I had spent so long being afraid of love that I had forgotten it could also feel like this like breathing properly for the first time in years.
The morning after I sent Felix that message, I woke up different.
Not dramatically different. Not the kind of different you see in films where the girl throws open her curtains and the sunlight pours in like a reward. It was peaceful than that. I just lay in my bed in the grey early morning and noticed that the stone in my chest the one that had been sitting there since my mother first said those four words felt lighter. Not gone,just lighter.
I checked my phone.
Felix had replied at eleven the previous night, which meant he had been awake waiting. His message was three lines long and each line undid something in me that I had not known was tied up.
I am not going to hurt you, Jasmine. I know you have no reason to believe that yet. But I am going to spend every day making sure you do.
I read it four times. Then I put my phone face down on my mattress and stared at the ceiling and had a very quiet, very private argument with myself about whether it was safe to feel as happy as I was currently feeling.
I lost the argument. Happy won.
That week was the best week I had experienced since arriving at college. Felix and I fell into a rhythm that felt both brand new and completely natural at the same time. We studied together every evening, sitting across from each other with our books spread between us like a border neither of us needed anymore. He would tap my foot under the table when I zoned out. I would steal his pen without asking and he would pretend to be annoyed and then smile when he thought I was not looking.
I was always looking.
We walked to class together in the morning, leaving early enough that the campus was still quiet and the air still had that cool, unhurried feeling that belongs only to the very beginning of the day. He always walked on the side closest to the road. I noticed that the second time and did not say anything about it. I just noticed it and filed it somewhere warm inside me.
He met me after my biology practical on Thursday with a drink he had bought from the canteen not because I asked, not because it was a special occasion, just because he had been passing and he thought of me. That was the thing about Felix that kept catching me off guard. He thought of people. He thought of me. Consistently, quietly, without needing to be asked.
I had not known that was possible.
My roommates noticed, of course. Flourish had recovered enough from her own heartbreak to start observing mine with something between amusement and hope. She told me one evening that I smiled differently now. I told her she was imagining things. She threw a pillow at me and said love looked good on my face.
I did not argue. I just smiled again differently, apparently and went back to my notes.
Best was quieter. She was still healing, still carrying the weight of what Frank had done, still walking carefully through her own days like someone who had sprained something invisible. But she watched Felix and me with an expression I could not fully read. Not jealousy,not sadness. Something more complicated than either.
Something that looked almost like hope.
And at night, after the lights went out and the room settled into its breathing silence, I lay awake and thought about how terrifying it was this happiness. How it had edges. How it could be taken. How it was the most vulnerable I had ever felt and somehow, inexplicably, I was choosing to stay in it anyway.
I was choosing Felix.
Every morning I woke up and I chose him again.