“These are great,” he says. “If you haven’t read them already, you can borrow them.”
“Why?”
His brows knit.
I mentally facepalm. “I mean—why are you being so nice all of a sudden?”
I watch everything tighten—shoulders, jaw, the line of his mouth—as if he’s swallowing the first answer and choosing the correct one. “I’m your TA,” he says, even, for the second time today. “I have booksthat might help you. Now, will you take them?” He nudges them closer and pinches the bridge of his nose, eyes closed for a beat.
I slide them to my side. I’ve read one; the other has lived on my list for years and has always been either out of budget or missing from every library near me. “Thank you.”
He nods without looking up.
Perfect. He hands me exactly what I need and I manage to make it sound like suspicion, or like I’m not grateful. And then I wonder why he thinks I’m difficult.
As if confirming my thoughts, he reminds me—gently but unmistakably—that he has work to do. I thank him and step out with my watered-down coffee in one hand and the tomes he loaned me in the other.
My head is still buzzing—from his nearness, from the way the ideas finally locked into place—when a familiar voice floats around the bend of the hall.
“I know that, Jessica. But he’s smart. Like,freakishlysmart. So I’m playing it smart too, okay?”
I don’t need confirmation, but the long, tanned legs in impossible heels and the black hair yanked into a tight ponytail make it official: Summer.
“Like, he literally turned down a fully funded postdoc at MIT because the lab’s models didn’t account for small-scale turbulence. Or something like that. Who does that?” She laughs, a bright, cutting sound that would make a hyena take notes. “It’s so nerdy it’s almost annoying, but he’s hot so who cares.”
Her eyes narrow the instant she clocks me standing at Holden’s door. “I gotta go. Kiss kiss, bye.” She ends the call, plants a hand on her hip, and gifts me a smile that is all enamel and warning. “Fish girl.”
“Hi.” I consider three options: retreat back into Holden’s office, jump out the window, or fake my own death. We’re on the first floor, so the window is technically OSHA-compliant. Jackass has done worse with fewer safety measures.
“You’re visiting my boyfriend, again?”
“I… this is my first time here,” I say, which is both true and useless. “I was actually just leaving.”
“Yeah, you were.” She smiles like the Cheshire cat and does not look away as she steps forward.
I move aside to let her pass just as the door swings open on a very serious Holden. “Who are you talking t—” He cuts off when his gaze lands on Summer. She slips between us and sets a perfectly manicured hand on his chest.
“Hey, baby.” His eyes flare at the pet name, then flick to mine, searching for—what, exactly? I nod a goodbye once more and take off down the hall. I am not staying for a live demonstration of PDA starring my TA.
On the walk back to my dorm, something tightens under my ribs. I’m chalking it up to too much input in too few minutes—office, ideas, books, Summer. It has absolutely nothing to do with her beautiful fingers on his very sculpted chest, because why would I care?
I make it to my room and drop the textbooks, my bag, and what’s left of my dignity in a single heap on the floor before I plop onto the bed. The air is quiet and cool; the central AC hums like a metronome. There’s a noteon my nightstand.
I love you. You suck for keeping me up, but I promise I won’t bring dead squids to the room.
Maya’s handwriting is as hilarious as her note, and I smile because, somehow, she’s always been exactly what I needed from the moment I rolled a suitcase into this place. I let that thought sit beside the jolt of my newly revived thesis plan, and the two of them pull a real smile out of me. I hug my pillow, close my eyes, and breathe until my pulse stops auditioning for percussion. Then I let the missed sleep find me.
CHAPTER SEVEN
My therapist once told me to “find what brings me peace and lean into it.” And it’s great advice, except I’ve chosen marine science, which is like voluntarily signing up to be stressed and underpaid forever. Okay, maybe not forever, but definitely at first.
Sometimes I wonder who I would’ve been if I hadn’t discovered the ocean early and decided, with the kind of certainty most adults don’t achieve, that this was it. That this was the thing I’d orbit for the rest of my life.
Growing up on the Atlantic does one of two things to a person: it makes you loathe the cold and salt and wind so deeply you flee inland and never look back, or it hardwires something briny into your blood. I’m clearly the latter—every birthday, every break, every moment of unstructured time has to be spent in or near water.
But if you strip away the wordoceanand everything related to it, what’s left?
I make a solid grilled cheese, but I’m too easily distracted to be trusted in a kitchen with anything sharper than a butter knife. I readconstantly, the way some people scroll—compulsively, and with minimal regard for social interaction—so maybe I could’ve been a writer. Except I have no idea what I’d write, and an even worse idea of what parts of my brain should ever be made public. And kids? I love kids. The way their brains tilt sideways to see things we’ve long forgotten how to notice. Maybe I could’ve been a teacher.
