It’s easy to lie with statistics. Harder to tell the truth without them. Jamie remembers the quote half-wrong—Dunkels, or someone like that—the kind of thing professors toss out in lecture halls that smell faintly of dry-erase marker and ambition. He’d written it once in the margins of a notebook he never finished, back when things were still…linear. Back when outcomes felt like they could be modeled.

Now, lying here, skin cooling under the thin Ithaca night air slipping through a cracked window, he knows there’s no clean dataset for this. No regression line to explain why he keeps ending up back in her bed.

Statistically, he shouldn’t be here.

He’d done the mental math before, in quieter moments—between pouring drinks at the bar on College Ave and wiping down sticky countertops while someone yelled for another round. Probability of re-encounter: low. Probability of reconciliation: negligible. Probability of repeating the same mistake twice—

He huffs under his breath.

Clearly not zero.

The room smells like her soap—something soft, not the harsh citrus he uses, but warmer—and underneath it, the faint trace of sweat and something he refuses to name. The galaxy lamp in the corner throws slow-moving constellations across the ceiling, across her walls, across him. Blues and violets drifting over skin like they mean something.

He used to make fun of that lamp.

Called it childish once, leaning against her desk while she glared at him, arms crossed, daring him to say it again. He had, of course. Pushed it too far. He always does.

Now the light paints her bare back in soft color as she sits on the edge of the bed, reaching for her water bottle. There are marks there—his fault, his doing—faint, blooming reminders of something neither of them is willing to define out loud. They look almost abstract under the shifting light. Like constellations of their own. Like something you could map, if you were brave enough to try.

He isn’t.

Jamie shifts onto his side, propping himself up on an elbow, eyes tracing the line of her spine without meaning to. It’s instinct, the way his attention keeps returning to her. Annoying, automatic, impossible to switch off. The same way it used to be before everything went to hell—before that thing happened, the thing neither of them names, like saying it out loud would make it solid again.

He drags a hand over his face, feeling the sting along his palm where her teeth had pressed earlier. There’ll be a mark there too. He doesn’t mind. He probably deserves worse.

You good? The words sit in his throat before he even says them, simple and stupid and loaded in ways he hates.

Because it’s never just that, with her.

Never just you okay? Never just this meant nothing.

He watches her tip her head back slightly as she drinks, throat moving, the galaxy light catching in her hair. For a second—just a second—something in his chest tightens in a way that has nothing to do with physical closeness and everything to do with memory. Late nights that weren’t like this. Laughter that didn’t come with edges. The version of them that didn’t have to pretend.

He swallows it down.

That’s kind of his whole thing.

Avoid, deflect, joke, touch—anything but actually feel the thing sitting underneath all of it.

Jamie pushes himself up, the mattress dipping under his weight as he moves closer. He doesn’t overthink it. If he does, he’ll stop, and if he stops, he might have to confront why he’s still here in the first place. So he just goes, sliding in behind her, arms wrapping around her middle like it’s muscle memory. Like his body remembers this version of them even if his head keeps insisting it’s a bad idea.

Her skin is warm against his chest. Familiar in a way that makes something in him ache.

His chin hovers near her shoulder for a beat before settling there, careful, like he’s testing whether this kind of closeness is still allowed. Like there are rules they never wrote down but both somehow understand.

His voice, when it comes, is lower than he expects. Rough around the edges.

“You good?”