Page 3 of Any Port in a Storm

Honestly, it’s a miracle I met him at all—I spent so much of last summer buried in my writing. The only reason we went to the dance hall in the first place was Ivy’s strong resolve that I get away from my laptop for the sake of my mental health.

I can totally see why Ivy, so sweet and happily settled, would want to double date with Porter and me. She thinks everyone deserves a soulmate, and she certainly wouldn’t understand dating someone purely for the sake of passing time.

But the fact is, I don’t love Porter. I don’t think I ever will. And seeing Ivy with Oliver always drives that point home for me. It breaks my heart a little, if I’m being honest. So taking him to Ogunquit with me is a total non-starter.

I look up to see Nick surveying my face in a way that feels an awful lot like a caress.

“What?”

He shakes his head. “Nothing. Just thinking.”

“Well, a university’s a great place for that,” I say with a wry grin, trying to deflect from the obvious subtext, which is that he’s thinking about me. About us.

When he smiles, too, my heart flutters in response.

My mind immediately jumps to what happened last July when I came home to meet with Spillinger. Nick’s pointed request: I need to talk to you. The way the bench he dragged me to felt under my bare thighs, sticky with sweat. How the air hummed with energy; how Nick’s fingers wrapped around mine. The way his pupils grew when our lips brushed; how I didn’t pull away.

I swallow a little harder than usual.

“Hey,” he offers, as if sensing my discomfort; this charged air still hovering between us, despite everything that’s happened. Despite how everything ended. “I’ve been meaning to introduce you to some of the doctoral candidates I got to know this semester. Come on.” He grabs my sleeve again, and this time, I don’t bristle, either at the contact or the demand.

“Sure,” I agree. And I follow him, still a little numb from the memory of his lips on mine, across the room.

TWO

eight years earlier

“Ithink your mailbox is over here.” Grace gestures to the far corner of the room, where thousands of small metal cubes in neat rows tease the promise of contact from home. “That’s where mine was, anyway.”

I’ve been on campus for exactly three hours, and so far, I’ve only managed to dump my things in the laughably small sophomore dorm room I share with Grace and shoo my parents away before they started bawling in public like they did last year.

Being an only child is a hell of a thing.

“I’m sure I’ll find it. You go get your coffee.”

Grace nods. “Want anything?”

“Sure.” I grab a rumpled five-dollar bill from my pocket and hand it to her. “Anything with espresso.”

“I’ll meet you back here.” She flips her blonde braid over her shoulder and strides purposefully in the direction of the on-campus café.

I’d finally memorized the combination on last year’s mailbox the week before classes ended. Showing up today to learn that the underclass mailroom was being moved to the grad student quad due to renovations didn’t exactly fill me with joy.

Digging through my purse, I pull out the blue index card my RA gave me, on which she’d scrawled “1235” beneath my name.

“I don’t understand,” I say out loud, surveying the numbers before me. The 1100s are exactly where they should be, then it just skips to the 13s.

A warm baritone over my shoulder disrupts my quest. “Can I help you find something?”

I turn around, fully expecting Cillian Murphy. But the face attached to the subtle Irish accent is anything but. Where Cillian’s all smolder and shadow, the tall, lithe man in front of me is pure light and utter chaos. Thick, chestnut brown hair that looks like it hasn’t been brushed; stubble creeping in across rugged cheekbones. And, peering out from under all that hair, the most brilliant baby blue eyes I’ve ever seen.

I guess he has that in common with Cillian after all.

As I blink away my shock at stumbling across such an attractive man in the mailroom, it occurs to me that I’ve seen him somewhere before. Maybe last year, in freshman history?

“Uh…” I stammer, struggling to find words. “I’m just…I’m looking for my mailbox.”

“I take it you have a 1200?”