[Serena’s POV]
* Columbia University, Spring 2018 *
The library at 2 AM is a cathedral of desperation. Finals loom like an execution date, and I've been here since dinner—if instant ramen counts as dinner—surrounded by case studies and economic theory that's starting to blur into meaningless symbols.
I'm three hours into a caffeine crash when the coffee appears.
Not at my elbow. Not with fanfare. Just suddenly there—a paper cup from the good coffee shop, the one that stays open late for students like us who've confused exhaustion with productivity.
I look up. Caspian stands beside my table, his own coffee in hand, looking as wrecked as I feel. Dark circles under grey eyes. Hair disheveled from running his hands through it.
"You've been here since six." Not a question. An observation.
"So have you." I saw him when I arrived, claimed the opposite corner like we're still enemies who need maximum distance.
"Figured you could use this." He gestures to the coffee. "You get that look. Around hour seven. Like you're contemplating homicide or dropping out."
The fact that he's tracked this—my breaking points, my timeline—does something complicated to my chest.
"Thanks." I wrap my hands around the cup. Still hot. Perfect temperature. He timed this.
"Can I..." He gestures to the chair across from me. "Everywhere else is full."
It's a lie. The library is half empty. But I nod anyway, because some part of me wants him close.
He sits. Opens his laptop. And we study.
Twenty minutes pass before he breaks the silence. "What circle of academic hell are you in?"
"Behavioral economics. Trying to understand why people make irrational decisions." I glance up. "Currently questioning my own rationality for taking this class."
"Ah." He leans back. "The 'humans are predictably stupid' field of study."
"Says the guy who probably thinks markets are perfectly rational."
"I think markets are composed of idiots making emotional decisions and calling it strategy." His mouth curves. "See? We agree on something. Mark the calendar."
The banter feels dangerous. Easy. Like we're people who do this regularly instead of rivals who've spent four years drawing blood.
"What about you?" I gesture to his screen. "Let me guess. Corporate finance. Mergers and acquisitions. Preparing to crush smaller companies under your designer boot."
"International tax law, actually." He turns his laptop so I can see the dense text. "Specifically, how multinational corporations exploit loopholes to avoid paying their fair share."
I blink. "You're studying... how to close tax loopholes?"
"Don't sound so shocked. Some of us have principles hiding under the privilege." His eyes meet mine. "Besides, my father's company could use someone who actually understands ethics. Revolutionary concept, I know."
The admission costs him something. I see it in the tension around his mouth. This is vulnerability dressed as sarcasm—the only language we both speak fluently.
Another hour dissolves. We trade comments about our readings—him mocking the pretentious academic language in my textbook, me pointing out logical fallacies in his case studies. It's comfortable in a way that terrifies me. Like we've been doing this for years instead of carefully avoiding it.
"Listen to this sentence," I read aloud. "'The asymmetric information paradigm demonstrates bounded rationality constraints in heterogeneous agent models.'" I look up. "That's just 'people are bad at decisions when they don't know stuff,' right?"
"Academic writing is fifty percent unnecessary jargon, fifty percent fear of being understood." He's grinning now. Actually grinning. "They're terrified that if they write clearly, someone might realize they're just stating the obvious."
"Says the guy whose debate arguments required a thesaurus to decode."
"That was strategy. Confuse the opponent with vocabulary." He pauses. "You were the only one who never got confused. You'd just use bigger words back."
"Obstinate recalcitrance in the face of sesquipedalian obfuscation."
He laughs. The sound is startling—genuine, unguarded. "Exactly that."
Something shifts between us. Some acknowledgment that this—this ease, this understanding—has always existed underneath the warfare. That maybe we've been fighting so hard because the alternative was admitting we fit together in ways that terrified us both.
At four AM, the library announces closing. We pack up in synchronized silence, and outside, February air cuts with enough teeth to wake the dead.
We walk. Not toward my dorm or his apartment. Just walking, because stopping means this ends.
"I'm convinced academia is a conspiracy," he says suddenly. "Make the language so incomprehensible that only people with enough money for therapy can survive it."
"Therapy to cope with academic writing?"
"Therapy to cope with realizing you've spent four years learning to say simple things in complicated ways." He's smiling but there's something beneath it. Something raw. "What do we actually know now that we didn't know freshman year?"
"How to function on three hours of sleep?"
"Critical life skill." His tone shifts. Goes quieter. "I'm going to miss this. Us. The fighting."
I stop walking. Actually stop, because the admission is too raw. Too honest.
Want flares in my chest so sharp it steals breath. Four years of want I've dressed as hatred because that was survivable. But this—this acknowledgment that he'll miss me—cracks something open I can't close again.
"It doesn't have to end." The words escape before wisdom stops them. Before I can protect myself. "After graduation, we could—"
"I can't." He cuts me off. Surgical precision. "My father expects me in the company. Full time. No distractions."
Distraction.
The word detonates. Reduces everything—every late-night study session I've imagined, every possibility I've been too afraid to want—to something inconvenient. Something he'll set aside when real life demands it.
The humiliation is instant. Corrosive. Because I revealed myself. Asked for continuation, for possibility, for us—and got dismissed with a single word that means: you're not worth the complication.
"Right." I force it past the constriction in my throat. "Of course."
"Serena—"
But I'm walking. Fast enough that following requires effort he won't give. My eyes burn with tears I refuse to shed where he might see them.
Behind me, silence. He doesn't call out. Doesn't follow.
The confirmation lands like a blade: I'm not worth chasing.
I make it to my dorm before the tears come. Hot and angry and humiliating. Because I let myself believe—for four hours in a library, for one walk where we laughed—that maybe we were something other than rivals.
That maybe the way he watched me, brought me coffee, existed in comfortable silence meant something beyond temporary amusement.
But I'm a distraction. The scholarship girl who doesn't fit his predetermined trajectory. The complication his father would never approve of.
I lie in my narrow bed and let the want curdle into something uglier. Safer. Because rage is survivable. Rage keeps you intact when desire would hollow you out.
By graduation night, I'm exhausted. Four years of wanting someone who can't want me back. The cheap champagne tastes like freedom and fuck-it-all recklessness.
When I see him on that balcony, looking lost, some desperate part of me thinks: one night where he can't walk away.
One night where I'm not a distraction. Where I matter enough to stay for. Even if it's just until morning.
Even if morning confirms what I already know: that some people aren't meant to be kept. Only temporarily borrowed before they remember where they actually belong.
The logic is drunk and broken and makes perfect sense. Makes sense right up until I wake to empty sheets and the devastating confirmation that I was right all along.