Page 24 of Hostile

We were walking the long way around the quad, as we always did when neither of us wanted to arrive anywhere, our breath making small clouds in the dark and our arms close enough that our coat sleeves brushed every few steps. The campus was quiet, as it was between finals and the holiday break—half empty, the students who remained moving through it with the distracted purposefulness of people who had somewhere to be and were taking the long way there anyway.

“You’re leaving Thursday,” I said. It wasn’t a question. He’d mentioned it twice, each time with the careful neutrality of someone stating a fact without revealing how they felt about it.

“Thursday morning.” He glanced at me. “You’re staying through the weekend?”

“The library doesn’t close for the break until Saturday.” I tucked my hands deeper into my coat pockets. “I have two papers due in January, and the quiet is helpful.”

He nodded. We walked a few more steps in the comfortable silence that had become its own kind of language between us—the one that didn’t need filling and meant something different from absence.

“I got you something,” he said.

I looked at him. He was staring straight ahead, as he did when he’d decided to say something and was going to say it no matter how it landed. “Wyatt⁠—”

“It’s small.” He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small, dark green velvet pouch, the kind that closed with a simple drawstring. He held it out without ceremony. “Don’t open it yet.”

I took it. Felt the slight weight of something inside—small and cool through the fabric. “Why not now?”

“Because I want you to open it when you’re alone.” He looked at me then, directly, wearing the expression I’d come to recognize as the one he wore when he meant something completely. “I wrote something on the card inside. I’d rather you read it without me standing there watching you read it.”

I turned the pouch over in my fingers. “That’s either very romantic or very alarming.”

“Hopefully the first one.” The corner of his mouth moved. “Probably a little of both.”

We had reached the steps of my building. The lit entrance cast a warm rectangle across the cold stone, and I stood at the bottom of the steps, looking at him, feeling the thing I’d been feeling for three months in its fullest and most inconvenient form—the one that had no clean category, that refused to be filed or managed, or approached with the systematic logic I applied to everything else.

I loved him.

I’d known it for weeks. I hadn’t said it, hadn’t planned to say it, and had, in fact, been operating on the working assumption that if I didn’t say it out loud, it would remain a private fact with limited consequences. Standing in the December cold, a velvet pouch in my hand, with Wyatt Aldridge looking at me like I was the only fixed point in a moving world, the working assumption felt increasingly insufficient.

“Safe travels,” I said instead. “Tell your family—” I stopped, because I had nothing to say about his family that I could say out loud on these steps without it landing badly.

He laughed quietly. “Yeah.” He stepped forward and kissed me—brief, warm, his hand cupping my jaw for a moment against the cold. “Open it tonight. Call me afterward if you want.”

He stepped back.

I went inside.

I opened it alone, sitting cross-legged on my bed while my roommate was away for the break. The room was quiet enough that I could hear the radiator knocking in the wall. The drawstring was stiff from the cold it had been sitting in, and I worked it loose carefully, the way you handle things you already know will matter.

The arrow was silver, thin as a finger, with a small loop at the top for a chain. Elegant. Simple. The kind of thing built to last rather than to impress.

The card was folded twice and written in Wyatt’s handwriting—the angular, slightly cramped print of someone who had been trained for legibility and kept drifting toward speed.

An arrow always knows where it’s going. I figured you’d appreciate something that doesn’t second-guess itself.

Merry Christmas, Megan.

—W

I read it twice. Then I sat with the arrow in my palm and felt the weight of it, which was barely anything in physical terms and considerable in every other sense, and I did the thing I’d been refusing to do for three months.

I let myself have it.

All of it. The Thursday coffees and the library silences and the October rain, and the careful, unhurried way he’d looked at me every single time as if he’d made a decision and wasn’t reconsidering. His honesty, which had been the first thing to disarm me and remained the most dangerous. The way he’d said mine too to every observation I’d ever made about myself, as if the answer were simple, as if it had always been simple, as if all I’d ever had to do was say a thing out loud, and he would tell me he already knew.

I held the arrow and thought about direction. About what it meant to always know where you were going—not blindly, not stubbornly, but with the kind of orientation that held through crosswinds and distance, and through the accumulated interference of everything that tried to knock you off course.

True north, I thought. That’s what he is.