Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Savannah
The following Monday, I get up early. First day of school jitters should wear off when you can legally drink. Still, I spend extra time blowing out my hair, applying my makeup, picking out an outfit that I hope reads as academically serious.
Dressed, with my laptop and notebooks in tow, I summon a rideshare—or attempt to. I wait by the door as the car nears and then…fuck, cancels.
Okay, I’ll get another. Your ride is fifteen minutes away. I wait. The timer changes. Your ride is seventeen minutes away.
I don’t want to be late. My father always said being early gives you the lay of the land—an advantage. Now I’m lucky if I’ll be on time. Your ride is nineteen minutes away.
I should just cancel out of this and…what?
I don’t have a car. That was another thing I should have done and didn’t.
I’ve never actually bought a vehicle. One appeared in the driveway for my sixteenth birthday and another for my eighteenth—my Lexus that my father held the title to. Now the repo company has it.
I’m punching at the rideshare app, trying to compose a text to the driver that’s something other than WTF? when Brayden comes home from an early morning run, shirtless and wiping the sweat from his face.
I do not stare. I do not. I should be used to this by now—clearly, he doesn’t think anything of being shirtless around me…so I shouldn’t think anything of it either. But my eyes get stuck on the muscles at his chest, the gleam of sweat, the flat nipples, the line of hair leading down…
“Hey, Sav.” Brayden says my name like he might be saying it for the second time. He nods toward my bag, now slumped on the entrance hall floor. “You going somewhere?”
“Classes. Hypothetically.” I blow a strand of hair from my face. “My ride is probably halfway to South Carolina right now.”
Brayden’s eyebrows pinch as if he’s just now realizing I don’t have a vehicle. “So take my car.” He pats his shorts pockets, then seems to realize he doesn’t have his car keys or even a shirt.
“How will you get to the ballpark?” I ask.
“I have a truck at my parents’ house.”
You’ve had two cars this whole time and didn’t offer me one? “I could take that one if you prefer your own car.”
“You ever actually driven a pickup?” he asks.
“You ever actually hauled anything in your pickup?” I shoot back.
Brayden laughs. The muscles in his belly contract. “Just baseball stuff. Wait here.” He goes upstairs—runs, practically—and returns a minute later with his keys.
“You sure you trust me?” I ask. “You’ve never seen me drive.”
He frowns for a second. “You seem like you’d be good at it.”
“I do?”
“You seem like you’d be good at—” He waves toward the front door as if he’s indicating the outside world. “Whatever you try to do.”
Something in the way he says it makes my chest ache. I’ve never had to try, really. Everything’s either been done for me or come so easy that I never really felt like I needed to put in effort. None of which I can say to Brayden. We’re married, but not that kind of married.
So I take the keys from him and try not to notice as his fingers graze over my palm like he’s reluctant to let go.
I get to class with five minutes to spare, enough time to down half an iced coffee and arrange my notebook and pens, feeling very Victoria-ish. I snap a picture and send it to her. Get back a You got this!!! a second later.
Only when the professor comes in and puts her first slide up on the screen, I’m not sure if I got this at all.
She’s young for a professor—in her late thirties at most—with dark brown hair in a bun without a single strand escaping.
She introduces herself as Dr. Shireen Ghorbani, a string of degrees behind her name. “So as you can see from the reading—”
My heart stutters. What reading?
Everyone else takes out print copies of journal articles, annotated with notes and color-coded highlights. I pull out my laptop, bring up the syllabus. Sure enough, under Week Zero assignments, there were three required readings that I somehow missed.
I click the links to them, trying to remember my Morningside password so I can get them off the campus library system while experiencing a brief, flushed moment of unbridled panic.
I moved across the country to be here—I agreed not to date for two years to be here.
I did so much and yet, right at this moment, clearly not enough.
The student sitting next to me—an auburn-haired guy with a sticker on his folded laptop that says I will stab you, along with a hypodermic needle, and another sticker with a trans flag on it—nudges his paper toward me.
It has about eighteen thousand notes written in the margins in cramped handwriting.
“Thanks,” I whisper. “I’m Savannah.”
“Forrest.”
“I didn’t see that we had reading,” I admit.
“Yeah, Doc likes to get people with that. Here.” Forrest lends me his paper.
I spend a minute skimming the abstract. Brayden didn’t know what bioinformatics was. Right now, I’m not sure I know either.
Up at the front, the professor has switched to a chart extracted from the paper. “Now, I know you are all familiar with GWAS plots, so I won’t spend a lot of time on this—”
G…what?
I take another gulp of iced coffee to wash away my anxiety.
What if I agreed to this whole thing—fake marriage, media charade, lying to everyone I know—and I fail anyway?
What if I should have stayed in San Diego, married one of my father’s rich friends’ rich sons, and played first wife for a while?
Isn’t that what you’re doing with Brayden?
Meanwhile, Dr. Ghorbani is still talking about the graph. The axes blur, the dots forming a vague cloud. An aura? That’d be the only thing that’d make today worse.
It takes me a moment to realize it’s not an oncoming migraine: my eyes are just filling with tears. I unfold my Starbucks napkin and wipe them away, then reread the syllabus. We had three papers to read for today, four more assigned for next week. And that’s just this class.
You seem like you’d be good at whatever you try to do replays in my head. Clearly not. But I can probably try. I slide the paper back to Forrest. “Thanks. Looks like I’ll have some cramming to do.”
“Some of us have a study group.” Forrest points to a woman sitting near him with dark brown hair, streaks of which have been dyed pink. “Katia and I meet Wednesday nights in the library.”
“Oh that’s—” I cut myself off before I can say great. I promised Brayden I’d go to his games as much as possible, including the three this week. Sorry, I can’t come because I need to watch my fake husband play professional baseball. “I’ll try to swing by.”
But I know I won’t be able to. That’s the thing I guess no one tells you about doing stuff for yourself. Sometimes you have to do it alone.