Jason woke to his alarm at 6:25 the next morning and lay there for a second before reaching over to kill it, the ceiling swimming slowly into focus above him.
Seven days. The number arrived before he’d even fully surfaced from sleep, patient as ever, sitting in the corner of his vision like it had never actually left overnight. He stared at it for a moment, willing it to feel less permanent than it did, and then got up anyway, because lying there arguing with a floating notification had never once changed the number attached to it.
He showered, dressed, and moved through his morning with the same practiced efficiency he’d built over the last two weeks, though something in the rhythm felt heavier today, like each step required slightly more deliberate effort than it had the day before. He checked his phone once while pulling on his shoes, no new messages, and told himself that wasn’t disappointing, and mostly believed it.
He was locking his door when Alex’s opened down the hall.
"Morning," she said, already dressed for the day, coffee in one hand, keys in the other. "You look like a man who didn’t sleep well."
"I slept fine."
"You look like a man who’s lying about sleeping fine." She fell into step beside him toward the stairwell, easy as always, no hesitation about matching his pace like they did this every morning, though this was actually the first time their schedules had overlapped this early. "Big exam coming up, right? Is that the source of the tragic face."
"Something like that."
"Seven days, isn’t it? I saw the flyer again yesterday." She sipped her coffee, glancing at him sideways. "You’ll be fine. You’ve got the face of someone who’s already spent way more time worrying about this than the material actually requires."
She said something almost exactly like that before. Jason filed the observation away, the same faint echo of Bree’s note from over a week ago surfacing again without any obvious explanation for why two people who’d never met would land on such similar phrasing. He shook it off. Coincidence. People said things like that all the time.
"You heading to campus?" he asked, mostly to change the subject in his own head.
"Kinesiology lab. Early one today. You?"
"Class, then probably the gym, then a study group that’s apparently going to run me into the ground for the rest of the week."
"Sounds thrilling." She grinned, and they reached the bottom of the stairwell together, stepping out into the cool morning air, the building’s front steps already busy with a handful of other tenants heading out for the day. "Hey, actually, since we’re both up early for once. Coffee. Right now. I still owe you one, and I’m bad at following through on things unless I make them happen immediately."
Jason hesitated, the countdown flickering at the edge of his vision, and something colder than curiosity ran through him at the timing of it. Seven days. A pretty, direct, available woman offering me exactly the kind of low-stakes coffee that could theoretically go somewhere, right when I need somewhere for it to go.
"I’ve got class in twenty minutes," he said, which was true, and also convenient in a way that made him faintly uncomfortable with himself for noticing.
"Rain check, then." She didn’t seem bothered, already turning toward the opposite direction. "I’ll hold you to it. I’m persistent when I actually want something."
"Noted."
She gave him a small wave and headed off, and Jason watched her go for a second longer than he meant to before turning the other way, walking toward campus with the same quiet unease sitting in his chest that had been building there for days now, low and constant, impossible to fully shake.
I have Sarah, he reminded himself, the same automatic thought from days earlier, except this time it didn’t land quite as cleanly as it used to. Not because anything about Sarah had changed. Because the ground underneath the whole relationship had shifted the second that second notification appeared, and no amount of repeating the sentence to himself seemed to fully steady it back into place.
Class passed in a blur, the professor’s voice a distant hum against the low, constant static of Jason’s own thoughts, and by the time he made it to the gym that afternoon, Ben had already noticed something was off before Jason had said a single word.
"Okay," Ben said, racking a weight, "what’s going on with you."
"Nothing’s going on."
"You’ve been staring at the same spot on the wall for like a full minute. That’s not a nothing face."
"I’m tired. Exam’s in a week."
"You’re not an exam-stress guy. You’re a get-mildly-annoyed-and-power-through guy. This is different." Ben crossed his arms, studying him with more focus than Jason expected this early in a workout. "This is the same face you had the week Amanda dumped you, actually, now that I’m looking properly."
Jason felt something tighten at the comparison, unfair and also, somewhere underneath it, uncomfortably accurate. "It’s not that."
"Then what is it."
I can’t tell you the actual answer, which is that a system I gained from getting rejected is now threatening to remove a very specific part of my anatomy unless I acquire a second girlfriend within a week, all while I’m actually, genuinely, in love with the first one. "Just a lot going on. School. Family stuff. Normal life things."
"Uh huh." Ben clearly didn’t buy it, but let it go the way he usually did, filing it away instead of pushing further, and Jason was grateful for that specific quality in him more than he usually let on.
They worked through the rest of the session mostly in silence, Ben occasionally correcting his form, Jason going through the motions with less enthusiasm than usual, his mind circling the same unresolved loop it had been circling for days now. Nadia. Bree. Vivian. Alex. Four names, four completely different women, none of them chosen for any reason beyond proximity and timing, and every single time he let himself actually consider one of them seriously, some quieter, more honest part of him recoiled at the idea of doing to any of them exactly what Amanda’s careless calculation had done to him.
Convenient. The word still surfaced sometimes, uninvited, whenever he caught himself running the cold, practical math the system apparently wanted from him. That’s exactly what this would make me. The exact thing I hated being.
He left the gym with that thought still sitting heavy in his chest and headed toward the study room, the group’s usual meeting time approaching, and found all three of them already there when he arrived, Nadia running through flashcards with brisk efficiency, Vivian sprawled sideways in her chair with her feet propped on the empty seat beside her, Bree tucked into her corner with her paperback, though she looked up the second he walked in, the same small, careful attention she always gave him now.
"There he is," Vivian said. "The man himself. You look exhausted."
"Long day."
"Long week, more like. You’ve had that face since Tuesday." She swung her legs down, sitting up properly, studying him with unusual seriousness for once instead of her usual chaotic energy. "You good?"
"I’m fine."
"You keep saying that. I don’t think it’s true, but I also respect that you’re not obligated to tell three people you’ve known for two weeks your entire emotional situation, so I’ll drop it." She grinned, softening the moment, and slid a stack of cards toward him. "Sit. Study. Distraction via academic suffering."
Jason sat, grateful for the deflection, and let himself sink into the familiar rhythm of the group, Nadia’s sharp corrections, Vivian’s constant, easy commentary, Bree’s quiet, precise interjections whenever someone got something genuinely wrong. The session ran long, close to two hours, the four of them working through material with the kind of focus that had become second nature by now, and somewhere in the middle of it, Jason actually felt himself relax for the first time all day, the countdown fading into background noise instead of the constant foreground pressure it had been since morning.
Near the end, Nadia set her pen down, glancing between the three of them. "I think we’re actually in decent shape for this. Six days out and I’m not panicking, which is new for me."
"High praise," Vivian said. "From the woman who scheduled breathing exercises."
"The breathing exercises worked. Don’t discount proven methodology."
"I’m not discounting it. I’m just noting it was insane."
"Insane and effective aren’t mutually exclusive." Nadia began packing up, brisk as always, and the group started dissolving into the usual scattered goodbyes, bags zipped, chairs pushed in, the room slowly emptying out.
Bree lingered a beat longer than usual, catching Jason’s eye as she gathered her things. "Walking my way today?"
My way, she’d said, not the same way, and Jason caught the small, deliberate phrasing shift, something a little more direct than her usual careful hedging. "Sure."
They left together, Vivian and Nadia peeling off in their own directions, and the evening settled in cool and quiet around them as they walked, the conversation easy at first, drifting through the exam, the trap questions, some story Bree was telling about a lab partner who’d nearly set something on fire during an experiment that had nothing to do with fire at all.
"You’ve been different lately," she said eventually, the conversation shifting without much warning, the same directness she’d shown at the door of the study room.
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