I swallowed, trying to put the right string of words together—one where I wouldn’t agree too immediately, wouldn’t make her feel she couldn’t choose a school in California. I’d meant what I said—I would follow her anywhere—but there was no denying that a big part of me was suddenly hoping I wouldn’t have to follow her there.

“You can’t?” I asked, hedging.

“No,” she said, and it sounded like she rolled over. “You need to be in a big city. Bigger than Berkeley.”

“You still have a lot of choices in cities,” I reminded her.

“I do.”

“So, Berkeley is out?” I asked carefully.

She breathed in, finally whispering, “Yeah. I think so. I liked it, but not enough.”

We fell silent, and I grew immediately sleepy with the sound of her quiet breaths in my ear. It rocked me from time to time to realize how easily I’d grown dependent on the sounds of her falling asleep next to me.

“I love you so much,” she mumbled.

“I love you, too,” I told her. “Come home to me.”

We fell asleep, neither of us bothering to hang up.

I surreptitiously canceled the car Hanna had scheduled to meet her at the airport and went there myself, on a wild tear deciding to drive the old Subaru from Manhattan to JFK.

The reality of this terrible fucking idea—the traffic, the sheer logistics of parking at the airport—reaffirmed my desire to not have to drive every day.

But when she came down the escalators looking exhausted and sweetly rumpled—fuck it, I would have navigated any cluster of cars to get to her. Surprised, she ran straight into my arms, smelling all warm and sweet and fuckable.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, voice muffled by my jacket.

“I’m stealing you away.”

“To home?” she said.

I shook my head. “We’re headed upstate for the weekend.”

Jerking back to look at me, she asked, “Why?”

Grabbing her bag, I led her outside. “When we got off the phone—this morning,” I added, laughing, “I couldn’t stop thinking about how much I wanted you home so we could talk and relax and get back to baseline. It was this weird antsy thing, and I realized... our life is going to change. And I need to know that we can talk about all of this somewhere other than the only place we’ve lived together. I need to know we can be us no matter where we are.”

She turned, stretching to kiss me beside the car, and I struggled against the temptation to open the backseat and fuck her in the sketchy parking garage.