“I hope I got you pregnant,” I say, voice muffled by skin.
She giggles a little. “It’s too soon in my recovery. Besides, the doctor said that fertility’s not a hundred percent given. We’ll just have to wait and see.”
“I know,” I whisper, but I mean it. I want to see Simone round with me, I want to leave something of myself behind, and for the first time, I think she wants that, too.
She plays with my hair, humming under her breath. “What if you did get me pregnant just now?” she asks, voice dreamy.
“Then I’d be the luckiest bastard on earth.”
She laughs, wraps her arms around me, and we drift into the hush of after, bodies tangled, sweat cooling, the sheets twisted beneath us.
I close my eyes, listen to her heart, and think: this is it. This is all I ever wanted.
No contracts, no control, just the wild, impossible risk of love.
We sleep, and in my dreams, she is already heavy with me.
We wake, and she is still here.
For the first time, I believe she always will be.
23
ANDIE HAS A DIRTY SECRET!
SIMONE
Campus is weird in summer. It’s too bright, too empty. The air buzzes with the absence of people, a kind of sonic negative that makes every footstep echo like a gunshot. The old elms and their ghosts still line the quad, but the students are gone—home to suburban bedrooms, internships, jobs at the Dairy Queen, or whatever else keeps them tethered to real life while the rest of us, the stragglers, drift through the vacuum of “accelerated” summer term.
I walk the main drag, alone except for a pair of groundskeepers sunburned to the color of old bricks. My shadow stalks me across the concrete, haloed by the kind of blue-gold sun that feels more August than June. I breathe in, and the air tastes like wet grass and sunscreen, a memory of childhoods I only experienced through TV. Even the squirrels look surprised to see me, pausing in their foraging to flick their tails and size me up.
I’m not an undergrad anymore. The degree is real, a slab of parchment sitting on my dresser at the dorm, proof I’m not just a perpetual screw-up. But I signed up for the co-term, the five-year BA-to-MA bridge, and that means I get to spend anotheryear in these borrowed buildings, walking these emptied-out halls. I’m a ghost in a place built for ghosts. I should find it sad, but mostly I feel lucky to be left behind.
My destination is the campus bookstore, an un-airconditioned cave that somehow smells simultaneously like cardboard and sugar cookies. I work here now, three days a week, stacking displays and slapping “required reading” stickers on the covers of books I’ll never read. It’s honest work, if you don’t mind paper-cuts and the stares of lifers who don’t recognize you without a backpack and a sense of dread.
Inside, the AC is a rumor, nothing more. My boss is nowhere to be found, which is normal. I duck behind the counter, drop my bag, and grab the cart of summer class books. I’ve gotten good at this: arranging the pyramid of paperback misery, the used copies always at the bottom, the new ones perched on top like a threat. Today’s project is a window display: “Century’s Best Beach Reads.” I laugh, thinking of anyone voluntarily readingUlyssesby a lake, but the poster says to put it there, so I do.
As I’m adjusting a stack of modernist poetry anthologies (no one’s beach read, ever), I feel the shift in the air before I see him. There’s a trick to it: the way his footsteps slow at the door, how he always hovers a second too long on the threshold, as if the world might pull him back. Even now, after everything, I catch myself attuned to his presence.
Liam steps in, dark hair still artfully wild, button-down rolled to the elbows, blue jeans faded at the knees. He looks out of place among the shelf of orientation t-shirts and century-old university pennants, but he owns the room in a way that makes everyone else background noise. I freeze, one hand on the cart and the other holding a copy ofWhite Teeth.
“Hey,” he says, soft and private.
It’s been almost two months since I graduated, since we stopped pretending. The rules are different now: no more office hours, no more clandestine emails, no more whispered rendezvous in the stacks. We’re just two people with a significant age gap and a shared addiction to stories. I still catch myself waiting for a shoe to drop, but it hasn’t yet. He’s here, and I’m here, and somehow, that’s enough.
I set the book down, brush my hair behind my ear, and try not to grin like a fangirl. “Hey, yourself.”
He glances around the empty store. “Busy day?”
“You know it,” I deadpan. “I’ve already restocked the rainbow highlighters and the entire John Green section. I might go for Employee of the Month.”
He smiles, and it’s not the “good girl” smile that still thrills me to the bone. It’s something softer, with edges worn down by actual affection. I feel my insides heat up in a way that’s got nothing to do with the faulty AC.
He crosses to the counter, hands in his pockets. “I was hoping you’d be here. I finished my summer seminar early.”
I arch an eyebrow. “The seminar about postwar poetry?”
“It’s more of a confessional, actually.” He says it like an apology. “I made them all read Plath and Sexton. There were casualties.”
