She was still in the thick of the journey to tenure, and she was a classic case of all the worst parts of that endeavor. She worked too hard and only rested when she crashed. She sometimes fell asleep while they were on the phone. She struggled to differentiate between the most important items on her checklist for tenure and the things that felt pressing because they were immediate. She was always tired and rushing around campus. She never just let herself breathe. It was hard to watch when he hadn’t really known her and had only suspected that she was running herself ragged, like most junior faculty often do, but seeing it up close was growing more difficult by the day.

He remembered what the tenure track felt like — the insecurity, the anxiety, the manic spurts of writing for hours or days at a time, and then months where even getting a paragraph on the page felt like a feat. Alejandro wanted to save Deja from making the mistakes he had or that he’d witnessed, but he also didn’t want to step on her boundaries when their relationship was so fragile and new. Besides, Deja clearly had a hard time prioritizing the things that made her happy, including him. There were things she wanted to do and see and experience, but she avoided them all because she didn’t have time — she didn’t make time — and he was secretly worried that if he pushed her too hard, she’d stop making any time for him.

So, he worked on weekends.

He pulled his car into the first parking space he saw. He checked his hair in the rearview mirror and made sure he looked casual, not too thirsty, and ready to work. He felt the exact opposite of all that, but if he showed up looking like he wanted to throw Deja over his shoulders and go back to his house to watch movies or spend the rest of the day in bed, he knew she’d clam up.

When he was satisfied that he looked less needy for her attention than he felt, he stood from his car and grabbed his satchel from the backseat, which was much lighter than normal since he’d left his laptop at home. He didn’t want to do any real work, so he’d thrown in a book he needed to read for a graduate class he was teaching next semester, figuring he could read unhurriedly while Deja worked. He just wanted to spend a little time with Deja before the semester ended, and he flew home for Christmas and the new year, and they were separated for over a month.