You know that arching, corrosive feeling, when you’ve numbed yourself with routine so thoroughly it becomes a kind of narcotic? Loneliness doesn’t vanish, of course—it sits there, patient and possessive, like a soul bent on devouring you whenever you stop moving. And so you work, you read, you exhaust yourself with schedules, with golden rules you’ve drawn up only to keep the noise at bay. Rules which you believed, for a long while, were inviolate. Bed at this time. Up at this time. Study, speak little, let nothing run too deep. And if you broke them? God—it was laughable, wasn’t it, how transgressive it felt to ruin something so insignificant. To stay up too late. To sit outside when you should have been asleep. To bend your own structure until it cracked. And yet, the smallest fracture made you feel like a rebel, like a god.

You wished for more. More of the late nights, when anxiety would have pinned you down, but the company—the voice, his voice—freed you of it. When you sat on benches, not talking sense, neither of you saying I don’t know because somehow you always did. Every sentence, even the half-formed ones, had answers. And in the quiet drift closer and closer, you two, as if the dark itself pushed you together, cats gathering under the orange lamps, strangers smoking by the library steps.

You should have known. God, you did know. When you broke your rules once, it was already too late. You wanted more. Greedy. Hungry. You’d tasted something too dangerous—warmth, attention, a pulse you wanted quicker under your hand—and you wished for it shamelessly. You thought of his heart, steady against your shoulder, and imagined it faster, ragged, because of you. And in wanting that you tipped the balance.

And now—cut off. No more him. He said he liked you, yes, but it was fragile, conditional. And then it broke. Now he walks past you in the halls like you’re only a column in the architecture of Hampden, something to be skirted around. You, who carry so many of his words stored in your chest like contraband, reduced to nothing. It’s a kind of death, this silence, this exile. And worse—how do you return? How do you go back to your old life, when you didn’t even know what you were missing? When the smallest morsels once made you feel full, and now you can’t help but crave the whole feast?

You see him now. After class, the yard stretching pale and cold around Hampden’s brick and stone, Henry at a distance, back turned. You ache for something shameful, cruel even: that he’ll turn, that he’ll see you, that he’ll come and sit as if nothing were broken, as if those nights till six in the morning had never stopped. You know you were selfish, you know you pressed your hunger onto him, made him carry something he never wanted. And yet, still, you want.

And then—he does turn. His gaze brushes past the others and, for one quick, disarming instant, lands on you. His glasses catch the light, his voice low, precise, carrying just enough irony to sting: “I thought you’d gone back to your room. It’s rather cold to be loitering here.”