Graces of Bliss Hall Book II

“Keeper Ryan is obsessed with me,” Donnelly would announce, voice ringing off the battered ceiling tiles of the Bliss Hall common room, echoing into the gallery, sometimes even down into the refectory where voices were supposed to hush for the morning. “He can’t keep his hands off my tights.”

She said it like a punchline, a feat, a curse and a blessing at once. The other Graces rolled their eyes, but none could deny that Donnelly’s keeper, Ryan, seemed to have won the sweepstakes in the vigilance and stamina department. He haunted the halls on visiting days, loitered outside her classrooms, and even when forbidden outright from certain floors, managed to invent errands, lost items, or heady, urgent notes from the faculty, all just to catch sight of her from twenty paces.

Grace Donnelly, after couple weekend, had to admit it to herself: she adored it. The first weeks had been a kind of shock, like falling into cold water. Your name called, a new uniform pressed into your hands, a keeper you’d spoken with only in orchestrated, stilted pre-couple interviews—then suddenly you were expected to be as close as skin, as familiar as weather. It had all seemed absurd the first night. She remembered standing in front of the full-length mirror in the pair’s dorm, trying to gauge the silhouette of her new navy dress and feeling like she was watching someone else’s story.

But the next morning, Ryan had appeared at her elbow before breakfast, notebook in hand, reciting her schedule. He walked her to ballet, stood outside the studio with a thermos of black tea exactly as she took it, then met her after for a brisk walk around the quad, insisting it was “good for digestion.” She’d tried to lose him a few times, slipping away among the columns or into the music library, but he materialized moments later, smiling, never breathless, as if he’d mapped every route she’d ever take before she set foot in Bliss Hall.

At first she found it patronizing. She’d made it seventeen years without anyone monitoring her hydration levels or correcting her posture. But little by little, Donnelly recognized the attention not as surveillance, but as a kind of nervous devotion—like the way a new parent checks a sleeping baby every ten minutes to make sure it’s still breathing. All the small rituals of her day—her favorite snacks, the way she liked her laces doubled, her aversion to certain fluorescent-lit hallways—Ryan catalogued and recalled, shaping his daily plans around them until she wondered if he was annotating her in the margins of some secret manual.

And then there was the physicality of it, which caught her off guard. Never before had someone wanted her so much—not just in the sexual sense, though there was plenty of that, but in the sense of wanting her company, her laughter, her moods and stories and even the sour silences when she was upset or tired. Ryan seemed to absorb every facet, every weather pattern of her personality, and returned it multiplied, as if the only thing he wanted in the world was more Donnelly, and then more again.

It was power, of a kind, and she relished it. But she also learned quickly that in the balance of Bliss Hall, the real power was supposed to belong to the keeper. It was his duty, his role, to claim his Grace, not just in show but in body and mind and practice. To her surprise, Donnelly found she liked this too. She liked when he took her by the arms, not too hard but firmly enough that she could stop thinking and just be moved from place to place. She liked that he claimed her again and again, as though repetition made it more real, more true; as if each time was a new proof that she was his, or that the world made sense arranged this way.

They were not the only pair to fall into this rhythm. By the end of September, the sophomore class had split into two visible species: the shadowless singles, who flitted together in tightly bonded friend pairs; and the coupled, who moved as one unit, the keepers always a half-step behind their Grace unless called to the front, at which point they would do whatever was needed, whatever made things easier, whatever would keep their Grace smiling, or at least not in tears. The keepers were the muscle of the relationship, but it was the Graces who determined the direction, the flavor, the pace of every interaction, even if it sometimes seemed otherwise.

But for Donnelly, it was not enough to be attended. She wanted to be owned completely, to be the axis of someone else’s world; and so she pushed, tested, dared Ryan to want her more than was strictly necessary. She started showing up late to their arranged meetings, just to see how long he would wait in the freezing foyer. She let her moods run unchecked, sometimes picking fights for the pleasure of seeing how he’d handle her at her worst. He always responded the same way: with calm, and patience, and the unshakeable sense that no matter what storm she brought, he would simply stand in it, clear-eyed and waiting for her to come back to herself.

It drove her mad, and then drove her wild with affection. And as their first semester together unspooled, Donnelly let herself be claimed in every way Ryan could think to claim her. They made out in the dark corners of the library, with the unspoken understanding that Prefect Reed would look away, so long as they didn’t disturb the study tables. They spent entire afternoons lying on the grassy hillock by the old conservatory, her head on Ryan’s chest, listening to the thrum of his heartbeat and the boring stories of his boyhood in the western provinces. Sometimes, instead of going to class, they’d sneak up to the seventh-floor observation deck, where he’d press her up against the glass while the city unspooled beneath them, and she’d let him because the world felt small and manageable in his arms.

Sophomore year: the year of claiming, the year of keeping, the year of coupling. This was what the time was for. Weekends and weekdays both. Keeper Ryan would ride her at least five times, like there was a schedule; morning without fail, again at night, once in the hush of the middle hours, and sometimes more after couple weekend had set them both alight. Ryan claimed Donnelly as only a keeper claimed a Grace; he would come for her as she left ballet, tights on, hair mussed. He would claim her again before the next class. He would claim her before lunch, after lunch, always at three in the afternoon, drawing her back to the room, back to the bed. Sometimes four, sometimes five times in a single day.

The first time had been almost catastrophic. There was a protocol, yes, but protocol assumed a slow climb, a conversation, a negotiation of boundaries. Instead, Donnelly had thrown herself at Ryan with the full force of her curiosity and need, and Ryan, startled—then delighted—had responded in kind. She remembered the way his hands shook, the way he kept asking her if she was sure, even as he lifted her onto the narrow bed, even as his breath went ragged, even as she laughed and told him, “I will never be more sure of anything in my life.”

They lost themselves for hours, tangled in each other, pushing past every warning and limit she’d been told to honor. They missed dinner, missed roll call, missed the entire evening block, and when they finally surfaced, the sheets were ruined and her thighs ached in the most satisfying, world-confirming way. The gossip arrived within forty-eight hours, but Donnelly didn’t mind; she liked being the story for once, the answer to the whispered questions about what really happened between Graces and their keepers.

The second time was gentler, more deliberate; Ryan had taken to heart every detail of her response, every cue of her pleasure, and built the entire encounter around her. He asked if she wanted to be kissed on the neck (she did), if she liked the lights on or off (off, at first, but at some point she wanted to see), if there was anything she didn’t want (she couldn’t think of a single thing, but told him she’d say so if it changed). They took their time, and she found that the more considerate and methodical he became, the more she wanted to undo him, to make him lose his composure all over again.

So Donnelly learned to calibrate her own performance, to invent little surprises—an extra button undone, a new curl to her hair, the trace of a perfume she knew he liked—for the pleasure of watching Ryan’s restraint give way. She became, in a sense, a student of his attention: noticing how the sight of her in her ballet tights made him flush, how the soft rasp of her voice in the morning made his hands restless, how the simplest joke could undo his seriousness in a flash. She enjoyed learning him almost as much as being learned by him.

Each time, the act itself became less about the finish and more about the pattern, the ritual, the knowledge that she was desired over and over, and that the desiring did not lessen or flatten but seemed to accumulate, until she felt more herself than she ever had before. It was, in its way, a kind of religion: worship in the form of repetition, devotion proven through consistency and daily return.

At first, Donnelly pretended to resent the attention. She played at rolling her eyes, at utter boredom, while the others in the cohort nudged or snorted or made a pretense of being above it all. But she could see the way they watched her: the way Yoon fixed her with that strange, clinical stare, as if she was observing some new species; the way Briese, who pretended to be too mature for gossip, angled her head to catch every word; the way Grace Winters herself, for all her aura of surgical detachment, sometimes blushed, sometimes bit her tongue, sometimes asked a single question that made everyone go quiet. Even Grace Anchors, who’d come from a family so famous for the discipline that her own grandmother was still quoted in the orientation packets, had her tells—fingers wound tight around her mug, listening with a kind of appalled fascination, as if Donnelly’s exploits were both a horror and a secret template for life beyond the rules.

Ryan spoke to her during sex, a slow, unhurried warmth to his words that edged into her. He told her how beautiful she was, not just once but again and then again, as if repetition could build a scaffolding that would keep her upright, keep her whole. Your lips are so sweet, he said, and the sound of his voice made her believe it. He told her her breasts were beautiful, the kind of beautiful that was doubled by the saying of it: beautiful, beautiful, as if the thing itself multiplied under his touch. And your ass, he told her, was lovely, was impossible to stop touching, and he grabbed it, cupped it, as if his hands would never tire of the shape it made. Her legs, too, delicious, delicious, the word lingering in the air between them. And her hair, he loved her hair, the softness, the light. Donnelly wanted this—the words, the attention, the way it felt to be seen, really seen. She had never had it before, this kind of wanting focused entirely on her, and it left her breathless.

Donnelly liked to think she told her stories for the humor of it, for the punchlines and the escalating absurdity, but of course that was only the surface. Beneath, she was flexing a muscle she’d barely known existed before Bliss Hall: the ability to make other people feel. Each time she recounted a new place, a new risk, a new way Ryan had made her lose composure or control, she watched the cohort’s reactions, the subtle tics and shifts and flickers of envy. She loved it, how even the most disciplined among them could be drawn into her orbit, compelled by the idea of pleasure as something simultaneously forbidden and absolutely sanctioned. The program said: you will become these women. Here, Donnelly was already the one they couldn’t stop watching.

There was always a performance to it. She played up the bravado—We had sex in the broom closet during class, can you believe it; we had sex on the football field and I lost my hair ribbon and never found it; we had sex in the library and almost got caught by Prefect Reed, can you imagine her face—but the truth was that the stories, even as she told them, were never quite as wild as they sounded. Not because the acts themselves weren’t real, but because the real thrill for Donnelly was afterward, when she could replay the memory and re-tell the story and see it reflected, multiplied, in the eyes of her friends. After all, the stories only mattered because someone else wanted them.

At first, the other Graces tried to keep up. There was a rash of bravado in the fall: Yoon, deadpan as ever, claimed to have done it in the roof garden after dark, though no one believed her because she never said more than a sentence at a time. Briese made an elaborate show of detachment, but when Winters asked her, pointedly, if it was true she’d been caught with her keeper in the Art Wing kiln room after midnight, Briese’s ears turned red and she didn’t speak for the rest of the week. Even Anchors, who seemed constitutionally immune to embarrassment, let slip that she and Carter (her keeper, as of the month before) had developed a “mutual aid arrangement” involving the locked music-practice rooms. All of it was theater—some of it true, most of it embellished for effect.

But Donnelly made it her calling. She would wait for the slow hour after dinner, when cohort time officially began and the day’s adrenaline was replaced by boredom and homesickness and the need for drama. She’d sprawl across the common room couch, one leg kicked over the armrest, and announce, “So, Ryan and I found a new place,” and the cohort would groan, but someone would always ask where, and then the game would be on. She relished the details: the cold stone tiles of the old stairwell against her back, the echo of her own voice in the dark, the danger of being caught and the certainty that if they were, it would be worth it just for the story. Sometimes, she even made things up, just to see if anyone would call her on it. They never did.

The more she told, the more she lived. It was a feedback loop: every new story made her feel more alive, more desired, more anchored in the world of Bliss Hall. Ryan, for his part, accepted the notoriety with a kind of good-natured resignation. He never complained, never tried to rein her in, only smiled his slow, lopsided smile and said, “They’ll be writing about you in the Case one day, you know that?” Donnelly hoped so. She wanted to be remembered, wanted to be mythic. She wanted every Grace who came after to wonder if it was possible, or even allowed, to be as wanted and as wanton as she was.

But underneath all that, the truth was quieter, more dangerous: Donnelly could not say she didn’t love it. Every week, every day, every hour she spent with Ryan—whether on the cathedral hush of the observation deck, or the less-than-hushed privacy of their narrow, institutional bed—only sharpened Donnelly’s appetite for him. She had not assumed, at first, that there would be so much of a future here; so much need, or so much of herself left to give. But he drew it out of her, skillfully and always with a patience that felt like a miracle after the blank years of waiting to matter. She tried to play it off as a joke, the way the others did, but for Donnelly the joke was over by the middle of sophomore year. Every time she let Ryan touch her she wanted more—more of the wanting, more of the risk, more of the feeling that at last she occupied, fully, the space and the story she’d always suspected she ought to. The more pleasure she felt, the more she wanted; the more she wanted, the more Ryan gave; and the more Ryan gave, the less she could imagine wanting anything else, or anyone else.

She told herself this was ordinary, this was expected: the keepers were matched to them for a reason, the program had the metrics to back it up, and everyone’s hormones were supposed to go berserk for the first full year. But that explanation failed to account for how Ryan looked at her, the way he seemed to memorize her jokes and her moods and the small, irrational preferences she didn’t know she had until he anticipated them. He kept a stash of the off-brand licorice she’d liked as a child, imported from the decaying city where her mother still lived. He learned, by trial and error and a kind of competitive curiosity, how best to coax a laugh from her in the morning, or how to lower her guard after a week of cohort drama. When she couldn’t sleep, he’d sit up with her and trade stories about the world before, his voice going gentle and just a little self-mocking, until her mind finally gave up the day.

Donnelly had never been delicate, never the type who needed coaxing, but with Ryan she found herself enjoying the surrender: the way a simple gesture—a hand on the spine, a kiss behind the jaw—could reroute her entire day, make her forget the world outside the room and the dozen things she was supposed to be worried about. He never demanded. He made it seem artless, inevitable, as if there were only ever the two of them, and the rest of Bliss Hall existed as background noise, a minor mystery for other Graces to solve. She liked that. She liked that when they were together, the story was theirs, and she could be greedy for it, and she could let herself be taken apart and put back together again.

When Ryan finally said I love you, it was not at the expected time—not in the afterglow, not in the safety of their routine, but one evening after a fight so trivial she couldn’t even remember what started it. She’d thrown a shoe at his head, as a joke, and missed; he’d overreacted, as a joke, and then they both laughed too hard and ended up on the floor, breathless and absurd. When he said it, she almost didn’t hear, but the way he pulled her close—like she was breakable, even if she wasn’t—made the words make sense. She didn’t say it back right away. She wanted to try it on first, to see if it fit.

They had sex again, that night—a kind of truce, or maybe an escalation. She liked that it didn’t have to be sweet every time. Sometimes it was rough, desperate, as if Ryan wanted to see how far she’d go, how much she’d let him have. She always let him. That night, though, he was careful: he unbuttoned her shirt slowly, tracing every inch of skin as if to memorize it, and she let him, not because she was in love but because she liked the feeling of being studied, of being the object of so much focus. He made her come twice before he even let himself touch her in earnest; she had to beg him, at the end, because he was so relentless about her pleasure it was almost cruel. She liked that, too.

Afterward, he lay with his head on her stomach and told her about his family—about the ruined farm in the western provinces, about his older sister who’d gotten out, about the mother who still believed in the old world and sent him care packages full of dry, bitter jokes. Donnelly liked these stories best of all: she liked when Ryan was a little uncertain, a little undone. She felt, at these times, that he was more real, more alive, than any boy she’d ever met. She told herself that she would never let it become a weakness, this wanting, but in the end she let it happen, let it bend her into a shape she’d never thought possible.

She started to crave the rituals of their togetherness: the daily check-in texts that became codewords for what they’d do later; the way he always found her in the dining hall no matter how crowded; the secret hand signals they’d worked out to communicate across a room of watchful Prefects. She liked that they had their own language, their own rules, a hidden order that belonged to nobody else. It made the rest of Bliss Hall—the lectures, the evaluations, the endless etiquette drills—feel like a stage set for the real thing. He made her feel indispensable, like the whole program would collapse if she was not there to anchor it. She wanted to believe this was true.

She was not immune to the rules. Every Grace knew the limits: the blackout hours, the curfew, the unspoken boundary that said you could have the boy, as long as you never let the relationship eclipse the mission. Donnelly ignored this last part. She wanted the eclipse. She wanted the totality of it. Sometimes she’d joke about running away together, or about stealing an unsanctioned marriage, or about getting pregnant just for the hell of it. Each time, Ryan laughed, but Donnelly saw the way his eyes tracked her when she said it, as if he was measuring the truth behind the stunt. She liked to think that if she pressed him, if she really asked, he would say yes. She did not press him yet.

The other Graces noticed the change. At first, they teased her for the classic honeymoon effect; then, when the honeymoon failed to wear off, they started to look a little afraid. Donnelly relished this. She started to exaggerate her stories, making each one a little more lurid, a little more impossible, just to see how long it would take for the cohort to stop believing her. They never did. They believed everything. She was becoming, she realized, a legend in real time. The others began to consult her, quietly, about first times, about boundaries, about how to get a keeper to pay attention. She did not mind being consulted. She dispensed advice with the same lack of filter she brought to every other aspect of her life: “If you want something, say it. If you don’t, leave. Boys aren’t complicated, but they like to think they are.”

She became, without entirely meaning to, the cohort’s oracle on pleasure. If you wanted to know what was possible, what could be gotten away with, what would leave you wanting more rather than less, you asked Donnelly. 

The program, in its omniscient, bureaucratic way, kept tabs on every coupling and longing in the cohort. There were layers of surveillance, some obvious, some not: the routine health checks that always included a blood draw, the psycho-affective surveys after every major holiday, the “self-report” modules that served as a corrective for the cohort’s tendency toward rumor. Donnelly knew perfectly well that her relationship with Ryan was tracked, graphed, and occasionally—she suspected—spectated by some anonymous analyst in the Matrons’ wing. It didn’t bother her. She found it flattering, if anything. Their connection was quantifiable, reproducible, exceptional enough to merit a mention in the year-end review. It was proof, of a kind, that she and Ryan were not only permitted, but essential.

She knew that the program not only anticipated such pairings, but in some sly way seemed to encourage—or at least design for—the charged current between graces and their keepers. Everything about the architecture of Bliss Hall and its satellite spaces drove home the point: the co-ed dining rooms, the strategically scheduled electives, the joint service projects that paired them off for days at a time. Even the punishments, when they came, seemed more performative than punitive: mandatory counseling, a weekend of “reflection,” maybe a transfer to a different study group for a month. Nobody was ever kicked out for falling in love. Quite the opposite. The headmistress, in one of her rare forays into candor, had said it outright: “Harmony between the lines is preferable to discipline above the lines.” Donnelly had smirked at that, but the message was clear. Her transgressions were not a liability, but a feature.

So she leaned into it. She let herself be watched, modeled, discussed. She even participated in the periodic “intimate wellness” panels, a euphemism for monitored roundtable confessionals about sex, desire, and the art of not losing your mind in a locked facility with a hundred beautiful boys and girls and only three sanctioned outlets for your feelings. Donnelly’s answers were always somewhere between provocative and practical. She liked complicating the data set, forcing the Prefects to update their hypotheses about motivation, attachment, or whatever else they were tracking this month. She viewed it as a game, and she liked games she could win.

By the middle of her last year, Donnelly had four frozen embryos in the race banks, a fact she shared freely with anyone who asked and several who hadn’t. She made a point of referring to them as “my future army,” which annoyed the more sanctimonious Graces and delighted the irreverent ones. Collection day was always an event: Donnelly would parade to the labs in her softest uniform, sign the digital release form with a flourish, and tell the nurse, “You can keep the tip.” It never got old. There was a running joke that Donnelly’s offspring would one day outnumber the faculty. She didn’t mind. She liked the idea of being the founder of a new cohort, or at least its most prolific cautionary tale.

She was certain she’d marry Ryan. There was no question in her mind about it. They’d talked about it openly, sometimes with biting sincerity, sometimes as a send-up of their own predictability: “We’ll get matched,” Ryan would say, “move into one of the Grace Park units, have a kid in the first six months, second before the ink dries on the mortgage.” It was a banality, but Donnelly took comfort in the image. She could see her future playing out one week at a time: the gossip, the drama, the sex, the long exhale of knowing exactly where she belonged. The only real surprise was how much she wanted it. The certainty of it.

But as a second-year, her ambitions were more local. She was mainly interested in the pursuit—the pleasure, plain and unadorned, of being with Ryan whenever and however she could arrange it. There were sanctioned hours and unsanctioned corners, and Donnelly was a master of both. She’d mapped every blind spot in the Bliss Hall security grid, learned the shift changes for the overnight Prefects, and cultivated plausible alibis for every stretch of missing time. She became, as Ryan put it, “a one-woman black market of joy.” The phrase stuck. Donnelly liked to think that even the most humorless Matron would have to respect it.

She kept a running log of their exploits, sometimes in her own head, sometimes on a locked drive in the library’s forgotten stacks. She recounted these stories to the other Graces sparingly, doling them out like contraband to those who needed it most. Donnelly understood that the real currency at Bliss Hall was not rule-following, but narrative: the stories you could tell, and the ones that stuck. Hers always stuck. She’d tell the others, “If you’re going to risk getting caught, make sure it’s for something worth the legend.” She lived by this credo.

Her best friend, Grace Yoon, once asked her if she ever worried about the future—about what would happen if she lost Ryan, or if something went sideways in the program’s relentless, unseen machinery. Donnelly had shrugged, then said, “I’m pretty sure the program wants it to work out. They’ve got too much invested.” She said it as a joke, but even she was not immune to the undercurrent of dread that ran beneath the surface of every relationship at Bliss Hall. There were stories—always stories—of matches that failed, of post-graduation placements that left Graces stranded or, worse, irrelevant. Donnelly told herself she was not like them. She would never let herself become replaceable.

And The Prefects caught wind, of course, but Donnelly had learned from Ryan’s intelligence: always give them what they expect, always act a little dumber than you really are, and they’ll never know how far ahead you’re planning.

and The Prefects caught wind, of course, but Donnelly had learned from Ryan’s intelligence: always give them what they expect, always act a little dumber than you really are, and they’ll never know how far ahead you’re planning.

If she was honest, though, the bravado was sometimes a cover. Donnelly was afraid, in the quietest part of herself, that the program would change her, or him, or both; that the world outside the walls would be nothing like this, and that all their rules and rituals would snap under the weight of real life. She pretended not to care, but she watched the older Graces closely. Many of them fell apart after graduation or else became so perfectly assimilated that you could barely see the outline of the person who’d come in. She did not want that. 

She wanted, if anything, to become more herself, and her boyfriend and keeper was making that happen.

Ryan kept careful, almost obsessive, watch over her. It was never oppressive, not the way she would have bristled at from anyone else; Donnelly, who had once lived her life bracing against loneliness and the high, tight airlessness of fear, now inhabited the world as if she’d been given a secret, invisible armor: the certainty of Ryan’s constant loving attention. He made her necessary—not merely to himself, but to the architecture of their shared days, the inside jokes and the private text threads and the ritual of always sitting close enough to let their legs touch beneath the table, even in crowded silence. She had never belonged to anyone before, not really, and the newness of this belonging left her both giddy and a little terrified, as if the world could take it away at any moment.

With Ryan, the context of her life changed. She found herself doing things she’d previously judged other girls for: rerouting her schedule to catch him between classes, lingering in the corridor outside his dorm just to stretch the goodbye a few minutes longer, memorizing the cadence of his walk and the weathered edges of his hands. She had not known, before, that she was capable of this kind of hunger, this capacity to bend around another person’s gravity field and find herself pleased by the shape it made of her. She could not have known, before him, the way simple domesticities—his clothes folded in the corner of her bunk, his toothbrush balanced alongside hers in the shared bathroom—would become the evidentiary markers of love, the proof that she mattered. Even the parts of herself she’d tried to hide or polish away—the loud laugh, the stubborn refusal to let a joke go, the way she blurted out the truth when it would have been easier to lie—Ryan noticed and, impossibly, seemed to like them better for it.

She told herself this was the program working as intended. After all, that’s what the entire edifice of Bliss Hall was designed to do: take the raw, bristling need to be seen and cherished and channel it into something generative, something useful for the future. Donnelly could recite the party line as well as anyone, could quote the little catechism that said their desires were not a problem but a resource, that the keepers existed not to constrain them but to help them flourish. But the actual, lived fact of being wanted—so obviously, so sincerely—was different than the theory. Being chosen by Ryan changed her understanding of what it was possible to want, and changed her understanding of herself. It was not just about sex, not even mostly; it was about the way her body felt like it had a home now, the way her laugh made him smile, the way he reached for her hand whenever they crossed the cold stone lobby.

She was sure of him. She was sure of herself in relation to him. With Ryan, certainty was not a performance or a bluff. He loved her every day, sometimes several times a day, and made no secret of how much he needed her. He said it with his hands on her back when she was anxious, with the mug of tea he brought to her after evening drills, with the way he never, ever looked at another girl the way he looked at her. And she loved him, she did, she could say it to herself now without flinching or irony. She loved him in the way a person loves a dream made solid, a future she could reach out and touch. If someone had asked her, then, if she would give up her own name to keep this feeling, she would have said yes, and maybe she would not even have regretted it.

She told her friends as much, sometimes without realizing she was being listened to. “I only ever feel completely loved when Ryan is inside me,” Donnelly once confessed to Winters, who blushed and rolled her eyes but later repeated the line to the group as if it were a badge of honor. The others teased her, but what surprised Donnelly was how little she cared about their opinions anymore. She had always been the one most desperate to impress, the quickest to seize on a moment of drama or improvise a new story when the old one started to wear thin. Now, she felt the urge to be impressive draining out of her, replaced by a calmer, deeper sense of satisfaction. She liked being the girl who was loved best. She liked being the one whose keeper brought her licorice from the old city, whose keeper had memorized her moods and learned to tell, just by the set of her jaw, when she was about to pick a fight. She liked the way Ryan’s attention made the rest of the world melt into irrelevance, and how, when he held her, the drama of the cohort and the petty contests for status seemed less important than a good, slow kiss or a nap together after curfew.

But it wasn’t perfect. There were the moments, too, when the security made her restless, when she wondered if this was all she would ever want, or if there might come a time when the uniformity of love would begin to dull its edge. She sometimes caught herself, in the middle of a routine moment—walking the path to classes, reading the same grey maples outside the window—wondering whether she was really as different as she liked to believe. The whole apparatus of Bliss Hall was designed to replicate itself: the pairings, the rituals, the endless talk of legacy and precedent. Even the rebellion of loving too much was just another stripe in the pattern. Donnelly did not want to be a pattern. She wanted to be the exception, the one who made the world bend around her instead of the other way around. She was not sure Ryan understood this about her, but sometimes when they were together, she sensed he might. Sometimes it felt like he was waiting for her to say it out loud.

Sometimes she’d wake in the night and watch him sleep, and think about the future they were supposed to want: the row house in Grace Park, the children in blue uniforms, the managed happiness of a life in service to demographic necessity. She didn’t hate the idea, exactly, but she could not picture herself there, not yet. She wanted more time—more stories, more drama, more of the impossible wanting that made everything in her body feel sharp and real. She wanted to be the one who broke the pattern, who escaped the gravity of imitation and precedent. She didn’t know if Ryan wanted this too, but sometimes when he looked at her, Donnelly could see the same hunger, the same refusal, burning behind his careful eyes.

In the mornings now, she woke to the smell of his coffee. He had moved his things in gradually—a drawer claimed, then two, then the whole left side of the closet—and somewhere in that slow accumulation she had stopped noticing the difference between his apartment and hers. He paid the utilities without mentioning it. He restocked the refrigerator with things she hadn’t known she wanted until they were there. When the overhead bulb in the kitchen finally burned out, it was replaced before she thought to buy one. She let him. More than let him—she felt something loosen in her chest each time he took something off her hands, some old vigilance she hadn’t realized she’d been maintaining. At night she fell asleep faster than she had in years, her back against his chest, his arm across her like a fact.

She would tease him, delighting in the mess of his morning hair or the way he always fumbled with the rules of romance, and he would just grin, letting himself be the cheerful, uncomplicated jock everyone expected. Then he would take her again, the way she wanted it, rough and right, and she loved the pulse of it inside her: that was always what she wanted, the warmth and fullness deep inside. “Is this what grown-ups mean, when they talk about making babies with love?” she asked him once. Ryan just shrugged, easy, unbothered, “I don’t know. All I know is I want you, forever, married, and I want a lot of babies with you, inside you.” Donnelly smiled. She could see he was perfectly happy here, utterly blissed-out, in the world they made together at Bliss Hall.