A Love More Than Lovely
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 11
Fourth year didn’t feel like a reward exactly, but it felt close enough to one that neither of them questioned it too hard.
The first few weeks still had teeth — Soo Yi finishing her sub-internship in urology, working alongside residents who treated her less like a student now and more like someone they expected to see again in a white coat with her own name on it, and Brad grinding through Step 2 CK prep in whatever hours weren’t already claimed by his own sub-internship in OB-GYN. But underneath the grind, something had shifted. There was no more fifty-hour floor climbing to seventy. There was no more falling asleep mid-sentence on the phone because neither of them had slept more than four hours in three days. For the first time in over a year, they had actual evenings.
They didn’t waste them.
“I forgot what this was like,” Brad said one Thursday, the two of them stretched out on a blanket at the park near his apartment, a real dinner between them instead of something eaten standing up at a counter. “Just sitting somewhere with you. Not studying. Not half-asleep.”
“I forgot too.” Soo Yi leaned back on her elbows, watching the sky go orange over the tree line, and let herself actually notice it instead of mentally filing it away as a distraction from something more urgent. “Third year took something from us. I didn’t realize how much until I got it back.”
“We didn’t lose each other, though.”
“No.” She reached over and laced her fingers through his. “We just went quiet for a while. This is us getting loud again.”
He laughed at that, and it was an easy, unguarded sound, nothing like the exhausted half-laughs that had passed for humor most of the year before. They spent that fall doing all the ordinary things third year had stolen from them — trying new restaurants because they could, going to a football game without either of them checking the time to see how soon they’d need to leave for a shift, driving out to Lake Bryan on a Saturday with nothing planned except being together. Soo Yi started cooking again, actual meals instead of whatever survived a microwave, and Brad rediscovered that he liked to read for pleasure, not just for boards, working slowly through a paperback on his nightstand that had sat untouched since sophomore year.
There was a rhythm to it that felt almost foreign after three years of running on fumes — Sunday mornings with nowhere to be, long enough that they could lie in bed talking about nothing important until noon without either of them mentally rehearsing the next shift. Priya came over most Fridays now, dragging her own boyfriend along, the four of them cooking too much food and staying up too late playing cards, and Soo Yi found herself laughing in the easy, unguarded way she remembered from freshman year, before the deepfake incident, before rotations, before either of them had learned to measure affection in stolen fifteen-minute windows.
“I missed this,” Priya told her one of those nights, catching her in the kitchen refilling drinks. “Not just hanging out. You. You’ve been somewhere else for a year.”
“I know.” Soo Yi handed her a glass, thinking about it honestly instead of brushing the comment off. “I think we both were. It wasn’t anything wrong between us. There just wasn’t anything left over.”
“And now?”
“Now there’s a little left over.” She smiled, glancing back toward the living room where Brad was losing badly at cards and taking it with good humor. “I’m trying to remember not to take it for granted, because I don’t think it lasts.”
Priya didn’t argue with that, just squeezed her shoulder once, and Soo Yi carried the drinks back in, sitting close enough to Brad that their shoulders touched for the rest of the night, the way they used to before either of them had learned what real exhaustion felt like.
They also made time, for the first time in longer than either of them wanted to admit, for both families at once. Catherine hosted a dinner in October, half celebration and half excuse to see everyone before application season swallowed the fall whole, and Ji-an drove up with Jung Woo and Soo Ah for the weekend, the two families settling into an easy familiarity that had been building since that first Thanksgiving years earlier. Soo Ah, nineteen now and starting her own freshman year at a different school, spent most of dinner needling Brad about whether he was still willing to share Soo Yi with her, a joke that had outlived its original context and turned into something closer to family shorthand.
“I’m serious,” Soo Ah told him over dessert, deadpan. “If she ever gets tired of you, I’m next in line.”
“Noted,” Brad said, entirely unbothered, the way he’d learned to be with the whole family’s brand of teasing. “Though I plan on making that a very long wait.”
Ji-an laughed harder at that than anyone, and Soo Yi caught her mother watching the two of them across the table with an expression she recognized now as pure, uncomplicated pride, nothing like the anxious scrutiny that had defined so much of Soo Yi’s childhood. Whatever her mother had once wanted for her — implants, a doctor found through the right introductions in Korea, a body altered to fit someone else’s comfort — none of it had mattered in the end. Ji-an had gotten a daughter who was happy, loved exactly as she was, and that had turned out to be enough.
The applications still had to happen, of course — fourth year wasn’t a vacation, whatever it felt like some weeks. ERAS opened in September, and both of them spent long nights at Brad’s kitchen table again, though this time the mood was different, less desperate, more like two people building something together instead of two people just trying to survive. Soo Yi listed her specialty as a dual — general urology, with a declared focus in female urology — and wrote her personal statement in one sitting, the words coming easily because she’d been living the argument for it since her third-year ER rotation, since Dr. Marsh telling her to figure out what fed her. Brad’s statement took him three drafts before it sounded like him and not like a résumé pretending to have feelings, but once he found the version that opened with Wallace and the six weeks of PT sessions instead of a list of achievements, it came together fast.
They applied to the same three programs — Baylor Scott & White Health in Dallas, Houston Methodist, and St. Joseph Health Center — a decision that hadn’t required much discussion once they’d looked at the map together and realized all three cities kept them in Texas, close enough to both families, far enough from Texas A&M to feel like a real next chapter instead of an extension of the one they were already living. Baylor Scott & White sat at the top of both their lists, unranked officially until the very end but never seriously in question between them. Soo Yi had liked the attendings she’d met on her interview day, the way the urology department talked about patient relationships instead of just surgical volume. Brad had liked that Dallas put them forty minutes from his parents and under three hours from hers, close enough for real visits, far enough to still be their own life.