Jenna's dorm room smells like cinnamon candles and the faint ghost of something burned in the microwave last night. I'm sitting cross-legged on her floor, my shoulder pressed against Liam's, a shared blanket draped over both our knees that Jenna threw at us when we walked in. "You two are a unit now," she'd said. "Units get the good blanket."
My sweatpants are his—gray, soft from a hundred washes, the waistband rolled twice to stay up—and I can feel the weight of my key in the pocket, pressing against my thigh. A reminder. I carry it everywhere now.
Jenna's laptop glows on the coffee table, rental listings scrolling in a slow parade of kitchens and living rooms and bathrooms I'm supposed to imagine myself in. "This one has a dishwasher," she says, tilting the screen toward us. "And the walls aren't that shade of landlord beige. They're more... sad eggshell."
"Dishwasher's non-negotiable," Marcus says from the armchair, his boots propped on Jenna's ottoman. He's got a beer in one hand, the bottle sweating onto his thigh. "I'm not spending my summer scrubbing pans because someone wanted to save forty bucks a month."
"Someone," Jenna repeats, raising an eyebrow. "You mean you."
"I absolutely mean me."
The girl on Jenna's bed—she was here when we arrived, introduced herself as Rachel or Rebekah or something with an R, a friend from Jenna's psych class with wire-rimmed glasses and a hoodie that says I Read Banned Books—scrolls through her phone and says, "What about something closer to campus? The ones near the art building are cheaper and nobody's been murdered there in like, two years."
"Two years is not the flex you think it is," Marcus says.
Liam's quiet beside me. He's been quiet since we sat down, his shoulder solid against mine, his hand finding mine under the blanket within the first thirty seconds. His thumb moves in slow circles on my palm, tracing and retracing the same path like he's memorizing it. He's nodding along to the conversation, his face neutral, but I know him now. I know the difference between his relaxed quiet and his thinking quiet.
This is thinking quiet.
I squeeze his hand once. He squeezes back, but his thumb doesn't stop moving.
"What about spring break?" Jenna asks, and the words land like a stone in still water.
Liam's thumb stops.
"That's cutting it close to graduation," Marcus says, and something shifts in the room. The rental chatter dies. Jenna's hand hovers over her trackpad. Even the girl on the bed looks up from her phone.
The silence stretches, filling with everything nobody's saying.
Forty-two days. I've been counting them in my head since Liam showed me his phone, since that number burned itself into my ribs. Forty-two days until he's not a senior. Forty-two days until the countdown app hits zero and the question—what now—stops being theoretical.
Jenna's looking at me. Marcus is looking at Liam. The girl on the bed is looking at all of us like she walked into the middle of a movie.
I feel Liam's thumb start moving again, slower now. A question.
I squeeze his hand once more, and I say it before I can talk myself out of it. "I think we should go."
Jenna's eyebrows go up. "Go where?"
"Somewhere." The word comes out before I've fully formed the thought, but as soon as it's in the air, I know it's true. "Spring break. Together. Before—" I stop. Before he leaves. Before everything changes. Before the clock runs out on forty-two days of having him this close. "Before the semester ends."
Liam turns his head to look at me. His pale blue eyes are unreadable for a long second, and then something soft breaks open in them. "You want to go somewhere?"
"I want to go with you."
The words feel too big for Jenna's dorm room. Too honest for a Tuesday afternoon with a half-empty beer bottle and a laptop full of rental listings. But they're out now, and I don't take them back.
Marcus whistles low. "Damn. She's serious."
Jenna's grin spreads slow and bright. "Okay, okay. Now we're talking. Where? When? How long? I need details."
"I don't know yet." I look at Liam. "We haven't—we just talked about it. But I want to."
"Spring break is three weeks away," the girl on the bed says, and when I glance over, she's already on her phone. "Last week of March. You'd have to book soon if you want something decent."
"See?" Jenna points at her. "Rachel's already doing logistics. This is happening."
"Rebecca," the girl says flatly, and Jenna waves a hand.
"Rebecca, Rachel, logistics queen—whatever. Point is, you're going somewhere."
Liam's thumb is still tracing circles on my palm, but slower now. Softer. Like he's not trying to figure anything out anymore. Like he's just... here, with me, in this moment.
"Where would we go?" he asks, and his voice is quiet, meant for me even though everyone can hear.
I think about it. The beach? Too far. The mountains? Too expensive. Somewhere between here and his state school, somewhere that feels like a promise instead of a goodbye.
"Somewhere with a kitchen," I say, and Jenna laughs. "Somewhere we can cook breakfast and not have to check out by eleven. Somewhere that doesn't feel like we're just waiting for Monday."
Marcus sets his beer down. "There's cabins up near Pine Ridge. My uncle used to take us fishing up there. Cheap in the off-season, like a hundred a night for a whole place."
Jenna's already typing. "Pine Ridge cabins. Let me see what we're working with."
I feel Liam's hand tighten around mine. When I look at him, he's watching me like I just said something he didn't expect. Like I surprised him.
"What?" I ask, my voice dropping lower.
He shakes his head, a small smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. "Nothing. Just—you said 'we.'"
"We," I repeat, and the word feels like a key turning in a lock. "I meant it."
His smile widens, just barely, but I see it. I feel it in the way his thumb presses harder against my palm, a secret language we've built in the space between math classes and late nights.
"Okay," Jenna says, spinning her laptop around. "Pine Ridge cabins. There's like six of them. Two are booked. The rest are open the last week of March." She looks at me. "You want me to look into it?"
I look at Liam. This isn't just my decision. It's ours.
"Yeah," he says, and his voice is steady. "Look into it."
Jenna crows. "Spring break road trip. I'm calling shotgun right now."
"Shotgun," Marcus and the girl on the bed say at the same time, and then they glare at each other.
"There will be multiple cars," Jenna says, already typing again. "I'm not fitting all of us and Marcus's ego in my Civic."
The conversation washes around us, bright and loud and full of plans. Marcus arguing about who gets to drive. The girl on the bed—Rebecca, I'm going to remember it now—suggesting a playlist rotation so nobody has to suffer through one person's music for four hours. Jenna pulling up cabin photos, debating which one has the best porch.
And underneath it all, Liam's thumb still moving on my palm, and my heart beating a rhythm I'm still learning to trust.
"You good?" I ask him, quiet enough that only he can hear.
He looks at me, and his pale blue eyes are clear. No shadows. No war. Just him, here, with me.
"Yeah," he says. "I'm good."
He lifts our joined hands and presses his lips to my knuckles. A kiss so soft I almost miss it. But I don't. I feel it.
Jenna makes a gagging noise. "Get a room. Oh wait, you already have one. Multiple, actually. You have options."
Liam doesn't let go of my hand. "Jealous?"
"Of you two being disgustingly cute? Absolutely not. Of the cabin with the hot tub that Marcus just texted me about? Extremely."
I laugh, and it feels easy. Natural. Like this is what normal feels like. A Tuesday afternoon, a dorm room, friends arguing about spring break, and the boy I love holding my hand like he's never letting go.
I think about my parents. About the call I promised myself I'd make. The one I'm still carrying in my chest like a stone I haven't decided to set down yet.
Liam catches my pause. His thumb stops moving again, and when I look at him, his head is tilted, a question in his eyes.
I shake my head. "Later," I say, and he nods. He doesn't push. He never does.
Jenna clicks open a new tab. "Okay, serious question: are we doing a group cabin or multiple cabins? Because I love you all but I also love sleeping without hearing Marcus snore through two walls."
"I don't snore," Marcus says.
"You absolutely snore. I have evidence. I have recordings."
Liam laughs beside me, a low, warm sound that I feel through his shoulder, through the blanket, through the space between us. And I let the question about my parents sit. I let it wait. Because right now, in this dorm room, with his hand in mine and spring break three weeks away and forty-two days until graduation, there's a future taking shape that I can almost see.
And for the first time in a long time, I'm not afraid of what it looks like.
"I think we should pick the one with the fire pit," I say, and Jenna looks at me with approval.
"See? She gets it. Fire pit means s'mores, and s'mores means—"
"Photos," Rebecca says dryly. "So many photos."
"Exactly." Jenna grins. "Content."
Liam's hand finds mine again under the blanket, and I wonder if he can feel how fast my heart is beating. Not from anxiety. From something lighter. Something that feels like before—before the breakup, before the move, before I learned to brace for impact.
Something that feels like starting to believe that good things don't have to end just because they're good.
Marcus leans forward, pulling up a map on his phone. "If we leave Friday after classes, we can hit the road by six. Get there before midnight."
"Assuming nobody gets lost," Jenna says.
"Assuming Sofia's the navigator and Liam doesn't touch the aux cord."
"Hey." Liam's voice is mock-offended. "My playlist is curated."
"Curated for sadness," Marcus shoots back. "It's all Bon Iver and that one band you found on Reddit."
"Bon Iver is a national treasure."
"So is silence, and I'd prefer that to twenty minutes of falsetto."
I laugh, and Liam turns to me, mock-wounded. "You're laughing at me."
"I'm laughing with you."
"You're definitely laughing at me." But he's smiling, and his thumb is tracing those circles again, and I think—
I think this is what it feels like to build something.
Not around a crisis. Not in the shadow of a goodbye. Just... here, in a dorm room, with people who don't know the shape of my past and don't need to, because they see the shape of my present.
Jenna closes her laptop with a decisive click. "Okay. I'm sending the cabin link to the group chat. We're doing this. Spring break. Pine Ridge. Fire pit. S'mores. Chaos." She points at me. "You're in charge of breakfast."
"I can work with that."
"Liam, you're in charge of keeping Sofia company while she makes breakfast."
"I accept this responsibility."
"And Marcus, you're in charge of not burning down the cabin."
"That's discrimination."
"It's experience."
The laughter fills the room, and I lean into Liam's shoulder, feel his arm slide around me, feel the blanket shift as he pulls me closer. The key in my pocket presses against my hip, warm and solid.
I came to America with a suitcase and a heart that didn't know how to stop waiting for the bad news. And somewhere between a math classroom in January and a dorm room in March, I started learning something else.
"Hey," Liam says, his mouth close to my ear. "I love you."
The words don't feel too big anymore. They feel like the only thing that makes sense.
"I love you too," I say back.
Jenna fake-gags again. Marcus throws a pillow at us. Rebecca—I'm going to remember it—sighs and says "young love" like she's forty instead of nineteen.
And I sit there, cross-legged on the floor, shoulder to shoulder with the boy I chose, the key he gave me warm in my pocket, and the future unspooling in front of us like a road I'm finally ready to drive.