Chapter 3: The Application
The application portal stared back at her, a sterile grid of text boxes and upload buttons.The cursor blinked beside ‘Destination: Barcelona, Spain’. It looked so far away.It looked like a fantasy.
Nikki lit a cigarette, the first she’d had in weeks, and blew smoke at the screen.The taste was acrid, a punishment. She typed slowly, meticulously.Art History 302: Modernist Revolutions. GPA: 3.8.Language Proficiency: Intermediate Spanish. She fabricated a convincing lie about seeking ‘global perspectives in post-modern artistic discourse’. The truth—I need to get the fuck away from here before I dissolve into his shadow—had no place on the form.
Her phone buzzed, skittering on the desk. A photo from Leo: him and Amara making stupid faces outside the library, a bright blue sky behind them.Wyd grumpy?Coffee run?
Her fingers hovered.She could tell them.They’d cheer. They’d ask a hundred practical questions she hadn’t considered.They’d make it real. She deleted the draft reply three times before settling on: Buried in work.Rain check? She needed to keep it hers, this fragile, seedling plan.To expose it to air felt like risking it being trampled.
She spent the next two days in a self-imposed quarantine. She went to class, she ate in her room, she worked on a new painting—broad, angry slashes of charcoal grey and a single, violent streak of vermilion.She ignored the growing pile of texts from Harry. They shifted in tone, a predictable gradient: playful (miss u x), to confused (u ok?), to irritated (Nikki.), to, finally, late last night, a simple: We need to talk.She hadn’t answered. The silence was a new muscle she was learning to flex.It ached.On the third day, a knock shattered her focus. It wasn’t the tentative tap of a friend.It was firm, impatient.She knew. Her heart did a frantic, traitorous squeeze. She closed her laptop, hiding the application, and walked to the door.She didn’t check the peephole.She opened it.He filled the frame. He wore a black hoodie, the sleeves pushed up over his forearms, his hair a messy halo of curls.He looked tired.Beautiful.He smelled like fresh air and faint cigarette smoke.
“You’ve been ignoring me,” he said.No hello.
“I’ve been busy,” she replied, not moving from the doorway.
He looked past her, into the room, his gaze taking in the new painting, the organized chaos.“Yeah. Looks it.” He didn’t wait for an invitation. He just stepped forward, forcing her to step back or let him walk into her.She retreated.He closed the door behind him.The room shrank. He walked to her desk, his eyes scanning the closed laptop, the empty coffee cups, the ashtray. He picked up the note he’d left.I’ll call you later. He crumpled it slowly, his jaw tight, and dropped it into the trash.
“You didn’t call,” she said, hearing the petty accusation in her own voice.He turned to face her, his eyes dark. “You didn’t answer your phone.What was the point?” He took a step closer. The air crackled with the static of all the unspoken things. “What’s going on, Nikki?”
“Nothing’s going on.”
“Bullshit.” Another step. She could see the faint shadow of stubble along his jaw, the pulse in his throat.“You left. You ran out in the middle of the night.Then you go radio silent. That’s not nothing.”
“Maybe I just needed space.”
“Space?” He gave a short, hollow laugh. “From what?From this?” His hand shot out, not to hit, but to gesture violently between them. “This is the one thing that doesn’t need fucking space. It needs air to burn.”
He was right, and the truth of it enraged her. “It’s burning me alive, Harry.”
The raw admission hung there. He stared at her, the anger in his eyes shifting, softening into something more desperate.He closed the final distance between them. He didn’t kiss her.He just looked down at her, his breath fanning her face. “Then let it burn me too,” he whispered. “Don’t leave me alone in it.”
His hands came u