Free Randomly Ever After by Julia Kent

Amy
    Keying in to the building where I now lived was still a novel experience. Moving in to share a bedroom with Sam, and an entire apartment with him and Trevor, still felt surreal. Sam and I had been together for about eighteen months now , and it made sense to take this step, but even a month after living together it felt...unreal.
    Sam was doing laundry and I’d just finished classes for the day, ready to come home, shower, and head out to his big gig tonight. Now that Liam and Charlotte were back together, the band felt complete. Settled. Stronger than ever, and a big-city tour was on the horizon.
    “Which key opens the mailbox again?” I mumbled to myself in the building’s foyer, finally getting it right on the second try. A bunch of junk mail, some letters with Harvard logos all over them (for Trevor, I assumed), some bills with Sam’s name on them, and—
    I froze.
    A letter from my university. For me .
    I raced to the apartment and flung everything but the letter onto the ground, kicking the door closed. Did they accept me? Reject me? Oh, God, what if I opened it and I didn’t get in? Should I open this alone, or wait until Sam got home?  
    Sam.
    Oh, boy.
    My hands shook as I opened the thin envelope, the yellow post office forwarding sticker like a gut punch. I’d wondered why so me of my classmates in grad school in my library science program already heard back, and I hadn’t. I’d figured I was on a waiting list.
    Instead, my move from my tiny apartment into Sam and Trevor’s place had delayed learning about my future.
    Sam’s words from last year rang through my head a hundred times a day:
    “ You’ll make a damn fine librarian, but you’d make an even better law librarian.”
    I’d started my grad school program hoping that someday I might find my way to law school, back to the passion I’d held before I thought I’d ruined everything by beating Sam in the big debate our senior year of high school. This past year I’d taken some law courses that counted toward my library science degree, and...  
    Someday was right here in front of me in the form of fine linen paper that felt like a knife as I slid my fingernail in the envelope’s corner, opening up my future.
    If they accepted me into the dual program, I’d need two more years to finish both my master’s in library science and law school. I’d be a JD, just like Trevor and Joe, though the school I’d applied to wasn’t Ivy League. That was fine—it was more affordable, less competitive, and I could take classes while finishing my library credentials.
    Win-win-win.
    The win that had haunted me from my senior year of high school was just one event in my past now, no longer the millstone around my neck, a weight of regret gone since Sam and I were back together.
    One niggling th ought thrummed through me as I slid the tri-folded sheet out of its casing and slowly, achingly opened it.
    Why hadn’t I told Sam?
    Hot tears filled my eyes as I sped through the words on the page, the only words I needed to read coming through loud and clear right from the start:
    Dear Ms. Smithson,
    We are pleased to inform you—
    My breath caught in my throat. The words looped through my mind a thousand times in one agonizingly slow second.
    We are pleased.
    The door creaked open and a flash of auburn hair poked through the crack, followed by the distinct body of my love, my life, the reason I could breathe.
    He carried a plastic laundry tub with freshly-folded, clean clothes , head bent down as he dropped the basket next to the door and fumbled with a backpack. Gnarled hands flexed, broken bones mended but sore as they always would be.
    “Hey! You’re home!” he said with a breathless quality I imagined I could easily match, if I could talk.
    I looked up from the paper and just stared at him, transfixed.
    We are pleased.
    “What’s wrong?” he asked, alarmed and at my side in a rush of kinetic motion, towering over me and his warm, tender embrace so