It’s become its own kind of gravity.
This room, this window, this specific air between us that exists nowhere else.
I’m going through the pile on my desk — the one that’s been accumulating for weeks, envelopes and forms and things I’ve been too checked out to open — when I find them.
Four of them.
All thick.
The good kind of thick.
The kind that means yes instead of no.
• • •
I stand there holding them.
Cassian is on my bed.
He sees my face.
“What.”
I look at the envelopes.
Columbia.
NYU.
University of Chicago.
Georgetown.
• • •
All far.
All very, deliberately, specifically far.
I applied to them during the grey year.
During the worst of it.
When the whole plan was to get far enough away that maybe the distance would do what the medication couldn’t.
Far enough to stop dreaming about him.
I forgot.
I actually forgot I’d done it.
I didn’t apply anywhere else.
“College letters,” I say.
He goes still.
“All good ones,” I add. Like that helps.
