Even in the dark, she’s still somehow lit from within. Her hair glints gold where it spills across the pillow, moonlight catching on it like it’s trying to make sense of her. Her cheeks and the bridge of her nose are kissed a shade too pink from the sun. We’ve all caught some rays since we got here, but on her, it looks like proof she’s alive, and vibrant, and here.
If her eyes were open, I know exactly where they’d land. On me. Reading me the way she always does, trying to parse the thousand things I don’t say out loud. Maybe they’d scowl a little too, like they did before she fell asleep—her soft, subtle way of telling me I shouldn’t have risked myself for her.
She used my own damn words against me. Said I was reckless. Said I broke my own rule: never risk your life unless you’re certain you can save someone else.
But here’s the thing—I wascertain. IknewI could get to her. Knew I’d tear the ocean apart if I had to. I wasn’t risking my life. I was making sure hers didn’t end where it shouldn’t.
So, yeah. Maybe I lied a little in that lecture.
Actually, I lied twice.
Because I told them I only believed in two truths. But the third one’s been here for a while, tucked under my ribs, gaining weight and shape and substance.
The third truth is this: I’m in love with her.
I have no damn idea what to do with that particular truth, though.
Because she isher—and I amme. And that gap? It’s not just philosophical. It’s tectonic.
She’s incandescent. Not just brilliant in the sterile, academic sense—but alive in the way ideas spark before they collapse into something revolutionary. Her mind is relentless, always moving, always hungry for the next pattern, the next theory, the next impossible problem to crack open with nothing but stubbornness and a glint in her eye. She terrifies me, sometimes. Not because I doubt her—God, never that—but because I know what the world does to women like her. The ones who don’t shrink. The ones whodareto be exceptional without apology.
And me?
I’m a man still trying to remember how to exist after my foundation cracked beneath me. Still relearning breath. Still clinging to a grief I haven’t yet figured out how to honor without being swallowed whole. I’ve built walls around everything soft in me, and she—God help me—she walks right through them. No permission. No hesitation. Just steps in and starts rearranging the furniture like she’s always belonged there.
And she does. That’s the problem.
But I’m still her TA. I’m still standing on a rung of a ladder that was built to keep people like her out—and people like me comfortable. And no matter how hard I try to unlearn the power I didn’t earn, it’s still there. I still benefit. I still have the privilege ofnotworrying what the world might assume if I walk into a room holding her hand.
She doesn’t get that choice.
She needs someone who doesn’t flinch under scrutiny. Someone who doesn’t carry death like a second spine. Someone who can give her hiswhole self, not just the part he’s managed to carve out from guilt and silence.
But I’m the one lying here, memorizing the way her breathing settles when she’s truly at rest. The way her lips part ever-so-slightly, like her body finally believes it’s safe. The freckles. The tiny scar near her temple I’ll have to ask about later. The exact tilt of her nose. I’ve committed them all to memory like a man afraid they’ll be taken.
And now I don’t know how to stop wanting what I have no right to ask for.
If I’m being completely, brutally honest, I think she probably deserves someone like Theo.
He’s still on the ladder, sure, but he’s a rung over. Adjacent. Not her TA, not her grader, not the direct pipeline between her work and its validation. Nothing he says or does affects her evaluations or her prospects. Which means he can admire her brilliance without being a possible threat to it.
And on paper? He’s everything she should want.
He’s what most people would calllight. But don’t mistake that for triviality—he’s not shallow. He’s full of instinct and loyalty and a kind of emotional fluency I couldn’t fake on my best day. He feels what he feels and then, impossibly, he says it out loud.
We met in the least curated way possible—on the water, both of us riding clean waves in Waikiki. He was training for a competition; I was chasing clarity the only way I knew how, by letting the ocean file everything else down. He caught my eye mid-set, tossed me a shaka, and that was it. Unspoken recognition. Like he knew I’d end up on the other end of his dinner order an hour later.
I was sitting at a bar counter, sand still stuck to my ankles, scanning a menu, when he dropped into the seat beside me and announced, “So I want to order, like, five different things, but I can’t decide.”
No greeting. No preamble.
“Rough day to be you,” I said, barely glancing up.
He groaned, flung the menu down and shook his wet hair in my direction. “What Imeantis—if I order all this food, are you gonna help me eat it or am I on my own, bro?”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. And that was the beginning of it—whateveritis with Theo. He’s pure signal, no noise. He doesn’t pretend, doesn’t posture. And in a field that demands constant proof of legitimacy, of performance, he’s the rare exception who doesn’t seem interested in playing that game.
Back then, I still had Jacob. And certainly I was different. Not more approachable, exactly. Just… less carved out by grief. I hadn’t yet mastered the art of putting my edges where people couldn’t touch them. And somehow, despite that, Theo got in.
