“What are the antibiotics for strep?” I quiz my boyfriend. Printed flashcards fill my hand and scatter the coffee table inside the loft of Superheroes & Scones. Three-day-old red velvet cake from Jane’s birthday lies next to more study materials and energy drinks.

It’s afterhours in the comics shop. Empty. The only real time I can enjoy one of my favorite places on Earth.

Farrow slouches on a yellow beanbag, his muscular legs splayed over my lap, and I reach for my mug of tea. Sitting straighter than him.

He flips a page in a comic book on his lap and answers, “Ampicillin, amoxicillin, and PCN.”

Yeah, I have no clue if that’s correct. Not until I flip the card over and read the answer on the back.

Farrow is grinning at the comic. “You don’t have to tell me it’s right, wolf scout. I know it is.” His eyes finally flit to me. “Keep going.”

He has a USMLE Step 3 exam tomorrow. Tomorrow. He said it’s the test he has to pass to get licensed. And he hasn’t studied a single minute for it.

So when I heard that, I printed out a tower of flash cards and bought practice materials. Here we are. Only now I’m starting to think he agreed to this study session just out of pure amusement.

That know-it-all smile stretches his face, and he raises his brows. Like he’s waiting. But he’s also skimming a comic book. He grabbed one from the store downstairs.

I set my tea down and read off a notecard. “What is the most common cardiac manifestation of Lyme disease?”

“An AV conduction block or defect,” he says casually. “Why does this girl talk to…wait, are those demons?” He frowns and rotates the comic to check the front cover. Like he’s ensuring he grabbed an issue of X-Men.

He did, and I don’t need to see the panel. “That’s Magik. She’s the sorceress supreme of Limbo.”

His eyes meet mine, and he almost laughs. “Fuck, I’m just remembering how big of a dork you are.”

I’d shove his legs off me, but for some damn reason, I love them across my lap. So I end up giving him a middle finger instead.

Farrow only smiles more and flips a page in the comic. “Let’s go, wolf scout, show me how great you are at quizzing me.”

I meant to give him something, and this is a better time than never. I straighten the deck of flashcards and put them down. I capture more of his attention when I reach for my backpack with my good arm.

I already stressed the fuck out of my shoulder muscle earlier today. I tried to lift a stack of medical texts (study prep material), and now my collarbone thumps like stereo bass is blasting inside the bone.

Anyway, I’m not as concerned about my injury. Not lately. I’m more worried about Farrow after the rooftop. I’ve seen him hyper-vigilant before but never unresponsive and spaced out, and I knew it was serious.

We talked about it for a long time the past few days. Inside our steaming bathroom after a shower, he was towel-drying his bleach-white hair, the roots recently dyed, and I was brushing my teeth at the sink. And he called them intrusive memories.

“It’s happened before,” Farrow said. “When I was five and six.”

I spit in the sink and rinsed my mouth a couple times, the mirror fogged. So I looked over my shoulder multiple times, but he was relaxed, tying his towel around his waist. I listened carefully to him.

And he explained, “After my mom died, I only had one memory of her.”

I remembered. “You heard her calling your name.” I put my toothbrush in the mirror’s cabinet, and then I turned around, my gray towel tied on my waist too. And I neared my boyfriend and scraped my wet hair back with my fingers.

Farrow nodded, looking me over with a small smile. He leaned a shoulder on the misted shower door and reached out for my hand.

I drew closer before I grabbed hold. Our pulses slowing in the fucking heat, and there was comfort passing between us. Some kind of solace in the steam, and he looked at ease. I know, I know—Farrow Keene is always at ease, but more so than he has been in recent days.

He whispered, “I’d hear my mom saying my name at random times. I wasn’t thinking of the memory, but it’d surface involuntarily. It’s more of a sensory thing, and my father had his colleague speak to me. I was a kid, so I was confused.” Farrow held my gaze. “But he told me to focus on whether there could be a trigger. A time of day, a feeling, a sound.”

“Was there one?” I asked.

“Yeah.” His eyes trailed over my cheekbones. “A bed.”

Farrow explained that every time he’d crawl into his single-bed as a kid and pull the covers up to his chin, he’d hear his mom say his name. And instead of avoiding the bed, he returned to it every night. “I tried to ground myself to something else. Another sound, another feeling, and after a while, the memory fell back.”

It made more sense why he immediately told me, “it’s the rain,” on the roof. He was identifying the trigger, and he wasn’t panicked. He’s been mostly angry that it’s happening at all.

So recently, my aim is to take more stress off him. Make his days lighter and better. In any way.

Now that I have my backpack in front of me, I unzip the main section. Farrow is watching from the yellow beanbag with escalating interest.

He scrutinizes the tower of flashcards I put on the coffee table. “Quitting early isn’t going to win you high marks,” he tells me, ditching the comic and reaching backwards for a hacky sack from a bin.

“This is called a fucking break,” I tell him.

“A break,” he repeats. “That doesn’t sound like the Wolf Scout way.” He tosses the blue hacky sack, and I watch his fingers wrap around the crocheted ball. He stares into me. “I must’ve really loosened those laces…” he trails off as I pull out a gallon-sized baggie from my backpack.

Farrow crunches up to me, shoulder-level, and he takes the baggie from my hands. Inspecting the contents through the clear plastic. His brows keep rising and rising at me like what did you do?

“This is for the first day,” I explain, my elbow on his knee and hand on his thigh. “I have another one for the second day.”

Step 3 is a two-day exam. The first day is seven hours, and the second day is nine hours. Only a forty-five minute break during each day.

It’s brutal—or so I’ve read—even if it’s the easiest of all the step exams.

Each baggie contains two protein bars, crackers, mixed nuts, grapes, a whole apple, and two turkey sandwiches.

“It’s important you’re not hungry during the exam since it’s long,” I tell him. “At least that’s what people say on the sdn forums.”

His smile slowly expands wider and wider, overtaking the whole damn room. He’s not saying anything, and I don’t know. It makes me fucking nervous.

My neck heats, but I double-down on confidence and gesture to his chest. “Preparing for stuff is my thing,” I tell him.

He laughs, and before I interject, he tells me, “I love your thing.” His smile is a million watts of power and fucking beauty. He waves the baggie. “Thanks for these; they’re perfect. And now you’ve successfully earned your ninety-fourth preparedness merit badge.”

I feign confusion. “That many?”

He almost rolls his eyes and leans in, cupping my jaw. My hand slides down his thigh towards his ass, and our eyes rake each other for a boiling minute. And our mouths meet—I pull back, our lips separating before they even sting or swell.

Farrow frowns. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m not distracting you before your exam, man.” My broad shoulder brushes his hard chest when I reach forward and collect the flashcards.

He tips his head. “You do realize I’m going to pass this exam even if I kiss the fuck out of you? Hell, I could fuck you all night, and I’d still ace it.”

I swelter, my muscles blazing with a hundred-degree desire. I try not to look at Farrow. Because if I look at my childhood crush who just said he could fuck me all night—I’m going to flash fuck me all night eyes.

“You can’t be that sure,” I retort.

“I kind of can. I know my shit, and this is shit I know.”

I force a grimace. “Looks like we know who has the better vocabulary now.”

“Always me, Harvard Dropout.” He reclines back on the beanbag, realizing that I’m not letting up, and he watches me flip through the flashcards.

I read off another one. “What are the drugs that lead to hypercalcemia?”

“Lithium and thiazides.” He passes the hacky sack from hand to hand.

Correct. I don’t tell him since he already knows. “How was your shift yesterday?” I ask while I search for another card that looks more challenging.

Farrow has been in his residency program for over a month now, and he barely ever tells me about his workday. And for someone who’s a kindergartener with stress—you know: he’s like rubber, stress is like glue; it bounces off him and sticks to you—working at the hospital has really stressed the hell out of him.

He just never tells me why or how.

I don’t know…it’s been getting to me lately. Farrow never shuts me out, and I can feel him closing that door to his work life more and more as the days pass.

Farrow chucks the hacky sack in the bin and tells me, “Nothing to rave about.” He ends there, and he sits up.

And I’m determined to eliminate his stress, not bug him about it. So I don’t press on about the hospital.

Farrow opens his exam day baggie. Stealing the apple, he takes a large bite, and the longer I watch him, the more he lifts his brows at me. “You’re looking at me and not your notecards.”

“Thank you for that update,” I say and tear my gaze off his smile that’s doing a number on me today. I read a card. “What do acanthocytes on a blood smear indicate? They also look like spur cells but with more rounded spurs.”

I flip over the card and read the answer. My stomach sinks.

“Maximoff,” he says in a silky but rough breath. He knows why I’ve stalled. He holds the back of my neck, his thumb stroking my skin.

The text on the card is clear.

Hypothyroidism, alcoholism, and liver disease.

My grandfather died from liver disease. It’s weird how little moments that you least expect can creep up on you and make you remember people you lost. And the older I get, my feelings about my grandfather shift and alter.

“What are you thinking?” Farrow says quietly, putting the apple aside.

I flip the card back over. “I’m thinking about my grandfather.” I stare faraway. “After he died, I was terrified that my dad would go out the same way.” I motion to my head. “In my mind, if he even drank a tiny sip of alcohol, he’d just collapse. And that’d be it.” I glance at Farrow’s hand splayed on his kneecap, and I lift it up and slowly interlock our fingers.

Farrow watches.

“It was just a little kid’s fear,” I tell him, “but I still remember going to restaurants where my aunts and uncles would have alcohol. There’d be a beer beside my dad’s water, and I’d worry all night that he’d accidentally drink out of the wrong glass.”

“How’d you get over it?” Farrow asks, and he lets me slip his silver rings off his fingers and collect them in my callused palm.

“My mom,” I tell him. “I told her why I was scared, and she said that my dad’s liver was made of vibranium.” Off his confusion, I add, “The same indestructible steel that Captain America’s shield is made of. She said that it’d take more than a single drink to destroy him.”

He breaks into a smile, lightness in his eyes. “That sounds like your mom.”

I nod, and I recognize that I just veered off the study track again. But while the wheels are off, I think about the hospital. His residency. One more time.

One last time.

I need to say this so I can just leave it alone. “I get that you can’t tell me anything about your patients,” I say to him. “HIPPA and all of that, but I’m still here if there’s anything you want to share. Stuff about your coworkers or what fucking cafeteria food you had for lunch. But if you want me to drop it, I’ll drop it.”

“Drop it,” he says, too quickly. Really goddamn quickly. And he’s serious. He’s not joking or fucking with me.

It hurts. God, I wish it wouldn’t. “Alright,” I nod, more tense, and I try to unthaw my frozen body and examine another flashcard. I close my hand around the rings I slipped off his fingers.

Farrow rubs his eyes, and then he swings his legs off my lap. Standing up, he takes his half-bitten apple and nears the mini-fridge underneath a Thor: God of Thunder poster.

This was the inverse of what I wanted to happen. Taking a breath, I focus on the flashcard. “What do you give a kid with chronic daily headaches?” I ask.

He squats to the mini-fridge. “A tuna sandwich.”

“What?” My brows furrow.

He glances back at me. “You asked what cafeteria food I had for lunch.” Our eyes dive to the bottoms of each other’s gaze. “A tuna sandwich. The day before that was chicken salad, and both were extremely fucking mediocre. The food is nothing special.” He takes a beat. “I’m sorry that I’ve been distant about work—I know that I am. Fuck, I hate that I am, but I just can’t talk about it yet.”

Yet.

So that wasn’t all of it. I nod a few times.

His chest rises in a tight inhale. “I’m trying to protect you, wolf scout. Trust me.”

I stop myself from asking, from what?

Because I remember that I’ve protected him from remorse, guilt, regret every time I withhold what he’s missed. I don’t rehash all the bullshit each heckler yells at the townhouse. Or how security has had trouble securing my bedroom window, even after the drone. I won’t tell him how the other day I asked Bruno, my new bodyguard, “Is something wrong?” and he stayed quiet.

With Declan, my bodyguard before Farrow, I was used to that silent treatment and lack of info. With Farrow, he gave me everything.

Everything.

He showed me what better looked and felt like, and now there’s this strange emptiness that Farrow once filled.

I don’t tell him any of that.

Because I’m not going to hurt him, and I realize now that there must be something similar happening on his end.

He’s protecting me.

I nod, more assured. “I get it.”

Farrow skims my features, easing more, and he reaches into the fridge and grabs a Fizz Life.

With his silver rings still in my palm, I absentmindedly slip a few onto my fingers.

“Tricyclics,” Farrow says, sitting right up against my side, on my orange beanbag. Shoulder to shoulder. He hands me the soda, and he bites into his apple. His movements distract my brain, and I shake my head. Fuck.

“What?” I ask.

He smiles. “Tricyclics, wolf scout.”

I must look massively confused. Because I am.

“The quiz question.” Farrow flicks my notecard.

Right. I glance at the answer. “Good guess,” I say dryly, the air lightening. We both breathe easier, and I’m happy about that.

“Not a guess.” He chews his apple, and I hone in on his upturning lips. He notices and asks, “Sure you don’t want me to fuck you all night?”

Very unsure. “Positive, and you should tease the wall, the carpet, that lampshade over there.” I point to the lamp across the loft. “Because it’d be more likely to give into you.”

Farrow lets out a long whistle. “He wants me to flirt with inanimate objects.”

I try really hard not to laugh. Christ, focus. I shuffle through a few more cards, and I notice the silver rings on my fingers. His rings.

I’ve worn them before today. Just like this, but it dawns on me in this second that his rings fit my fingers perfectly. We’re pretty much the same size. And I’ve never noticed that before.

I wouldn’t need to steal a ring in order to match his size. I can just buy one that fits me—and I can’t believe I’m thinking about this. But it’s never meant something to me the way it does right now.

This powerful moment surges through my core. Because I feel ready to do more than just dream or think about forever with him. I’m going to make it happen.