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Lissa’s online (but on-campus) college experience was going swimmingly. There was only one problem with online school- Lissa was required to sit in-person for exams. In the middle of the day.
Which, ordinarily, was no problem. Lissa was a good student and never dipped below a 95% average. She did all her homework, listened to all her lectures, and took good notes. She’d actually fallen asleep during her 2PM legal ethics final and had still managed a 90% in the class.
Until oceanography.
Which was currently bringing her to tears.
Lissa had been given the choice between a few science classes. Even though she was a political science major, the college demanded “well-rounded” students. Lissa decided that oceanography would be the easiest of the three options.
Lissa had rarely been so wrong.
Professor Jackson was well aware of the fact that most people, like Lissa, believed that this class would be easy. Professor Jackson took that personally and sought to make every student enrolled for an easy A regret their entire existence.
For some reason, Lissa’s brain could not differentiate the bathypelagic zone from the mesopelagic zone, nor the epipelagic zone from the abyssopelagic zone. Then there was the thermocline and upwelling and hadal zones. Each of the zones had different temperatures and salinity and exposure to light. And don’t even get her started on memorizing all the instruments to measure seismic waves or all the government agencies involved in tsunami warnings.
It was futile, Lissa decided. She was just not going to do well in Oceanography. She may as well just quit now. But every time she thought about throwing in the towel, she saw her parent’s disapproving stare. They’d expect no less than perfection.
She also thought, not for the first time that evening, about Andre. Andre never got the opportunity to go to college, but Lissa knew he would have excelled. He would have taken this seriously, gotten a 4.0, and managed to play a club sport on top of everything else.
But Lissa wasn’t Andre. As much as she wanted to be, she would never measure up to her brother. She sighed, burying her head in her arms.
The cool wooden tabletop felt good on her cheek. Lissa’s brain felt dry and itchy, probably due to lack of sleep and too much screen time. Moroi eyes were extra sensitive, and it was all too easy to overstimulate. A quick glance at her watch told her that she had been in one of the study rooms in her dorm for six hours.
She picked up her phone and suppressed a groan. Three missed texts and a call from Christian. She had worked straight through their usual Facetime session. She’d also missed the closing of the dining hall, which meant more hours without food. Awesome.
As a night student, Lissa had to be extra careful to time her meals. She usually used the 9PM close of the dining hall to stock up on her meals for the day. The dining hall didn’t open again until 7:30AM, which meant if she didn’t get in before the dining hall closed, she didn’t have lunch.
Stupid, Lissa chided herself. How could she forget to grab lunch? How could she forget to check her phone on time? Stupid! She was so stupid!
Lissa flinched at the iron taste blooming in her mouth. Great. She had bitten her cheek once again. She fished in her bag for the bag of starbursts Rose had her carry and popped one in her mouth, giving her teeth something else to bite.
The mixture of sugary cherry and blood wasn’t a pleasant one, but it was a necessary one. The stress over this stupid exam was bringing her back to old habits. Dangerous habits. She sighed, opening her laptop to make another therapy appointment for the following day.
The door to her study room opened with a creak.
Lissa sighed, not bothering to turn away from her screen. The cleaners came in to take out the trash once a night, and it was probably around that time now. The downside of working during the night, she supposed.
“Rose told me where you’d be,” the intruder said, setting the paper bag in front of her computer. Her head snapped up. She’d know that voice anywhere.
“Christian? What are you doing here? Is that-”
“Two apple cider donuts, a hot chocolate with extra whipped cream, and a fruit cup with no blueberries and no oranges? Yes, ma’am it is. I’ll accept payment in the form of kisses and offers of eternal love and- baby, are you crying?”
Lissa hadn’t realized how overwhelmed she’d been until Christian had gotten here. She closed her laptop and flung herself into Christian’s arms, squeezing him tight.
“It’s okay,” he soothed her, despite his surprise. “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”
“I missed you so much,” she sobbed into him.
“I’ve only been gone for a week, my love.” He rubbed her back in gentle circles. “I missed you too though. Croissants aren’t half as cute as you.”
She laughed weakly.
“I’m sorry about all this,” she said, using one of the napkins in the donut bag to wipe her eyes. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“My extreme good looks, probably.”
Lissa rolled her eyes.
“Eat,” he coaxed, pushing the donut bag towards her.
Lissa devoured it, finding herself surprisingly hungry.
“What can I do to help?” Christian asked.
Lissa pushed her index card stack to his side of the table.
He didn’t complain when she kept forgetting what the bathypelagic zone was, or whether saline water sank or float relative to freshwater. He just shuffled the notecards she got wrong and quizzed her again and again until she got them right. Every time she got one right, he’d spear a piece of fruit with the plastic fork and feed it to her.
Lissa knew Christian loved her like she knew the sky was blue or the grass was green. It was a fact of life. But she had rarely felt so loved as she did right now, watching her usually impatient boyfriend holding up her color-coded index cards.
“I love you,” she said quietly.
“The answer was actually echinoderms,” Christian said dryly.
“I mean it,” Lissa insisted. “Thank you. You’re exactly what I needed.”
“Good to know you need me,” he said with a flirtatious wink. And if Christian’s cheeks were a little red from her compliment, well, she didn’t mention it.
Two hours later, the stack was finished. Lissa now knew everything on the cards. She was prepared as she was going to be… unless all the information slipped out between now and then.
“You’ll do great,” Christian promised.
“You don’t know that,” she said miserably.
“I don’t,” he agreed. “But if you fail this test, you’ll still pass the class. You may lose your perfect grade point average, but you won’t fail out of the university or anything drastic.”
“It would be pretty drastic to lose the 4.0.”
“You expect too much of yourself, my love. This is one stupid class that you’ll literally never use unless you, like, open an aquarium or something.”
She laughed. “No, thank you. I’ve seen enough diagrams of squids for a while.”
He leaned over from his seat to press a kiss to her head, and Lissa melted under his touch. It didn’t matter that they had been dating for years. Something about the sweet touch made her smile just as much as it had when he first did it.
“I can’t stop freaking out about the test tomorrow. How am I ever going to sleep?”
“I bet I can think of a way to tire you out,” Christian said with a wicked grin.
And he did.
“Maybe I should go over them one more time-”
“Lissa. Light of my life. Angel. If you go over these cards one more time I’m going to lay in the quad and let the snowplow run me over. Okay?”
“Okay,” she sighed, and snuggled closer to his chest. The beat of his heart below her ear soothed her, even if both of them were a little too big for Lissa’s twin bed. Their legs were twisted together, her torso pressed against him. He always complained that he woke up with a mouthful of hair, which Lissa called the price of cuddling.
“But what about just the ones-”
“-VASILISSA DRAGOMIR-”
“Fine!”
“Love you,” she said meekly.
“Love you too.”