Laid In America -

She was sitting on a leather couch, alone. She wore a simple grey sweater and jeans, no costume. Her hair was a messy bun, and she was reading a dog-eared paperback by the light of a strobe. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.

Her name was Maya. She was a grad student in astrophysics. Her family was from Chennai, but she’d grown up in Texas. She spoke with a drawl that curled around her Tamil consonants. They talked for three hours. About singularities, about the monsoon, about the way light bends around a black hole and the way his mother bends light around a kitchen. Laid in America

Zayn thought about Chad’s words. Get laid. He thought about the app, the loneliness, the way his accent felt like a wall between him and everyone else. She was sitting on a leather couch, alone

He kissed her. Not because the party demanded it, not because Chad told him to, but because the space between them had finally collapsed, like a dying star into something dense and real. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

He was leaning against a wall, calculating the parabolic arc of a ping-pong ball someone had tossed, when he saw her.