“I can leave him now,” I said. “Not because he’s okay. Because leaving won’t break him.”
“For a little while,” I added. “I can breathe.”
James studied my face for a long moment. Then he nodded once.
We stood together and walked out of the cafeteria.
The corridor outside felt narrower than it used to. Or maybe I was just more aware of the space between bodies—the way people shifted when we passed, the way conversations thinned and angled away.
James stayed close, not touching, but near enough that I could feel the heat coming off him. Like he was trying to lend me his steadiness without asking if I wanted it.
"You don't have to prove anything," he said.
"I'm not proving anything. I'm just showing up."
He stopped outside the lecture hall. Through the open door, I could see students settling into seats, notebooks out, laughing softly like they hadn't spent the last week turning me into a cautionary tale.
"I'll be right here," James said. We walked into class together, the familiarity settling my nerves more than I expected.
I found my usual seat and James sat down beside me.
Around me, conversations hummed at the particular frequency of people trying not to be overheard. I caught fragments. Mountain. Healing Center. Dangerous.
My name, twice.
I pulled out my notebook and opened it to a blank page. Wrote the date in the top corner, because that’s what normal students did, and I was committed to being normal—even if it killed me.
No one here knew I’d climbed Denali.No one knew I’d pulled a feral wolf back from the edge and bonded to him.No one knew James had followed me into the wild, fought a bear, and come back bound to me just as irrevocably.
I was just a student who’d been gone for a while and had returned. Just ignore the rumors. Nothing to see here.
A girl I vaguely recognized—dark hair, sharp jaw, always sat three rows ahead—glanced back at me. Her eyes widened slightly when she realized I was looking. She turned around so fast her ponytail whipped the shoulder of the guy next to her.
I pretended I hadn't seen.
Professor Vince Tomlinson entered through the side door at exactly two minutes before the hour. He was carrying a stack of papers that looked like it might contain our academic futures, and his expression suggested he was already disappointed in most of us.
"Good afternoon," he said, setting the papers down with a thud that silenced the room. "For those of you who've forgotten, we're discussing transformation narratives this week. Metamorphosis. Change. The stories humans have told themselves for millennia about becoming something other than what they were."
He began pacing, the way he always did when he was warming up to something. His shoes clicked against the stone floor in a rhythm I'd once found soothing.
"Today's focus: the question of return." He paused at the window, silhouetted against grey light. "When a character transforms—whether into an animal, a monster, a god—what determines whether they can come back? And more importantly..." He turned to face us. "What does 'coming back' actually mean?"
My pen moved across the page. Notes. I was taking notes. This was fine.
"Consider the selkie," Vince continued, walking between the rows now. "She sheds her skin, lives as a human, takes a husband, bears children. By all appearances, she has successfully transitioned from one state to another." He stopped two rows ahead of me. "But the skin remains. Hidden, perhaps. Locked away. And the moment she finds it—"
"She leaves," someone said. A boy near the front, eager to impress.
Vince smiled faintly. Not unkind.
"She returns," Vince corrected. "There's a difference. Leaving implies abandonment. Returning implies that the human life was the interruption, not the other way around."
He resumed pacing, slower now. Thoughtful.
“The question isn’t whether transformation is possible. Clearly it is — every culture we’ve studied says so. The question is whether integration is possible.” He glanced around the room. “Can you be both things at once? Can you carry the change with you without being consumed by it?”
My pen had stopped moving.
