and she had stood in the bathroom queue hearing herself and feeling the woman’s eyes drop from her face to her feet to the place the towel ended on her legs, as if the bells had made Lauren’s legs public property for the length of a corridor. Lying on her side, the shorts had twisted high on her hip, and the black lace edge of her panties showed above the waistband of the denim, where she had not bothered to tug them straight. None of that was in the picture. She had checked.

‘Question four makes no sense.’

‘Question four makes perfect sense, you just haven’t read the chapter.’

‘I’ve read the chapter.’

‘You’ve read the chapter title.’

‘Same thing, essentially.’ He shifted on his end, propped against his headboard in a T-shirt, and she caught him glancing toward the bottom edge of his screen, as if he could see past it to where her legs were. ‘Is the anklet still on?’

‘Obviously it’s still on. You made it borderline impossible to remove, and I am not losing a rule on day four.’

‘Let me see it.’

‘This is a video call about a problem set.’

‘The problem set can wait thirty seconds. Let me see it.’

Lauren rolled her eyes at him, entirely for effect, and picked the phone up off the pillow.

She sat up against the headboard, and drew that foot toward her, so that her right knee came up and the foot sat flat on the duvet beside her left thigh. Then she held the phone out in front of her, low, and tipped it down so that the camera pointed at her foot. On her screen, in the big window, Dean’s face. In the little window in the corner, what he was seeing: her bare foot on the grey duvet, coral toenails, and the thin gold chain tight around her ankle with its three tiny bells, and the pale line above it that proved she had not been taking it off when he was not there.

‘There. Happy?’

‘Thrilled. Purely from a wellness-compliance standpoint.’

‘Point your toes.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Point them. I want to see if it slides when your foot moves. If it slides, it’s too loose.’

‘It cannot possibly be too loose, Dean, it’s leaving a mark.’

‘Humour the compliance officer.’

She pointed her toes, long and slow, purely so he could see how stupid he was being. Her foot stretched out flat along the duvet, the arch curving high, and the bells slid a fraction down toward the bone and chimed once. The point made the whole leg longer in the little window. She saw it a second too late.

‘Now flex.’

She flexed, pulling her toes back hard toward her shin, and because her knee was already up, the whole leg came with it: the calf tightened, and the knee rose higher toward her chest, and her thigh lifted up off the duvet and filled the lower part of the frame, close to the camera.

She was not looking at the little window. She was looking at Dean’s face in the big one, waiting for him to admit the anklet had not moved.

So she did not see, until his face changed, what he saw: her bare thigh, raised and close to the lens, and at the side of it, where the frayed hem of the daisy dukes had pulled away from her leg with the bend, a narrow gap, and in the gap, a strip of black lace. She glanced down at the corner of her screen, saw the lace, and felt the flush hit her throat as if he were in the room. She did not drop the phone. Dropping it would have been a confession bigger than the gap.

‘It didn’t move,’ she said.

‘It moved a little.’

‘It did not move.’

‘Maybe a millimetre,’ he said, in a voice that had gone slightly thick, and she put that down to him losing the argument, because the other explanation was the one she had told him she did not believe in.

‘Sure. Nothing suspicious about the guy who bought actual jewellery for my ankle and now wants a dedicated viewing.’

‘It’s quality assurance.’

‘It’s the third time this week you’ve asked to see it, Dean. At some point quality assurance starts looking a lot like a hobby.’

‘I reject that characterisation.’

‘You can reject it all you want, it’s still extremely accurate.’ She put the phone back on the pillow, upright, facing her, and lay back down on her side, grinning at the way he had gone very slightly quiet rather than arguing, which was, she was learning, usually a sign she had landed somewhere true. She still did not call it legs. She called it him liking the win. The lace in the little window sat in her stomach anyway. ‘Face it. You’re the least convincing non-control-freak I’ve ever met.’

‘I have no comment on that accusation.’

‘That’s not a denial.’

‘It’s a strategic silence.’

‘It’s a confession with extra steps.’

They argued about the problem set for another ten minutes after that, mostly for show, both of them fully aware that neither was going to open the textbook again that night. It was only when Lauren reached for the phone to end the call, her thumb hovering over the red button, that Dean spoke again, his voice less certain than it had been all evening.

‘Wait. Can you show me again? Before you go.’

‘You saw it ten minutes ago.’

‘I know. Humour me. And get your face in it this time.’

‘My face.’

‘Face and ankle in the same shot. So I know it’s actually you wearing it, live, and not a photo you took on day one.’

‘That is the most paranoid thing you have ever said to me.’

‘Compliance.’

She sighed, loudly, and rolled over onto her stomach.

She lay flat on the bed on her front, propped up on her elbows, with the phone held in front of her face in both hands. Then she bent her knees and lifted her feet up into the air behind her, the way she used to lie on her bed reading magazines when she was fifteen, and crossed her ankles, and swung them gently.

On the screen it was all there in one simple picture. Her face at the front, propped on her elbows, hair falling forward. And behind her head, sticking up into the air, her two bare feet, coral toes, and around the right ankle the thin gold chain with its bells, chiming softly every time she swung her feet. She could also see, in the little window, the curve of her back and the shorts, and she tugged the hem once with the side of her wrist and only made it worse.

She was watching his face, not her picture. She swung her feet slowly, smiling at him, and caught something unguarded cross his expression for half a second before he smoothed it back into something casual. It was not the face he wore for a joke. It was the face from the stairwell landing. She felt it in her stomach and decided, firmly, that it was the control. He liked that she had kept it on. He liked that she had walked it across the quad and let a guy hear her and let a woman make her put her foot on a chair. The ankle was just where the rule lived.

‘There. Satisfied?’

‘For now.’

‘For now,’ she repeated, amused. ‘You say that like there’s a version of this where you’re ever actually satisfied.’

‘I’m choosing not to answer that on the grounds that it might incriminate me.’

‘Noted. For the file.’ She let her legs slide back down onto the duvet and put the phone back on the pillow, and caught the careful way he was still looking at the screen, even with her feet out of the picture now. ‘Anything else, or can I go pretend to do actual homework?’

Dean hesitated, just long enough that she noticed.

‘Could you send me a picture of it? Later, I mean. Just for the...’ He stopped, visibly searching for a word that was not the real one. ‘For the records.’

‘The records.’

‘The wellness records. The compliance file.’

‘Dean.’

‘Yes.’

‘You want a picture of my ankle for a compliance file that does not exist.’

‘When you say it like that it sounds worse than it is.’

Lauren laughed, properly, the kind of laugh that came out before she had decided whether to be flattered or exasperated, and found she had landed closer to flattered than she wanted to admit. The flattery was the dangerous part. She put it with the rest of the things she was not examining, next to the clasp she had not opened and the stairwell she had not come back down and the lace she had seen in the corner of her screen.

‘Fine. One picture. For the extremely real compliance file.’

‘Thank you. Face in it again. Ankle in it. And tongue out, so the stud shows.’

‘Tongue out? Why on earth would a compliance file need my tongue?’

‘Proof it’s live. Anyone can hold up an old photo.’

‘That is not a thing, Dean. You made that up just now.’

‘Possibly. Tongue out, please.’

‘You are a creep, you know that? Creep. With a file. That’s what you are.’

‘I accept those terms.’

‘You’re unbelievable.’

‘You’re sending the picture anyway.’

She was, in fact, already going to. She took it the moment the call ended, before she could talk herself out of it.

She lay down on her stomach on the bed, propped up on her elbows, and held the phone out in front of her face in her right hand, on the front camera. Then she bent her knees and lifted her feet up into the air behind her, and crossed her ankles.

On the screen it was one simple picture. Her face at the front, propped on her elbows, her hair falling forward over one shoulder. Behind her head, her two bare feet up in the air, coral toes, and around the right ankle the gold chain with its bells, the pale line above it showing clearly against her tan. And behind her face, in the background of the shot, her back curved down to the daisy dukes, where the low waistband had slipped down a little as she lay there, so that a thin band of black lace showed above the denim, and at the leg the frayed hem had gaped enough to show a second, smaller edge of the same lace against the side of her ass.

Then she remembered the tongue. She stuck it out at the camera as far as it would go, and the silver stud clicked against her bottom teeth on the way out and sat in the middle of her tongue, catching the lamplight. She tried to keep a straight face and failed, and the picture caught her halfway into a grin around it, eyes laughing at him. She pressed the button.

Then she looked at the photo before sending it, longer than she meant to. It looked ridiculous and also, annoyingly, not bad. Her feet up in the air behind her looked playful, and her legs looked longer than they ever did in a mirror, and her face, with the tongue out and the stud showing, looked like a woman who had agreed to more than a pledge. Then she saw the band of black lace above her shorts, and the second edge at the side, and her thumb hovered over the edit button. Cutting it out would mean admitting there was something there worth cutting, and he had seen her in a bikini at the lake last summer, and he had already seen the gap on the call. It was just underwear. She left it. Her face was hot in the little preview, which the photo would also keep.

Her thumb hovered once more, over send, and for a second she thought about deleting the whole thing and telling him the file could stay empty. Then she sent it, with no caption at all, because by then neither of them needed one.

His reply was a single word, received, which was worse than a paragraph. She looked at the photo again afterwards, her feet up in the air, the bells, the lace, the tongue, the flush she had not managed to keep out of her cheeks, and could not see what he was seeing. They were legs. She had had them her whole life. The sentence did not sit as comfortably as it had over coffee.

Outside, the Wellness Month banner over the dining hall snapped once in the wind. The month had, properly, begun. The anklet stayed on. She slept with the bells against the sheet, and every time she turned over they told the dark she was still wearing it. In the morning the pale line was darker, and the photo was still in the thread, and a woman she did not know said, passing her on the stairs, that she had heard her before she saw her. Lauren said pledge, and kept walking, and did not take it off.