Page 98 of Escape Velocity
Preparations for finals are already on the way, the threat of them looming over his head.
It’s the brief moments before Thanksgiving where he can take things slowly, but after Thanksgiving, it’s full-throttle finals mode.
Mason doesn’t know what to expect anymore. November used to be a time when he felt like he belonged with his family, when he started celebrating Christmas early with them by putting up decorations and playing Christmas music on the radio.
This year is different. Everything is different.
He has to toss out an entire belief system that he had adopted his whole life and build a new one, but he’s still hanging onto the vestiges of who he used to be.
The boy who did what he was told. The boy who gotgood grades. The boy who was going to be a prolific writer just like his parents.
Some things have changed, and some things haven’t. Callum is still with him. They had spent time apart, but now they have found their way back to each other.
How much three months has changed. It’s like he left his old self back in Northwood and had inhabited some other body. Living a double life.
And of course, it’s so confusing and so disarming to conjoin both of these so-called body doubles into one. The Mason who’s a writer and who’s going to make his family proud and the Mason who’s in a relationship with Callum Brown and is a physics whiz.
Dead leaves crunch beneath his worn boots. Flurries of snowflakes dance around him on his way back to his dorm from the library, way past his usual bedtime.
The world is quiet when snow falls.
It’s like he could hang up all his worries and disasters on a hanger in his closet when the flakes softly tumble out of the sky. Like the frigid wind and the icy streets freeze time and the growing panic in his mind.
All he can focus on is Callum.
His cheeks flushed as icy wind sweeps through him, and he puts his hands further into his pockets and shrugs his shoulders high to try and block it out.
It’s been a few weeks since he and Callum had their moment at the Halloween party. Their schedules never lined up properly to have more than a few moments alone together.
Mason sees Callum at games and briefly in between classes, but their relationship is left to handwritten notes left in Mason’s books or morning texts that Mason would wake up to while Callum was at practice.
Joel is always in Callum’s dorm, or Simon is always in Mason’s. Mason has to study. Callum has to practice.
Something is always in the way.
It’s an odd predicament. They’re in the same place, but they can’t find the right moment to meet, until tonight.
He knows it’s a bad idea to see him given everything that’s happening. Any chance of anyone seeing them together only means more cannon fodder for gossip if anyone does end up seeing them together.
Mason walks up the steps to the gazebo in the middle of the quad, with fairy lights hanging from the ceiling. It’s his first time in it, and it shields him from the developing storm that threatens to bury Montgomery in snow.
He leans on the banister of the gazebo, watching as the flurries dance in the wind, waiting for Callum to show up.
“Mason.”
He stops and whips around, as Callum’s low timbre and voice thick with warmth stops him in his tracks.
“Callum,” Mason says, his voice almost breaking.
Callum appears almost incandescent in front of him, like he’s glowing, like a meteor that had been pulled through the Earth’s atmosphere and collided on Montgomery’s front steps.
Mason practically runs at Callum, like he’s doing to tackle him.
He throws himself at Callum and wraps his arms around him.
“Mase!” Callum cries as Mason thumps into him, making Callum grunt like he’s being tackled.
His plaid jacket just feels like home.
