He pauses. “I am.”
“Sure. But I saw Alexander from BIOL 403 walking alone too back there and I didn’t see you screeching to a halt in your truck to save him.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“So what is it then? You think I’m weaker? Or—what—naïve?”
“Fuck no,” he says, a little too fast. He steps forward now too, close enough that I have to tilt my chin to keep looking at him. “I don’t think you’re weak. Or stupid. Or incapable. I think you’re?—”
He cuts himself off,swallows hard.
I stare at him, heat crawling up my neck. “Tell me.”
His hand goes to the back of his neck again, fingers digging in like he needs the anchor. “Coralie,” he says, voice low, unraveling, “please don’t make this harder than it already is.”
“Harder for who?” I ask, barely above a whisper.
“I just wanted to make sure you got home safe. And you’re not inside yet.”
There’s a war in his voice. One much older than any amount of time we’ve known each other. He’s careful, yes. But he’s cracking, too. Splintering in places I don’t think he expected me to see.
So I take a breath, and a step back. Then another.
“Good night,” I say.
He nods—one sharp, measured dip of his chin—but stays where he is, watching. He doesn’t move, doesn’t blink, not even when I swipe my ID and disappear through the dorm doors. When I glance back through the glass, he’s still there, holding that same line between restraint and something else entirely.
CHAPTER TEN
Every groundbreaking discovery in science basically starts with,“Huh. That’s weird.”
Which, in hindsight, is exactly when I should’ve stopped running the Holden experiment.
From the moment I laid eyes on him and thoughtsomeone should really buy him a larger shirt before that thing gives up on his chest entirely,I should’ve looked away. I should’ve shut the whole thing down. Filed him under “Do Not Engage.”
But no. Of course not.
I went“Huh. That’s weird,”and then I inquired.
First, it was the way he enters and exits a room with the same subtle intensity, like gravity doesn’t apply to him the same way it does to the rest of us. That confidence, that near-arrogance—so certain of his abilities and the precise value of them—had me stumped. I’ve never met someone so infuriatingly aware of his own utility.
And then he used that same dismissal on me.
Not that I haven’t been cut off mid-sentence before. And not that I think people are required to indulge my every tangent. But the way he did it—like the sound of my voice personally offended him—made something in me tighten. I couldn’t make sense of it. Which, unsurprisingly, only made me want to try.
That was the first mistake.
The rest? Well, we’ve since graduated to a deeply tangled, mutually inadvisable knot of complications—each one outdoing the last in how messy it wants to be.
Because yes, he’s sharp. Rigid. Doesn’t smile at school—at me or anyone. His edges are sandpaper. But then... there’s the Holden who laughed at the coffee shop. The one who cracked a joke in the ocean and froze when he realized who I was. The Holden who, for reasons unknown, shows up for me. For my thesis. For Penny. For getting me home safely in the dark.
All of those Holdens—they’re real. They exist.
But none of them compare to the version who holds the walls up. The one who won’t let me see past the job title. Who won’t give me a piece of himself, even when I’m already holding so many. Not just my TA. Not just Theo’s friend. Not just Penny’s uncle.
A mosaic of contradictions, made up of moments I shouldn’t have kept, and versions of him I was never meant to meet.
And still, every time I get close, he slips just out of reach.
