Page 114 of A Stealthy Situation

He smiles and rolls his eyes at me. “Do you even need to ask? Of course I’ll move back. And then here again and back again as many times as we need to.”

“Really?”

“We’ve already worked out we can’t be apart. I hope Harrison is prepared for that.”

“I jokingly told him we’ll all have to live together when we’re older, and he just nodded and said, ‘Make more money, got it,’ and carried on with what he was doing.”

“Good man.”

“The best.”

“Who’s the best?” Harrison asks, throwing my door open.

Embarrassingly, I jump from the bed and throw myself at him. “I didn’t think I’d see you for two more days.”

“Yeah, but then on the way home, I was like fuck that and decided to come over.”

Emmett snorts. “A whole semester, my ass.”

“I’m going to do it just to prove you wrong,” I tell him.

“Uh-huh. I’m going to … do literally anything not in this room.”

He leaves, and Harrison lifts his eyebrows. “You know, someone is going to start questioning why you’re always out there when I visit.”

“Em has been living here for five months, and not a single one of my brothers has noticed. I think we’re safe.”

That relaxes him, and he ducks his head to kiss me. “A semester is going to suck.”

“Agreed.”

“We’ll talk every day though. And now I have a job with regular hours, I’ll be able to save for flights to Vermont.”

I quickly shake my head. “You’ll be done with your master’s and either studying more or starting as an ecologist somewhere. You can’t risk that by flying out to see me.”

“I might even be working in Vermont with you.”

“We can only hope.”

“Well, I’m not giving you up. No matter where we are or how long it takes.”

How long. Yeah, that’s what worries me. My doctor is confident I’ll get there, but will a semester be enough time? What if I fail and need to take the class again? A semester is one thing, but two? One of the things about having time blindness is that sometimes a long amount of time will fly, but there’s the flip side to that. A semester could feel like years. Not being able to process the time distance to seeing him again is going to be one of the hardest parts.

“Hey.” He smooths a thumb over my forehead. “No more worrying. We’ve got over a year before we even need to think about it.”

“Right.”

“Which is a lot of time to spend together first.”

That makes me smile. “I’ll take all of the time. And all of the late-night visits. And just … everything.”

“Even my plant facts?”

“Even the boring ones.”

He squeezes the life out of me. “I’ll make sure to think up some extra-boring ones, then.”

“Suddenly, that semester away is looking better and better.”

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