Chapter 3: The Library Encounter
I’m hiding in the library’s top floor, trying to focus on my Victorian Literature essay, when I hear footsteps stop at my table. I look up and it’s Kendall. She’s even more polished in person, all blonde waves and a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. She sits down across from me without asking, setting her designer bag on the table. ‘You’re Nikki, right? Harry’s friend?’ Her voice is sweet, but her gaze is sharp, cataloging me. I nod, my pen frozen. ‘I just wanted to thank you,’ she says, tilting her head. ‘For being there for him while I was gone. He told me you were a good friend.’ The word ‘friend’ lands like a slap. I feel my spine stiffen. ‘He’s easy to be around,’ I say, my voice even. She laughs, a light, practiced sound. ‘He is, isn’t he? Anyway, I’m throwing him a welcome-back party tonight at The Oak. You should come. Bring your friends.’ She slides a flyer across the table. I look at it: a photo of Harry laughing, his arm around Kendall. I feel something crack inside me, but I smile. ‘I’ll see if I’m free.’ She leaves, and I stare at the flyer until the ink blurs.
I don’t go to the party.
Instead, I go to Aria’s studio and help her paint a mural until my fingers are stained blue. But all night, I wonder if he looked for me there.
The paint, a deep cobalt, bleeds under my nails as I drag the roller in broad, mindless strokes. Aria’s music—some angsty indie folk—does little to drown out the thought. He looked for you. He didn’t. Back and forth. The roller squeaks.
“You’re gonna wear a hole in the canvas,” Aria says, not looking up from her meticulous line work. Her own hands are speckled with magenta.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry.Be angry. It’s better.”
“I’m not angry.”
“Bullshit.” She finally glances over, her purple hair catching the dim studio light. “You’re painting like you’re trying to erase something. That’s not sadness, Martinez. That’s fury.”
I lean my forehead against the cool wall next to the canvas. The smell of acrylic and dust is grounding. “She called me his friend. Made it sound like I was the neighborhood kid who walked his dog while he was on vacation.”
“She’s marking her territory. It’s primal, animal shit. You don’t have to accept the label.”
“But it’s accurate, isn’t it?” The words taste bitter. “That’s all I was. Friends with benefits. Benefits now officially revoked.”
Aria puts her brush down. The silence expands, filled only by the hum of the space heater. “Did he call? Text?”
I shake my head, pushing away from the wall. My phone has been a dead weight in my back pocket all night. Not a vibration. Not a single blue bubble. The applause from the poetry slam feels like it happened in another lifetime. Him disappearing from that corner booth feels like the only real thing.
“Then screw him,” Aria says, simple and final. “His loss. You poured your guts out on that stage and he just… ghosted? After that poem? Coward.”
It wasn’t his loss, though. It was mine. I’d given him the raw, unedited pages of my heart and he’d left the building. Maybe Kendall had been waiting outside. Maybe he’d taken her hand and they’d walked to The Oak, to their party, without a second thought.
I wash my hands in Aria’s tiny sink, the blue swirling down the drain but clinging to the creases of my skin. A lost cause. “I’m gonna head out,” I say, my voice tired.
“Stay. We can order disgusting amounts of lo mein and watch terrible movies.”
“I just need to be in my own bed, I think.”
She doesn’t push. Just hugs me, a quick, tight squeeze that smells of paint and her sandalwood perfume. “Text me when you’re home.”
The walk back to my dorm is cold. The kind of cold that seeps through your jacket and finds the cracks in your resolve. Campus is quiet, the usual Thursday night chaos muted. As I cut through the main quad, I hear it—the distant thump of bass from The Oak Bar. Laughter, loud and communal, spills out into the street a block away. I stop, my feet rooting to the frosted grass.
I can picture it perfectly. The dark wood, the sticky floors. Harry at the center of it all, that easy smile plastered on his face, a plastic cup in his hand. Kendall draped over his shoulder, claiming her prize. His brothers, Liam, Niall, all of them, clapping him on the back. Welcome back, man. You got your girl back.
My chest aches, a physical hollowing out.
I’m about to turn away, to flee back into the shadows, when a figure stumbles out of the bar’ side door, alone. The streetlight catches the chestnut curls, the familiar slope of his shoulders. Harry. He’s by the dumpster alley, fumbling with his phone. His head is down.
Without thinking, I step behind a large oak tree, my heart hammering against my ribs. Just keep walking. Don’t let him see you.
But then I hear his voice, thick and slurry with drink, raised not in celebration but in frustration.
“
“No, listen to me—it’s not… God, it’s not that simple.”
He’s pacing, a short, agitated path in the gravel. The blue light of his phone screen illuminates his face from below, carving deep shadows under his eyes. He looks wrecked.
“I was there, Kendall. I saw her.” His voice drops, but the wind carries it right to me. “She fucking gutted me. Do you get that?”
My breath catches. Ice forms in my veins. He’s talking about the poem.
“Because it was real! And what we’re doing in there? It feels like a fucking museum exhibit.” He’s slurring, words tripping over emotion. “I can’t just pretend I didn’t hear that. I can’t pretend I don’t—”
He stops, runs a hand through his curls so violently it must hurt. He listens to the response on the other end, his posture slumping. “Yeah. Okay. Fine. I’ll be in. In a minute.”
The call ends. He doesn’t move. He just stares at his phone, then hurls it against the dumpster with a sharp, plastic crack. The sound is swallowed by the bass from inside. He braces his hands on his knees, head hanging.
I step out from behind the tree. The frozen grass crunches under my boot.
He goes still. Slowly, he straightens up and turns. His green eyes find me in the half-dark, widening. For a long moment, we just stare. The noise from the bar feels miles away.
“Nikki.” My name is a raw exhale, clouding in the cold air between us.
“You heard it,” I say. It isn’t a question.
“Every word.” He takes a shaky step forward. “You wrote that… about us. About me.”
“I wrote it about me.” My voice is tighter than I want it to be. “About what it does to a person. To be a secret.”
He closes the distance until I can smell the whiskey on him, the faint, familiar scent of his detergent underneath. His eyes are bloodshot, roaming my face like he’s trying to memorize it. “You called it ‘The Arrangement.’ You made our bed sound like a fucking corporate merger.”
“That’s what it was, Harry.”
“It wasn’t.” His hand comes up, fingers hovering near my cheek but not touching. “It was never that for me. You have to know that.”
I laugh, a sharp, broken sound. “What was it, then? Because from where I’m standing, you got a welcome-back party thrown by your girlfriend tonight. I got a consolation flyer and a ‘thanks for walking the dog.’”
“She’s not my—”
“Don’t.” I cut him off, finally finding my anger. It burns through the hurt, glorious and clarifying. “Don’t lie to me now. Not after I stood up there and showed you everything. You left. You just walked out.”
“I was scared!” The confession explodes from him, loud enough to echo off the brick wall. He lowers his voice, leaning in. “You fucking terrify me. What I feel for you… it isn’t clean. It isn’t easy. It’s this huge, messy thing that doesn’t fit in my life, and I panicked. I saw Kendall and I thought… maybe that was the easier fix.”
“Is it?” I whisper.
“No.” The word is final. “It’s a ghost. You’re… you’re right here. You’re real.”
His control shatters. His hand finally cups my jaw, thumb stroking my cheekbone. It’s not gentle. It’s desperate. “Tell me to go back inside, Nikki. Tell me to go back to her, and I will. I’ll walk away and I won’t bother you again. But if you don’t…”
His other hand finds my hip, fingers digging in through the fabric of my jeans. His breath is hot against my lips. “If you don’t, I am going to take you somewhere and I am going to ruin whatever the fuck is left of those ‘rules.’ I need to feel you. I need it so bad it’s making me stupid.”
Every cell in my body is screaming. This is a terrible idea. This is heartbreak waiting to happen. But his eyes are stripped bare, all the charming pretenses gone, and the want in them mirrors my own too perfectly.
“Don’t go back inside,” I say.
A rough sound escapes his throat. He captures my mouth in a kiss that’s all hunger and no finesse. It tastes like whiskey and apology and need. His tongue pushes past my lips, claiming, and I open for him, my hands fisting in his jacket to pull him closer.
He breaks the kiss, breathing heavily. “My place. Liam’s gone for the weekend.”
We don’t speak in the cab. He just holds my hand, his grip almost painful, staring out the window. His thumb rubs frantic circles on my knuckles. The silence is thick, charged. I can feel the heat coming off him.
His apartment is dark, smelled of stale beer and boy. He kicks the door shut and it echoes. Then his mouth is on mine again, backing me into the wall beside it. The impact knocks the air from my lungs.
“I need to see you,” he murmurs against my lips, his hands already pulling at my sweater. “All of you. Now.”
He helps me yank it over my head. My bra follows, clasp undone with a quick, practiced twist of his fingers. The cold air hits my skin, then his hands, warm and rough, cover my breasts. He bends his head, taking a nipple into his mouth, sucking hard until I cry out, my head thudding back against the wall.
“You wrote about my mouth,” he says, voice muffled against my skin. He nips at the tender flesh. “You called it ‘a beautifully cruel paradox.’ I fucking thought about that all night. While she was talking. While they were toasting. All I could think was… I want to be cruel. I want to be so good to you it hurts.”
He drops to his knees, his hands making quick work of my button and zipper. He drags my jeans and underwear down my legs in one violent motion. “Step out.”
I do, shivering. He looks up at me, from this vantage, and the raw hunger on his face is devastating. He hooks an arm around my thigh and pulls me to his mouth.
He doesn’t tease. His tongue licks a broad, wet stripe through my folds, then zeroes in on my clit. He sucks it, hard, and my knees buckle. He holds me up, his other arm wrapping around my ass to keep me there. He eats me like he’s starving, like he’s trying to devour every unspoken word between us. The obscene, wet sounds fill the dark hallway. I moan, my fingers tangling in his curls, pulling.
“That’s it,” he growls, the vibration making me shudder. “Fucking use me. Get yours.”
The coil in my abdomen winds tight, brutally fast. His tongue is relentless, circling, flicking, penetrating me shallowly before returning to my clit. He groans against me, the sound of a man getting exactly what he deserves. “Taste so fucking good. Always did. Mine.”
The possessive word, growled into my core, tips me over. I come with a sharp cry, my body convulsing against his mouth. He rides it out, lapping at me until I’m sensitive and pushing at his shoulders.
He stands, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He’s fully hard, the outline of his cock straining against his jeans. He pushes me, turning me to face the wall. “Hands flat. Stay.”
I hear the rustle of his clothes, the rip of a foil packet. Then his body presses against my back, skin to skin, searing hot. His cock, sheathed, nudges between my thighs from behind, sliding through the slickness he made.
“You feel that?” he whispers in my ear, biting the lobe. “That’s what you do to me. Every fucking time.”
He guides himself to my entrance and pushes in, not slowly. He fills me in one deep, relentless stroke that makes us both gasp. He’s big, and I’m tight, and the feeling is so intensely familiar it’s a new kind of pain. He bottoms out, hips flush against my ass, and stays there, trembling.
“God,” he chokes out. “Fuck. Nikki.”
Then he moves. He fucks me with a furious, driving rhythm, his hands braced on the wall on either side of my head. The apartment is silent except for the slap of skin, our ragged breaths, the creak of the wall under the force. Each thrust is a punctuation mark. This. Real.
“Tell me you feel this,” he demands, his voice ragged. “Tell me it’s not just me.”
“I feel it,” I gasp, pushing back against him, taking him deeper. “It’s not just you.”
He swears, a filthy, beautiful string of words. One hand leaves the wall and wraps around my throat, not squeezing, just holding, a hot brand of possession. The other slides around my hip, fingers finding my clit again, rubbing rough, urgent circles.
“Come again,” he orders. “Come on my cock. I want to feel you swallow me up.”
The dual sensations are too much. The fullness, the friction, his commanding voice. It builds again, a deeper, more seismic wave. I shatter, my inner muscles clenching around him in rhythmic pulses. My cry is muffled against the wall.
The feeling triggers his own end. With a broken groan, he drives into me one last, perfect time and holds there, his body bowing over mine as he empties himself into the condom. His forehead rests between my shoulder blades, his breath scorching my skin.
We stay like that, pinned to the wall by gravity and spent passion, for a long time. His softening cock still inside me. His hand slowly loosens from my throat, stroking the skin there in a silent apology.
The reality begins to seep back in, cold and unwelcome. The silence now feels heavy, loaded. He pulls out gently, and I feel the loss immediately. I hear him dispose of the condom.
When he turns me around, his face is a battlefield of emotion. Wonder, shame, fear.
He opens his mouth to speak, but his phone, salvaged from the alley, buzzes violently on the floor near our discarded clothes. The screen lights up the dim room.
KENDALL flashes across the display, over and over.
The spell breaks.
The spell breaks.
The buzzing is an obscene intrusion, a jagged electric saw cutting through the fragile quiet we’d just built. His eyes, which had been so clear, cloud over with a familiar, frustrating guilt. He looks from me to the phone, then back to me, and I watch the shutters fall behind his gaze.
“Don’t answer it,” I say. My voice sounds strange, used.
He doesn’t move. The phone finally goes silent. The screen darkens. For three seconds, there is hope.
Then it starts buzzing again, skittering on the hardwood. KENDALL. It is a siren call to a simpler, emptier version of his life. I see the pull of it in the tightening of his jaw.
I bend, picking up my jeans and sweater from the tangle of our clothes. The fabric is cold. “You should get that.”
“Nikki, wait.”
“For what?” I step into my jeans, my movements sharp, jerky. The soreness between my thighs feels like an accusation. “For you to explain how this,” I gesture between our naked bodies, “isn’t you choosing? You’re in her bed, but you’re fucking me in a hallway. What does that make me, Harry?”
He rakes both hands through his hair. “It’s not that simple. There’s history. There’s expectation—”
“There’s bullshit.” I yank my sweater over my head. My purple curls snag in the wool. “You heard my poem. You know what it did to me, those months of being your secret. And now, the minute she’s back, you’re making me one again. A better-hidden one.”
He grabs his own jeans, stepping into them. “It wasn’t like that tonight. This wasn’t some planned deception. I saw you, and I… I lost my mind. You have to believe that.”
“I believe you wanted to get laid.” The words are meant to wound him, and they do. He flinches. “I believe you’re confused. But belief doesn’t change the fact that your phone is ringing for her, and I’m the one putting my clothes on to leave.”
The phone stops, then immediately starts a third time. The persistence is aggressive. It fills the whole dim apartment.
“So what do you want me to do?” His voice rises, edged with a panic that mirrors my own crumbling insides. “Throw away a two-year history in one night because we had a good fuck?”
The air leaves my lungs. A good fuck. He might as well have slapped me. The visceral memory of his mouth, his hands, his cock inside me—it curdles into something shameful.
“Yeah,” I whisper, nodding slowly. “That’s exactly what I want you to do. Because if it was just a ‘good fuck,’ then your history shouldn’t be a problem. You should be able to walk away from it. From her.”
I find my boots, sit on the floor to pull them on. My hands are shaking. The small dagger on my ribcage feels like it’s burning, a stupid, permanent mark of a fleeting impulse.
He stands there, shirtless, torn, the phone rattling on the floor between us like a live grenade. He doesn’t pick it up. He doesn’t move to stop me.
That is my answer. The clearest one he’s given me all night.
I stand, walk to the door. My body feels both heavy and hollow.
“Nikki.” It’s a plea, but a weak one.
I open the door. The hallway light is brutally bright. “Go back to your party, Harry.”
I don’t look back. I walk down the stairs, each step echoing the final, dull thud of my heart. The cold night air hits me like a sobering splash of water. I make it halfway across campus before the tears come, hot and silent and furious.
I don’t go home. I can’t face Aria’s knowing eyes, her justified “I told you so.” I end up at the 24-hour diner off campus, in a sticky vinyl booth under fluorescent lights. I order coffee I don’t drink.
My phone buzzes once. A text.
Harry: It wasn’t just a good fuck. You know it wasn’t.
I stare at the words. They are a life raft thrown from a sinking ship, but the ship is still choosing to go down. I don’t reply. A minute later, another buzz.
Harry: I’m sorry.
I turn my phone face down. The waitress refills my cold coffee. The sunrise is a gray smear through the greasy window when I finally leave.
The next two days pass in a numb haze. I go to classes, take notes I don’t read. Aria watches me but, bless her, doesn’t push. She just leaves a grilled cheese sandwich on my desk one night, the comfort food of our childhood.
On the third day, I see them.
I’m cutting through the student union, head down, when the sound of his laughter stops me dead. It’s the easy, charming laugh he uses in public. I look up.
They’re by the big stone fireplace. Kendall is perched on the arm of a chair, long blonde hair cascading over one shoulder. She’s leaning into Harry, who is standing beside her, one hand resting on the back of the chair near her hip. It’s a casual, possessive gesture. He’s listening to something Liam is saying, a half-smile on his face.
He looks relaxed. Normal. Like the man who fucked me senseless against a wall and then watched me walk away simply doesn’t exist.
Kendall says something, tilting her face up to him. He looks down at her, and the smile he gives her is fond. Uncomplicated. It’s a knife, twisted slowly.
As if sensing the weight of my stare, his eyes lift. They scan the crowd and land on me. The fondness evaporates. His smile dies. His hand slips from the chair back.
We look at each other across the crowded room. The noise fades to a dull roar. His mouth forms my name, silently.
Kendall follows his gaze. Her perfectly sculpted eyebrows draw together. Then she smiles, a slow, cold curve of her lips. She places a deliberate hand on Harry’s arm, pulling his attention back to her. She says something. He looks down at her, conflicted, and then back at me.
But the moment is broken. The spell, again, shattered by her simple touch.
I turn and walk away, my blood roaring in my ears. This is the reality. This is the choice. I have my answer, painted in vivid, public color.
The anger returns, a cleaner, sharper force than the grief. It fuels me. That night, I open my purple notebook. I write a new poem. It’s called “The Ghost.” It’s about watching your own heart haunt someone else’s life, invisible and ignored.
I am halfway through when my phone buzzes. Not a text. An actual call. Harry’s name illuminates the screen.
I let it ring. Once. Twice. On the third ring, I pick it up. I say nothing.
I can hear his breathing, ragged. The background sounds of the bar, the distant thump of music from The Oak, are gone. He’s somewhere quiet.
“I can’t breathe,” he says, his voice raw and stripped bare. No greeting. No preamble.
“That sounds like a personal problem.”
“She’s here. At my apartment. She’s asleep in my bed.” The words tumble out, choked. “I’m in the fucking bathroom, Nikki. I’m locked in the bathroom because I can’t… I can’t lie next to her. I close my eyes and all I see is you. I smell you on my sheets even though she’s in them.”
I press the phone closer to my ear, my heart a frantic drum against my ribs. “So leave. Walk out.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“You keep saying that. ‘It’s not easy.’ What that means is, it’s not worth the cost. I’m not worth the cost of the mess.” My voice is steady, cold. It surprises me.
“You are.” The desperation in his tone is a live wire. “You have to know you are. What I feel for you… it fucking terrifies me. With her, it’s just… it’s nothing. It’s static. With you, it’s a lightning storm. It’s all I think about.”
“Then prove it.”
“How?” The word is a plea.
“End it. Tonight. Go in there, wake her up, and end it. Then call me.” I pause, letting the challenge hang in the static between us. “If you don’t, don’t call me again. Ever.”
I end the call before he can reply. I sit in the dark of my dorm room, clutching the phone to my chest. I wait.
The minutes tick by. Five. Ten. Twenty.
An hour passes, silent.
The poem in my notebook remains unfinished. The ghost, it seems, has been laid to rest.
I close the book. I don’t cry. I just feel a vast, empty stillness. It’s over.
Then, a soft knock at my door.
Not Aria’s rhythmic tap. This is hesitant. Urgent.
I freeze. My heart stops, then restarts with a painful lurch.
I walk to the door, my bare feet silent on the cool floor. I don’t ask who it is. I already know. I can feel him on the other side, a turbulent energy seeping through the wood.
I unlock the door and open it.
He’s there. Hair a mess, eyes wild, chest heaving like he ran the whole way. He’s wearing a thin t-shirt and sweats, no jacket. He looks unraveled.
“She’s gone,” he says, the words a gust of breath. “I did it.”
He doesn’t wait for an invitation. He steps forward, crossing the threshold, and his hands come up to frame my face. They’re icy cold. “I told her it was over. That I was in love with someone else.”
The world tilts. The words hang in the space between us, immense and fragile.
He searches my face, his own a landscape of fear and hope. “I’m so sorry. For every second I made you doubt that. For being a coward.”
I should make him say more. I should be careful. But the emptiness inside me is already flooding with a reckless, terrifying light.
“Say it again,” I whisper.
“I love you, Nikki.” He says it clearly, each word a vow. “I’m in love with you. It’s you. It’s only ever been you.”
He kisses me. It’s not like the fevered kiss in the alley, or the desperate one in his hallway. This one is deep, slow, and devastatingly sure. It tastes like truth and apology and a terrifying future. I kiss him back, my hands fisting in his shirt, pulling him fully into my room, into my life.
He kicks the door shut. This time, there is no buzzing phone. No other claim on him.
His mouth leaves mine to trail down my neck. “I need you,” he murmurs against my skin, his voice thick. “I need to be inside you when I tell you again. I need to feel you believe it.”
My fingers push under his shirt, finding the hot skin of his back. I pull the fabric up and he breaks away just long enough to yank it over his head. My own sleep shirt follows, then my shorts. We don’t make it to the bed. We sink to the rug beside my desk, a tangle of limbs and urgent hands.
There’s a new ownership in his touch now, a reverence mixed with the raw hunger. He worships my body with his mouth—sucking my nipples until they peak into hard, aching points, licking a burning path down my stomach. He hooks his thumbs in the waistband of my panties and pulls them down, his eyes dark as he looks at me, spread open before him.
“So fucking beautiful,” he growls. “All mine.”
He pushes my thighs apart and buries his face between them. His tongue is a relentless, knowing thing. He licks into me, deep, then flattens his tongue against my clit, applying a perfect, steady pressure. He’s not just trying to make me come; he’s trying to rewrite every doubt. Each flick, each suck, is a promise. I cry out, my hips arching off the floor, my hands gripping his hair.
“That’s it,” he says, his breath hot against my wet flesh. “Come for me. Let me taste how much you want this.”
I shatter quickly, overwhelmed by the intensity of his focus. My orgasm rolls through me, sharp and sweet. He licks me through it, gently now, until I’m trembling and sensitive.
He moves up my body, fumbling with his sweats. I help him, pushing them down over his hips. His cock springs free, thick and hard. He grabs a condom from his discarded pocket, sheathes himself with shaking hands.
He positions himself between my legs, his weight on his elbows, caging me in. The head of his cock presses against my entrance, already slick from his mouth. He doesn’t push in. He just holds there, his eyes locked on mine.
“I love you,” he says again, and then he sinks into me, inch by devastating inch, until he’s fully seated.
We both moan. It’s different. The physical act is the same—the stretch, the friction, the exquisite fullness—but the space it occupies in the universe has shifted. It’s no longer a hidden thing. It’s claimed.
He begins to move, a slow, deep rhythm that feels like a conversation. Each withdrawal is a question, each thrust is the answer. I wrap my legs around his waist, pulling him deeper, meeting him stroke for stroke.
“Look at me,” he pleads, his pace increasing. I open my eyes. His face is flushed, his lips parted, his gaze utterly open. “I love you. I love you. I love you.”
He chants it like a prayer, his thrusts becoming harder, faster. The desk leg rattles against the floor. My back scrapes on the rug but I don’t care. All I feel is him, everywhere, the words and the motion fusing into a single, undeniable truth.
“I love you, too,” I gasp, the confession torn from me. It’s terrifying. It’s the most real thing I’ve ever said.
He cries out, a raw, broken sound, and his rhythm shatters. He drives into me one last, deep time and holds, his body shuddering as he comes. I feel his release, the hot pulse inside the condom, and it triggers my own, a second wave that clenches around him, milking him through his pleasure.
He collapses onto me, his full weight a comforting anchor. His face is buried in my neck, his breath hot and ragged against my skin. We stay like that for a long time, slick with sweat, hearts hammering against each other’s ribs.
Eventually, he rolls to the side, taking me with him, keeping me tucked against his chest. Our breathing slowly calms in the dark room.
Outside, a car passes, its headlights painting a brief, moving stripe across the ceiling. The real world is still out there, with all its complications. Kendall. His friends. The inevitable fallout.
But here, on the floor, sticky and spent and tangled together, there is only this new, fragile truth. We have crossed a line. There is no going back.
He presses a kiss to my forehead, his lips lingering. “What now?” he whispers.
I curl closer into the heat of his body, tracing the lines of the tattoo on his bicep I know so well. For the first time, the future doesn’t feel like a threat waiting in the shadows.
It feels like a page, blank and full of possibility.
“Now,” I say softly into the dark, “we find out.”