After
I was getting so good at betting.
Dad: Good.
I was still looking at the word when the dots came back for one more round. Then:
Dad: They missed you.
I didn’t have to ask who. I sat on the edge of the bed and read the four words more times than I’ll admit to.
My dad had spent years speaking fluent silence, and here he was attempting a new language, careful and stiff, like a man ordering coffee in a country he had landed in that morning.
The grammar was strange. The accent was thick. I understood him perfectly.
Me: Tell them I’ll come say hi soon. After finals.
There it was. After. I filed my father in the same place I was filing everything else that May, set the phone on the nightstand next to my mother’s photograph, and fell asleep easy.
Finals week turned the apartment into a machine with two settings.
Zane studied the way he did everything, like a siege, fortified at the kitchen table behind a wall of color-coded notes, granola bar wrappers accumulating around him like shell casings.
I studied the way I did everything, in unpredictable bursts, on the floor, in the bathtub with no water in it, once memorably inside the closet because the acoustics felt studious.
But the mornings came back to us. That was the thing I kept noticing.
The music was playing again. The shower ran, the coffee went into the blue travel mug, his cologne went onto my wrist, three granola bars went into the side pocket.
We kissed at the door like people who had somewhere safe to put things.
The off-balance morning from last week felt like weather that had passed through and kept moving.
My dad called on Tuesday night. That was new, too.
The man texted under duress and called under subpoena, and here he was, calling for no reason I could find anywhere in the conversation.
He asked which exam was next. He asked if Zane was studying or just over-studying, which was such an accurate read of the kitchen table that I laughed out loud.
He told me the new hummingbird, the one with the crooked tail feather, was a bully and he was considering an intervention.
It was four minutes of nothing. It was the best call we had ever had.
“I’ll let you go,” he said, before I had even thought about going. He’d been doing that lately, ending things first, gently, like he was being careful with my time. Finals, I figured.
“Okay, Dad. Talk soon.”
“Talk soon, kiddo.”
By Friday, Zane’s siege had moved to campus. He had his exam at noon, the big one, the one he had been building fortifications against for weeks. He kissed me twice at the door. Once for luck, once because the first one was for luck therefore it did not really count as a kiss.
“Are you going to the library?” he asked me.
“Library,” I confirmed. “Third floor. By the windows.”
“Text me when you’re done.” He picked up his backpack, then paused in the doorway, looking back at me with those eyes doing their quiet inventory of my face. Whatever he found there must have been fine because the corner of his mouth came up. “One more, Seren.”
“One more,” I echoed.
After.
The library during finals week became its own ecosystem.
Every table was a campsite, every outlet was contested territory, and the silence had a texture to it, hundreds of people being quiet together, all that panic politely compressed.
I claimed a table on the third floor by the tall windows, just like I told Zane I would, and set the blue travel mug down like a flag and spread my notes across my territory.
The afternoon sun came through the glass in long warm bars.
Somewhere below, Zane was sitting down in a lecture hall with a pencil and a superstition.
My dad was at home filling the feeder. Everything was stored exactly where I had left it.
I got to work.
I was forty pages into my Communications theory review, highlighting definitions of “interpersonal dynamics” that felt like common sense repackaged as tuition costs, when a shadow fell over my laptop.
I didn’t look up. In the library, looking up meant inviting eye contact, and eye contact meant someone asking to borrow a charger.
“Hey. No bodyguard today?”
The voice was low, dry, but a bit hesitant.
I looked up. It took me a moment to place him, but eventually I recognized the blond hair and ordinary features.
Finn was standing at the edge of my table, a massive, dog-eared biology textbook tucked under one arm and a half-empty bottle of water in his hand.
He was wearing a faded red hoodie that had seen better days, and he was looking down at me with a mild, friendly sort of curiosity.
I blinked, my brain still half-stuck in a paragraph about the evolution of mass media. “What?”
“Your boyfriend,” Finn said, gesturing vaguely toward the door with his drink. He wasn’t smirking; he just looked genuinely amused by the memory. “The one from the coffee stand. He looked like he was about to check my ID and clear the perimeter. He’s not here?”
A tiny, involuntary laugh caught in my throat. Everyone else in my life, Cassidy, Gavin, even my dad, handled the situation around Zane and me with a kind of fragile understanding. They knew why he was protective, so they knew why it was genuine and not controlling.
“He’s in an exam,” I said, leaning back in my chair. “So, you’re safe for at least another ninety minutes.”
“Oh, good,” Finn said, pulling out the heavy wooden chair at the table directly next to mine and setting his backpack down. “I don’t think I have the energy to navigate that today. This bio stuff is kicking my ass.” He sat down, stretching his legs out under the table and flipping his book open.
“Zane said you spend the entire lecture looking at your watch,” I said, the phrase slipping out before I could censor it.
Finn didn’t look offended. He just ran a hand over his hair, looking down at a diagram with a tired but patient sigh.
“Yeah. I have to catch the four-fifteen bus to the commuter lot to make my shift at the warehouse. If I miss it, I’m late, and my manager is strict about the timecard.
I’m just always tracking the minutes, so I don’t get stuck. ”
“Right,” I said, slightly wincing at the awkwardness. “That makes sense. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make it sound like…”
“No, it’s fine,” he said, looking over at me with a quiet, reassuring smile. “It probably looks like I’m just counting down the seconds to escape. Which, to be fair, sometimes I am. What are you studying?”
“Communications,” I said, gesturing to my notes. “Just a ten-page paper on corporate branding.”
“Sounds a lot better than statistical biology,” he said, turning back to his pages. “Trade you anytime.”
For the next hour, the only sound between our two tables was the clicking of keys and the occasional heavy sigh from a stressed-out sophomore three rows over. Around three, Finn stood up, rubbing the back of his neck. He looked down at his laptop, then over at me.
“Hey,” he said, dropping his voice to a quiet library whisper. “I’m going to run down to the basement cafe and grab a coffee before my brain completely shuts down. Do you mind watching my stuff for a minute?”
I looked at his open MacBook, his expensive graphing calculator, and the car keys sitting carelessly on the wood. “You want me to watch your things?”
“Yeah, if you don’t mind,” he said simply. “Just so no one walks off with the laptop. I’ll be right back.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll keep an eye on it.”
“Thanks. Hey, I never got your name.”
“Oh,” I blinked, realizing he was right. “It’s Seren.”
He disappeared down the stairwell, leaving me alone with his life spread out across the table.
It was a stupid, mundane thing, the universal library understanding of stranger-safety, but as I sat there, keeping watch over his belongings, I realized the room hadn’t changed shape.
My chest did not hurt. The threat dynamic that usually dictated every interaction I had outside of Zane’s line of sight had not crept in, and it had happened without any effort at all.
Ten minutes later, he came back with a paper cup and a small brown bag.
He set a mini package of gummy worms quietly onto my notebook.
“For helping me out,” he murmured, sliding back into his seat.
“Oh. Thanks,” I said, staring at the bright neon sugar. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“They’re good for studying,” he said, opening his laptop again. He typed something quickly, then looked back up at me, entirely casual. “Hey, give me your number.”
I paused. Finn noticed the hesitation, and his expression shifted. “Just for the future,” he explained. “If you want, I can save you a seat, so you don’t have to fight the crowd. I spend a lot of time here. Just text me when you get to the building. I can save you one of the good outlets.”
“Oh,” I said, a small wave of relief washing through me. “Right. Yes, that would be great. Thank you.”
I typed my number into his phone when he passed it over. When he took it back, he just saved it, set the phone next to his bio-stats notes, and took a sip of his coffee. We went back to working side by side in silence, until twenty minutes later when he stood back up.
“Well,” he said quietly, looking back at his textbook. “See you next time then.”
The second the door clicked shut behind him, leaving me alone in the small perimeter of our study space, my phone vibrated against the wood.
The screen read: Dad.
I let out a short, stressed breath through my nose, checking the time at the top of my laptop screen.
2:40 PM. The final draft of my corporate branding paper was due by five, and I was still two pages short of the required limit.
I pressed my thumb against the green button, slipping my headphones on to keep my voice down.