POV: Chase Sterling

The morning of graduation is supposed to be the best day of my life.

I keep telling myself that as I stand in front of the bathroom mirror, straightening my collar for the fourth time. The tie is wrong. I redo it. The ring box in my jacket pocket feels like it weighs twenty pounds, pressing against my ribs with every breath I take. I've had the speech memorized for two weeks. I've rehearsed it in the shower, on the walk to class, lying awake at three in the morning while Vivian slept beside me, her hair fanned out across the pillow like something out of a painting.

Today is the day.

I let out a slow breath and check my watch. She's two floors up. We agreed to meet before the ceremony, just the two of us, before the chaos of cap and gown and family photographs swallowed the whole morning whole. I know her schedule better than I know my own. She'll be finishing her coffee, probably checking her reflection one last time, probably already a little impatient.

That's fine. I can handle impatient. I've been handling Vivian Ashford for three years.

I take the stairs.

Her door swings open before I can knock, and she's standing there in a silk robe that barely hits the top of her thighs, holding a half-empty coffee mug and looking at me like she's already mildly annoyed by my existence. Her dark hair is loose. Her feet are bare. She looks like every single thought I've ever had that I probably shouldn't be having.

"You're early," she says.

"I'm on time."

"I said nine."

"It's nine-oh-two."

She holds the door open and turns away without another word, which I have learned to interpret as an invitation. I follow her inside and close the door behind me.

The room smells like her perfume and the faint ghost of the coffee she's been nursing. Her roommate's side is already cleared out, Dani probably already down at the venue schmoozing with her parents. We have the room to ourselves, and the morning light is coming through the curtains at that low, golden angle that makes everything look softer than it actually is.

Vivian sets her mug down on the dresser and turns to look at me. For a moment she doesn't say anything. She just looks, the way she sometimes does, like she's running some kind of silent calculation that I'm not allowed to see the result of.

Then she crosses the room, takes the lapels of my jacket in both hands, and kisses me like we've got somewhere to be and time is already running short.

I don't object.

She tastes like coffee and something underneath it that I've never been able to name, and my hands find her waist on instinct, pulling her closer, and the ring box digs into my ribs and I ignore it completely because she's already working my jacket off my shoulders and dropping it on the floor. Her silk robe follows about four seconds later and then there is nothing soft or hesitant about any of this.

"We're going to be late," I manage, which is a deeply stupid thing to say under the circumstances.

"Then we'll be late," she says, and hooks a finger into my collar, and that's the end of the conversation.

She's beautiful in the way that still catches me off guard sometimes, even after three years. Not the soft, easy kind of beautiful that asks you to be gentle with it. The kind that dares you, that holds your gaze just a beat too long, that makes you feel like you're always on the verge of losing something you can't name.

She walks me backwards until my knees hit the edge of her bed and then she pushes, and I go down, and she follows, straddling my hips with the kind of unhurried confidence that has always undone me completely. I get my hands on her thighs and she lets me, for exactly one second, before she takes both my wrists and pins them above my head and leans down and drags her mouth along my jaw until I forget what day it is.

"Vivian."

"Don't talk," she says against my throat.

I don't talk.

She pulls back just far enough to look at me, and there it is, that expression, the one that makes me feel like I'm something she's deciding whether to keep. Her hair falls forward around her face. The morning light is doing something devastating to her collarbone. I pull one hand free and she lets me this time, and I trace the line of her throat with my thumb and watch her eyes go a shade darker.

Then she reaches between us and wraps her hand around me and every coherent thought I have dissolves instantly.

She's not gentle about it, which is on-brand, which I have never once complained about. She strokes slowly, watching my face with that calm, measuring attention she gives to everything, like she's cataloguing exactly what works and filing it away. My jaw tightens. My hips shift up against my will.

"There," she says quietly, like she's confirming a hypothesis.

"You're insufferable," I tell her.

She smiles, which is rare enough that it hits me in the chest even now, even like this, and then she sinks down onto me in one slow, deliberate movement and the smile disappears into something rawer and more honest, something I'm not sure she means to let me see.

I sit up and get my arms around her and she lets out a breath against the side of my neck that I feel everywhere. She rolls her hips and I grip her tighter and for a little while neither of us is performing anything for anyone.

That's the thing about Vivian that I've never been able to explain to anyone who doesn't already know her. Everywhere else she is architecture, all clean lines and deliberate angles and nothing showing that wasn't meant to show. But here, like this, when she's moving against me with her hands fisted in my shirt and her breath coming quick and uneven, she is something else entirely. Something that feels, against all available evidence, like mine.

I pull her down harder and she makes a sound that she'd never make anywhere else, low and involuntary, and I feel her grip tighten on my shoulders like she's trying to anchor herself to something. I find the rhythm she needs and hold it and watch her face go blank with it, watch everything deliberate fall away, and I think, not for the first time, that I would do almost anything to keep seeing her like this.

Her breathing gets ragged. Her hips stutter. My name comes out of her mouth in a way I've heard maybe a dozen times in three years and every single time it sounds like something she didn't mean to say out loud.

She comes with her face pressed into my shoulder and her whole body shaking, and I follow her over the edge about thirty seconds later with my hands in her hair and her name somewhere in the back of my throat.

Afterwards, she lies with her cheek against my shoulder and stares at the ceiling, and I stare at the side of her face, and neither of us says anything for a long moment. This is the part I've always loved best, this particular quiet, where Vivian Ashford lets her edges go soft for sixty seconds before she remembers to pick them back up again. I've never told her that. I'm not sure she'd appreciate knowing.

"We really are going to be late," she says finally.

"I know." I don't move.

She tilts her head and looks at me sidelong, that expression she has that I've never been able to fully decode. Something between amusement and assessment. "You've been weird all morning," she says.

"I've been normal all morning."

"You've been nervous."

I'm quiet.

She sits up, reaching for her robe, and the soft moment closes up like a door swinging shut. I sit up too. I reach for my jacket. My hand finds the ring box and closes around it, and my heart does something stupid and complicated in my chest.

Now. Do it now.

I stand up. I look at her.

She's tying the belt of her robe and checking her reflection in the mirror above the dresser, already reassembling herself, already becoming the version of Vivian that the rest of the world gets to see. The girl who walks into every room like she's already decided whether she wants to be there.

"Vivian."

Something in my voice must give me away because she pauses, just slightly, before she turns around.

I hold out the ring.

It's a good ring. I spent four months' savings on it. It catches the morning light in a way that I'd practiced imagining, because yes, I am exactly that person, I rehearsed this moment, I had the speech. I had the whole speech.

What comes out instead is: "I love you. I want to do this with you. Whatever comes next, I want it to be with you."

The silence that follows is the worst silence of my life.

Vivian looks at the ring. She looks at my face. Something moves through her expression that I can't read, something that's here and gone before I can catch it, and then her features settle into the careful, polished neutrality that I recognize from every argument we've ever had where she'd already decided how it was going to end.

"Chase," she says.

Just my name. Just that.

"Don't," I say, because somewhere in my chest I already know.

"I'm not going to tie myself to a nobody." Her voice is even. Not cruel, exactly, which is almost worse. "Not at twenty-two. Not at the starting line."

The ring is still in my hand. I'm aware of it the way you're aware of something you've cut yourself on. The morning light is still coming through the curtains. Everything looks exactly the same as it did twenty minutes ago and nothing is the same at all.

I don't say anything.

She turns back to the mirror.

I'm still standing in the hallway outside her door when I hear it.

Dani's voice, bright and carrying, coming from the stairwell. She must have come back for something. I catch two, three, four words, her roommate's laugh, the particular sharp delight people get when they've just heard something good, and I realize with a cold, settling certainty that the door wasn't as closed as I thought it was.

By the time I reach the landing, Dani is already on her phone.

I stand very still. Around me, the dorm corridor is starting to fill up, people filtering out with their caps under their arms, families texting their locations, everyone bright and noisy and moving forward into the best day of their lives.

Someone nearby catches my eye and looks away too quickly.

Someone else leans in to whisper.

I put the ring back in my pocket.

My hand is steady. That surprises me. I look down at my hand like it belongs to someone else, someone who already knows what comes next, someone who has already crossed some invisible line I didn't see coming.

The sunlight through the end window is very bright.

Something behind my eyes goes very quiet, and very dark, and very still.

Nobody, she said.

I think about the ring. I think about four months of savings and two weeks of rehearsed speeches and three years of mornings exactly like this one that I had apparently been misreading from the very beginning.

Then I stop thinking about it.

I straighten my collar. I pick up my cap from where I'd left it on the hallway bench.

I walk toward the stairs.