“I have no idea what I’m going to do,” he admits, his voice low, quiet. “To be totally honest, I only know one thing.”
The base of my neck tingles, and I close my eyes, lean into him.
“What’s that?”
“I’ll be doing it next to you,” he says. “And I’m pretty sure I can handle anything if you’re with me.”
“Anything?”
“Anything.”
I put a hand around his neck, draw him in, kiss him. He tastes a little like cinnamon, smells a little bit of pine and just-fallen leaves and I wonder again, for the thousandth time, at my luck in finding him.
Then the kiss ends. Caleb squeezes my hand, reaches for the door, pulls it open and the cacophony floods in.
And it sounds just like home.EpilogueThaliaSix Months LaterI ignore the sweat pouring down my back and crouch in front of the box, bending my legs and keeping my back straight. The corners firmly in my hands, I take a deep breath, plant my heels, and lift.
“Ollie, for fuck’s sake,” a voice behind me says.
“I got it,” I gasp out, fingers already slipping.
“You don’t,” Javier says, hurrying around the other side of the box I’m attempting to lift. “What happened to I’ll get the smaller boxes?”
He wraps his arms around it and takes it from me, lifting it like it weighs nothing.
“I can get that one!” I protest, but Javier ignores me and walks down the ramp of the moving truck, then into the open front door of our apartment.
“Do you think you’re Rosie the Riveter again?” Bastien asks, hopping up into the moving truck.
“I’ve been taking a weightlifting class at the gym,” I protest, eyeing the rest of the boxes, because I think Javier just took the last one I had even half a chance of lifting.
The rest all seem to be labeled BOOKS.
Turns out that between Caleb and I, we have a whole lot of books. That’s actually one of the reasons we picked this apartment in Ochreville, the town that contains the Virginia Institute of Technology: the living room is lined with bookshelves.
“Has that made you taller than five-foot-two or infused your body with testosterone?” Bastien asks, casually lifting a box and hoisting it onto his shoulder.
“I’m five four,” I tell him, and finally grab a floor lamp that’s sitting next to a box. It’s very light, and I carry it into our new living room, then plant it on the floor and look around.
Boxes. Boxes everywhere, interspersed with furniture that mostly came from Caleb’s old apartment, because it’s not like I fought to keep the coffee table that Harper, Victoria, Margaret and I found on a curb our sophomore year.
“Which room is green?” asks a voice, followed moments later by Silas, bringing another box in.
“Green is the study, purple is the bedroom, blue is the living room,” Levi says with the patience of someone who’s explained something a thousand times. “It’s on the chart on the wall.”
“You know, Thalia,” Silas calls, walking down the hall. “Some people just label their boxes with words.”
“Every system has flaws,” I call after him and Levi.
I didn’t even know Silas was coming until he showed up this morning at Levi’s house, where Caleb and I had spent the night. He claimed that he just wanted the free donuts and pizza, but as we were driving, Caleb told me his suspicions.
It’s early August, and the two months since I’ve graduated have been a whirlwind. My lease with my roommates ended in June, so I moved in with Caleb for a little while. Dr. Castellano offered me a summer job continuing my research for her before I started graduate school this fall, and Caleb got a freelance gig writing problems for a mathematics textbook.
Slowly but surely, things are working themselves out. I kept my scholarship and graduated Magna Cum Laude; Caleb has been tutoring and working on textbooks and generally figuring out what to do with his life, now that he can do anything.
I was worried he’d hate it. I was worried that he’d resent me for losing his job, that he’d feel like he’d wasted years of his life in graduate school only spend one semester as a professor, but he’s been fine.
Happy, even. Almost giddy. Once a week he comes home with some new harebrained scheme, and even though he never acts on any of them — an audio tour of the Appalachian Trail? An app that will instantly tell you if a number is prime or not? — he’s got a verve and energy just talking about them, about all the possibilities that he’s got now.
“You’re not just standing around, are you?” he says, and speak of the devil, Caleb comes into the living room through the sliding glass door that leads to the back yard we share with the other two apartments in this building.