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Ryland had thought, through his past year of navigating the gothic quadrangles and dining halls, that he had already seen every variant of beauty the campus had to offer—the sleek athletes with defined lines, the intense poets in unwashed wool, the legacy blondes who moved through the world with the frictionless grace of people who had never been told no. He had dabbled here and there, tried things out, generally knew who and what stirred him.
He realises that afternoon that everything he thought he knew about his tastes was actually very, very wrong.
Walking toward the chemistry building with two coffees in a cut-up milk carton—one for himself, one for Dr. Petrov's TA who'd promised him some help on his lab report—Ryland let his gaze wander around, taking in the beauty of campus in fall, before the lethal coursework tinted its loveliness. And noticed in the distance, the beauty on campus in fall, whose loveliness no toil could taint.
She sat on the low stone wall that bordered the south garden, a paperback held loose in one hand while the other shaded her eyes. Even from thirty yards away there was something about the line of her shoulders that made him forget where he was going—line of her shoulders, who are we kidding—he thought with a shake of his head. It was actually her legs, miles long and crossed at the ankle, that first caught his eye. Surveying up, she wore a professional pencil skirt with a decidedly-not graphic tee, delicately trimming one collarbone. Her hair, barely orange, was pinned up in a way that looked both careless and deliberate, a few loose strands catching the wind.
Huh.
Ryland adjusts his grip on the carton and begins to trudge across the quad.
It’s a long walk, and somewhat breaks the immersion in the movie scene he’s started conjuring in his head. She notices him in her peripheral, and looks up when he’s finally a few meters away.
"Hi," Ryland says. Brilliant. Pulitzer Prize for opening lines. Up close, she was even more gorgeous than his blurry eyes had imagined—sharp cheekbones, mouth pulled into something that wasn't quite a smile. "I'm Ryland Grace.”
She lowered the book slowly, marking her place with a finger, and looked at him with an expression of mild, pleasant curiosity.
“Eva Stratt.” There was something vaguely foreign in her voice—he made a mental note to ask later. “Hello.”
“I, uh saw you from over there and thought—well, I knew I'd regret it if I didn't come say hello."
She finally sets her book down, blinking prettily. “Uh huh.”
“What do you have there?” He gestures to the book.
She flips it to show him; After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy.
“Ah.”
“Are you familiar?”
“Not at all. I’m in the lab all day—I’m a biochemistry major, just declared.”
"Ah." A small, devastating smile played at her lips. "Sophomore. That explains the—“she gestures broadly—“enthusiasm."
Ryland felt his ears get hot, but he didn't look away. "Is that a bad thing?"
"Not necessarily.” She paused, considering. "It can be...entertaining. In small doses."
"I'm very entertaining," he offers, shifting his weight. The coffees were rapidly cooling in his tray but he barely noticed. "In all doses. Large ones, even. My friends say I'm basically a, a golden retriever in human form."
"How exhausting for everyone around you," she says, faux-sweet.
He laughed—couldn't help it. There was something about the way she delivered it, that seemed endearing despite its clear judgement. "So, what do you study?"
"International Relations and History." She picked up her book again, but didn't open it. "If you couldn’t tell."
"Right. Sorry.” He took a breath. " You, uh, probably have to get back to that so I'll be quick. Would you want to get coffee sometime? With me, properly? And not like this, where I'm holding two and can't actually give you one because it’s spoken for by my very, very scary TA."
Eva looked at him for a long moment, her head tilting slightly. When she spoke, her voice was soft, almost sympathetic. "You’re very eager.”
Almost. Polished politesse wrapped around a tiny blade. Ryland felt his ears grow even warmer. He should have been embarrassed—knew, abstractly, that he was being dismissed—but something about the way she said it, the careful precision of her words, the way she looked at him and catalogued his reactions made his stomach tighten in a way that had nothing to do with humiliation. He presses on, even though he rationally shouldn’t.
“So?”
“No.”
Ryland nods, trying to look dignified despite the sweat starting to form on his lower back. “Alright, fair enough. Can I ask why?”
"I don’t think you know what you’re asking for.” Her gaze drops back to her book. “But it was very cute watching you try. Run along now, Ryland.”
"Okay," he said, backing away. "Okay.” And adds, before he can think better of it—“I'll see you around."
She didn't look up from her book, but he saw the corner of her mouth twitch. "If you say so."
Ryland internally fist pumps, backing to continue watching her for a few steps before turning toward the chemistry building, already plotting how to accidentally-on-purpose walk past the south garden tomorrow. And the day after that.”
Behind him, he could have sworn he heard her laugh.
He tries to find her the next day, but searches to no avail. He checks the green from the previous day, then again an hour earlier, then an hour after that. He wanders through the humanities quadrangle, every floor of Stirling, even the hallways of the school of global affairs. She was nowhere, but seemed to loom everywhere—he sees her eyes or her hair in three dozen strangers, but never sees her.
When he finally does catch a glimpse of her it’s three days later while he’s in line at Atticus, and he spots a whirl of strawberry blond and lacey white linen behind the shelf of sourdough. He'd ordered a coffee while watching her talk to someone and only drops his gaze to fumble for his phone. When he looks up from the register, she'd disappeared, and he turns to see her slipping out the door, cup steaming into the autumn air.
Ryland asks around, and when no one in his circles seem to know anything he figures that she’s not in his year and starts asking up.
He hits the jackpot the following Monday in the dining hall, sitting with a mix of his friends and some upperclassmen. Alvin, a junior in archaeology, tears open a granola bar with his teeth. "Eva Stratt? She's just transferred, from Sciences Po.”
“A transfer, in junior year?”
“Yeah. I didn’t even know that was allowed. She’s in one of my classes, scary smart.” Alvin’s eyes narrow mischievously. “Why’re you asking?”
Ryland’s face reacts before his mouth does, and the table titters.
“Dude, seriously?”
“Didn’t know you were into older women.”
He groans, leaning back into his chair.
“Stratt? Who wouldn’t be?”
He hits the source of that comment, prompting another wave of laughter.
“Don't," advises one upperclassman, still laughing, and Ryland sits back up again.
"Don't what?"
"Don't," he repeats with a smirk, which Ryland found to be very unhelpful and ominous.
The intelligence he gathers over the following week comes in fragments, breadcrumbs gathered from people who were only just starting to know her. She was a transfer from Sciences Po, brilliant as could be and apparently—already universally adored by the faculty. She was seen at the opening meetings for the debate association, acutely acquainted with its incumbent president. She was also, supposedly, a nepo baby.
When he finally does get to talk to her, another week later, it’s surprisingly her who approaches him.
“So,” he hears a silky drawl from behind him, and almost keels over when he turns around and sees Eva. “My stalker.” A sliver of her midriff is bare and at his eye level and it distracts him enough that her words takes way too long to process and—
“I—what?” Ryland sputters, and when she raises an eyebrow he clocks what she means and turns instantly red. “Oh my God, I’m so so sorry, I was just—”
She shushes him with a finger to his lips and Ryland feels his brain fry instantaneously, sizzling into a puddle of nothing. “Library. Quiet.”
“Right. But I really am sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking, I don’t think I was thinking at all, actually. It’s, uh, a really bad habit.” He swallows. “Sorry, again.”
“I was joking. Nothing to be sorry about,” Eva says with a slight smile, and slinks down in the seat next to him. “Like I said, your enthusiasm is endearing.” She crosses her legs, and Ryland has never felt more like a teenage boy than in that moment, eyes traitorously dropping to her bare knee as he fights to keep his gaze on her face. He gulps again, mouth dry.
“Okay. So…”
“I need to get some work done, and—” she gestures— “looks like you do too. After, we can get coffee.”
So they get work done, and go for coffee afterwards, and Ryland is left utterly winded and amazed when she finally takes her leave. The residual beam on his face lasts long into the evening, withstanding the evening chill, and even the relentless teasing from his friends.
He offers to help her study for one of her courses—human evolutionary genomics, a science course to fulfill a breadth requirement—even though she probably doesn’t need his help. He buys her coffee and brings it to her dorm on rainy mornings because she doesn’t like the buttery’s, and likes trudging out in the cold rain even less. He shows her around the city during reading week, takes her out to dinner—she foots the bill after the second time and silences his protests with a pointed glare—and falls deeply and desperately in love.
(and, decidedly, ignores the dubiously concerned smiles of his friends when he tells them such.)
She’s gasping as he ruts into her desperately, all uncharacteristically high and—oh fuck it, he distantly thinks—cute whimpers and he grins, nipping at her ear.
The words tumble out before he can catch them, breathless and wrecked, buried somewhere in the hollow of her throat where her pulse flutters like a trapped bird. "I love you," he pants, stupid and inevitable and her fingers which had been clawing divots into his shoulder blades go slack.
Eva arches up, meeting his next thrust with a roll of her hips that makes him groan, her mouth finding his and she bites his lower lip hard enough to sting, sucking the pain away before she releases him. Her hands slide up to cradle his jaw, thumbs pressing into the hollows beneath his eyes with just enough pressure to remind him who's holding him there.
"Focus," she whispers, and it isn't I love you too, but it isn't I don’t either and then she's moving—heels digging into the mattress, thighs clamping around his waist to reverse their positions with a strength that surprises him. She pushes him onto his back, following to straddle him, palms flattening against his heaving chest to pin him there.
She sinks down slowly, deliberately, watching his face with an almost predatory focus as she envelops him and his mouth falls open in a silent gasp. Her hips roll once, experimentally, and his hands fly to her waist but she catches his wrists, reaching to force them down against the pillows on either side of his head.
"Stay," she commands, squeezing until he nods, frantic and wrecked beneath her. She sets the pace now—unhurried, devastating, grinding against him with each downward stroke in a way that makes his vision blur at the edges. He whines, rutting up into her, hands twitching to touch but she presses her weight down, pinning him harder.
"Please," Ryland chokes, writhing against the restraint of her hands, the heat of her. "Please, Eva—"
She leans down, her hair curtaining around them both, and rakes her teeth along his jaw until the path burns.
After, neither of them bring it up. He chalks it up to the heat of the moment.
So they fall into Winter relatively easily, something between friends and partners. Eva goes to bed wrapped tightly around him, who provides her with some needed stress relief for her impossible workload, but she also doesn’t mention him to her parents at all. Ryland answers his peers’ gibes and gapes after he’s seen emerging from her room in the morning with a range of noncommittal smirks, adjusting depending on how humble he has to seem. All in all, it’s a mutually beneficial relationship.
It really wasn’t just sex, though—Ryland emphatically explains to Ilyukhina one day as she steals one of his rolls off his place. Olesya Ilyukhina, physics and chemical engineering double major, was a great friend in that she shared practically every interest of Ryland’s. She was a terrible friend in that one of their shared interests was Eva Stratt, and often felt the need to bring it up.
“You’re fucking kidding, she’s my exact type! I was helping out at O-Week and saw her the literal first day,” she had whined weeks ago, when the news of his new friendship first broke out into their friend group. “You have got to be kidding. I tried to talk to her and she was polite, but so cold. Naked in the nettles.”
“What?” Ryland had responded, amused at her distress.
“What what?” She had hit him then, and not lightly. “Oh. Russian saying.”
And now she was hitting him again and stealing his rolls, annoyance radiating off her in palpable waves.
“I respect women, okay, but she walks across campus in heels? And those stockings?” Olesya makes a disgruntled gesture at the army of navy sweats in the dining hall. “When this is the usual crop, I can only have so much self restraint.”
“Sucks to suck, Lessy.” Ryland lets off easy with the stolen roll, a consolitary prize, and grins at her displeasure until his cheeks hurt. “Her legs really do save lives.”
“You are the worst!”
Winter flies by, counted by caffeine consumed and pages flipped. They’re both swamped with exams as the break looms large and Eva puts a torturously strict ban on liaising that last week, so Ryland counts the seconds until he can see her again between his Anki cards. Both of their last exams are on Thursday, his after hers, and when he finishes it is perfectly sunny outside, glorious, and he sprints to her dorm without a care in the world. He finds her in the doorway before he can knock, like she'd been listening for his footsteps, and then he's crowding her back inside, mouth finding hers, hands everywhere—her jaw, her waist, the doorframe behind her.
"Easy, chiot," she laughs against his lips, but her fingers are already tangled in his hair, pulling him closer.
"No contact," he breathes, walking her backward until the backs of her knees hit the bed. "A whole week. I barely even saw you. Do you know what you do to me?"
She answers by kissing him harder.
They don't leave until evening, surfacing only for showers and scavenged snacks before collapsing into her narrow bed, skin-warm and entwined. The radiator hisses through the night. He wakes past dawn to pale winter light striping the walls and Eva already awake, propped on one elbow, watching him with a heavy-lidded focus that sends electricity up his spine.
"Morning," she murmurs.
Before he can answer, she's swinging a leg over his waist, settling her weight against him with a familiarity that steals his breath. Ryland blinks up at her, still half-drowned in sleep, painfully aware of his morning breath—and of his body responding to her heat, her weight, the way she fits against him.
"Hi."
"Hi." She brushes hair from his eyes, smirking. "You're excited."
"Bit difficult not to be," he manages, "when you're—" She grinds down, slow and deliberate, and his words fragment.
She takes her time. Morning light stripes her bare shoulders when she finally frees him from his pajama bottoms, as she sinks onto him with a low exhale that sounds like relief. Ryland's fingers dig into her hips, anchoring himself as she begins to move—unhurried, almost lazy, rolling her hips in circles that promptly turns his brain off.
"So," she says, angling just so, watching his mouth fall open. "Winter break. What's the plan?"
"I'm—" He chokes, arching as she sinks fully, clenches. "Staying here. They're moving us—hhgn—to Old Campus."
"Mmm." She lifts, sinks again, setting a pace designed to unravel him. "Sounds cold."
"Insulation's...decent," he gasps, trying to track her eyes as she picks up speed, amused at his struggle. "You?"
"Europe." She laughs, breathless, grinding down just to feel him twitch inside her. "Berlin first. My mother and the weihnachtsgans. Then Lyon. Madeira."
"Madeira," he repeats, head is fogged and body straining. He moves his hands up to grips her waist and presses his thumbs over her lower belly, feeling himself inside her through the soft flesh, and she gasps, caught off guard.
“It’ll be warm over there.”
“Very.” She clenches deliberately, still smug, and he feels a challenge spark in his chest, bolder than usual. He bucks up to meet her next descent, knocking the air from her lungs while pressing his thumbs down, pinning her from the inside and out.
Her pupils blow wide. He keeps his hands there, moving her to his rhythm. “I’ll miss you,” he says smugly when her eyes are just about rolled back, watching her eyes flutter as he grips her waist tighter.
“Miss me or—ah—miss this?” Eva tries to regain control, to adjust the pace, but he holds her down, grinding up hard and deep, pressing a palm firm against her abdomen, holding her there until she squirms.
“You don’t get to rush this” he breathes, and slides one hand down to finally work her over, slowly and sweetly, as many times as she can take. "Miss you. Miss you driving me fucking crazy for two weeks."
“I’ll miss you too,” she whispers later, slumped on top of him, and it’s better than any Christmas present he’s ever gotten.
Ryland spends Winter break alone in Old Campus, shivering only occasionally, and always thinking of Eva. He’s the only one in his immediate friend group staying on campus and it doesn’t bother him too much—the grounds are peaceful and quiet with the blanket of snow, a completely new experience from the mild winters of his childhood in San Francisco. He reads, picks up fiction and course texts alike, and texts Eva as much as his ego allows.
His phone buzzes periodically with Eva's messages—photos of frost-rimed Brandenburg Gate, complaints about her father’s attempts at cooking, a beautiful shot of her (and the Atlantic from a cliff in Madeira behind her) that made his chest ache with wanting. He replies with careful restraint, rationing his enthusiasm as he counts the days until she’s back, but still checks the timestamps obsessively, and more often than not, types out three responses before finally sending one.
She returns in January with a tan line on her collarbone, a light wash of sun kissed freckles, and gifts—Spanish wine, a scarf in a soft orange that she looped around his neck immediately, a nice fountain pen engraved with his initials. The first week back was golden: they stole donut holes from TD at midnight, fucked with the windows open to the freezing air, walked through the slush to the art museum where she explained the abstraction in what could have been an utterly nonsensical way. Ryland felt drunk on her presence, on the smell of her shampoo and the way she mumbled his name when she was half-asleep.
But he still couldn't say girlfriend when his friends asked, and couldn't say we're together without feeling like a fraud. They slept in the same bed most nights, knew each other's coffee orders, had inside jokes that made them laugh until they couldn't breathe—but she had never once called him her boyfriend, had never introduced him as anything other than "Ryland," had never confirmed what they were in any language (the only language. dumb American) he could understand. She acted like she loved him, Ryland thinks—remembered his schedule despite the tightness of hers, brought him pastries before tests, and looked at him sometimes with such focused tenderness that his throat closed. But she didn’t say it.
The auditorium smelled of wool coats and stale coffee, the overhead lights humming a familiar frequency that Ryland had come to associate with sharp words and humanities students. He'd attended three of these meetings before break—sitting toward the back at first, then gradually migrating forward until he was beside her, their thighs pressed together under the folding chairs while she whispered commentary about speaker technique and logical fallacies. Coming tonight? she had texted—7pm if you do, please do not wear that gray sweater it makes you look consumptive and he had arrived to find her in her usual seat, an empty one beside her.
The chamber settled into a practiced hush as the chair struck the gavel, sound cutting through the din of the warming room.
"The resolution before the house tonight: Resolved, that abortion access ought to be recognized as a fundamental right."
The first speaker, a senior with a sharp jaw and sharper suit rose deliberately, notes folded more from ritual than necessity, and began with measured confidence, weaving constitutional doctrine into moral philosophy, statistics into stories and the night wore as each side presented and the conversation opened up to the floor.
Afterward, they walked through the frozen quad toward her dorm, puffs of breaths mingling in the cold air. "You were practically vibrating," Eva says, amused, and adjusts his glasses. "I thought you were going to stand up and speak."
"Well, if I was prepared I would have. That second guy was infuriating," Ryland mutters, still warm with it. "The way he kept talking about 'protecting women' like they can't protect themselves. Like the state needs to step in and make the hardest decision for them. It's patronizing and dangerous and—" He catches himself, laughing. "Sorry. I get worked up."
"Don't apologize." Eva's gloved hand found his bare one, their fingers interlacing automatically. "It's refreshing. You're very... certain."
"I just think it's simple," he said, earnest, watching his boots crunch through the salt-crusted snow. "A person's body is their own. Full stop. No government, no court, no debate society gets to legislate that."
Eva was quiet for a moment, her profile unreadable under the gas lanterns. "That's a very progressive view," she says finally, her voice carrying that same mild, pleasant tone she'd used when they first met—the one that made him feel like a specimen under glass.
"I don't think it's progressive," he said, confused. "I think it's basic."
"Mm."
“Why, you don’t think it is?” He’s a bit surprised and it definitely shows in his voice, and she looks up at him wryly. “We’re at a very liberal liberal arts college.
"Well, in Europe the conversation is…well. Different. More medical, less ideological. Definitely less shouting."
"Is that better?"
She shrugs, her shoulder brushing his arm. "It's just different. You Americans treat everything like a crusade. Come on," she says, tugging him toward the warmth of her building. "We’ll get tea and you can explain to me why I'm wrong about continental healthcare systems."
"You're not wrong," he said, following her. "You're just..."
"European?"
"Something like that."
So they talk about reproductive rights, and trudge back outside to join in on the snowball fight in the quad, and laugh into the night in a way that feels almost domestic. Winter drags on contentedly, elongating like the stretch of daylight. Morning arrives in a thin gray light that only increasingly ripens into blue day, and the afternoon shadows’ reclaim of the courtyards gradually push the starts back later and later.
He notices Eva rubbing her temples one day during breakfast, which is not new, except she also pushed away the coffee she'd normally drain, which definitely was. Then she snaps at him, twice in one day—once over a misremembered quote, once when he tried to rub her shoulders—and apologized with kisses that felt distracted. By the next week she was sleeping twelve hours, waking only to vomit quietly in his bathroom while he hovered outside the door, knuckles white.
“Just a bug," she said, waving off his concern, but her eyes had gone hollow. She stopped wanting to be touched. When he brought her soup from the dining hall, she let it go cold on the nightstand. Ryland watches her curl away from him in sleep, her spine a ridge he was suddenly afraid to touch, and felt the distance between them yawning open like something alive and hungry, wondering if it was something he did or worse—didn’t.
The stairwell to Eva’s room smelled of someone's burnt popcorn, a acrid thread beneath the older scents of wood polish and radiator steam left over from a movie night. Ryland climbs with his hand trailing the banister, his palm catching on splinters he knew by heart now—he'd traced this route dozens of times, could climb it blind, drunk, half-asleep. But tonight the familiar felt foreign, the landing too bright under the single bulb and his heart hammered in his throat when he knocks on Eva’s door.
She stands back to let him pass, her movements careful, deliberate. The bed was made with hospital corners, her desk cleared of its usual avalanche of books. Only her coat, thrown haphazardly over the chair suggested any disorder—a crumpled surrender in navy wool.
"You can sit," Eva says, and he does, choosing the floor with his back to the radiator, his knees drawn up. She remained standing, hovering near the window, her fingers finding the cord of the blinds and wrapping it around her index finger until the tip went white.
"Is everything okay?" he asks, because she had texted come over without the usual punctuation, without the now or the please or the emoji she used when she wanted to pretend she wasn't serious and the tone of her voice was seriously scaring him.
"I found something out," she said. "Last week."
Ryland watched the cord tighten around her finger. "Okay." And is suddenly very, very sure on what she’s going to say next before she says it.
Oh my God, she’s—
"I'm pregnant."
The radiator knocked behind him, a sudden percussion. He didn't flinch, predicted it and prepared accordingly in that tiny stretch of time—couldn’t flinch, when the words between them were so real and heavy, and he felt his heart rate adjust to accommodate—up, then carefully forced down—he had read once that panic helped no one. He cycles in his head through the options of what to say next. How was obvious. Mine? was stupid and out of the question and would probably, no—definitely get him physically slaughtered.
"Okay," he breathes, and his voice comes out as steady as he could manage. "Um.”
“Yeah.”
And he tries to inhale, exhale, because panic really would help no one and he makes himself meet her gaze firmly. The sky is dark outside, shafts of navy flickering in and out as Eva twirls the tilt wand. “How are you?"
She laughs, a single, shaky sound. "Really?"
"I…don't know what else to say.” Ryland wrings his hands, offers a sheepish smile. “Do you want me to do a dramatic faint? I can work up some Victorian hysteria if it would help."
Eva's mouth twitches. "Tempting."
"Or I could…uh. Offer to marry you," he continues, because the silences felt dangerous and he had always been terrible at silence. "Very romantic, you know. Down on one knee, ring pop from the corner store. We could elope to Paris and then I could disappoint your parents in person."
"Christ, Ryland." But she was almost smiling now, or something adjacent to it, flexing her finger as she released the cord.
“So?” He scoots closer to her, until he’s leaning against her bed, almost at her feet.
Eva moved to the bed and sat on the edge, not close to him but not as far, her knees angled toward the door. "I'm tired," she says softly. "I think I know, what I’m going to do. What I should. But I just feel tired."
Ryland nods. He thinks of his mother, of the clinic on 16th Street where she'd taken him along once to pick up a friend, of the way she'd held that woman's elbow like it was made of glass.
"Whatever you need," he says, and tentatively places a hand on her knee. "I can—I know you don’t need it, but I have savings. If you want to—I can research places. Clinics. Or if you don't, if you want to think about other options, I can—"
"Stop," she said, not unkindly. She was looking at her hands, at the chipped polish on her thumbnail. "You're doing the thing."
"What thing?"
"The…God, I don’t know, The correct thing, I suppose." She worries her bottom lip between her teeth. "You're being very good, Ryland. Very supportive.”
What? And he’s confused, on why she says it like that.
"Huh."
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry.” he says quietly, and reaches for her hand.
"Don't be sorry. Or, I’m sorry too. Just be..." She takes his hand but trails off, frustrated, pushes her hair back from her face. "I don't know."
He shifted, uncrossing his legs, letting his hands rest palms-up on his thighs—a posture of surrender, of openness. "Okay."
"You're not going to ask what I want?"
"I don't know if you know yet."
She closes her eyes. "I don't."
"Then I'll wait," he says. "I'm good at waiting. You know that."
A smile flickered at the corner of her mouth, there and gone. "You are," she admits. "It's your most annoying quality."
The radiator knocked once more, a final sound, and Eva lay back on the bed, her arm over her eyes. Ryland stays on the floor, watching the shadows shift across her ceiling, waiting for her to tell him what came next, or if nothing came next, or if he was simply meant to witness this moment. He thought of all the things he could say—that he loved her, that he would stay, that they would figure it out—and he swallowed them, one by one, until his mouth was empty and his heart was full of a silence that might, if he was very careful, be enough.
The morning after is like all morning afters, the same stale quiet and warmth of skin on skin, but also not in every single way.
Ryland wakes before Eva, which used to be a rarity and was now rapidly reversing through the events of the past month. He lies still, watching the dust motes twirl, listening to her breathe. He turns his head on the pillow and just looks at her, the way the light finds her cheek, the way her hand has curled into the space where he'd been lying. He studies the flutter of her eyelids and lets himself have this moment of normalcy before everything shifts again.
She wakes up after a while, natural for once—he’s hit both their alarms. It’s not gradual—Eva has never been a gradual waker, always surfacing suddenly an expression that takes a half-second too long to register where she is, what day it is.
“Hey.”
“Hey.” He brushes her cheek, presses a kiss there. “How are you?”
“Give me a second,” she mumbles, and rolls her shoulders with a groan. Ryland pushes himself up to sit, caressing her side and her ribs when she nods permission. After a few minutes, he tries again.
“How are you?”
“Not nauseous, surprisingly." He tries to kiss her, but she pushes him away. “Morning breath. Today I mind.”
“Alright, alright,” and he helps her up, helps her stand even though she can stand for goodness’ sake—waits with bated breath as the water splashes on and off, and exhales relieved when he doesn’t hear gagging. Eva reappears, freshened up, and joins him back on the bed.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Yeah. We should, sooner rather than later, right?”
Eva crosses her legs, criss-cross-applesauce. He mirrors.
“So.”
“So.”
“So?”
They could do this forever, he thinks, and it would not be so bad.
“I want an abortion.”
“Okay.” And Ryland exhales with a smile, a bit relieved.
"I'm not going to tell my parents."
He nods. "Alright."
"My mom would cry," she explains, a prior train of thought now just vocalised, tone dropping sardonically. "She'd yell at me while crying and then she'd ask if I prayed about it. My dad would be…disappointed, probably, but still try to be supportive, which is somehow worse. They'd make it about the potential kid. They'd want to talk about keeping it, moving back with them, or they'd want to know why I even—" She stops, shakes her head. "I can't. I can't have them in my head right now. Or ever, but that can’t be helped."
"Okay," Ryland soothes. "You don't have to."
"Will you tell yours?" she asks.
He thinks of what they might have said, if he did. "No," he says. "I don't think that would help anyone."
“Okay.”
And it seems okay, it almost seems okay and he can ask if she wants him to book an appointment, if she wants him to be there for it but she suddenly bursts into tears and collapses into his arms and he does not know what to do.
She cries so suddenly that for a second he thinks she's laughing, that he's misunderstood the sound because Eva never cries, has never dropped a single tear in front of him. Then her knees give a little and she folds into him, face buried against his shoulder, hands clutching the back of his shirt hard enough to wrinkle the fabric. He freezes before instinct takes over. One arm circles her waist to keep her upright, the other settles uncertainly between her shoulder blades, rubbing slow, awkward circles because it feels like something people do when there is nothing useful to say. He whispers her name, then again, softer, but she only shakes her head, sobs muffled against his chest. He doesn't tell her it's going to be okay—he doesn't know if it will be. Instead he just holds her as tightly as he dares, letting the silence stretch around them as her hiccoughs fade, absorbing each shudder as though he could shoulder some small fraction of the weight simply by refusing to let go.
Once she’s calm, they try to talk about it. Really talk, the way people are supposed to when facing something this consequential. But the words keep getting stuck, mangled in the throat, emerging as half-sentences and shrugs. She starts to say something about the timing, about school, about them and then stops, frustrated by—and he has to coax the reason out of her to calm her down—how small it all sounds when articulated.
He smooths it with jokes the best he can. It's what he has always done, this alchemy of turning tension into laughter, finding the absurd in the devastating. He tells her about his uncle who got a vasectomy and then won a lifetime supply of diapers in a raffle, stupid stories from undergrad and assorted blarney. She laughs despite herself, leaning into him, and for a moment they are just two people on a Wednesday morning, tired and uncertain but together.
"I know this is right," she says suddenly, after she’s steeled herself and found her voice again. "I know it is. One hundred percent. When I looked at that test I felt—nothing. No, that's not true. I felt invaded. Like something had gotten inside me without asking."
“Parasite,” Ryland says, in another attempt to smother her burst of sadness. “Actually, while babies do rely on the host for nutrients like a parasite, parasites do also have to be a different species. So we can’t call it that.”
And she laughs and calls him a nerd, and he thinks that they’ll be okay.
But later, when she is in the shower and he is refolding her clothes in her closet she stands under the water longer than necessary, and he peeks to see that she’s crying where he can't hear, where she can pretend it is just the spray. And feels guilt latch on somewhere in his chest, feeding on him, draining everything in order to grow.
The booking happens on her laptop in her dorm room, side by side on her narrow bed, his shoulder pressed against hers as she navigates the student health portal. She types her netID, her student insurance number, the dates. He watches her fingers move across the keys and notices when they hesitate over the question about gestational age—she counts back on her fingers, lips moving silently, then enters the number. Six weeks. Five, maybe. Definitely early enough for the pills. They choose a morning slot, Friday, the earliest available and they sit in the silence that follows after she shuts her laptop with a click, the appointment now a physical thing, a mere twenty minutes' walk across campus.
Friday arrives sunny, antithetical in every way to how she feels, she tells him with a scoff, and he really doesn’t know what to say. They walk. The health centre sits at the edge of the green, Georgian red brick old for all the new on the inside. The waiting room has a scarce smattering of students, and as they check in at the desk Eva keeps her eyes firmly fixed on the linoleum.
The consultation is brief, clinical, kind. A nurse explains the process: one pill at the center, four at home, twenty-four hours apart. The cramping will be intense, he warns. Like a heavy period, but more. Eva nods. She has read the forums, the articles, the pamphlets from the Women's Center. She swallows the first pill with water from a paper cup in a room that smells like hand sanitizer and winter coats, and suddenly it is done, irreversible.
He helps her cancel her sections—sends the emails she cannot write, makes the excuses for her tutorials that she cannot. Stomach bug, he types. Food poisoning. She'll be back next week. The lies feel unnecessary and obscene, sitting in her sent folder next to clarifications on lectures and glowing feedback from advisors. She lies on her bed that evening, the second set of pills dissolving between her cheek and gum, tasting like chalk and something faintly chemical. He brings her water she doesn't drink, crackers from the dining hall she doesn’t eat.
Eva curls into herself, knees to chest, as the cramping starts slowly, a distant warning, then arrives all at once like a fist and he sits on the floor beside the bed where he can see her face, where she can find his hand without looking. The pain is animalistic, relentless, a grinding that seems to come from behind her hip bones. She breathes through it the way the nurse advised but the breaths come jagged despite her best efforts. He holds the trash can when she looks queasy, but she can’t throw anything up. He holds her hair. He does not look away when she bleeds, when the clots come, when she cries out and then apologizes for crying out, aware of the thin walls, the suitemates down the hall, and then cries more.
"Don't," she says once, when he moves to adjust her blankets for the umpteenth time that hour, moves to do something. Her voice is scraped raw. "Just stay."
He stays.
The worst of it lasts six hours, but comes back still rough after eight. She drifts in and out of a half-sleep that is not restful at all, waking to new waves of pain, to the pressure of his hand on her back, to the sound of him reading aloud from a textbook she cannot focus on, the words just rhythm, just presence. By morning the bleeding has slowed to something manageable, something her body has done before. She is hollowed out, sore, emptied. He calls his most discreet friend to bring them tea so he doesn’t have to go out and when a knock comes, he kisses her knuckles in apology for leaving her even for those few seconds. Carl brings two thermoses and a few stolen buttery mugs, along with a paper bag of pastries which he accepts no thanks for. Ryland takes her hand again the instant he can and pours the tea with the other, and the steam rises between them like a curtain lifting.
"Okay?" he asks.
Eva nods. Looks out the window at the elm branches, barren, at the familiar steeples and spires behind them, and says nothing.
She shuts him out firmly Sunday evening, pushing him away with a resolute kiss once he’s made sure she’s eaten and is able to keep it down, and she’s assured him that she can stand, can walk, can perform basic hygiene. He’s haggard as well after the past two days, only slightly less than she is and finally acquiesces to go back to his own room and clean up, get ready for the week, and collapses into dreamless sleep the moment his body lands on his own cold bed.
The week starts like every other week—lively, accelerated, and relentless. The campus reasserts itself in his life with its gaudy insistence—the noon bells marking the time melodically, the small layer of snow slowly turning to slush on the roads as the temperatures rise. He sees Eva in passing once in the morning, once in the afternoon, moving through like a woman underwater, but she moving nonetheless, and fast. That is the thing he notices first. The speed of her.
She’s in her classes, the third floor of Jackson when he texts her from the far side of campus, from the biology building that smells always of formaldehyde. She answers within seconds—in seminar. u? He pictures her there, leaning forward over the table with that intensity she brings to everything. He sends back a photo of himself with a sandwich, and asks if she’s eaten. Eva reacts with a thumbs up and ignores his next ask to meet for dinner.
She’s not in her dining hall Monday evening, and when she isn’t again on Tuesday he checks every single one until he finds her. She is surrounded by her friends when he spots her, listening intently and engrossed in the conversation. She waves at him when she finally notices him staring, blows a kiss that would have felt teasing a few weeks ago and he still flushes, but it feels different. Her friends, used to her little lapdog, invite him to sit, and extract their entertainment at his expense.
Later, walking her back to her residential college, Eva talks without stopping—about her paper on sanctions regimes, about the TA who asked her to cover an extra section, about the function she wants to go to on Friday, about anything that is not the situation.
"Eva," he says finally, when they reach the doors. “I—you really don’t have to…” and trails off, not sure how to put it.
"Have to what?"
"Act like this. Do any of this."
She shoots him a withering glare that normally could level nations, but now just fills him with a deep sadness. The light from the college entryway catches the hollows beneath her eyes, contouring them deeper, into her very bones. “I have no idea what you’re implying,” she says evenly, and disappears into the building.
The questions find him in the lab, in his common room, in the basement library he retreats to. Her friends ask him, the ones who have noticed her absence, her distraction. Is Eva okay? She seems off. Is everything okay with you guys? He learns to deflect with the same skill she uses to advance, turning inquiries into jokes, into observations about midterm stress, about thesis anxiety, about the general malaise of February.
His friends ask too, the biochem cohort who have watched him disappear, who have noted his distraction during lab sections, his failure to appear at the usual gatherings. He tells them nothing, because it is not his to tell, because the secret sits between them like a third presence, visible only to those who know to look. He sees them watching him watch her at the function on Friday, the one she insisted on attending, where she drinks too much and laughs too loud and disappears into the bathroom for twenty minutes that feel like hours. He waits by the door. He does not knock. When she emerges, her mascara is perfect, her smile is perfect, and she takes his hand as if she has not just been crying in a stall, as if they are just a normal couple at a normal party in the middle of a normal semester.
Sunday, they walk together through the city, the slush already melted into sludge water, now mostly evaporated into nothing. She is quieter here, the performance finally exhausting its fuel.
"I keep thinking I'm going to feel it," she says. "The relief. Everyone said there would be relief."
He waits. This is the first time she has spoken of it since.
"Instead I just feel..." She searches for the word, maybe just in English, or maybe at all. "Hollow."
"Eva…"
"Don't." She holds up her hand. "Don't say anything you've read or heard or think you're supposed to say."
He closes his mouth. The wind moves through the bare branches above them, a sound like water, like rushing.
"I just want to be past it," she says. "I want to be on the other side of this week, this month, this year. I want to be the person I was before I knew what this felt like."
"You can't bulldoze through it," he says quietly. "That's not how it works."
"Then how does it work?" She turns to face him, and her eyes are bright, dangerous, the eyes of someone who has been fighting herself for days. "The nurse said 'take it easy.' My advisor said 'focus on your health.' But no one will tell me what that means. Do I stop? Do I keep going? Do I fail my classes or ace them? What is the correct way to be, for a woman who has done what I did?"
He has no answer. He knows only that she is trembling, that her hands are cold even in her pockets, that she has lost weight she could not afford to lose. He knows that in her tutorials tomorrow she will speak with authority about state sovereignty, about the right of self-determination and she will organise all her points the way they should be and deliver them with the exact cadence needed to impact.
He hopes that later, when she is unable to sleep, unable to name what is keeping her awake, that she will call him.
"You're allowed to not be okay," he says.
"I'm not okay," she admits. The words cost her. He sees them leave her like something physical, a weight she has been carrying in her throat. "I'm not okay, and I hate it, and I hate that I hate it, and I just want—" She stops. The wind fills the silence. "I just want to be alone.”
“You can’t.”
“I wish I could.”
“I know.”
The wind tousels her hair, bright against the gray of the afternoon.
“I don't want you to leave."
"I won't."
She nods.
They fall into school. Just regular school again. She’s almost the same but he knows her tells, knows that it still plagues her. He reads up on what might be causing it—knows she definitely hasn’t, hasn’t talked to anyone about it to his knowledge, and feels paralyzed in his powerlessness.
…the main prostaglandin F2 alpha metabolite, 15-keto-13,14-dihydro-PGF2 alpha, increased to a significant peak at day 6 followed by a significant fall to day 14. These findings supports a direct effect of mifepristone on the decidua, initiating prostaglandin synthesis…
He researches what he must, then researches her in between, pubmed and jstor and reddit threads until 3 a.m. Searches for her relentlessly across the two hundred acres of campus, and steals her time when he finds her. He doesn’t talk about it, even though he so badly wants to, and she, he deduces, so badly needs to.
They eat in the dining hall where the windows are tall and the light gentle, coming through in slabs and settling on the long tables. Eva cuts her food into precise geometries—triangles of chicken, parallelograms of potato—and Ryland watches her chew each bite exactly twelve times before swallowing. Around them, the theater of college continues: someone laughing too loud three tables over, the scrape of chair legs, a light rustle of puffers as bodies shift and rearrange themselves in the pews of adolescence.
"You've been reading about the after effects," she remarks, after she finishes, after a long while of silence.
He looks up from his own plate, where he has been pushing lentils. "How did you—"
"Your tabs. You left your laptop open the other day." She says it without accusation, the way she might note a change in the weather. "I don't mind. I just wish you would stop."
"I want to understand."
"You can't." Eva stops twirling her fork, sets it down. The tines make a small, clear sound against the ceramic. “Mary’s room and all that, right?” And when he looks confused— “the thought experiment. Mary has learned everything there is to learn about colour, but she has never actually experienced it for herself. Will Mary gain new knowledge when she sees?” Her eyes are weary. “I don’t even understand, really, no matter how much I’ve tried.”
He wants to touch her hand, but the table between them has become a vast distance, a tundra. "Then tell me what to do."
"Nothing," she says. "There's nothing to do."
She stands, tray in hand, and walks toward the conveyor belt where dirty dishes disappear into the mouth of the kitchen. He watches her go, her posture perfect, her shoulders back.
In the library they occupy adjacent carrels in the tower where the air smells of old paper and the dust motes swim in the light like plankton. He is trying to memorize the citric acid cycle, the way electrons cascade down the respiratory chain like stones falling through water.
Ryland looks over. Eva is writing furiously, her hand moving across her page with the violence of someone trying to keep up with a thought. He can see, from his angle, that she has rewritten the same sentence three times, each iteration only slightly different, a mere word the barrier to perfection. Later, when the clocks tick eleven, she closes her books and nudges him.
"Walk me back?”
Spring is coming, theoretically, but the air still carries the memory of winter, a cold that lives in the stone. Ryland wraps his coat around her as the night air blows vigorously, tousling his hair and chilling his bones.
"I dream about it," she murmurs, sudden and unbidden. They pass a statue, bronze face turned toward the street, forever young and about to be hanged. “Not the procedure. Before. I dream I'm holding something very small in my hands, something the size of a seed, and I'm trying to decide whether to plant it or swallow it."
He stops walking. She continues two paces, then stops too, her back to him.
"Do you regret it?" he asks.
She turns. In the lamplight, her face is all shadows, the architecture of her cheekbones sharp as any tower tip. "That's not the right question. Regret implies a choice made in error. I don't regret it. I would do it again. I will do it again, if I have to, a thousand times. But—" she coughs, slightly forced, hiding something. "But I didn't know I would mourn it. I didn't know my body would—would fucking betray me by grieving something that was—something impossible, something that I didn’t want."
He has no answer. They stand there, two figures in the dark.
“Thank you for telling me,” he says finally, almost a whisper.
“It,” she snaps, “is not a gift you thank me for.” Her consonants are sharp and words meant to cut, but he hears a small sniff when she burrows into his side, and just holds her.
They begin to sleep together again, but it is a different geography now. She comes to his room after the main libraries close, after the parties have spilled their last drunks into the streets, when the campus is quiet enough to hear the chirps of the spring migrants. She climbs into his narrow bed still dressed in her clothes—jeans, sweater, sometimes even her coat—and presses into his chest. He wraps his arm around her torso and feels her breathing, the rise and fall that is the only conversation they have left.
They don’t touch more than that. Instead he holds her, his nose in her hair, smelling her shampoo, his hands around her. Sometimes she sleeps. More often she lies awake, her eyes open in the dark, staring at the wall where he has taped a poster of the periodic table, all those elements arranged in their logical order, everything in its place, everything knowable.
"You're so warm," she whispers one night, as the last of winter melts away into spring.
"You're not," he says.
"I know. I can't get warm."
He pulls her closer. It is late into the night, or early in the morning—three or four, liminal in its silence.
"I wrote a paper today," Eva says into the dark. "About the Treaty of Westphalia. About how after thirty years of war, they decided that sovereignty meant the right to determine your own religion. Cuius regio, eius religio. Whose realm, his religion." She pauses. He feels her swallow. "I kept thinking about jurisdiction, about what I have sovereignty over. My body agreed to one thing. My mind agreed too. But something else, something I don't have a name for, refused to—if we’re sticking to the metaphor—sign the treaty."
He waits. This is the most she has said in weeks.
"I don't know how to govern myself," she says. "I don't know what the laws should be."
"Eva—"
"Don't." But her voice is soft now, exhausted. "I’m sorry, I keep telling you not to do this, not to say that. But please. Just don’t."
So he doesn't.
Outside, Spring finally arrives in earnest, trees exploding into blossom as if nothing had ever died, as if the winter had been a dream. He holds her while she trembles, while she refuses to cry, kisses her without expectation, while they both pretend that this is enough, that this proximity, this silence without understanding, is a kind of answer.
If they’re friends with benefits but now without the benefits, Ryland wonders, are they just friends now? Friends who sleep together? Friends who kiss?
Eva has been staring at the same page of Thucydides for forty minutes, the Greek swimming like tadpoles, when Ryland slips into her room, returned from the buttery with the cup of chamomile tea she requested.
"Eva," he says. His voice is careful, the voice of someone approaching a skittish animal. “Can I tell you something?” He hands her the tea, then sits at her desk.
“Hm?” Her eyes are a bit glazed, still lost in Athens, slowly adjusting to focus on him in the dim lamplight. “Yeah, go for it.”
“It’s about the chemistry of the brain, post abortion.” He pauses, gauging her reaction before continuing, ready to stop at any moment. “I stopped researching after you told me to, for the record. But I think you didn’t really mean it when you did say that and the stuff I read would maybe help you understand. Some of what you’re feeling.”
Eva sighs, resigned, perhaps already imagined this conversation happening, perhaps already read what he’s offering. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
She props herself up and sets her textbook aside. “Tell me.”
So he does. He tells her about the about the corpus luteum, about how it takes six to eight weeks to dissolve, how the hormones don't just stop. How the brain, the actual physical brain can't distinguish between postpartum depression and post-abortion depression because the neurochemical signature is identical. He migrates to the floor beside her bed and tells her about progesterone withdrawal, the way the endocrine system doesn't care about intention, about the studies and papers and feels maybe, just a little bit of tension drain out her shoulders.
When he finishes, she reaches down to grab his hands.
"I keep dreaming about parallel lives," she says. Her thumb moves across his knuckles, feeling the bone beneath the skin. "Not the one where I kept it. I dream about the version where I didn't notice. Where I went another week, two weeks, and miscarried naturally. Where it was taken from me instead of given away. I think I could have borne that better. The lack of agency. The—" she searches, her eyes on their joined hands, "—the abdication of choice. Having a choice means having to live with the ghost of what you didn't choose."
Ryland turns his hand over, palm up, and she settles hers into it. Two continents, finding their matching coastlines.
"I feel like I killed something," she whispers. The word hangs in the air, terrible and terrifying and Ryland’s heart lurches.
“Eva, I really don’t want to argue with you about this but a fetus isn’t—”
"Not a person, Ryland.” She cuts him off. “Not a baby. I don’t know and I don’t really care about whether you, or anyone else thinks a fetus is a person or not. It’s not about that, and quite frankly I’m fucking tired of everyone just making it out to be about that. It’s not.”
“Okay.” Ryland he bites his lip, embarrassed at his outburst. “I’m sorry. You were saying?”
Eva starts again, shaky. “I feel like I killed a version of my life. A…a door I walked through and can't walk back out of. And everyone keeps telling me it's just medical, just tissue, just a procedure, and I want to scream that yes, it was, but it was also mine. It was an almost. My could-have-been."
He kisses her knuckles.
"I think I love you," she says.
"I know," he responds.
They survive the way soldiers survive a siege: together, in the trenches of the library basement where the radiators bang and the fluorescent lights hum a tuneless song. Eva writes and Ryland memorizes, and they pass notes instead of texting like teenagers of a bygone era, except the notes are fragments of the things they cannot yet say aloud.
today I felt some relief, she writes. it came suddenly, in the shower. I thought I was having a heart attack.
the corpus luteum dissolved, he writes back. your hormones are adjusting.
They sleep together now in the full sense, though they are still careful with each other, still learning the new topography of trust. She cries, tears coming not in the dramatic catharsis of film but in small, embarrassing bursts—over a burned bagel in the dining hall, after receiving an okay grade on a paper, once while watching a pigeon struggle to carry a french fry across the quad.
"I don't know when I'll be normal," Eva tells him as April arrives with its showers, lying in his bed with her head on his chest, listening to his heart beat its steady rhythm.
“Oh, being normal is overrated.” He knows it’s not what she means, but it gets a laugh out of her regardless.
They survive April the way different species survive the same winter: she in the upper reaches of libraries, camped with Houghton and Hobbes; he in basement labs with fluorescent lighting, running gels and titrating solutions.
Eva’s main focus is her junior seminar paper—a million and one pages on humanitarian intervention and the Responsibility to Protect, on how the international community decides who is worth saving and at what cost. Ryland survives ochem. She starts texting him again, menial matters and sweet nothings. He leaves her little sticky notes with dumb drawings and bags of buttery scones from a bakery on the outskirts of the city. They study separately, separately next to other sometimes, and make do.
Finals arrive with the sudden violence of New England spring—one day frost, the next day the magnolias exploding, the students emerging from their burrows blinking and pale. Eva presents her paper on a Thursday afternoon in a seminar room overlooking the courtyard. She speaks about R2P, about the failure in Rwanda, about the ethics of intervention, and passes with flying colours. Her professor writes excellent work at the top of the final draft, suggests she might expand it into a senior thesis.
Ryland sits his finals in halls rank with similar anxiety. He finishes early for once and walks to Eva’s exam hall, waits on the steps with two iced coffees, watching the light move through the elms. She emerges at dusk, her hair escaped from its bun, her eyes tired but clear. She sees him and beams, standing on the steps above him, looking down.
"You survived!” He announces, laughing as his voice echoes in the courtyard.
"We survived," she corrects, and runs down to meet him. When she reaches him, she takes the coffee—cream, touch of sugar, exactly right—and then she kisses him where Nathan Hale still waits for his hanging, where the spring light lasts until eight o'clock and the air smells of possibility, right there in the quad where anyone might see.