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At first, it’s a relationship confined entirely to two rooms of Oxford’s undergraduate dorms, where New York is as abstract of a concept as the vast Atlantic waters under the jet on her flight over. The distance doesn’t change the fact that she’s a Roy, but it’s a little easier to see herself as a real person too.
Shiv’s eighteen and she’s all knees and elbows. She’s also too much teeth until she wakes up one morning with Harper in her bed and realizes that she’s going to need to lend her a turtleneck before sending her off to breakfast at the dining hall. She’s never been good at knowing when to stop.
Harper doesn’t ask questions like the boys Shiv fucked at the beginning of the semester. She’s from money, but not Roy-level money. Not people back home would recognize the name money. She smells like shea butter to Shiv’s Chanel, talks fondly of her mom and makes one-pot risotto in her in-suite kitchen for the two of them, and while they eat in front of whatever show is on Thursday nights, Shiv wonders if this is what life’s been like for her. Half of her is jealous and the other half is appalled at herself for it.
The eight or ninth or tenth time Harper asks her to grab dinner, go shopping together, meet up between classes, Shiv agrees. It’s not like people are going to know. She could have girlfriends. As in friends that are girls. She doesn’t, but she could, so there’s nothing suspicious about sitting across a cafe table from a pretty brunette who no one could possibly know is wearing her sweater.
Shiv cries that night. Harper's worried because Shiv won't talk. Shiv won't talk because you don't tell someone that you want to hold their hand in public but the idea makes you sick to your stomach because you're not sure you're made to feel that strongly about other people and even if you are, they're the wrong type of person.
Rome’s pissed when he finds out she’s bringing a friend home for Thanksgiving. She wonders if it’s because he and Ken can’t do it without being called faggots. She wonders if he knows about her.
They’re alone on the jet and Shiv’s got a hand on Harper’s hip, thumb teasing a belt loop of the ripped jeans she’s already told her she’ll need to change before getting to Logan’s penthouse. Harper asks if it isn’t a little weird, sex on a plane, and Shiv says that’s only because proles only have piss-stained public washrooms to do it in. Harper looks over like she doesn’t know her.
In the car outside her old home the enormity of it hits her. That she might love this girl. That her dad is upstairs. She wishes this hadn't occurred to her all at once, so that she could unweave her brain's reactions to the two facts, but she's pretty sure they're both pretty scary even by themselves. She tells Harper that she needs to leave.
She sends a text after the family greetings, an apology that won’t make up for a wasted trip across the ocean. She books two flights, commercial but first-class, to Harper’s family and back to Oxford at the end of the break, and sends her the details. Tell them it was a surprise? She looks up from her phone to Roman studying her face with interest.
“Hey Shivy, weren’t you supposed to have a friend here?…Hope?…Heather?”
Her phone lights up with an incoming message. Harper: K.
Roman lifts an eyebrow.
“Whatever,” Shiv shrugs “She’s like… not a real person.”