Chapter 48 Not Pining
Elias POV
I am not pining.
This is something I tell myself on Thursday morning while getting dressed and then again at breakfast and then one more time while walking to my ten o'clock lecture, which is the number of times you tell yourself something before it starts to sound like a confession rather than a fact.
He is at an away game. He is three hours from here on a team bus doing the thing he has spent his entire university life preparing for. He texted me last night when they arrived, the hotel name like he promised, a brief message with his schedule, nothing that asked anything of me. I texted back something easy and went to sleep.
I am fine.
I go to my lecture. I take notes. I contribute to the discussion in a way that makes the professor nod approvingly. I eat a proper lunch. I spend two hours in the studio working on the personal project I have been putting off for months, and something about the afternoon light through the tall windows and the particular quiet of the space finally makes the work move. I fill four pages. I lose track of time.
This is the version of myself that exists when I am not orienting around someone else's gravity. It is still me. In some ways it is more me than the version that has been running at a slight angle toward Noah Carter for the past several years.
I like this version.
I need to remember to keep coming back to her.
Ivy drags me out on Thursday evening to an event in the arts building, a student exhibition from the final-year photography cohort. I am not in the mood and I go anyway, which is the correct decision approximately ninety percent of the time.
The work is good. One photographer in particular has a series of portraits that stops me in the middle of the room. Ordinary people photographed in the places they feel most themselves. A woman in her kitchen at six in the morning. A teenage boy backstage before a school play, half in costume. An elderly man in an allotment surrounded by things he has grown.
There is one of a girl sitting on a wall in the rain, not sheltering, not performing discomfort. Just sitting. Looking out at something the frame does not show. She is completely herself in a way that the camera has caught without disturbing.
I stand in front of it for a long time.
Ivy appears at my elbow. "Good, right?"
"Yeah."
"She did that whole series in a week. Just walked around and photographed people being themselves when they forgot someone was watching."
I think about that. Being yourself when you forget someone is watching. For me those moments are rare enough to feel like something worth protecting when they happen.
"I want to write something like this," I say. Not really to Ivy. Just out loud.
"Like a portrait series?"
"Like something that catches people being real. In words."
Ivy looks at me sideways. "That's literally just good writing."
"I know. I'm working up to it."
We leave the exhibition at nine and walk back across campus and the night is cool and easy and I feel the three days of careful distance from Noah like a physical thing, present but not heavy.
I check my phone once.
He has not messaged since yesterday.
I think about texting him. I decide not to. Not because I am keeping score, not because I am making a point. Just because he is in the middle of something that matters to him deeply and I do not need to reach into it. We are okay. The space between us right now is not damage. It is just space.
Two people can be real and still have space.
I am still learning that. But I am learning it.
Back in the dorm, Ivy makes tea and I sit on my bed and look at the pages I filled this afternoon. They are rough and uneven and some of it is very bad writing and some of it surprises me with how close it gets to the thing I am trying to say.
I open a new document on my laptop.
I type: What it feels like to exist visibly in a world that has not decided what to do with you yet.
I stare at that title for a while. Then I start writing underneath it.
I write for an hour without stopping.
When I finally look up, Ivy is asleep and the tea has gone cold and it is nearly midnight. I save the document with a title that is just today's date.
Outside the window, the campus is dark and quiet.
Not pining. Not waiting.
Just here.