After #2
“Hey, Dad,” I murmured, leaning over my keyboard to look like I was just talking to my screen. “I’m actually in the library right now. I’m right in the middle of a final pass.”
“Oh,” he said. The word came through the speaker lower than usual. “I won’t keep you long then. Just wanted to let you know the lawyer got the forms. Everything is sealed up.”
“Oh, great. That’s good news. Thanks for letting me know.” I kept my fingers hovering over my keyboard, my eyes scanning the paragraph I had been tracking before the interruption.
“It’s a nice afternoon here,” he said mildly. He didn’t hang up, which was the first real departure from his usual phone rhythm. “The hummingbirds are all over that feeder today. Must be four of them out there. I was just sitting on the porch watching them.”
“That’s great, Dad,” I said, my voice tight with a subtle, anxious impatience. I typed a single sentence, deleted it. “I’m glad they’re using it.”
“Your mother always said they liked the afternoon sun best,” he murmured. “I was just thinking about that.”
“Dad, I really have to go,” I interrupted, brushing him off before he could slide any further into the memory.
My chest was starting to do that familiar, high stress tighten that had nothing to do with ghosts and everything to do with a ticking academic clock.
“I have two hours to finish this conclusion or I’m going to lose a letter grade. ”
“Right,” he said. His tone was entirely peaceful, lacking any of the sharp, demanding irritation that usually followed a rejection. “Go do your work, Seren. I’ll take a picture of the hummingbirds for you.”
“Okay. I’ll call you on Sunday night, okay? Love you.”
“Love you too, kiddo.”
By four-thirty, my final sentence was typed, and the file was uploaded to the student portal. The library had begun to empty out, the frantic, suffocating energy of the afternoon draining away as the afternoon began its transformation into evening.
I was sitting back in my chair, staring blankly at my screensaver, when a familiar hand dropped onto the wood next to my blue mug.
I looked up. Zane was standing there, his jacket slung over one shoulder, his dark hair a little messy from where he had clearly been running his fingers through it during the exam.
But the heavy, anxious look he had carried all morning was completely gone.
His shoulders were loose. His eyes were bright.
“Tell me you’re done,” he said, his voice a low hum in the quiet of the library floor.
“I’m done,” I breathed, a massive, unprompted smile breaking across my face. “I just submitted it.”
Zane let out a short, triumphant laugh, reaching down to grab my bag from the floor. “Good. Because if I had to think about molecular structures for another five minutes, my head was going to explode. Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
The walk back to the blue apartment felt entirely different from our walk there this morning.
The air was hot, smelling of early summer and asphalt, and the campus felt lighter, like a weight had been lifted off the entire student body at once.
Zane kept his arm slung over my shoulders, pulling me in close against his side as we walked, his thumb tracing slow, happy circles against my collarbone.
“How did it go?” I asked, looking up at him. “The final?”
“Crushed it,” he said, and there was not a single trace of doubt in his voice.
He looked younger when he smiled like this, the sharp, defensive edges of his features softening into something easy and content.
“The essay section was exactly what I studied last night. Every single question. I sat there writing for two hours straight. I think my hand is permanently cramped, but it’s over. ”
“I told you,” I said, nudging his ribs with my elbow. “All those highlighters paid off.”
“They did,” he agreed, leaning down to press a quick, hard kiss to the top of my head.
“But mostly I just wanted to get back to you. I have spent the last hour thinking about making a massive dinner, forcing the radiator off with a wrench, and not looking at a single piece of paper until September.”
By the time we let ourselves into the apartment, the space was flooded with gold peace.
It felt comfortable. It felt safe. Zane dropped his backpack by the door with a satisfying thud and turned to wrap his arms around my waist, pulling me flat against his chest. “No more exams,” he murmured against my neck, his lips tracing a slow path up to my jaw.
“No more exams,” I whispered, my hands sliding up into his hair.
He kissed me then, deeply, thoroughly, with all the sweet, lingering ease of a Friday night where we didn’t have anything to study for.
His hands moved down to the small of my back, lifting me slightly until my toes were barely touching the floor, holding me entirely against him.
It was that specific way he held me when the rest of the world finally stopped loud talking, like he was subtly reminding the air between us that we didn’t require any extra space.
I let my head drop back against his forearm, my hands curling into the collar of his shirt.
His lips moved from my mouth to the sensitive skin right below my ear, his breath warm and perfect.
“You smell like library coffee,” he murmured.
“And you smell like a guy who just sat in a crowded room for three hours,” I whispered, laughing a little as his hair brushed my cheek.
“Well, that’s what I did.” He pulled back just enough to look down at me, his thumbs tracing the line of my hipbones beneath my sweater.
The golden hour light hit the side of his face, turning the dark of his eyes into something warmer, almost amber.
He looked at me the way he always looked at me when he was finally done holding his breath, like I was the only thing in the room that had a fixed position. “I missed you today.”
“Zane, we saw each other at breakfast. I put three granola bars in your bag.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said softly, his expression settling into something more intense. “You were two hours away last Friday and then you were on the third floor of the library all afternoon. That’s two Fridays in a row.”
“I’m right here,” I said, reaching up to run my fingers through the messy hair at the back of his neck again, pulling him down toward me again. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Good,” he whispered against my lips. “Please don’t.”
He kissed me again, but the frantic energy of his exam ending had fully dissolved now.
He moved his hands beneath the hem of my sweater, his palms slightly rough against my bare skin, tracing the curve of my waist with a slow familiarity that felt like a quiet conversation we had been having for years.
He guided me back a step, then another, until the back of my hips hit the edge of the kitchen counter.
He didn’t break the kiss. He just stepped into me, his thighs framing mine, his weight leaning into me just enough to remind me how small my body was against his.
The counter was cold through my shirt. He wasn’t.
Heat came off him like he had been standing in the sun, and I wanted to press into it until I could not tell whose it was.
His hand slid up the back of my neck, into my hair, and closed around it.
Not pulling. Holding. My whole body understood the difference before I did.
The kiss got deeper and slower at the same time, which should not be possible, which was the whole problem with him.
He kissed me like we had years. Like the wanting was the point and the having could wait. I made a sound I would deny later.
He smiled against my mouth when I did. I felt it.
I bit his lower lip for it, and the smile died and something else took its place, something with more gravity, and his hips pressed me into the counter hard enough that the edge would leave a line I’d find in the mirror tomorrow and stand there touching.
His mouth left mine and traveled. Jaw. The place below my ear.
My throat, where my pulse was giving me away in Morse code, and he stayed there, reading it.
His hands found my waist and gripped, and I felt what it was costing him.
The stillness. He was holding himself back the way you hold a door against weather, and knowing that was hotter than anything he could have done with his hands.
For a long time, it was just the two of us in the quiet of the blue apartment, breathing each other in, while the sun slowly melted into the floorboards.
The next morning, the small square of Lucy’s face on my laptop screen pixelated for a second, the Wi-Fi lagging before snapping back into focus.
Usually, I had therapy every Tuesday, like clockwork.
But sometimes, Lucy liked to schedule what she called a check in.
Basically, it was extra time around the pressure points, like finals week, to make sure I hadn’t tied a knot in all the progress we have made together.
Zane had gone to the grocery store to buy things for a dinner we didn’t have to rush through. I sat cross-legged on the couch, the laptop balanced on my knees, my fingers lightly tracing the edge of a blue mug.
“You’re breathing differently today,” Lucy noted through the speakers.
She didn’t have her legal pad out yet; she was just sitting back in her office chair on the screen, her glasses pushed up into her silvering hair, looking at me with that clinical curiosity that usually made me want to close the tab.
“I went back to West Bridge,” I said, and the name of the town didn’t even cause a hitch in my pulse. “To my dad’s house.”
On the screen, Lucy paused, her eyes widening just a fraction before settling back into their professional stillness. “And how did that feel?”
“It was fine,” I said, a small smile touching my face. “We opened some boxes. We sorted through my mom’s things together, her old recipes, her scarves. No one slammed any doors. No one shut down. We just… handled it.”