Long Before the Study Hall

Erin 8100 BP - 4000 BP = 4100 BP

The Master’s Elevator opened into sunlight so cold and bright it made Andy think of high-altitude cities, where winter stabs all the harder for lack of windbreak. The familiar quad unfolded under them—UIC, west campus—wide squares of late-January ice cut by salt-bleached walkways and the distant, lazy arcs of students on their way to not quite the same future. In his memory, the whole place had the color of a used lab coat. Today it was more like a movie set: everything real, but with the sense of someone having hand-picked the extras and swept the trash off-camera.

Erin stepped out first and held the elevator for him, one hand braced against the steel as if she’d done this a thousand times. She looked over her shoulder, and in her face he saw not the directness of confrontation, but a private glee—something both sly and not entirely safe for work. “I picked the arrival point myself,” she said. “Spent longer on it than I’ll ever admit.”

Andy stood blinking on the threshold, trying to clock what was different about this version of campus besides the fact that his fiancée was naked, green, and shaped like a sculpture student’s fever dream. “You nailed it,” he said. “But the lecture hall on the east side—” He pointed. “That’s a new façade. Has to be.”

“Redid it four years ago,” Erin said. “I came back once to see it.” She had not moved her hand from the elevator, as if she might need to slam it shut in case of earthquake or second thoughts.

“Why’d you come back?” Andy asked.

“Does it matter?” Erin let the elevator doors husk themselves shut with a pneumatic sigh; her stride, as she stepped away from the steel threshold, was brisk and unhesitant, as if her feet remembered these walkways better than her mind ever had. It was almost a provocation, the way she set off, bare as a debutante from some fevered Regency, green as a spring shoot in the snow, daring Andy to so much as flinch at her nudity. Nobody on the quad seemed to bat an eye, but perhaps that was the signature realism of Arabella’s spell: it bent reality enough to let the impossible pass, but preserved just enough friction to make you wonder, deep down, whether you weren’t the one out of step.

“I have a plan,” she said, not looking back, but letting her words hang behind her as if she’d left them for him to pick up. “And the plan is we walk through the places on this campus that belonged to us before anything else did.”

Andy wasn’t sure how to feel about that. He’d walked these same squares years ago—sometimes in the company of Erin, sometimes with Liesa or Sam, always with the ghost of Laura at his side. And yet, following Erin now, he felt like an undergrad again: a little out of his depth, a little desperate to impress, a little afraid of what he might find if he looked too closely at the footprints behind him.

“Is there an order to it?” he called after her.

“There is,” Erin said, “and I’m not telling you what it is.” She looked back with a smile like a dare. “You can follow or you can guess, but there are only two rules.”

“Let’s hear them.”

She stopped and faced him. “Rule one: if I ask you what you remember, you have to tell the truth. Rule two: you can’t be more embarrassed than I am, at any given point.” The look on her face was so Erin—every inch of her, even now—that he wanted to both laugh and ask her again to just marry him on the spot, right here next to the salt-streaked grass.

“I’m not sure rule two is enforceable,” he said, but even as he spoke, she closed the gap between them, reached up, and cupped his face with both hands.

Her touch was cool and dry, like the surface of a stone warmed by the sun. “You’re making it worse for yourself,” she murmured, and then she kissed him—soft but deliberate, her lips parted just enough to let him taste the air between their mouths, her breath shivering with the cold—and held him there, in public, until Andy felt the heat rise to his cheekbones, and reckoned that perhaps embarrassment was the point.

When she let him go, it was not as a dismissal, but as a kind of benediction. “There’s still time to run,” she said, and the unspoken but was plain as the sun on the quad.

Andy did the math on what that would even look like, considering he was on a date with a naked mint-green plant-woman in the middle of a Chicago campus. “I think the ship has sailed,” he decided, and knew it was the right answer.

They cut across the grass, Erin not slowing once even as her breasts bounced with every step. There were looks, obviously. But nobody lingered, and most of the crowd was too occupied with their own phones or the misery of winter classes to take in the spectacle of an entirely nude woman whose body did not remotely obey normal human rules. Andy irrationally wondered if the Reality Adjustments were working, or if UIC was just ahead of the curve on green nudists.

Erin’s stride never faltered. Every few yards she’d glance at him, checking to see if he was keeping up, but never slowing, never waiting. The tips of her nipples were rigid and blushed dark green from the wind or from his attention on her. It should have looked ridiculous, or at least pornographic, but instead it just made her seem more herself, as if the body Arabella gave her was only now settling into its final, perfect shape. Erin noticed. “I thought today would be the day it finally got to me,” she said. “But I’m not even a little bit embarrassed.”

They passed the Rec Center, where years ago Andy had once gotten himself locked on the roof during a blackout, and Erin had scaled the side stairwell to bring him a hoodie and a thermos of gas-station hot chocolate. He’d never told her thank you, not really; at the time, it had seemed both too vulnerable and too obvious, and he’d always assumed he’d have infinite chances to make it up to her. Now, with every step, he thought about the million small rescues that had gone unnoticed, the way love was always easiest to see in the rearview.

They veered right at the science quad. There, on the windward side of the lecture hall, was the broken bench where he’d once tried to teach her how to solve a Rubik’s Cube, only to have her take it apart in two minutes flat, reassemble it, and then claim she’d “solved” it the creative way. He pointed at the bench, and she laughed, the kind that left creases at her eyes and made her shoulders shake.

“You remember that?” she said, slapping his arm just a bit harder than strictly necessary. “I was so proud. I thought you were going to be mad, but instead you gave me this look—” She made a face: wide-eyed, mock-betrayed, too sincere to be a joke. “I think that was the first time I realized I could actually get a rise out of you.”

He shrugged, hands in pockets. “You always could. I just hid it better back then.”

Her smile flickered, went soft for a second. “You really did.”

They walked. She pointed out a vending machine alcove by the stairwell, said, “That’s where I ate three dinners in a row during finals week,” and Andy remembered the particular sour smell of that hallway, the way she’d look up from her phone and offer him the second-best package of Oreos with a fake apology. He said, “I remember you once traded a bag of Skittles for a five-minute shoulder rub.”

She nodded. “It was worth it. I had actual knots.”

He grinned. “You had the upper traps of a competitive swimmer.”

They rounded the corner. She pointed out a side door where she used to prop open the latch with her textbook because the card reader never worked. “I was nearly late to my own midterm because of that,” she said. “Twice.”

Andy said, “You still aced it.”

She shrugged. “The department was full of masochists. You had to be one to survive.”

He placed a hand at the small of her back as they walked. The skin was cool, but not cold. He kept his hand there, and felt the tiny twitch of her spine as she adjusted her stride.

They entered the library by the old revolving doors, which were just as he remembered: graffitied, slightly too heavy, smelling of stale paper and the sweat of generations of stressed-out undergrads. Erin led the way to the elevator, then stopped at the mailboxes and asked, “Do you remember which floor I always studied on?”

“Sixth,” Andy said, without thinking.

She gave him a look of pure approval. “Impressive. Most people don’t even remember their own.” She hit the button and waited for the elevator in silence. When it arrived, they got in, and she pressed her palm to the brushed steel, eyes closed, as if recalibrating her entire memory.

On the sixth floor, she led him straight to a row of window tables. The seats were empty, but the table at the end had a gouge in the top—an old, clean knife mark, the shape of a question mark.

She put her hand flat on the table. “This was mine,” she said. “Every day that semester, always the same one. Nobody else wanted the sun in their eyes, so it was safe.” She looked out the window, the late light making the green of her skin seem even less plausible. “I liked watching the quad, seeing the same people over and over, like animals on a migration route.”

He said, “I remember you making fun of the guy in the red parka who always did the quad in exactly nine minutes.”

She grinned. “He was my favorite. I never spoke to him, but I was sure he’d end up being important to someone.”

He nodded at the chair. “Are we sitting?”

She didn’t answer, just sat, then gestured at the seat opposite.

He took it, and they faced each other over the battered laminate, just as they must have done a hundred times.

She looked at him, hands folded. Her nipples were visible over the edge of the table, huge and mint-green, but neither of them mentioned it. She said, with all the offhand menace of a guidance counselor, “Tell me again about the Environmental Systems course you needed help with.”

---

Andy’s first instinct was to play it off. He tried, he really did—an affected, sheepish shrug, a quick glance away as if the view out the window required urgent analysis. But Erin just waited, hands folded, her elbows propped on the battered study table, staring at him with those dark, inescapable eyes. Even now, years later and through a filter of mint and sunlight and nakedness, she could bring him back to the base note of embarrassment in half a heartbeat.

He said, “You want the syllabus, or just the story?”

Her mouth twitched at the edge. “Let’s go with the story. I’ve got the syllabus memorized.”

So he gave it to her, straight: “I needed a pretext. I was failing the math on my own, and you had the only passing grade in the class, so I did what any rational coward would do—I asked you for help and then prayed you wouldn’t figure out I was there for you and not for the content.”

Erin arched a brow. “I know the truth,” Erin said, and her voice softened so suddenly it made him go cold under the skin. “Andy, I figured it out in the first two minutes. You hadn’t even taken that course. You borrowed the book from the front desk, memorized a half-dozen equations, and led with them like you’d just written the textbook.”

He felt his ears burn, and it must have shown on his face, because she let herself laugh, just once, a pure and bright sound that rebounded off the stacks and made Andy want to crawl under the table.

“You could have just said no,” he offered.

“I could have,” Erin said. “And part of me wanted to, because that was what I did back then. But you walked in, all rumpled and nervous and three days late on a haircut, and I realized you’d practiced that opening line a hundred times. The first thing I thought was, ‘This is a person who has never had to fake wanting a thing, and he’s about to collapse if I call it out loud.’”

He smiled, small. “I would have.”

Erin leaned in, arms crossed over the table so her breasts rested, unignorable, between them. “You went thirty-eight minutes before you said something real. I kept waiting for you to recover, but instead you doubled down, and I kind of loved it.” She dropped her gaze to the table, where her hand curled and uncurling like she was smoothing invisible creases from the laminate. “I let you run with it because I didn’t want you to leave.”

The words hit Andy harder than he expected. He swallowed, throat dry. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

She didn’t answer right away. Instead, she watched her own hand, as if the answer might be buried under her palm. “Because it would have meant admitting I wanted you there before you’d done anything to deserve it. I didn’t say things like that out loud, not at twenty-two.”

Andy blinked. For a second, he couldn’t think of what to do with his own hands, so he planted them flat on the table, mirroring her, trying to get some traction in a moment that felt like the world’s smallest earthquake.

“You’re saying it now,” he said, and even to himself, it sounded like a question.

Erin nodded, slow and deliberate. “I’ve thought about those forty minutes more than I’ve admitted to anyone. Even myself.”

He looked at her, this woman he’d nearly lost to a million tiny misunderstandings. “What did you think about them?”

“I thought about what it cost me, to make that decision. Four years of building an arrangement where nobody got close enough to figure out what I needed, and it hadn’t cost me anything because nobody tried. Then you did, and you were so obvious it hurt, and I still let you stay.”

Andy felt something uncurl, deep in his chest. “I didn’t realize you could see all of it.”

“I could,” Erin said, and her lips quirked again, like she was almost proud. “But the part that still floors me, years later, is what I saw in your face across the table. You had gone to enormous trouble to be frightened in front of me on purpose.”

He laughed, soft and raw. “It doesn’t sound romantic when you put it that way.”

“That’s the thing,” she said, picking up the rag of the moment and wringing it for all it was worth. “It was romantic. The dumb, beautiful, old-school kind. You wanted something, so you went and got it, and you didn’t care if it made you look like an idiot.” She paused, looking at the battered gouge in the table, the old question mark dug in the surface. “I let you keep the story. Because if I’d taken it, you would have had to admit you’d come all that way for nothing.”

Andy stared at her hand on the table, at the way her thumb traced a slow, absentminded line along the edge. He reached over and covered it with his own. The contact sent a charge up his arm, as if he’d closed a circuit that had been open since the day they met.

He could tell she felt it, too; her thumb twitched once against the web of his hand, and for a second she didn’t seem to be breathing.

Andy wasn’t sure he was, either.

“What’s the part you never said?” he asked, quietly.

She let the silence spool out, let it grow dense and hot and full of unfinished business before she answered. Then, with a voice just above a whisper, she said: “That I spent six years angry at myself for folding that fast. But standing in this building today, I realize that folding was the best thing I ever did.”

She didn’t look up, but her voice didn’t waver. “I spent all those years thinking that if I’d just held out a little longer, made you work harder, maybe the story would have lasted. Maybe it would have earned a different ending. But now I think the mistake was in thinking it was all about the story, not the part where I realized, too late, that I wanted you there, at that table, more than I wanted to win.”

He squeezed her hand, thumb running lightly over her knuckles, and for a second he almost said something about the past, about how little it mattered to him now, but the words stuck in his throat. For a minute, all he could do was hold her hand, feeling the faint tremor in her fingers and the way the pulse in her wrist lined up so closely, almost perfectly, with his own.

He tried to come up with something honest, something that wouldn’t sound like a line, but all he could manage was: “I spent the whole drive home that afternoon convinced I’d made a complete ass of myself and that you were just being nice about it.”

“You did,” she said, and though her voice was flat, the corners of her mouth ticked up with a warmth that rewrote every cold day in the intervening years. “And I was. But that’s not the point.” She looked up, caught his gaze and held it, and for a second it felt like being interrogated by a benevolent deity: judgment paired with an absolute refusal to let you off the hook. “Would you have come back if I’d called you on it?”

Andy thought about it—really, genuinely tried to imagine a version of himself that would have survived that first afternoon, the way his stomach had turned itself into an origami crane of anxiety, the way he’d measured every word and then said them all wrong. He saw himself, thin and nervous and three days out from a haircut, sitting across from someone who could see exactly how scared he was, and he knew the answer.

“I wouldn’t have,” he said. “I would have gone home.”

She nodded, slow and deliberate, as though she had already known. “That’s what I’ve thought for eight years. It’s why I still can’t sit at this table without my hands going cold.”

He held her hand, just like that, while the world around them faded to a kind of white noise: the hum of the air handler struggling with the heat, the distant thump of a dropped backpack, the click of a librarian’s heels on the terrazzo tiles. In the space between those sounds, it was just the two of them, orbiting the old wound.

Andy wanted to say something, to name the gravity that kept pulling them back to this table, but all he could manage was, “There’s one thing in your account that’s wrong. And it’s not the pretext.”

Her smile flickered. “What is it, then?”

“The timing,” Andy said. “You’ve spent eight years feeling guilty for folding fast when you were the last of the two of us to arrive.”

She blinked, and for a second Andy could see her cycling through all the ways that sentence could be parsed, test-driving each one for weight, for plausibility, for risk.

“What does that mean?” she said, and though she tried to keep her voice even, he could hear the catch in it, the fragility.

He stood, letting his hand slip from hers, then offered it palm-up as if inviting her to join him. “It means there’s somewhere else on this campus I need to show you first. And you’re not going to like how long I sat on it.”

Erin’s mouth pulled to the side, half challenge, half curiosity. She stood, straightening to her full height, and he led her out, into the cold and the sunlight, their hands twined, heading for the next place on the map neither of them had quite admitted to loving.

---

Andy led the way to the greenhouse, which sat half-forgotten on the north end of campus, the glass panes always a little fogged even in the dead of winter. The building hadn’t changed since they were students—if anything, the grime was thicker, the door handle more corroded, the potted conifers outside more obviously dying. He held the door for Erin, and a wall of humid air hit them both: an instant, breathy warmth carrying every possible shade of leaf, soil, and ancient fertilizer.

Erin stepped through, then just stopped. “God,” she said, and inhaled deep. “It’s like a childhood memory got left on the stove overnight. I used to come here after shifts, when my brain was too tired for anything but dirt and light.”

Andy followed, the door hissing shut behind him. “I was hoping it still smelled the same. Means the bench is probably right where I remember it.”

She gave him a look—half curiosity, half warning. “What bench?”

“You’ll see.”

They passed through the first bay, low beds of starters and transplants, most of them asleep for the season. At the third row, Erin stopped at a rack of seedlings under a cheap fluorescent tube and crouched down to their level. She touched the edge of the soil in a plug tray with two fingers, then said, quietly, almost to herself: “Hey. I know. I know, it’s too wet and the light’s wrong and nobody’s checked on you in a while.” She pressed her fingers a little deeper. “You’re not done.” She stayed there a moment, and Andy watched, not sure what he was seeing, as the nearest seedling’s stem seemed to straighten slightly, then the others followed, little leaves budding as if striving to be better, for her.

She stood, wiped her fingers on her thigh, and said, “Where’s your bench?”

He led her down the side path. She walked a half-step behind him, unhurried, trailing her knuckles along the edge of a shelf of browning succulents without seeming to realize she was doing it. Where her hand passed, the succulents shivered, straightened, the green returned. Behind her hand, a small rosette of echeveria that had been folded in on itself like a fist slowly opened, its edges flushing faintly pink. Andy saw it. He kept walking.

At a rack of hanging baskets she paused, reaching up absently to pinch a dead leaf from a string-of-pearls, and three of the shriveled beads on the strand below her fingers plumped back to green. She’d already moved on.

“Did you ever come back?” she asked. “After school.”

“No.”

She looked at him. “Not even to visit?”

“I drove past it once.” He stopped at the end of the row, where a stand of citrus trees crowded the back corner. The air changed here—sharp and tart, the smell of peel and something fermented and sweet underneath. “I didn’t come in.”

“Why?”

He thought about how to say it. “Because I knew it would smell exactly like this. And I didn’t trust myself to handle that alone.”

Erin went still. Just behind her left shoulder, a small pot of something that had been entirely gray and leafless had put out one white flower, barely the size of a thumbnail. She didn’t look at it.

“Andy,” she said quietly, and there was something in her voice that wasn’t quite pity and wasn’t quite tenderness but lived in the same neighborhood as both.

At the back, half-swallowed by a grapefruit tree that had spent two decades listing sideways as if exhausted, was the bench.

“This is where I first saw you,” Andy said.

Erin’s brow furrowed. “No, it isn’t. We met in the library.”

He shook his head. “We spoke in the library. I saw you here, spring of sophomore year. About a year before the table.”

She glanced around, as if expecting to see a younger, smaller version of herself lurking under the orange tree. “I didn’t know you were even in this building.”

“I wasn’t,” Andy said, hands in pockets. “I was supposed to be at the lab, but the professor cancelled last minute. I didn’t want to go home, so I wandered here. You were sitting right there—” He pointed at the bench, “—reading, knees pulled up, eyes so deep in your book you never noticed anyone pass by.”

Erin looked at the bench, then at him, then back again. “What was I doing that was worth remembering for a year?”

He shrugged, slow. “Nothing. You were just… so you. Like you’d built a private world for yourself and didn’t care if anyone saw. It stuck with me.” He ran a hand along the rough wood of the bench. “I decided that day I wanted to know you. Took a year to get up the nerve to try.”

She sat, gingerly, the wood still rough from years of weather and neglect. Her legs spread a little, and Andy caught himself staring, not at her body—though that was impossible to ignore—but at the absolute lack of shame or self-protection in her posture. Erin could do vulnerability like it was a contact sport, and somehow she still made it seem impossible to wound her.

After a while she said, “That changes the library.”

He sat beside her. “How?”

She looked at her knees, flexed her toes inside the sneakers. “I spent eight years thinking of that afternoon as the moment you finally worked up the nerve. And I thought you might have noticed me a few days earlier. But it wasn’t—it was just the moment you decided to stop hiding.”

He let that settle, unsure if it was a compliment or the opposite. “Is that bad?”

“It’s just different.” Erin’s voice was low, almost shy, a quality Andy had never heard from her before. “What took you a year?”

He exhaled, slow and white in the humid air. “I didn’t have a plan that would survive contact. The only one I had involved faking most of a semester’s coursework. I thought if I did it wrong, you’d see through me and I’d have to leave campus to avoid dying of embarrassment.”

Erin laughed—a real, bracing laugh—and for a second the condensation on the glass flashed in the sun like diamonds. “You were so full of shit,” she said, and her mouth split into a grin. “But you wore it like a badge.”

Andy shrugged, letting the warmth of her beside him erase the old shame. “It’s the only way I knew how.”

She nudged his thigh with hers. “Do you remember what I was reading, that first time?”

He considered, shook his head. “Not the book. Just the shape of you against the light. Like you belonged here and nothing could change it.”

She watched him, expression unreadable. “You’ve never told anyone that.”

“Sam knew,” Andy admitted. “But nobody else. Not until now.”

Erin looked down at their knees, then took his hand, threading her fingers through. Her skin was cool, but not cold, and smooth.

Neither of them said anything for a long time. Behind them, the water pipes ticked and somewhere in the back a mister hissed, showering the empty air with moisture and memory.

After a while, Erin said, “I’m glad you waited. I don’t think I would have known what to do with you if you’d come any earlier.”

He squeezed her hand, gentle. “I don’t think I could have, either.”

She leaned her head back, let it rest on the glass wall behind the bench, and closed her eyes. In the half-light, her hair caught sun and shimmered auburn, even through the mint green of her skin.

Andy watched her, and realized she was crying. Not much. Just a single line down her cheek.

He said nothing. Just held on.

---

They left the greenhouse with hands still twined, and neither of them spoke until the shock of cold on their cheeks made it impossible to keep their heads down. The sun had dropped a little lower, sharpening every shadow; the quad was emptying, but a few stragglers still cut across the paths in groups of twos and threes, hunched into coats and clutching phones.

Erin guided them not to the sidewalk, but toward a battered, salt-pocked bench facing the main artery between the student union and the science building. She didn’t stop until she’d swiped the snow off, claimed the near side and patted the place beside her with the gravity of a judge summoning a witness.

“Do you know what this one is?” she asked, voice lighter now, but with a thread of something sharp beneath it.

He sat, knee brushing hers. “I think so.”

She looked at him, a sly squint in her eyes. “Let’s see if you’re right.”

He matched her stare. “This is where I brought you coffee most mornings, senior year, before either of us had a car. You’d be here ten minutes before your first class, even in zero degrees. I’d walk fifteen minutes out of my way to get here before you.”

She leaned back, folding her arms beneath her breasts, which looked as if they might rest on the bench itself if she slouched any further. “You remember the flavor?”

He tried. “Double-shot vanilla with half skim, half regular, splash of cinnamon.” He grinned. “You claimed you could taste if I skipped the cinnamon. I tested that once, and you called me on it.”

She laughed, but it was not dismissive. “You never brought it twice in the same cup. There was always some weird, slightly-off cup from the dining hall or the dollar store.” Her eyes narrowed, and he felt her looking straight through the intervening years. “Why?”

“Because it wasn’t about the coffee,” Andy said, and his voice caught a little. “It was about you.”

She looked at him for a long time. Then, voice steady: “Do you remember what you said, the first time you handed me one?”

He didn’t hesitate, not even a beat. “‘I asked for you.’”

That did something to her face—stripped it down to nothing but the raw, unvarnished feeling under all her defenses. She went quiet. “How do you still have it, word for word, after all this time?”

He shrugged, helpless. “I never lose anything. That’s how my brain works.”

Erin nodded, as if this explained more than just a trick of recall. “I can barely remember my own mother’s phone number. But you remember everything.”

He looked at her, wishing he could say it was always an advantage. “Sometimes it’s a curse. I hear it all. Even the things you wish I’d forget.”

Her mouth went sideways, but she didn’t look away. “Did you know I watched that moment, once, during the First Challenge? In the Cabana. I was in there with Liesa. I watched it and thought it would get swallowed up, but…” She let the rest hang, as if waiting for him to finish the sentence.

He said, softly: “I was watching. I saw the whole thing.”

She blinked, surprised, then let out a low, honest sound. “How much of it?”

“All of it,” he said. “Every word.”

She pressed her lips together, the silence stretching. Then she said, “I’m going to say it anyway. The part I said to her. Because it’s different, saying it to the person who made it real.”

He nodded, braced for whatever came next.

She looked at her hands, then at him. “I’ve thought about that sentence—‘I asked for you’—more than most of the years since. I still don’t know what you meant by it.”

He said, “I meant exactly what it sounded like.”

She shook her head, but it was a gentle motion, not a rejection. “It doesn’t matter what you meant. It matters that you said it. Nobody in my life, until then, had ever put me in a sentence like that.”

He wanted to say a thousand things, but the only one that came out was, “You deserved it.”

She laughed, sudden and sharp, and then just as suddenly she was in his arms, pressing her cold cheek against his neck, her breasts flattening against his chest with a pleasant, insistent weight. She smelled like wind and citrus and herself.

He held her, buried his face in the tangle of her hair, and whispered, “I never stopped wanting you.”

She squeezed tighter, and for a moment he thought she might break him.

After a while, she drew back, just enough to look him in the face. “I kept one of the cups, you know,” she said. “For a while.”

He smiled, touched her cheek. “How long was a while?”

She shook her head. “Not elaborating.” Then she pressed her lips to his, gentle at first, then with a need that made his hands shake.

He kissed her back, and the world—the campus, the bench, the winter air, every other thing—vanished for a minute.

When they broke, she leaned her head on his shoulder and watched the empty quad. He held her, silent.

---

They walked out of the campus shadow and into the city proper, the streets crusted with rock salt, the cars making a slow exodus out of the university lots. The cold didn’t touch them; they strolled the block like it was April, not January, Erin’s skin luminous under every bit of exposed sky.

On the first corner, Erin stopped, hands on hips, and pointed at a divey taqueria with neon signage and glass fogged from the inside out. “Still here,” she said. “It hasn’t changed its lighting or menu in ten years. I respect that.”

Andy smirked. “You said once that the green salsa was so hot it could strip varnish.”

She shot him a sidelong look. “You spilled it all over my white sweater and then tried to fix it with club soda.”

“I still maintain it was a valiant effort.”

“You made it worse. It went from neon green to a weird brown.”

“I’ve always been an innovator.”

She made a face, and they moved on.

Andy, after a beat, said, “Did you ever come back, after we split?”

She didn’t look at him, just kept her eyes forward. “A couple times, maybe. Not to mope. Just… I liked their tacos.” She shrugged. “Didn’t make it a thing.”

They let the silence walk a block ahead of them, until a crosswalk signaled and Erin pulled him to a halt. She pointed at the curb. “This is where I twisted my ankle, winter of second year. You carried me four blocks home.”

He remembered, instantly: “You were mortified, and then you made me swear never to tell anyone.”

“Which you did,” she said, “and then you held it over my head for months.”

He grinned. “I remember it differently.”

She raised a brow. “How differently?”

“I remember you not wanting to be let down, even after we got home.”

Erin laughed, and the sound bounced off the windows above. “You can remember it however you want. I was the one being carried.”

They made it two more blocks, Andy feeling the years compress with every step. At a stop sign, Erin stopped short at the foot of a short flight of stone steps, each one worn smooth by generations of tenant shoes and city winters.

She didn’t say anything.

Andy followed her gaze up the stairwell, taking in the chipped limestone, the half-buried gum wads from decades of student traffic, the black-painted banister clotted with old handprints and salt residue. Erin’s eyes tracked the climb like she could read old secrets off each riser.

He said, “Are we going in?”

“Nobody’s going in,” Erin replied, and her voice was clear, but touched with the melancholy Andy associated with late nights or the last days of spring semester. “You haven’t lived here since senior year, and probably no one’s bothered to scrub the rent-catcher flyers off the mailboxes since.”

He looked at the steps, then at her, then back again. “This is where—” He stopped. “Oh.”

She smiled at him, not mockery, but the kind of pleasure that came from being remembered. “Yeah. Here. Not the usual college cliché, but I figured we’d at least upgrade from the library.”

He let the moment play out before walking up to the first step. “I was going to say it was this one,” he offered, tapping the stone with the toe of his sneaker.

Erin shook her head. “You’re off by one. It was the next up, because I remember my boots were on the edge and I was trying not to slip. The only reason I didn’t land on my ass was because you caught me by the jacket.”

He blinked, reconstructing the memory. “You sure?”

She was already stepping up, breasts bouncing freely, mint skin catching the lowering light. “You had a thing about standing on the lower step. But now you’re even taller, so that’s throwing you off.” She positioned herself, then patted the tread in front of her. “Stand here.”

He did, and he realized, faintly, that she was right—about the step, about the height, about everything.

“How are you so sure?” he asked, a half-laugh hiding a full embarrassment.

Erin’s voice went a touch lower, and she smoothed her hair behind her ear, exposing the curve of her jaw. “Because I stood here for five minutes arguing with you about something so dumb I can’t even remember what it was, and you went quiet, and I knew what was coming. I kept talking anyway because I had no idea what else to do with my hands.”

He felt his own hands try to solve the problem, ending up in his pockets like they always did. “That tracks.”

She laughed, but softer. “You hesitated, you know. Like you were running some internal diagnostic for signs of catastrophic failure.”

Andy winced. “I was. And then I said, ‘I was gonna wait and see if you’d make the first move, but then I remembered you’d rather die than lose a bet.’”

“That’s not true.” Her eyes went all the way gentle. “I’d rather die than let you think you won a bet.”

They stayed that way for a moment, one step apart, with the city all around and a slant of snow-dimmed sunlight painting her body in blues and greens. Erin’s nipples were hard, dark as ink, and he could see the faint, dew-bright sheen where the wind caught her skin. Andy realized then that he was probably staring, and that she knew it, and that she wanted him to see.

He said, “Did you ever think, six years ago, that we’d do any of this again?”

She leaned closer, and her breast brushed his arm, soft as a sigh. “I thought about it,” she admitted. “Never thought it would happen.”

He hesitated. “Do you want to reenact it?”

Erin snorted. “You’re getting married to me in two days, and you’re asking for a do-over on our first kiss?”

“It’s not a do-over,” Andy said, “it’s a historical reenactment.”

She rolled her eyes, but the smile on her face was unmistakable. “God, you’re a dork.”

He shrugged. “You knew what you were signing up for.”

She shook her head. “I really didn’t.”

He grinned, then said, “Do you want to or not?”

Erin didn’t answer. She placed her palm flat on his chest and pressed, a controlled nudge that sent him upright and steady on the higher step. Then she wrapped her other arm around the back of his neck and closed the gap, and her lips found his in a way that was both familiar and so new he felt it up through the backs of his teeth.

The kiss went on. It was long enough that Andy lost track of everything except the pressure of her hand and the taste of her breath. She opened to him, slow, and when their tongues met, he felt her body shudder all the way through. Her bare hips pressed into his, and he felt the heat of her there, hot and slippery, even through the winter air.

When she broke it, she did so by dragging her lips along his jaw, then letting her head rest against his shoulder for a beat. He kept his hands on her waist, feeling the subtle, impossible strength in her body.

“Better?” he asked, voice low.

Erin didn’t let go of his shirt right away. When she did, she took her time, bunching the fabric in her fist. “It was better the first time,” she said, without a trace of apology. “Because neither of us knew if it was going to work.”

He smiled, eyes closed, savoring it. “I can’t argue that.”

She looked up at him, a flicker of challenge in her eyes. “I’m lying,” she said, but didn’t say which part.

Andy said, “I know,” and kissed her again, softer, with all the years between them as proof.

They stood there for a while, the two of them on the steps, as the city moved around them, anonymous and unknowing. Andy kept his hand on her waist, and Erin leaned into it, her skin cool but alive under his palm. The steps were cold through his jeans, and he barely noticed. The moment felt almost outside of time.

When they finally broke apart, Erin shook out her hair and started down the steps. “You’re going to make me late for the next stop,” she teased, but Andy could hear in her voice that she didn’t mind.

He followed, taking the steps two at a time, feeling the echo of old nerves replaced by something far sweeter.