Page 4 of Any Port in a Storm

I exhale gratefully. “How’d you know?”

His smile is even brighter than his eyes. “Because I’m a 1200, too. Here.” He gestures me past a trash can and around a corner. “They’re over in this annex.”

“Dare I ask why we’ve been relegated to this isolated alcove?”

“It’s a funny story, actually. There was an…incident, shall we say? Last semester.”

I tilt my head. “An incident?”

“Some sort of hazing ritual. Somebody from the chemistry department put a beaker of acid in 1265.” He shifts the messenger bag on his shoulder. “Unfortunately, it spilled.”

“Whoa.”

“Yeah. Anyway, by the time the college found it, it had dripped through and caused a ton of damage. They had to pull out the whole bank of mailboxes and get new ones.”

I locate 1235 and try the combination on the card from my RA. “At least ours are clean.”

He snickers. “Did you get booted out of the student union? I heard they’re doing renovations over there.”

“Yeah.” The door to my mailbox opens with a satisfying click. “I’m surprised they had enough extra space here for the entire campus.”

“The university way overshot when they built this grad space,” he says, sliding two letters from box 1212. “I think they expected much higher enrollment.”

“Wait.” I spin to face him. “Weren’t you in my freshman history class? If you’re an undergrad, shouldn’t you be getting a new mailbox also?”

His brows wrinkle over his nose. “I was your TA for a couple of weeks. Remember? When Henry was sick?”

Pixels of memories twinkle to life, but the picture isn’t totally clear. Freshman year was tough for me—I struggled to settle in, then I battled a deep depression after Alex, my high school boyfriend, broke up with me in October.

“We should see other people,” he’d said. I reminded him that we’d promised to try long distance; to make things work. But Alex had doubled down. “I think this is for the best.”

It was only a month later when I learned he’d already started seeing other people—before we had that conversation.

For the rest of the fall semester, it was all I could do to get out of bed. I subsisted on vending machine Pop-Tarts and pour-over coffee, and I wasn’t paying any attention whatsoever to what was going on around me. I managed to pull off a 3.5 GPA, which was a miracle, all things considered.

When I broke free of the fog after the holiday break, I resolved two things: one, I would eat at least one serving of protein every day. A routine visit to my doctor after Christmas revealed I was severely anemic.

The second resolution was somewhat more ambiguous but arguably more important: I’d never let a man break my heart again.

“I’m so sorry,” I say then. “I definitely remember you. But I don’t recall actually meeting you.”

He sticks out his hand. “Nick O’Connor.”

The name rings a bell, and another memory flickers to life. “Oh. Were you at that Esplanade cleanup day, also?”

His lips tilt up lazily. “I’m glad I made such an impression, Laurel Montgomery-Parker.”

My heart thuds at his use of my full name. “Okay, now I feel like a royal jerk.”

“I’m Irish,” he shrugs. “I think all the royals are jerks.”

My laugh is louder than I intend. “I just meant…I don’t really remember meeting you. But you clearly remember me.”

“Well, first of all, I was your TA. It’s part of my job to know my students.”

“You were my TA for a week.”

“Yeah.” He throws an envelope into a nearby recycling bin. “But I’m good with names. Details have always kind of been my thing.”