LittleTooMuch: Ooooo he’s also bossy. I like it.
NumberEleven: we need to at least attempt to sleep sometimes.
LittleTooMuch: Have fun with that. I’m headed to a party with my brother against my will. Goodnight.
NumberEleven: goodnight.
I set my phone down and lean back against my headboard, staring at the ceiling.
Somewhere on this campus there’s a girl who can’t sleep, who hates tea, who makes jokes to survive her own thoughts—same as me.
Somewhere on this campus there’s someone who makes my chest feel warm and tight with one sentence and doesn’t even know she has that kind of power.
And I still don’t know her name.
For now, that’s the rule. No names. No faces. No expectations. Just the quiet. Just her.
And the growing, inconvenient truth that I’m going to want more eventually, too.
3
HARLOW
If it were up to me, I’d never make plans. I’d be curled up with a good book twenty-four seven, living vicariously through fictional people who have the decency to handle their drama without fluorescent lights and strangers’ perfume.
But thanks to my dear, darling brother, I’m walking into my first college party. He calls itgetting me out of my room. I call it exposure therapy with an extra dose of bass.
The football house is already pulsing before we even make it up the walkway—music thudding through the lawn, voices spilling out of open windows, someone laughing like they’ve never once experienced shame. The porch light flickers on and off like it’s also having regrets.
Same.
Kai’s hand is firm on my elbow as we climb the steps, like he thinks I might bolt. He’s not entirely wrong.
“You good?” he asks, giving me that focused, assessing stare that makes everyone else on campus look like they’re just…existing casually. I flash my most convincing smile. It is, objectively, terrible.
“I’m fine,” I say.
Kai’s eyes narrow immediately, calling my bluff like it’s a bad pass he saw coming from across the rink. “That sounded a lot like a lie.”
“It wasn’t,” I say quickly, then add—because apparently, I enjoy digging my own grave, “it was just…aggressively untrue?”
Kai huffs a laugh. “Harlow.”
“What?” I ask, forcing my feet to keep moving even as every instinct in my body screamsturn around, go back to your dorm, crawl under a blanket, and never speak again.
Kai’s grin is brief—a flash of something softer under all the intensity. “You’ve been on campus for a month. I know you can handle a party. Plus, I want to introduce you to my teammates.”
A month.
That’s what I keep telling myself, too.
A month since I stopped taking classes online at home, where everything was predictable and quiet and I could control the environment down to the lighting and the texture of the blanket on my legs.
A month since I moved into a dorm and discovered college is basically one long sensory experiment designed by people who must hate silence. Dorm doors slam at random. Someone is always microwaving something that smells like wasted youth. The dining hall is a fluorescent nightmare full of choices and stares and conversations that blur together until my brain feels like it’s stuck buffering.
And I’m supposed to act like this is normal. Like I didn’t pause my life for years and come back mid-season. Like I didn’t spend a good chunk of that pause learning how to eat without turning it into math followed by guilt and a trip to the bathroom. Like I didn’t spend another chunk learning how to wake up and not immediately wish I could disappear.
Kai thinks campus is the easy part. Of course he does. He’s a hockey player—and not just any hockey player. He’s the teamcaptain, which means people step aside when he moves and listen when he speaks. He knows exactly where he belongs, what he wants, and how to look like nothing can touch him.
