I should just cancel out of this and…what? I don’t have a car. That was another thing I should have done and didn’t. I’ve never actually bought a vehicle. One appeared in the driveway for my sixteenth birthday and another for my eighteenth—my Lexus that my father held the title to. Now the repo company has it.
I’m punching at the rideshare app, trying to compose a text to the driver that’s something other thanWTF?when Braydencomes home from an early morning run, shirtless and wiping the sweat from his face.
I do not stare. I do not. I should be used to this by now—clearly, he doesn’t think anything of being shirtless around me…so I shouldn’t think anything of it either. But my eyes get stuck on the muscles at his chest, the gleam of sweat, the flat nipples, the line of hair leading down…
“Hey, Sav.” Brayden says my name like he might be saying it for the second time. He nods toward my bag, now slumped on the entrance hall floor. “You going somewhere?”
“Classes. Hypothetically.” I blow a strand of hair from my face. “My ride is probably halfway to South Carolina right now.”
Brayden’s eyebrows pinch as if he’s just now realizing I don’t have a vehicle. “So take my car.” He pats his shorts pockets, then seems to realize he doesn’t have his car keys or even a shirt.
“How will you get to the ballpark?” I ask.
“I have a truck at my parents’ house.”
You’ve had two cars this whole time and didn’t offer me one?“I could take that one if you prefer your own car.”
“You ever actually driven a pickup?” he asks.
“You ever actually hauled anything in your pickup?” I shoot back.
Brayden laughs. The muscles in his belly contract.“Just baseball stuff. Wait here.” He goes upstairs—runs, practically—and returns a minute later with his keys.
“You sure you trust me?” I ask. “You’ve never seen me drive.”
He frowns for a second. “You seem like you’d be good at it.”
“I do?”
“You seem like you’d be good at—” He waves toward the front door as if he’s indicating the outside world. “Whatever you try to do.”
Something in the way he says it makes my chest ache.I’ve never had to try, really.Everything’s either been done for me orcome so easy that I never really felt like I needed to put in effort. None of which I can say to Brayden. We’re married, but not that kind of married.
So I take the keys from him and try not to notice as his fingers graze over my palm like he’s reluctant to let go.
I getto class with five minutes to spare, enough time to down half an iced coffee and arrange my notebook and pens, feeling very Victoria-ish. I snap a picture and send it to her. Get back aYou got this!!!a second later.
Only when the professor comes in and puts her first slide up on the screen, I’m not sure if I got this at all. She’s young for a professor—in her late thirties at most—with dark brown hair in a bun without a single strand escaping. She introduces herself as Dr. Shireen Ghorbani, a string of degrees behind her name. “So as you can see from the reading?—”
My heart stutters.What reading?
Everyone else takes out print copies of journal articles, annotated with notes and color-coded highlights. I pull out my laptop, bring up the syllabus. Sure enough, under Week Zero assignments, there were three required readings that I somehow missed.
I click the links to them, trying to remember my Morningside password so I can get them off the campus library system while experiencing a brief, flushed moment of unbridled panic. I moved across the country to be here—I agreed not to date for two years to be here. I did so much and yet, right at this moment, clearly not enough.
The student sitting next to me—an auburn-haired guy with a sticker on his folded laptop that saysI will stab you,along with a hypodermic needle, and another sticker with a trans flag on it—nudges his paper toward me. It has about eighteen thousand notes written in the margins in cramped handwriting.
“Thanks,” I whisper. “I’m Savannah.”
“Forrest.”
“I didn’t see that we had reading,” I admit.
“Yeah, Doc likes to get people with that. Here.” Forrest lends me his paper.
I spend a minute skimming the abstract. Brayden didn’t know what bioinformatics was. Right now, I’m not sure I know either.
Up at the front, the professor has switched to a chart extracted from the paper. “Now, I know you are all familiar with GWAS plots, so I won’t spend a lot of time on this?—”
