“Any?” I ask playfully.
He winks. “Any.”
“Well…as you could tell, I think I’m helplessly behind here—”
“So…tomorrow?”
I want to rub my cheeks that hurt from the smile on my face. “I—I don’t want to be a bother oranything—”
He stops me. “It would be the furthest thing from a bother, Lydia.”
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
I roll my eyes as my smile is still very present. “Fine…I guess I’ll keep using you. But there needs to be some sort of fair trade here.”
He gives me this sinful look, and my stomach swarms with butterflies. “Trust me, your presence is enough.”
68
Bash
I’ve never studied this much in all four years of college…
She has me wrapped around her finger. Anything she asks for, anything she needs…I want to give her. It feels stupid to say that I prayed for someone like her to come into my life…but it’s true…kind of. I honestly couldn’t have prayed up an exact replica of Lydia. She’s better than anything my mind could have thought it wanted before she existed in my world. And I mean that purely in a friendship way, just the person she is at her core. Don’t get me wrong…I like her…too much even. But it’s more than that with her, always has been.
We’ve fallen into a rhythm together. After my therapy session today, I swing by the café to grab her order and mine. When I see her walking towards me, I hold out the coffee like it’s our secret handshake in the form of a paper cup. She takes it smiling, and it hurts how big my grin is around her. We fall into step with each other, and it always feels too in sync to be by accident.
The library is quiet this time of day, our favorite time to catch it. Most days, our study sessions look like half studying actual class work, and half studying each other, falling into effortless conversations. Sometimes the conversations are light, sometimes they’re deep, sometimes they’re everything in between, and last until way after our coffee is gone or cold.
Being around her has become the least stressful part of my days. The fear I used to carry, about ever caring again, about sticking my neck out far enough that someone could chop it off, somehow went straight out the window without asking. Somehow, Lydia was thrown into my life in probably some of the messiest ways possible, and has just…stuck. Really,I’mthe one who’s stuck.I’mthe one who doesn’t want to leaveherorbit.
We pull out laptops, notes, and pens, trying to start on Chapter 8—behavioral economics—but conversation takes over instead, and we let it. We roll into conversations that don’t really matter but do because they feed me pieces of her little by little.
After playing a game of real-life ‘friends, siblings, or dating’ with students around the library, Lydia throws out a conversation I wasn’t ready to catch. “So…how many hearts on campus haveyoubroken, Bash?” The tease is light, but her eyes are curious.
I huff. “Zero.” I swivel my pen in my fingers. “Haven’t been a relationship person with most of my time here.”
Her eyebrows lift. “By choice or by just not having any candidates?”
“By fear,” I say, being honest. “After my sister…” I exhale through my nose. “Loving anyone felt like inviting loss in. I didn’t want to willingly start something I couldn’t survive.”
She leans back, sipping her coffee, considering that statement. “I get that…but you shouldn’t close yourself off to the possibility of happiness, even if it’s scary. You deserve to experience it.”
“It doesn’t scare me the same way anymore. Especially…recently,” I hear myself say it before I can decide whether it’s smart to or not. The sentence hangs between us. The tension thickens in that quiet, sweet way that makes you want to say something stupid to break it. So I do say something stupid.
“Which guys should I be jealous of on campus?”
She blinks, shocked at first, then smiles, and I can see the mischievous wheels turning. “Youwould be jealous ofallthe men who are in love with me here on campus?” The tease in her tone is loaded.
“Honestly?” I ask. “Yeah. I would.”
Her smile softens. “Well, good thing there aren’t any,” she says, then pauses, looking up at the ceiling like she’s about to tell on herself. “Well…except my old drug dealer, who…kind of told me he loved me.”
I freeze, a beat too long. “Oh, were you two—?”
“No,” she says quickly, shaking her head. “It wasn’t like that. I wasn’t in love with him or anything. We were—friends, I guess, in a messed-up way. I used him to hide…and to get high,” she says, laughing a little, needing to add some humor. “He cared…maybe too much, but I wasn’t able to be anything more for him…or for anyone.”
