Fall's Finals Preparation

Fall's Finals Preparation
The library’s fluorescent lights had begun to hum. That was how I knew it was time to leave—when the silence became loud enough to hear, when the words in my textbook started swimming off the page and reforming into shapes that made no sense. I blinked at the clock on my phone.

8:00 p.m.

Two hours and forty minutes hunched over my textbooks and notes. My spine protested as I straightened. The chair groaned. Someone three carrels down shot me a look.

I closed the textbook. The sound of it, that heavy, definitive thump felt like permission. My highlighter had bled dry somewhere around page three hundred. My notes sprawled across six pages of loose-leaf, cramped cursive that would be illegible by morning. The pressure for fall finals had crept up on all of us, a slow-tightening vise none of us had noticed until our shoulders were living somewhere near our ears.

Outside, the air bit through my jacket. Campus was quiet in that particular way it only got after dark during exam season; no laughter, no music spilling from dorm windows, just the shuffle of exhausted students trudging toward whatever passed for rest.

Our apartment windows glowed warm when I rounded the corner. I opened the door and let myself in.

Elias sat at his reading in the corner of the living room. His textbook lay open in front of him, but his pen had stopped moving. His broad shoulders curved inward, and his dark hair—usually pushed back from his forehead in that careless way I loved, had fallen forward, screening his face.

He didn’t look up when I closed the door.

Didn’t look up when I hung my jacket on the hook.

I crossed the room and stood behind his chair. His gaze was fixed on the page, but his eyes weren’t tracking. They’d gone glassy, unfocused. The same paragraph sat under his unmoving pen, its margins still blank.

My hand found his shoulder. The muscle there was knotted tight, rock-hard under my palm.

“You’re not reading anymore.”

His head lifted. Blinked. “I’m reading.” The words came out hoarse, defensive in that way exhaustion makes everything sound like an argument.

“You’ve just been staring at your notes.”

He didn’t deny it. His jaw worked for a moment, and then his shoulders dropped, not much, just a quarter-inch, but I felt it under my hand. A surrender.

“I’m exhausted.” Elias admitted and gave a long yawn.

“Come sit with me in the kitchen,” I said. My thumb traced a small circle against his shoulder blade. “I’ll make us something to eat.”

He turned his head. His cheek pressed against my knuckles. For a moment he just stayed there, breathing, and I felt the tension leaching out of him in degrees.

Then he stood.

His arms came around me first, he was always faster at that, always the one to initiate the holding. I tucked myself against his chest and breathed in laundry detergent and that sweet smell of Elias. Good smells. Home smells.

“Hey,” I murmured into his shirt.

“Hey yourself.”

We pulled back just enough to kiss; just lips against lips, soft and familiar, the kind that says I see you and I’ve got you at the same time. His mouth tasted like cold coffee.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you too.”

I set him up at the kitchen table with a glass of water and strict instructions to do nothing. Then I opened the refrigerator. Leftover cooked shrimp sat in a glass container on the middle shelf. Next to it, half a bell pepper, some carrots, a head of garlic that needed using. Spaghetti in the cabinet Olive oil. Red pepper flakes.

Spaghetti shrimp stir fry came to my mind instantly. Fast. Warm. And deliciously comforting anytime, any day.

I brought out all the ingredients I needed and I started with the slicing. The knife felt good in my hand; something tangible, something I could control. Carrots became coins under my blade. Green peppers fell into neat strips. The garlic cloves surrendered their papery skins and minced down into something fragrant and sharp.

Behind me, Elias talked.

“Marcus had a full meltdown in the departmental library today. You need to be there, he was actually sobbing. Someone had to call his mom.”

“Oh god. Poor Marcus.”

“Professor Klein assigned another twenty pages of reading. On top of the thirty from Monday.”

He continued, his voice still carried that gravel of exhaustion, but it was loosening, finding its rhythm again. “I swear she thinks we don’t have other classes.”

I scraped the carrots into a bowl and started on the peppers. “Everything’s compressed this semester in a way I just can't understand.” I remarked.

I know, I just…” Elias sighed. Ran a hand through his hair. “I’m tired of feeling like I’m always three days behind.”