5
BREANNA
He came back up the bank with my shirt in one hand and my bra in the other, moving through the dark like the riverbank was his living room. The voices had drifted past—probably someone in a boat, laughing, never even looking toward our stretch of bank. Silence had descended again by the time Bishop reached me.
He handed me the clothes without comment. No smirk. No joke about the scramble. Just the quiet competence of a man who handled what needed handling and moved on.
I pulled the shirt over my head and sat in the grass with my knees up, listening to the river. The fireflies were still going—thinner now, the peak past, but still pulsing along the bank in scattered gold.
My body was humming with something I couldn't easily explain. Not just the physical part, though that was still everywhere—in the ache between my legs, the tenderness of my skin where his beard had scraped my neck, the warm heaviness in my limbs. It was something underneath that. Deeper. Like a frequency I'd been tuned to my whole life had shifted, and the new one was clearer.
Bishop sat down beside me. Close enough that his arm pressed against mine. He didn't say anything. He just sat there, solid and warm, and let the night settle around us.
"I have lab on Monday," I said.
"You mentioned that."
"It's a three-hour drive. If I leave in the morning, I'll make it back with time to prep."
"Okay."
I pulled a blade of grass and twisted it between my fingers. The river oats were soft and cool, still holding the warmth of the day underneath. Somewhere downstream, a barred owl called—a low, rolling sound that carried across the water and into the trees.
"I've been thinking about what I said earlier," I said. "About how if I let this happen, everyone who ever looked at me and decided I wasn't serious gets to be right."
He was quiet. Listening the way he always listened—with his whole body, unhurried, like whatever I was about to say was worth the time it took me to find the words.
"They were wrong before I met you," I said. "They were wrong when I walked into your shop yesterday. They were wrong when I was sitting in a lecture hall and a guy next to me explained my own thesis topic back to me like he'd invented it. They were wrong every single time." I dropped the blade of grass. "And they're still wrong. Whether I drive back to Raleigh tomorrow and never see you again or whether I?—"
I stopped.
"Whether you what?" His voice was low. Not pushing. Just there.
"Whether I come back."
The fireflies pulsed. The river moved. Bishop turned his head and looked at me, and in the faint gold light, I could see the expression I'd been trying to describe since yesterday afternoon.It wasn't patience. It wasn't desire, though that was part of it. It was certainty. The look of a man who’d already arrived at the answer and was waiting for me to find my way to the same place.
"I can do my coursework remotely," I said. "Most of it. There are residency weeks on campus—a few weeks a year for lab intensives. But the fieldwork is the degree. That's the whole point. And the fieldwork is here." I looked at the river, at the bank, at the fireflies still drifting above the waterline. "Hadley Bend is here."
"It is."
"And you're here."
"I am."
"I'm not giving up the degree. I need you to know that. I'm not walking away from the program. I'm not going to be the woman who dropped everything for a man she met two days ago."
"You're not dropping anything." He said it the way he said everything—direct, certain, no wasted words. "You're adding something."
My throat tightened. Not pain. Fullness. The feeling of a space I'd been protecting so fiercely I'd forgotten it was empty—finally being filled.
"I'll come back," I said. "After lab. I'll talk to my advisor about shifting my field site. The data from tonight alone—even without samples, the population observations, the synchronous flashing—it's enough to justify a site proposal."
"You'll have samples next time. I'll bring you out here as many nights as you need."
"You don't have to guide me every time. Once I know the line through the chute?—"
"I know I don't have to."
