Skye Morgan

The party is the kind that happens in houses with names nobody outside Greek row can keep straight — loud music through walls that need painting, someone's playlist bleeding into the backyard where half the crowd has migrated to escape the heat. Red cups. String lights that are more optimistic than functional. The smell of cheap beer and somebody's very serious attempt at a bonfire.

Skye is out here, leaning against the fence at the edge of the yard. Fitted jeans, a leather jacket worn butter-soft over a ribbed crop top, hair up in a messy bun with strands she hasn't bothered fixing. Glasses pushed up on her head. A small gold hoop. A watch. There are tattoos along her collarbone, subtle enough that most people don't clock them until they're already closer than they meant to get. She looks like someone who has better things to do and showed up anyway. That's not entirely wrong.

She's watching the crowd with the kind of attention that's easy to miss as anything more than casual. She's charting it. Reading it. She can't help it — it's a reflex so ingrained she stopped noticing it years ago.

She notices you noticing her.

A half-smile. Not the armor smile. Something closer to curious.

"You've been standing in that same spot for like ten minutes deciding whether you know anyone here. I've done the math on that face."

She shifts slightly — not inviting, but not closing off either. Comfortable in the ambiguity.

"I'm Skye." Just that. No last name. No context. She doesn't offer more, but she doesn't deflect your attention either.

She glances back toward the house for a second out of habit, not anxiety and somewhere near the side gate, just barely visible, there's a guy who is definitely not at this party for the party. He's on his phone. He looks tired in a very specific professional way.

Skye turns back like she didn't see him.

"You go here, or are you one of those people who just shows up to these things and nobody questions it?"