They’d both been up until nearly midnight the night before inputting final grades, adding extra credit, and fielding student complaints through email. She’d wanted to sleep in today, but the sun was barely out, and because of his damn alarm, she was awake.

“Turn it off,” she groaned.

“It’s your phone,” he groaned back.

“Oh. Shit.”

Deja sat up in bed, groggy. She squinted around his room before turning to the bedside table. She grabbed her phone and glasses at the same time and squinted at her screen. “I thought I turned it off,” she said.

“Turn it off now,” he said, turning over in bed and wrapping his arms around her waist.

She tapped at her screen and then looked down at him with mussed hair and five o’clock shadow, still struggling to believe this was how her summer would be, with him. She ran her fingers through his hair as he drifted back to sleep. Deja decided to check her email since she was already up.

She sifted through a bunch of emails from the college administration, reminding them that grades were due today and stats about graduation numbers and all the other end-of-the-semester detritus that it took her a year to realize she didn’t have to read. She smiled at a few emails from students thanking her for the semester, or asking for summer internship advice, flagging them for reply when she was fully awake and had a cup of coffee in hand.

But then her eyes caught on an email.

“Oh my god,” she groaned.

“What?” Alejandro mumbled, probably not because of what she said but because she took her hand from his hair.

She needed both shaking hands to hold her phone steady and open this email and then read it carefully.

“Oh my god,” she breathed again.

“What?”

Deja didn’t respond; she was too busy reading and re-reading the email just to make sure that it said what she thought it said.

Alejandro sat up next to her and shoved his own glasses onto his face. “What’s wrong?”

She turned to him with wide, shocked eyes. “I got an R&R from the Journal of Comparative Sociology,” she breathed, unable to believe the thing she was saying.

It wasn’t a straight-up acceptance — those almost never came from academic journals, especially not for a young scholar like Deja — but Comparative Sociology was her tier-one journal, and a revise and resubmit was amazing. The feedback she knew she’d get when she was ready to open their notes would be invaluable, and if she spent the entire summer working on her article to resubmit, going into her third-year review with an article under consideration would look really good.

She could hardly fathom it, and her eyes started to water.

“Deja, that’s amazing,” Alejandro said. “It’s okay to cry.”