I nod, and he lifts a hand. Measured. Controlled. Like everything he does. His fingers slide through a strand of hair that’s come loose, pushing it gently behind my ear. The touch is intentional, reverent, like he’s daring me toflinch.
I don’t.
I can’t.
The brush of his fingers against my cheek is fire. When his knuckles graze the side of my neck, I forget how lungs work. My mouth parts. It has to. No one can possibly be a nose-breather through something like this.
And just like that, it’s over. He drops his hand, the warmth vanishing with it, and takes a step back. Then another. Back to safe distances and unreadable expressions.
His eyes search mine, and the fingers of the hand that touched me flex once, twice. Then he opens his mouth, that low rumble I can’t deny liking coming forward.
“Coralie, listen, I think you should know tha?—”
Alana strikes again in the most unoriginal plot twist there is, cutting him off and snatching his attention as she and Theo walk back our way. “Alright, girl, if we don’t leave now I’ll spend all of my very few dollars on this boardwalk.”
Theo chuckles, glancing at her and the small bag she’s holding that definitely wasn’t there earlier. I nod, though my mind’s still fogged and my body’s still buzzing from everything that did and didn’t happen.
And then it all moves too quickly. Goodbyes get said, Theo asks Holden where he parked—it’s in the opposite direction from Alana’s car—and just like that, our paths split. Whatever Holden was about to say is now a sentence without an ending, floating somewhere I can’t reach.
He was about to tell mesomething. I know that. And the problem is, I’m good at knowing things. Great, even. But waiting to find out is where my dignity goes to die. And this? This in-between mess of glances and tension and half-started sentences? It’s uncertainty incarnate.
I wish, just once, I could do the thing where people “find peace and lean into it.” But peace feels like a luxury. And clearly, in or out of the lab, the universe isn’t planning on handing it to me anytime soon.
CHAPTER EIGHT
There’s a moment during most social experiments, somewhere between observation and interference, where you realize the line you drew isn’t a boundary anymore. It’s a suggestion. And a blurry one at that.
You tell yourself you’re still being objective. That the data matters more than the feelings. That science is bigger than you, than him, than this.
But, as it turns out even, well-controlled experiments fall apart when the subject starts to feel and, suddenly, you can’t tell if what you’re seeing is cause or effect. Once the variables shift, there’s no clean reset—only the slow realization that you’ve already crossed into the territory you swore you'd only observe.
Since that afternoon with Holden, the variables have very much shifted and my thoughts have narrowed into an obsessive loop: wondering how Damon is doing, wondering what my next meal will be, and—most persistently—wondering what Holden was going to sayto me. It’s not complicated, really. Just three thoughts orbiting with perfect repetition, forming a neat little mental cul-de-sac I can’t seem to exit.
To cope, I’ve confined myself to a reliable rotation of environments: the lab, where Damon remains my safest point of contact; the classroom, where the variables are mostly predictable; and the solitude of my dorm, where there are no unexpected interactions, no eye contact, no near-confessions.
Here’s something I wish someone had warned me about: being good at complex academic problems does not make you any more equipped to solve emotional ones. If anything, it sets you up for failure. The smarter you are, the more you believe you should be able to reason your way through anything. That if you’re observant enough, patient enough, you’ll reach a conclusion. But sometimes the data is corrupted. Sometimes the entire dataset isyou. And you’re not objective. You’re not even consistent. You’re a walking outlier with a margin of error wide enough to drown in. In other words, you’re unreliable as hell.
So, in the spirit of controlling what I can, I’ve pulled back from everything I can’t.
The upside of all this self-imposed distance from society is that I’m doing well. Academically. Classes are almost insultingly easy. I catch myself breezing through material that used to take effort, and I allow a small, silent kind of pride to live there. I don’t know what Holden thinks of me, or what he meant to say that afternoon, or whether it would have changed anything. But I know marine science. I know octopuses. I know Damon—who has finally started letting me test a few things without staging a small-scale rebellion. Small wins, right?
It’s with that same determined focus that I make my way to Dr. Kymbert’s lecture. The last two were cancelled in favor ofprerecorded sessions from previous semesters—understandable, considering she’s been deep in legislative hearings to push a ban on reef-damaging SPF chemicals. But today, no last-minute cancellation appeared in my inbox, and I couldn’t be happier. Two full hours of hearing her speak, maybe even a glimpse into the latest developments in her coral protection research? Honestly, that counts as a good day in my book.
I claim my usual spot in the second row, grateful for the leggings shielding me from the chair’s sandpaper upholstery, and for the sweater jammed in my tote, because the AC in this room is on a personal vendetta against anyone dressed for the tropics outside.
Students filter in with that slow-burn chaos unique to lecture halls—some brave the front, others cling to the back, keeping track of escape routes. A girl I vaguely remember from a lab on cetacean blubber insulation takes a seat two spots over and gives me a shy, exhausted smile—her eyes rimmed red in the specific, shared language of too many deadlines and not enough sleep.
I return it, mine reading something likeI feel you, girl. We can cry next to the centrifuge later if you want.For a second, I think she might actually be telepathic—her grin blooms wide, eyes suddenly bright—but then I catch the shift of her gaze, following movement behind me down the aisle.
Which is when I realize I’m not the one lighting her up. Not even close.
Indeed, I like Dr. Kymbert as much as the next science nerd, but the kind of grin spreading across that girl’s face isn’t usually caused by groundbreaking coral policy. It’s more likely to be the six-foot-something gravitational force making his way to the front of the room. Holden walks with that unhurried, faintly bored confidence of someone who’s always being pulled into rooms, never chasingthem. He’s in olive cargos and a black waffle-knit long sleeve, a white T-shirt barely peeking out underneath. It seems like every time he walks into a space, the air shifts, like the entire radius is recalibrating to make room for him.
He sets his laptop on the small table at the front, then leans against it, arms and ankles crossed in synchronized dismissal of the room around him.
“Alright, settle down,” he says, not raising his voice, and yet the room does exactly that.
From day one, I’ve understood that Holden was some kind of campus folklore. The kind of person people had opinions about. The stories followed quickly—about his exacting standards, his critiques that border on clinical dissections. Even Maya and the girls have heard of him—and they’re more likely to talk about anything related to hair products than scientific journals.
