The radiator clicked. Maya counted—three seconds, then four, then a gap that stretched until she realized she'd been holding her breath. She let it out slow, her shoulders dropping a fraction of an inch.
Her right hand was still on the trackpad, the mouse arrow a tiny gray wedge resting exactly where Submit had been. She hadn't moved it. Hadn't scrolled. The screen hadn't changed either—her ten words sat beneath Stillwater's reply, bare and waiting, and the cursor below them blinked with a patience that tightened her throat all over again.
She pulled her hand back. Curled it into the sleeve of her hoodie. The fabric was soft, worn thin at the cuff from months of her thumb rubbing the same spot.
No notification. No new comment bubble. Just the thread as she'd left it—her reply hanging there, the timestamp already seven minutes old. Seven minutes wasn't long. She knew that. But the internet was supposed to be fast, and Stillwater had replied so quickly the first time, and now the silence felt deliberate.
She read her own words again. I didn't think anyone would understand. The sentence looked smaller on the screen than it had felt in her chest. Smaller and more desperate and maybe that was the problem—maybe she'd come on too strong, maybe Stillwater had read it and realized she was too much, maybe—
Maya pressed her thumb against her bottom lip. The raw spot was still tender, a small sting that grounded her. She dropped her hand.
The view counter ticked up by one. Someone else was reading. Not Stillwater. Just a stranger passing through, rubbernecking at the mess she'd left on the page. She watched the number hold steady, waiting for it to climb again, but nothing happened.
She closed the laptop halfway. The hinge resisted, the screen dimming to a low glow that caught the folds of her blanket and the edge of her bare foot pressed against the wall. Beyond the window, the campus was dark and still. No cars. No voices. Just the radiator humming and the faint whir of her laptop fan and the hollow quiet of a room that knew she'd just done something she couldn't undo.
Her phone buzzed on the nightstand. She lunged for it—too fast, her elbow catching the corner of her textbook and sending it sliding to the floor with a flat smack.
The screen lit up with an email alert. Department newsletter. She swiped it away and set the phone facedown.
The radiator clicked again. Four seconds this time. Then five. Then nothing for so long she stopped counting.
She lifted the laptop screen an inch. The cursor was still blinking. The thread was unchanged. Maya let the screen fall back down and sat in the dark, her thumbnail finding the worn spot on her cuff, waiting for a chime she was no longer sure would come.
The sore was smaller than she remembered. Maya pressed harder, finding the ridge where tooth had met skin hours ago, the copper taste faint but still there. Her eyes closed without permission, and the dark behind her lids was warmer than the room.
She stayed there. Breathing. Counting the radiator's clicks like heartbeats—three, four, then the long pause where nothing happened and she had to remind herself that silence wasn't the same as rejection.
The bed creaked when she shifted. Her spine found the wall, cold through the hoodie, and she let her head fall back until the plaster pressed against her skull. The laptop was still open. She knew that. The screen was still dim. She knew that too. But keeping her eyes shut felt like hiding, and hiding felt like the only thing she was good at right now.
Seven minutes had become eleven. Stillwater might be typing. Might be asleep. Might have read her reply and closed the tab with a quiet exhale that meant too much, too fast, not what I signed up for. Maya's thumb found the sore again and this time the sting was sharp enough to make her wince.
She pulled her hand away. Pressed both palms flat against her thighs. The fabric of her sleep shorts was thin and she could feel the warmth of her own skin bleeding through.
"Stop it," she whispered. The words fell into the dark and died there. No one heard them. No one was supposed to.
A car passed outside—headlights sweeping across the ceiling in a slow arc that caught the edge of her desk, the spine of her textbook still splayed on the floor, the corner of her laptop glowing faint and patient. The light moved on and left the room darker than before.
She opened her eyes. The thread was still there. Her ten words. The blinking cursor. The timestamp now reading fourteen minutes. And beneath it—nothing. No gray bubble with Stillwater's username. No ellipsis promising a reply in progress. Just the hollow architecture of a forum that didn't care whether she fell apart in her dorm room at one in the morning.
Maya closed the laptop. Not halfway this time—all the way, the hinge clicking shut with a small finality that made her stomach drop. The room went black except for the red charge light on her phone facedown on the nightstand. She stared at it. Waiting. Daring it to buzz.
Her hand moved before she could stop it. Fingers wrapping around the phone, flipping it over, the screen lighting up with nothing new—no notifications, no messages, no sign that anyone in the world was awake and thinking about her. She set it down again. Carefully. Like it might shatter.
The radiator hummed. Four seconds. Five. Then the long quiet where Maya pressed her thumb to her lip and tasted copper and told herself that waiting was just another word for hoping, and hoping was the thing she'd promised herself she wouldn't do anymore.
Her fingers found the laptop before she'd decided to move. The hinge resisted, a small mechanical complaint, and then the screen bloomed pale and blue across her face, chasing the dark into the corners of the room.
The thread loaded. Her ten words still hanging there, the timestamp now reading seventeen minutes. She dragged her gaze down, past the blinking cursor, past the hollow white space where a reply should be—
And stopped.
Gray bubble. Stillwater's username. Three lines of text she couldn't read fast enough, couldn't read slow enough, her eyes stumbling over the words and snapping back to the beginning and starting again.
You weren't too much. You were just honest. I've been sitting here trying to figure out how to say that without sounding like I'm diagnosing you, and I think I just failed, but I meant it. You're not alone in this.
Maya read it a fourth time. Her throat closed and opened and closed again. The radiator clicked—three seconds, four—and she didn't count the gap because she was too busy pressing her knuckles against her mouth and trying to remember how to exhale.
She didn't cry. She was too tired to cry, too wrung out from seventeen minutes of hoping and not-hoping and telling herself she'd promised she wouldn't do this anymore. But something in her chest unclenched, a fist she hadn't known was clenched releasing its grip one finger at a time.
The cursor blinked below his reply. Waiting. The text box was still there, still empty, still asking her what she wanted to say next, and for the first time all night she didn't feel like she was going to be sick answering it.
She typed thank you and deleted it. Typed I'm crying and deleted that too, because it wasn't true and she didn't want to lie to him, not now. Her hands hovered over the keyboard, trembling slightly, the tremor she got when she was overwhelmed and trying not to show it.
Then she typed: I don't know why that scared me so much. She didn't delete it. She read it once, the words clean and simple and more honest than she'd been with anyone in months, and she pressed Submit before she could talk herself out of it.
The reply posted. Her words stacked beneath his, two strangers trading pieces of themselves in a thread that no one else was reading at one-thirty in the morning. Maya pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them and watched the screen, waiting, not-counting the seconds, her bare foot still pressed against the cold wall and her heart beating slow and steady and alive.