In the morning, he woke up on her futon, a thin blanket over him. She was already at her desk, scribbling equations in a notebook, a strand of hair tucked behind her ear. She didn’t turn around.
He was laid, instead, into a story. Into the soft gravity of someone who saw him. And for the first time since he’d landed, Zayn felt like he was exactly where he was supposed to be.
He walked over, heart hammering. “That’s not a beach read,” he said.
It wasn’t a line. It was a fact. Like gravity. Like the cosmic microwave background.
Later, they walked back to her apartment, a small, cluttered place with star charts on the walls and a kettle on the stove. She made him chai with ginger and black pepper, the way his mother made it. They sat on her floor, backs against the bed, and talked until the sky turned the color of a new bruise.
“You snore,” she said.
It was his third week as an international exchange student at a sprawling, sun-bleached university in Arizona. His roommate, a lacrosse player named Chad with a jawline you could cut glass on, had given him two pieces of advice: “Don’t make eye contact with the frat guys during rush week,” and “Get laid, bro. It’s America.”