Sunshine at Midnight

Chapter One - The Walk Back (May POV)

May Carter had always believed there were certain kinds of loneliness that became easier to carry after midnight. Not because the ache grew smaller. It did not. If anything, the dark made every feeling more honest. But after midnight, the world stopped demanding that people perform. The campus softened. The brick buildings seemed less severe. The endless walkways of the University of Michigan, usually crowded with rushing undergraduates, cyclists, professors, campus tour groups, and graduate students moving through life with exhausted purpose, became wide and silver beneath the streetlamps.

At that hour, Ann Arbor felt almost gentle. The cold had teeth that night, but not enough to bite deep. It was early autumn, the kind of Michigan evening that held onto the last warmth of the day only in memory. The trees along the sidewalks had begun to turn, their leaves flashing gold and copper whenever the wind moved through them. Somewhere far off, a group of students burst into laughter, their voices rising and fading like sparks. A bus sighed at the curb. A bicycle bell chimed once in the distance. The smell of frying oil, wet leaves, and city pavement clung to the air.

May pulled the sleeves of her oversized cardigan down over her hands and walked with the paper bag from the burger place tucked against her chest. There were fries in the bag, though she had sworn she was done eating. She had said it with conviction too, with one hand on her stomach and the other pushing away the last bite of her double cheeseburger as if it had personally offended her.

But then Hank had grinned at her across the booth, all warm brown eyes and easy mischief, and said, “You’re going to want fries later, May. You always want fries later.”

“I do not always want fries later.”

“You literally always want fries later.”

“I am a woman of complexity.”

“You are a woman who lies about fries.”

So now she had fries. And beside her, Hank carried nothing except his phone, his wallet, and the smug satisfaction of having been right. He walked close to her. He usually did. At five feet four, Hank Ellis was only an inch taller than she was, which meant walking beside him never made May feel swallowed by someone else’s shadow. That was one of the things she liked about him, though she had never said it aloud. There was no looming with Hank. No physical intimidation. No careless masculine largeness that made her body tense before her mind had even decided whether it needed to.

Hank had a compact, lively presence. He was quick with his hands when he talked, quick with his smile, quick to notice when May went quiet. His hair was dark and always a little messy, as if he had just run his fingers through it after losing an argument with himself. He wore a navy hoodie under a faded denim jacket and had the open, familiar expression of someone who made friends by accident.

May felt safe around him. That was the easiest way to say it, though perhaps not the most complete. Safe was too small a word for the way Hank fit into the edges of her life. Safe sounded passive. Hank was not passive. He checked in without making her feel watched. He teased without cutting too deep. He remembered things she had told him weeks earlier and brought them back at strange, tender moments, as if he had been storing small pieces of her in his pockets.

He knew how she took her coffee during long research days. He knew she hated when people read over her shoulder. He knew she liked campus best after rain, when the stone buildings looked darker, and the sidewalks shone beneath the lamps. He knew she had a habit of pretending she was not tired until she nearly fell asleep sitting upright in the graduate lounge.

And sometimes, more and more lately, he did things that made her wonder about small things ...ambiguous things. His shoulder brushing hers when there was plenty of room on the sidewalk. His hand finding the small of her back when they crossed busy streets. His fingers closing lightly around her wrist when he wanted her attention. The way he sometimes tucked her hand into his without asking, as though it were the most natural thing in the world for them to walk like that. Not possessive exactly. Not romantic enough for her to accuse him of anything. But not nothing either.

Tonight, as they stepped away from the glowing warmth of the burger place and started toward the dorms, Hank looped his arm around her shoulders. May’s body registered it before her thoughts could organise themselves. The weight of him was familiar. His arm was not heavy. It was comfortable, friendly, almost brotherly if she wanted it to be. But that was the problem. Hank lived in that soft, dangerous territory between friendship and something that could become more if either of them ever decided to name it.

She glanced sideways at him. He was looking ahead, talking to Paul. May’s gaze moved, briefly and carefully, to the man walking on Hank’s other side. Paul Bennett was not someone May knew well. She knew his name because Hank had said it several times over the past month, always casually, as if Paul were not slowly becoming a recurring presence in places May had not expected him to appear. Paul from the public policy master’s program. Paul from Hank’s seminar. Paul who knew a good coffee place near State Street. Paul who had joined them once at the library café, then again at trivia night, then tonight at the burger place.

Paul was tall. Six foot one, according to Hank, who had volunteered the information for reasons May still did not understand. He had blond hair that looked darker at the roots and lighter where the light caught it, blue eyes, and a face that would have made him noticeable even if he had been standing still in a crowd. He had that clean, composed kind of attractiveness that suggested good genes, good posture, and the lifelong confidence of a man who had learned early that people were inclined to be kind to him.

He wore a grey wool coat over a white sweater, dark jeans, and expensive-looking sneakers that had somehow survived the night without a single stain. May had noticed that about him. Paul stayed neat. Even in a crowded burger place full of ketchup packets, grease-slick baskets, and students laughing too loudly over cheap food, he had looked untouched by the mess of ordinary life. Not cold, exactly ...just polished.

“Central Campus is prettier at night,” Paul was saying, his voice smooth and pleasant. “During the day it feels like everyone’s trying to get somewhere before they miss their entire future.”

Hank laughed. “That is the most master’s-student thing you’ve ever said.”

“I’m serious.”

“You always are. That’s your problem.”

Paul smiled, accepting the insult with an ease that suggested he had never had to defend himself from much worse. “And your problem is that you think taking nothing seriously counts as a personality.”

“Ouch.” Hank pressed his free hand to his chest. “May, are you hearing this? I bring him into our sacred burger tradition and he attacks me on the walk home.”

May looked up. “Sacred burger tradition?”

“Yes.”

“We’ve gone there three times.”

“Exactly. Tradition.”

Paul glanced at her then, and May felt the small, immediate pressure of being looked at by someone who knew he was good-looking. Not in an arrogant way, perhaps. Paul did not leer. He did not drag his gaze over her. He simply gave attention with the clean precision of a man who had been taught that eye contact could open doors. “You’re the historian, right?” he asked.

May almost corrected him automatically, then stopped herself. People were always reducing doctoral work into something smaller and easier to hold. “Literature,” she said. “Contemporary women’s fiction and body politics.”

Paul’s eyebrows lifted. “That sounds more interesting than my degree.”

“That depends on how much you enjoy suffering.”

“She loves suffering,” Hank said. “She chose a PhD.”

May nudged him lightly with her elbow. “You’re on campus for a one-year fellowship thing. You don’t get to judge me.”

“It is not a thing. It is a prestigious professional development program.”

“You called it a thing yesterday.”

“That was before Paul was here. I’m trying to sound impressive.”

Paul laughed. May smiled too, but beneath the smile her thoughts kept moving in circles. It was not that she disliked Paul. There was nothing wrong with him. That was almost the issue. He was handsome, educated, friendly, and attentive in a way that seemed carefully measured. When he asked a question, he listened to the answer. When he spoke, he did not interrupt. During dinner he had paid for his own food, held the door open without making a production of it, and asked May about her research as though he genuinely wanted to know. On paper, he was exactly the kind of man May’s friends would have nudged her toward.

So why did his presence make her uneasy? Not exactly unsafe but just a slight underlying uncomfortableness that she couldn't seem to dismiss. Perhaps a better way to put it would be that Paul did not make her feel unsafe ...He made her feel observed. He watched as though he were trying to understand what category she belonged in. As though May were not simply Hank’s friend, not simply a doctoral student walking back to the dorms with fries in her bag, but a question Hank had placed before him.

Do you like her? Could you like her? Would this work? The thought had come to her the second time Hank brought Paul around. She had dismissed it then, irritated with herself for assuming she was the subject of some silent male arrangement. But tonight the feeling returned, stronger than before.

Hank had invited Paul to dinner without asking her first, though it was not done rudely. Hank was never rude. He had simply appeared with Paul outside the library after May’s evening seminar and said, “We’re starving. Come with us.” We. Not I.

May had gone because she was hungry, because she liked Hank, because Paul had smiled politely, and because saying no would have required an explanation she did not feel like inventing.

Now, walking beneath the yellow glow of the streetlamps, with Hank’s arm warm around her shoulders and Paul’s long stride keeping an easy pace beside them, May wondered whether she had accidentally walked into something she had not agreed to. The campus opened ahead of them in layers of stone, glass, and shadow. Beyond the road, the buildings rose with old academic grandeur, their windows lit here and there by students still working late. Michigan had a way of making ambition look beautiful from the outside. Tall libraries. Grand facades. Names carved into stone. Walkways that seemed to promise a future to anyone disciplined enough to keep moving. May loved it and resented it in equal measure.

She had come here because it was the kind of place people respected before they respected you. When she told people she was doing her PhD at Michigan, they reacted with admiration, sometimes surprise, sometimes that quick flicker of recalculation she had learned to recognise.

Oh. You must be smart. As if her body had suggested otherwise. As if softness and intellect were opposing forces. May was five foot three, brown-eyed, black-haired, and chubby in a way that had shaped nearly every room she had ever walked into. Not because she hated herself. She did not. Not anymore, at least not in the dramatic way people expected women like her to hate themselves. But she knew what the world saw first. She knew the half-second pause when someone looked at her face, then her body, then decided what kind of woman she was allowed to be: sweet, funny, approachable, best friend ...not the girl men lost sleep over. The assumptions had followed her all the way to graduate school.

She had built armor out of cardigans, sarcasm, lip gloss, and academic competence. She knew how to be charming enough to make people comfortable, sharp enough to make them careful, and busy enough that no one asked too many questions about what she wanted when the work was done and the lights went low.

Hank’s arm tightened slightly around her shoulders as they crossed the street. “Cold?” he asked her.

“A little.”

“You want my jacket?”

“You are wearing a hoodie and a jacket. I’m not taking your jacket.”

“That was not the question.”

“I’m fine, Hank.”

“You always say that.”

“Because I am usually fine.”

“Usually is doing a lot of work there.”

May looked at him, and for one brief second the conversation around them thinned. Hank’s expression had softened. The teasing remained, but beneath it was something else. Something attentive. Something that knew her too well. Her heart gave a small, uncertain turn.

Then Paul said, “You two are like an old married couple.” The moment broke.

Hank laughed first, too quickly. “She wishes.”

May rolled her eyes because that was the expected response. Because it was easy. Because it kept everything in the safe territory of jokes. “Please,” she said. “I would be widowed by finals week.”

“You’d kill me?”

“I’d make it look academic.”

Paul laughed again, but May felt his gaze shift between them. There it was ...that subtle measuring. May tucked the paper bag closer to herself and stepped slightly out from under Hank’s arm, pretending she needed to adjust her cardigan. Hank let her go without comment, but she felt his glance. She hated that she felt guilty. She had no reason to feel guilty. Hank was her friend. He had no claim on her. She had no claim on him. Whatever flickered sometimes in the space between them had never been spoken aloud, and unspoken things were not promises. They were only possibilities. Maybe that was why they were so dangerous.

The three of them continued along the walkway. The dorms were still some distance away, their windows glowing like stacked little lives. Somewhere nearby, music pulsed faintly from a student apartment. A girl in a maize hoodie hurried past with wet hair and slippers, clutching a textbook to her chest. Two boys argued loudly about basketball near a bike rack. The ordinary noise of campus at night wrapped around May like a reminder that she was one person among thousands, carrying one small confusion through a world too large to notice.

Paul moved closer as the sidewalk narrowed beside a row of construction barriers. “Careful,” he said, lightly touching her elbow. It was polite, barely a touch. His fingers were gone almost immediately.

May smiled because that was what women were trained to do when a gesture was harmless but unwanted in some small, private way. “Thanks.”

Hank looked over, not sharply ...not jealously exactly. But he looked. May saw it. Paul saw it too. For a second, something quiet passed between the two men, something May could not name. Then Hank shoved his hands into his jacket pockets and looked ahead.

“So,” Paul said, turning his attention back to her, “do you live in the graduate housing near North Quad?”

“Mm-hmm. For now.”

“For now?”

“I keep telling myself I’ll move off campus when I become a real adult.”

“And when does that happen?”

“Probably never.”

“Good answer.” His smile was easy.

May could imagine other women enjoying it, leaning into it, letting themselves be warmed by the focused light of his attention. She wished she could do the same. Maybe it would be simpler. Paul was attractive in the obvious way, the uncomplicated way, the way that made sense. But there was something about obvious beauty that sometimes bored her before she had a chance to be impressed by it. Or maybe, she thought, glancing at Hank from the corner of her eye, obvious was not what unsettled her. Maybe ambiguity did.

Hank had gone quieter, which was unlike him. The change was subtle, but May knew him well enough to feel it. He was still walking beside her, still present, still close, but some part of him had retreated behind his own thoughts. May wanted to ask what was wrong but she did not. Instead, she looked ahead toward the path cutting between the buildings, where the shadows gathered more thickly beneath the trees. That was when she first saw him, not clearly. Only as a shape at the edge of the lamplight. A tall figure standing near the steps of one of the older residence halls, half-turned toward a group of students gathered beneath the archway. He was laughing at something someone had said, his head tipped slightly back, one hand tucked into the pocket of a black jacket. Even from a distance, even before May could make out his face, there was something about him that pulled the eye.

Some people occupied space. This man commanded it. He was tall enough that everyone around him seemed arranged in relation to his body. Broad-shouldered, relaxed, dark-haired. Not restless, not trying, not performing loudly for attention. He did not have to. Attention moved toward him on its own, like iron filings drawn to a magnet. May’s steps slowed before she realised it.

Hank noticed. “What?”

“Nothing.” But it was not nothing. The man turned then, and the lamplight caught his face. May felt the thought leave her head. He was devastating. That was the only word her mind supplied, and even that felt inadequate. Handsome was too clean, too polite, too weak for the physical fact of him. He had black hair, slightly tousled as if he had run a hand through it after practice or after a shower. Brown eyes beneath dark brows. A strong jaw. A mouth that looked unsmiling even when it curved. He wore confidence like other men wore cologne, not sprayed on for effect but rising from his skin as something natural and dangerous.

James Keller. May knew his name because everyone seemed to know his name. Not personally. Not in a meaningful way. But campus had its own mythology, and James Keller had become part of it. Senior athlete. Business major. Rumored discipline problem. Rumored genius on the field. Rumored heartbreaker off it. The kind of man undergraduates whispered about in dining halls and graduate students pretended not to notice while noticing anyway.

May had seen him twice before. Once outside the gym, shirt damp with sweat, laughing with another athlete as if the world had never told him no. Once in the library café, where he had stood in line for coffee and somehow made ordering an Americano look indecent. Both times, May had looked away quickly.

Tonight, she did not look away quickly enough. James Keller’s gaze moved across the sidewalk, passing over Hank, over Paul, and then landing on her, only for a second, maybe less. But May felt it with the strange, electric certainty of a hand closing around her wrist. His eyes did not widen. His expression did not change. He simply looked at her, and the noise of campus seemed to dim around the edges.

May’s breath caught. Then one of the girls near him touched his arm, laughing too brightly, and James glanced away. The moment ended. May kept walking. Her face felt warm despite the cold.

“May?” Hank asked.

She forced herself to look at him. “What?”

“You okay?”

“Yes.”

Paul glanced toward the residence hall steps, then back at her. Something unreadable crossed his face, quick as a shadow. “Do you know him?” he asked.

May’s grip tightened around the paper bag. “No,” she said.

And because that sounded too fast, too defensive, too much like a lie she had not meant to tell, she added, “I mean, I know who he is. Everyone knows who he is.”

Hank followed her gaze and made a low sound. “James Keller.” There was something in his voice May could not read ...dislike, maybe, or caution.

Paul’s mouth curved slightly. “The James Keller?”

Hank looked at him. “You know him?”

“Not really. I’ve met him once or twice.”

“Of course you have,” Hank muttered.

May looked between them. “What does that mean?”

“Nothing,” Hank said.

Paul, still smiling, said, “It means Hank thinks anyone over six feet with social skills is an enemy of the people.”

“I never said social skills,” Hank replied.

May tried to laugh, but it came out softer than she intended. Ahead of them, James Keller moved down the steps and walked past them, headed towards the burger place. Then his gaze cut back to her, again. This time, May was sure. It was not a passing glance. It was not accidental. His eyes found her through the small moving crowd, held for a beat, then travelled briefly to Hank beside her. To Paul. Back to her.

May felt suddenly, absurdly aware of herself. Her cardigan. Her loose black waves stirred by the wind. Her soft stomach beneath her dress. Her thighs in black tights. Her brown eyes, which she knew looked too large when she was startled. The paper bag clutched against her chest like a shield. She hated that one look from a stranger could make her feel exposed. She hated more that some reckless part of her liked it.

“Come on,” Hank said, quieter now. “Let’s get you back.” The words were ordinary, but his tone had changed.

May looked at him. “I can get myself back.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

His expression flickered. Paul glanced away politely, suddenly very interested in the buildings across the street. Hank exhaled. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

May softened, because she knew he had not. Because she knew Hank’s protectiveness came from care, not ownership. Usually. But tonight, with Paul on one side and James Keller’s gaze still burning somewhere behind her, everything felt more complicated than it should have. “I know,” she said.

Hank nodded, but the ease between them did not quite return. They continued walking, the three of them moving through the cold, beautiful night toward the dorms, toward the lit windows and locked doors and quiet rooms where people became themselves again. May tried not to look back. She made it twelve steps. Then she failed. James Keller was still there. Standing now at the edge of the walkway, his body angled as though he had been about to head into the burger place but had decided against it.

He was looking at May. This time, he did not look away. Something low and unfamiliar moved through her, not fear, not exactly desire either, though it lived close to that. It was awareness sharpened into a blade. The sudden knowledge of being seen by someone who did not seem confused by what he saw. May turned back around quickly, heart beating too hard. The fries in the paper bag had gone warm and soft against her chest.

Hank was silent. Paul was smiling faintly. And somewhere behind her, James Keller remained in the dark, like the beginning of a bad decision waiting for her to turn around one more time.