25. Skylar
Skylar woke to warmth.
Not the thin warmth of her radiator clicking through its cycle or the borrowed heat of a blanket.
Real warmth. A body pressed against her back, an arm slung across her waist, steady breath stirring the hair at her nape.
Charlie’s fingers curled loosely against her ribs, palm flat to her skin where her shirt had ridden up during the night.
She lay still.
Charlie shifted in his sleep, tucked his face into the curve of her neck, and murmured a sound so quiet the vibration registered against her skin before the word reached her ears.
Fresh-cut grass. The scent lived in his skin even in November, when the campus fields lay frozen and the locker rooms smelled like industrial cleaner. She breathed him in and let the stillness hold.
Outside, a garbage truck rumbled past the apartment. Pale gray light pressed through the curtains, washing the room in the cold blue of late autumn.
A week ago, staying had been a choice. A brave one, hard-won. This morning it was just the truth. No negotiation. No escape plan folded in her back pocket. Just his breath on her neck and the absence of any desire to be anywhere else.
For the first time since the morning the fire marshal had knocked on her grandparent’s door and she’d learned the world had no guarantees, the word that surfaced was not “safe” or “careful” or “temporary.”
Happy.
She pressed her lips together and let herself have the word.
Twenty minutes later, the need to work won. Three final papers, two photo edits, and a lab report stacked against a deadline that didn’t care how warm Charlie’s hands were. She eased out from beneath his arm, padded to her desk in bare feet, and retrieved her laptop.
The kitchen table was the logical destination. Instead, she brought the laptop back to bed, folded herself cross-legged beside Charlie’s sleeping form, balanced the screen on her knees, and opened the assignment folder.
Her laptop protested immediately. The fan whirred at a pitch that rattled the casing.
The screen flickered, froze, and caught up three seconds later with a stutter that rearranged her open tabs into a sequence she hadn’t chosen.
The pit in her stomach yawned as she closed two browser windows and waited.
The cursor spun. A white bar crawled across the center of the screen.
Her fingers hovered above the keyboard, afraid to press another key, afraid the next command would be the one that tipped the machine over the edge.
Charlie slept through the grinding, one arm thrown above his head, his face slack and unguarded.
Her laptop fan screamed louder.
The screen went black.
Skylar stared at the dark rectangle balanced on her knees. Cold spread through her palms. She pressed the power button. Held the power button. Pressed the power button a third time while the bed shifted beneath her and Charlie’s breathing changed.
Nothing.
The hope she’d been rationing collapsed all at once.
She set the dead machine on the mattress and dropped her head back against the wall.
For a year and a half, she had coaxed life from the ancient device, replacing the charger twice, clearing the cache weekly, restarting mid-assignment when the processor overheated.
The laptop had outlived every reasonable expectation, and the timing of its death, three weeks before finals, carried the specific cruelty the universe reserved for people who couldn’t afford replacements.
“How long has it been doing that?” Charlie propped himself up on one elbow, blinking sleep from his eyes.
“Doing what?”
“Sounding like a lawnmower engine with a death wish.” The words landed warm and half-formed against her shoulder.
A laugh pushed through her chest despite the knot forming behind it. “A while.”
He sat up. The sheets pooled at his waist and morning light caught the ridge of muscle along his shoulders, and Skylar’s brain performed its usual treason of drinking in details she had no business filing away during a crisis.
He reached across her and pressed the power button.
The screen stayed dark. “I think it’s dead this time. ”
Skylar screwed her eyes shut and banged her head against the wall. “What am I going to do?”
“Let me buy you a new one.”
The offer carried the ease of someone picking up a coffee tab. Charlie’s relationship to money occupied a different galaxy from her own, a place where laptops were replaceable objects and not the single piece of technology standing between a student and academic ruin.
She faced him. “No.”
“Skylar.”
“I said no.” She yanked the dead laptop into her own space, a reflex she recognized as absurd even as her arms closed around the machine. Guarding a corpse.
Charlie studied her face. The assessment lasted two seconds, patient and thorough, the way he read a defensive formation before a snap. “Your finals are in three weeks. Every assignment, every submission portal, every textbook at Thorndale lives online. You can’t finish the semester on your phone.”
The truth hurt. The library had shared terminals, but the wait times during finals stretched past midnight, and the reservation system operated through the same login portal she couldn’t access without the laptop she was currently holding against her chest.
“I’ll figure something out.”
“Or you could let me help and pay me back with the Senior Night bonus.” His arms folded across his chest, casual, as if the offer didn’t carry the weight of a thousand dollars.
The Senior Night bonus. Skylar’s teeth pressed together, and the math she carried in the back of her skull at all times, the running ledger that never slept, scrolled forward.
Three hundred and twelve dollars sat in her bank account.
The Dean’s payments had totaled twenty-five hundred so far.
Two thousand of that was already in Ironwood, chipping away at the four-thousand-dollar electrical panel her grandmother needed replaced before the December inspection.
The remaining five hundred had bled into groceries, bus passes, and the charger she replaced in October when the old one sparked against her hand.
Two events remained. The gala and Senior Night would pay a thousand combined, plus the two-thousand-dollar completion bonus.
Every cent of that bonus was already spoken for: the second half of the panel repair, then enough shifts at the diner to scrape through spring.
That money was the difference between surviving the rest of the year and drowning in the slow, familiar way she’d been drowning since August.
A laptop would cost at least five hundred. Probably more for a machine that could run the editing software her photojournalism course required.
Skylar turned the math over again. Borrowing.
A loan with a payback date and a specific dollar amount and an exit strategy she controlled.
She would owe Charlie Carnell for a few weeks, and then the debt would clear, and the balance sheet would return to zero, and she would remain the kind of person who carried her own weight.
“I’ll pay you back. Every cent. The day the bonus hits.”
“I know you will.”
He accepted her terms without negotiation because the money meant nothing to him, and the ease of the transaction exposed the gap between their worlds in a way that made the muscles along her spine tighten. She shoved the discomfort down and nodded. “Fine.”
He reached for his phone on the nightstand. “What specs do you need?”
“Something that opens without screaming.”
The corner of his mouth lifted. “I’ll narrow it down.”
His thumbs moved across the browser, scrolling through options with the focused attention he gave everything, and a thought settled behind her collarbone before she could deflect the weight of the realization.
The camera on her desk. The coffees, the dinners he shared with her, the drive to Ironwood.
Now a machine she would spend every remaining day of the semester typing on, her fingers pressing keys he paid for, her work flowing through a screen that carried his money as surely as the camera carried his guilt.
Borrowing. She would pay him back.
Inspiration struck. “I have a condition.”
Charlie glanced up from his phone.
“You submit for the fellowship.”
The shift in his expression arrived in stages.
First the stillness, the careful blankness he wore when a conversation veered toward the territory he guarded.
Then a flicker behind his eyes, too fast to name, that she’d learned to read as the distance between what Charlie craved and what Charlie allowed himself to pursue.
“Skylar.”
“You are a writer.” She held his gaze. “Not someone who writes on the side, not a football player with a hobby. A writer. Your workshop pieces are the strongest in the class, and that includes the girl with the pink hair who already has a literary agent. You should be submitting.”
“The deadline is in five days.”
“Then you have five days.”
He set the phone down. His jaw worked around an argument forming and dissolving behind his teeth.
She recognized the shape of his resistance.
Years of suppressing every desire that didn’t fit inside the frame his father built had trained Charlie to treat his own ambitions as indulgences rather than necessities.
The fellowship wasn’t a prize. The fellowship gave him permission to become the person he already was.
“My father would lose his mind.”
“Your father loses his mind when you miss a phone call. The bar is already on the floor.”
A breath punched out of him, startled and rough. “Things aren’t that simple.”
“No.” She shifted closer. Her knee pressed against his thigh beneath the sheets.
“But the fellowship isn’t about your father.
The fellowship is about you and what you want to do with the rest of your life.
I watched you sit in that workshop for twelve weeks writing circles around every other person in the room, including me, and pretend the words didn’t matter. ”
His throat moved. The swallow was audible.
“You told me you trust me.” Her hand found his beneath the sheets and held on.
“So let me tell you what I see. I see a man who writes the most honest prose I have ever read and hides the pages on his phone behind a locked screen. I see someone whose voice deserves more than a notes app and a password. Submit the application. Take your own work seriously. Because you are the only person in that classroom who doesn’t. ”
The silence stretched. Morning light streamed across the bed. Charlie stared at the dead laptop between them, and the muscles in his face cycled through an argument she could trace but not hear: the brow creasing, the mouth thinning, the slow bob of his Adam’s apple.
“What if I submit,” he said, “and they reject me?”
“Then you submitted. Then you tried. Then you did the brave thing instead of the safe thing.”
His eyes found hers. The blue carried the same unguarded quality she had photographed during the portrait session, the mask peeled back far enough that she could see the shape of the man underneath.
A man who wrote about boys who chose football to keep their parents from fighting and who sat in workshops listening to strangers dissect his autobiography without flinching.
“Okay.”
One word. Quiet enough to miss if she hadn’t been listening.
Skylar pressed her forehead against his shoulder and let her eyes close. Beneath her skin, a tremor ran through him, brief and involuntary.
When she pulled back, Charlie picked up his phone again.
His thumb hovered over the laptop listings for a moment before he opened a new tab and typed “Lighthouse Fellowship application” into the search bar.
The cursor blinked on the screen, patient and waiting, and the morning light through the curtains caught the edge of his jaw, where the tension had finally, barely, begun to ease.
The dead laptop sat between them on the sheets. Soon there would be a new one, paid for with money she would return after Senior Night. The fellowship would take longer. The fellowship might change everything.
Skylar tucked her knees to her chest and let herself watch him read.