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Four weeks before the end of your first year in university, you find the vacant seat beside you in Calculus suddenly occupied.[break][break]

It's not so much the action of it (classmates have come and gone since the very start, albeit with heavier emphasis on the latter as time marched on) as the timing that catches you off guard. New admissions shouldn't have even been possible so close to the ending of the year; that anyone would bother showing up to a challenging course with a cumulative final within the home stretch seems almost brazen.[break][break]

And yet, there she sits, looking not unlike a child on their first day of primary school, textbook at the ready, notebook open and in hand. She doesn't look like any student you've ever seen on the campus before. If she had, you're certain you would have remembered her: dark, dark hair, likely unruly in its natural state, draped in gentle waves over the shoulder; an attire as modest as it is charming; large chocolate eyes that light up upon realizing that you are, in fact, taking your seat directly beside her. She's cute, is what you mean. Terribly so. You can't even remember the last time you thought that about a girl.[break][break]

“I'm Norah,” she tells you with a lilt in her voice and an outstretched hand that you unthinkingly reach to accept. And then, a nail in the coffin you would never have known she was laying in, “Hey, I forgot to bring a pen. Can I borrow one of yours?”[break][break]

It's only (mis)fortunate that it's your bubble she slips into, and it's only (mis)fortune that it falls to you to help her understand the material in class, and it's only (mis)fortunate that you and no one else are the one your instructor approaches about things like catching up on the basics and tutoring outside of class and extra credit on the final for your troubles. Norah settles down at your little kitchen table only three days later for the very first time, and at least you can be grateful that she catches on quick, if not for the fact that your studying time has effectively gone up in flames.[break][break]

American, born and bred. Her accent gave her away immediately, but you struggle to mentally pin Washington on a mental map when she tells you stories of home in a city that rains just as much as here between formulas and calculations. You, too, were born state-side, but your memories of the time are long gone. You don't even think to bring it up. She'd scraped together pennies and nickles for years for her chance to see England with her very own eyes, even if only for the tail end of a semester and the summer that will follow. “I already know I won't want to go back,” she says from behind her curtain of hair, eyes focused on the papers sprawled out around her. “But Seattle's got its own perks. If you ever feel like traveling, you should stop by sometime!”[break][break]

Spoken so casually – as if she isn't speaking about a city on the other side of the globe, thousands and thousands of miles away.[break][break]

“Why did you arrive so late in the year?” You can resist this question, tickling at the back of your mind since you first laid eyes on her. Despite yourself, you can't help but wonder if it would be better to simply not show up at all when that tardy.[break][break]

What you don't expect to hear is: “I was supposed to have been in class from the start of the semester. Something turned up, though, and I spent most of that time in the hospital.” At your silence, she tilts her head up to meet your eye. At the look of muted surprise and discomfort at her expense, she smiles wide and reassures, “It wasn't anything serious.” To yourself, you doubt. That's a sizable amount of time to spend in aqua scrubs and laid out on a monitored bed – but at the same time, you don't care to press the issue. She is, after all, here, and she does, after all, look fine. Why bother questioning beyond that?[break][break]

So it becomes habit. Routine. Daily. An hour and a half minimum out of every afternoon, handed over solemnly to the foreigner who punches numbers into her calculator, asks you questions perhaps only once a session, and talks on and on and on about everything and nothing all at once. Friendships she's made, more numerous in a matter of weeks than you have in the entirety of your college years; books she's been reading, most you've enjoyed, some you've never heard of; parties she's been to, parties she's going to, little acts of innocent rebellion that don't line up with your image of gentle hands and turtle neck sweaters. You've holed yourself up in your apartment for so long, fixated on the idea of academic perfection and the ideal future you will bring about for yourself (and maybe just others, if you have your way) that these ideas all seem as foreign as the girl who prattles them off in excitement. Glimpses into a world that you don't belong in. Glimpses into a world you could not belong in.[break][break]

Impossibly, though, when you ask her why she bothers to waste her time at your kitchen table every night, particularly when she barely uses your help so much as your company, all Norah says is, “Because I like spending time with you, you big lug. Now help me figure out what the answer to number fifty-three is.”[break][break]

Because she likes spending time with you – perhaps not above the others, or even beside them, but enough to give you the time of day. You, who had not realized how little you smiled or laughed until she brought them out of you again and again. You, who has forgone hobby and interest in the pursuit of a single-minded goal. You, humble and small and shy, who would not have possibly been able to open your mouth and your heart to the dark-haired woman if she had not first bridged that gap that exists between every human being: lonely, isolating.[break][break]

It sets your heart alight. Warms you from fingertip to toe, like a fire without any of its inherent destruction.[break][break]

Norah likes you.[break][break]

There are a dozen excuses you can make for why you haven't gone before, and a dozen more you can make for why you are going now, but you'd be a liar if you claimed the reason for both wasn't the American girl in pink batting her eyes and tugging at your wrist. You wouldn't have gone because someone like her wouldn't have been there; you only go now because at least there's something, someone to make it worth the trip. Those four weeks before the end of your first year of university have flown past faster than you'd ever thought they could, and before summer dawns in full, your classmates have dedicated themselves to one final party for the school term – or, perhaps more accurately, the first of many to celebrate the freedom of the months to come. It's the only night you finally, finally accept the invitation.[break][break]

Unsurprisingly, you drink too much.[break][break]

“Y'know,” your friend says, words slurred, breath reeking, arm hooked around your shoulders and neck, “this'd definitely be illegal back home.” You do know this, inebriated or otherwise: legal drinking age in the US versus legal drinking age in the UK. She giggles in your ear (too close, too close) and says, “Not that that'd stop us, huh?”[break][break]

Not her. You, maybe – although maybe not. Tonight, you think you'd run all the way out to the Atlantic and take a dive, if only she'd ask it of you. Taking a swig of something spiked seems like very little compared to all of the trouble she could get you into, and all of the trouble you would gladly get into for her. This isn't at all aided by how reasonable everything she proposes sounds to your drunken brain. It's not as though either of you are in any state to be driving home, so it only makes sense to walk home to your apartment together, right? And there's only one bedroom there, so it only makes sense to share the room, right? And neither one of you would want the other to sleep on the floor – heavens, no – so it only makes sense to crawl into bed together, and whatever happens after (oh, the things that happen after) is only a matter of circumstance.[break][break]

Only a matter of circumstance.[break][break]

“It's fine,” Norah tells you the next morning.[break][break]

She tells you this because you panic, woken to a pounding in your head, a woman in your bed, your clothes strewn haphazardly across the floor. This is so stupid, stupid, stupid, but she holds your head in her hands, holds you together in one piece, and whispers reassurances until the frenzy fades and the room stops spinning around you.[break][break]

And, “It's fine,” you tell her over a shared glass of water, something for the hangover, two pieces of toast. It's fine because it doesn't have to mean anything, this little stunt of yours, not when three months from now, you'll never see each other again. It's fine, because everyone makes mistakes in their life, and this is just one mistake you've both made together –[break][break]

A mistake you make again – and again – and again – and again – and again –[break][break]

“You're dating Norah? Seriously? She's going to leave you at the end of summer, you know. Can't you see how bad of an idea this is?”[break][break]

“Of course I do. That's why we most certainly aren't dating.”[break][break]

“Please. With the way you two act around each other, I half expected to see an engagement ring on her finger already.”[break][break]

“It's not... It's not like that.”[break][break]

It's not. Of course it's not. This isn't love – because if neither of you talk about it, this thing you have going on between you, then it isn't love. It's fixation or fascination or fanaticism (a mistake, just a mistake, stupid, stupid, stupid), but it's not love.[break][break]

… Right?[break][break]

Together, you bury the sounds of the city at night with music – jazz, full of soft piano, gentle saxophone; her pick, not yours – as another restless evening sets in. It's past midnight, but your brain is as awake as it was at noon, burdened by thoughts too weighty to even attempt to settle down. Your countdown is running down by the second. Not even a month left before the counter strikes zero. There are better ways to spend your time than this, lounged out on the couch as the girl sketches to her heart's content on the same old kitchen table as always, but you don't know exactly how.[break][break]

“What was your college major, anyway?” She doesn't turn to look at you as she asks, but you can see the way she stiffens from your vantage just the same. “Uni, I mean. Sorry.”[break][break]

“Psychology.” You will, as you always have, give her a pass on the slip.[break][break]

“Why?”[break][break]

The tried and true question, one that has always followed the question of major. From Norah, who has admitted that her own was a virtual grab bag of a choice, what with work at her parent's business back home all but guaranteed for her, it seems, at the surface, particularly hollow. But you know her better than to doubt. You have never spoken anything that she didn't listen to with rapt attention. She has never prompted from you something that she did not treat with respect.[break][break]

Unfortunately, there are parts to the answer that you aren't sure she, or anyone, for that matter would care to hear: That your parents were unnerved by you, in their visits to your grandmother's estate to visit their little boy living in another country. Too sharp. Too perceptive. You would pick people apart seam by seam, stitch by stitch, and mother and father didn't know how to deal with a stranger of a child who could read them like a book. You learned with time to keep the comments to yourself, to see but not tell, but it was too late to mend old wounds. You work with what you're good at; you pursue that which you believe yourself guaranteed a future. (But is that all?)[break][break]

“I've lived my life with the vague desire to be of some use. To someone. To the world. I can't pretend that I have the ability to change a city, a whole nation for the better, but I thought... if only on an individual basis... maybe someone like myself could do some good in a place sorely without.” When you look now, she's turned to face you from her spot on the chair, focused only on you and the words you spill. “I don't believe I'm cut out for hospital work, but mental health is just as important. If I can use these skills to make lives easier, then I think that someday... Someday, I can be happy with myself.”[break][break]

And oh, she's smiling at you now, broad and toothy and resplendent, the very same grin that strikes you right down to the core and makes it so you can't take your eyes away. She stands, crosses the distance between you, takes your cheeks in her hands and plants one great kiss to the crown of your forehead. “You're such a sap, Alex. A big ol' softy.” Every word oozes affection. “But I know you'll do great – someday.” Then, like a light switch struck, the room changes: a new song slips through the speakers, and Norah perks up at the very first note. “Oh, oh, oh, I love this song. Come dance with me?”[break][break]

“Dance? To this?” you parrot, bewildered. If there's an appropriate way to dance to Frank Sinatra, you aren't sure you know it – but she's already taking your hands in her own and pulling you up and onto your feet, not a care of the incredulity in your tone or the hesitation in your movements as you follow her. (That's just how she is, though, you think; when her heart is warmed, or her interest peaked, her instinct is to touch, as much as she can, whatever she can get away with. It's fortunate for you both that you don't particularly mind.)[break][break]

In the end, you settle into something that's more of a sway than what you'd consider a dance proper. She rests first your hand on her hip, then your other in her own, and together you move clumsily against each other to beat of her song while she whisper-sings fly me to the moon against the crook of your neck, the stubble on your jaw. The clumsiness, of course, is credit entirely to you. You don't know where to put your feet. They end up on hers more often than the floor.[break][break]

“You kind of suck at this, don't you?”[break][break]

“I'm very sorry.”[break][break]

You move to pull away, but she holds you firmly in place, laughing happily against the clothe of your shirt. “No, no, don't go! This is fine. It's kind of charming, actually.” Stiffly, slowly, you try to settle back into the groove of things; nearly succeed until she adds, “... Even if you keep stepping on my toes.”[break][break]

You don't see her or hear from her for four days after that night.[break][break]

Distance makes the heart grow fonder, you hear mockingly in the back of your mind, but 'fondness' isn't what you're feeling so much as wide-eyed panic. Not because Norah is gone. You aren't so dependent on a single girl that your world would shatter around you when she finally, finally realizes that she doesn't have to settle for someone of your ilk.[break][break]

You panic because you hadn't prepared yourself for the ache in your heart that you knew, knew she would leave in her wake. Sooner, later. Just a matter of time. It had been so easy to wake up with her in your arms every morning and think that it was nothing, nothing at all, and that life could simply go on with empty sheets and an emptier pit in the bottom of your stomach. Because this isn't love, right? (Stupid, stupid, stupid.) You had a month to build back up your crumpled walls, a month to convince yourself that she was just another person to pass into the archives of time, and you wasted it, wallowing, pitying, falling further and further in lo-[break][break]

When she shows up again, it is with an apology on the tongue and a bandage where an IV had been hooked into her arm.[break][break]

It wasn't anything serious echoes terribly in your ears.[break][break]

“Maybe... Maybe I'll miss my plane. Toss my phone in the river, so Mom and Dad don't try to call looking for me. Stay here a while longer, until I can earn back the money to pay for another ticket.”[break][break]

It's four thirty AM on a Tuesday. She rests her head on your chest in the dark of what will be dawn, and neither one of you sleep. You are a smart man filled to the brim with foolish ideas and idiotic mistakes, and you give into another just as you give into the fantasy she constructs with her lips and teeth and tongue.[break][break]

“You can live here with me in the meanwhile. The rent will be cheaper between the two of us.”[break][break]

“Mmm.” Her hair tickles your chin. You hold her closer. Tomorrow looms like a hanged man. “If that's how it'll be, I might have a hard time ever wanting to go back.”[break][break]

The worst part of it all is that the picture weaves itself together so simply, so believably in your mind: of the two of you together right here (not that she hadn't spent most of the summer here, anyway). The two of you, together, right here. In another two years, you'll have finished university. Tuition may be too much for her to handle on her own, but it wasn't as though the dark-haired woman was particularly attached to her major, anyway. She could work during the days, draw during the nights, there was that pleasant little bakery just down the street hiring full time. I found the woman that I want to marry, Mom, Dad. The only problem is that she's leaving tomorrow, and I don't think I'll ever see her again.[break][break]

It's petulant. You already know all of the hundreds of answers before the question ever slips past your lips. But in a voice not your own, you can't help asking, “Why can't you stay?”[break][break]

(This is what you expect to hear:)[break][break]

Because it's not that simple. Because I don't have the money. Because one boy out of three billion of them isn't worth it. Because this isn't really love.[break][break]

(And this is what she says:)[break][break]

“Alex, I'm sick.”[break][break]

(Oh.)[break][break]

There is speculation, and then there is confirmation. Speculation: the hospital visits, the bags under her eyes, the way she'd spoken so bittersweetly of a dream to one day travel the world that would never, never come to see fruition. At least she could settle for Britain, just for summer vacation. At least she'd the chance to meet you. Confirmation: a genetic disease passed down from her grandfather's side, fortunate enough to skip over her mother, but cruel enough to manifest in her own rebel of a body in her sophomore year of high school. With modern medicine and its predicted advancements, she'll be fortunate to live to thirty. Fortunate, they had told her, like there was anything lucky about dying – in terrible pain – young.[break][break]

There's treatment (weak, barely effective) in the states. And who would want to live their limited life away from loving, supportive family? “I think, anyway,” she tells you, “that my parents would come looking for me. Kind of puts a damper on the running away idea.[break][break]

“It's nice to think about, though, isn't it? Really... really nice.”[break][break]

Your shoulder is wet where she buries her face into it, and there is no sentence, no word you can hope to scrape together to console the awful way she shudders and shakes against your side. Tomorrow, she'll be gone. In a decade, she'll be gone – really, truly gone. Is there anything that can console that?[break][break]

Dawn breaks over the horizon, and the light of a new day slips in through the blinds. If there is anything, anything at all, you swear you'll be a man who can find it. Someday. Someday.[break][break]

“You've got my phone number, don't you? Don't be a stranger, now!”[break][break]

Norah's fussing with her luggage, trying to keep everything on her person on her shoulder or in her arms as she speaks. There's no indication of the morning's episode in her eyes. Make up hides the old tear tracks, the bags beneath the eyes well enough, and her smile is as dazzling as the very first day she flashed it at you. It's a light that smothers everything. Doubt. Worries. The foretoken of departure. Behind her, around you, passengers shuffle their way out of their seats and through the gate. There isn't much time before she'll be expected to do the same, but she's paused like a photograph in an album, waiting, waiting. Waiting on you.[break][break]

This is the part where you say it. It. What you have been denying for months now.[break][break]

This is the part where you at least take her hand, kiss her hard, enough to make up for all of the hundreds of days you won't be able to.[break][break]

(But you can't – lead feet, numb hands, trembling heart. You can't, so you don't.)[break][break]

“Goodbye, Norah.”[break][break]

Four weeks before the start of your second year in university, you find the once-occupied seat at your kitchen table horribly, horribly vacant.

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