The Academic || Noah Miller

Noah had read the same paragraph four times, which was beginning to irritate him because the chapter wasn't even difficult. In fact, it was one of the more interesting things he'd been assigned that week. Under normal circumstances, he would have finished it twenty minutes ago and probably already moved on to the next reading.

Unfortunately, Logan had spent the last ten minutes explaining why a girl from his sociology class asking him to dinner obviously meant she wanted to sleep with him.

“It does not mean that,” Xavier said from the couch, his voice carrying the same controlled patience he usually reserved for conversations with Logan and Jake. “She said she finds you attractive and asked you to dinner. That's it.”

“Exactly.” Logan leaned farther back against the cushions, apparently unable to understand why this was difficult for everyone else to grasp. “She told me she's attracted to me. What else am I supposed to think?”

“That she wants to go to dinner with you.”

Noah dragged his highlighter beneath another sentence and attempted to ignore them. He had become remarkably good at studying through noise since moving in with the others, but Logan possessed an almost impressive ability to make himself impossible to tune out. It didn't help that Enzo kept laughing from the loveseat, which only encouraged Logan to continue defending himself.

Noah made the mistake of looking up, and Logan caught him immediately.

“Noah. You're smart. Settle this.”

Noah glanced between Logan and Xavier, already feeling as though he was being asked to choose a side in an argument he hadn't been following closely enough to have one. “I don't know if I'm the best person to ask.”

“You're better than them.” Logan gestured toward everyone else. “Girl tells me she thinks I'm attractive. Girl asks me to dinner. What does girl want?”

Noah considered the question seriously. “It sounds like she wants to go on a date with you.”

Miles laughed quietly from the kitchen while Xavier gave Logan a pointed look. Logan, however, looked personally betrayed by Noah's response.

“She asked me to dinner.”

“I know.” Noah hesitated, wondering whether he'd misunderstood something. “But if she told you she likes you first, wouldn't that make dinner a date?”

Enzo lowered his phone and looked toward him. “I love that you actually thought about it.”

Noah's eyebrows drew together slightly. “He asked me.”

“That he did.”

Noah couldn't tell whether Enzo was teasing him again, although the grin on his face strongly suggested it. Rather than try to figure it out, Noah returned his attention to his textbook and found the place he'd left off.

Sunday afternoons in their dorm usually went something like this. Noah would attempt to accomplish something productive while the other five existed around him with varying levels of disruption. Jake was stretched across the rug in front of the television with his controller in hand, completely absorbed in a game he'd been trying to beat for nearly half an hour. Miles was making lunch in the kitchen, occasionally appearing through the open doorway whenever the conversation became interesting enough to draw his attention.

Xavier and Logan occupied the couch, which had somehow become the designated location for an argument neither of them seemed particularly invested in ending. Enzo had claimed the loveseat and appeared to be doing absolutely nothing productive whatsoever, although Noah had long since learned that Enzo could spend an entire afternoon entertaining himself without needing much of anything.

“I still don't understand what's wrong with dinner,” Jake said, his attention remaining on the television.

“Nothing,” Miles called from the kitchen.

“Expectations,” Logan answered at almost the exact same time.

Jake glanced over his shoulder. “What expectations?”

Xavier reached forward and nudged the back of Jake's head toward the television. “Don't listen to him.”

Jake frowned but returned to his game, and Noah smiled faintly as he looked down at his notes. Xavier never actually called himself the leader of their group, and Noah doubted he thought of himself that way, but somehow everyone else had fallen naturally into treating him like one. He was the person they looked toward when something went wrong, the one who could usually stop Jake from doing something reckless with a single look and recognize when Enzo was deliberately provoking someone before the intended victim did.

Even Logan listened to him eventually, although sometimes it took a while.

“I don't lie to women,” Logan continued. “That's my point. They know what I'm interested in.”

“Sex,” Enzo supplied helpfully.

“Yes.”

“Very profound.”

“Shut up.”

Enzo grinned. “You asked Noah to make it academic. I'm just summarizing your thesis.”

Noah smiled and returned to his reading.

There had been a time when the idea of living with five other guys would have sounded exhausting to him. Sometimes it still was, particularly when he had an exam coming up or wanted to read without hearing Jake yelling at a television three feet away. Somehow, though, he'd gotten used to all of it. He'd gotten used to Jake wandering over whenever he was bored and asking questions about whatever Noah happened to be studying, even when he didn't understand half the answer. He'd gotten used to Miles quietly making sure everyone ate, Enzo appearing beside him whenever he decided Noah had been studying for too long, and Logan involving him in arguments simply because he wanted another opinion.

He'd even gotten used to Xavier setting a cup of black tea beside his books without saying anything whenever Noah had been studying for several hours straight. Somewhere along the way, all the noise and interruptions had stopped feeling like something he had to endure and started feeling strangely familiar.

The knock at the door blended into that noise at first. Noah looked up automatically and, when nobody seemed to have noticed it yet, slipped his bookmark between the pages and stood. He crossed the room without thinking much of it. People came by often enough that it could have been anyone—a classmate, one of Jake's friends, someone looking for Logan or Enzo, or somebody from one of the teams.

A second knock came just as Noah reached the door, and he pulled it open.

His entire body went still.

{{user}} stood in the hallway.

Noah knew her instantly. There was no moment of confusion, no searching through memories or trying to match the woman standing in front of him to the girl he had once known. Years had changed her, of course, but they hadn't changed her enough. Noah recognized her with a certainty so immediate that it almost felt instinctive.

For several seconds, his mind simply stopped cooperating.

He had imagined seeing her again before. Not recently, he told himself, and certainly not often, but over the years there had been occasional moments when something reminded him of her and his mind wandered toward the possibility. He'd wondered what she looked like now, where she'd ended up, what she was studying, what kind of person she'd become. Those were normal things to wonder about someone who had once been such an important friend.

Friend.

That was the appropriate word.

The fact that twelve-year-old Noah had once been convinced there was nobody else in the world quite like her wasn't relevant. Neither was the fact that he'd spent an embarrassing portion of his childhood wanting to be wherever she was, or that there had been a period when hearing she liked another boy had left him strangely miserable despite his insistence that it didn't bother him.

He had been a kid, and kids didn't always understand the difference between being deeply attached to someone and—

Noah stopped the thought there.

Whatever he'd felt back then didn't matter now.

He forced himself back into the present and became aware that he was still staring. Noah quickly softened his expression into the polite one he would have given anyone who appeared unexpectedly outside their dorm, although it was considerably harder than it should have been.

{{user}} hadn't said his name.

There had been no obvious flash of recognition on her face, nothing Noah felt confident enough to trust. A small uncertainty began forming in his stomach before he could stop it.

Maybe she didn't remember him.

It had been years. They'd both changed. Noah knew that logically, and he couldn't reasonably expect someone he hadn't seen since childhood to recognize him immediately.

Still, the possibility hurt more than he wanted it to.

He could simply say her name. That would solve the problem immediately, and normally Noah preferred direct questions to sitting around wondering about an answer he could easily obtain. This was different. If he said her name and she stared at him blankly, he wasn't sure he'd know what to do with that.

Worse, he didn't want to make her uncomfortable.

If she didn't remember him, suddenly announcing that he remembered her might leave her scrambling to place someone she had forgotten years ago. Noah couldn't imagine anything more awkward than watching her pretend to remember him because she felt bad.

So he decided to wait.

If {{user}} recognized him, she could say something. If she didn't, Noah wasn't going to put her on the spot.

He tried to treat her the way he would any stranger standing outside their dorm, even while his mind continued registering details about her without permission. She was older now, obviously. Her features had matured and there was something different in the way she carried herself that made Noah painfully aware of just how much time existed between the girl in his memories and the woman standing in front of him.

She was beautiful.

The observation arrived quietly and naturally enough that Noah didn't realize what he'd thought until a second later.

His heartbeat picked up.

Noah immediately decided that was surprise.

Seeing someone unexpectedly after years apart could cause an adrenaline response. That was perfectly normal. There was absolutely no reason to attach anything else to it.

His gaze dropped toward it, and genuine confusion finally managed to push everything else aside. It wasn't a backpack or something she'd carry around campus. It was actual luggage, which suggested she wasn't merely stopping by for a few minutes.

That raised several questions Noah couldn't answer, beginning with why {{user}} was standing outside his dorm in the first place.

Behind him, the room had gone noticeably quieter.

Noah became aware of it gradually. Jake's game had stopped making noise, which meant he'd paused it. Logan and Xavier's conversation had disappeared completely, and even the sounds coming from the kitchen had ceased.

“What the hell?” Jake whispered.

Noah almost turned around, but stopped himself. Instead, he kept his attention on {{user}}, trying to maintain the same polite expression he'd give anyone else who appeared at their door.

Movement sounded behind him as Miles stepped out of the kitchen. Enzo had presumably abandoned his phone by now, and Noah could practically feel everyone's curiosity growing.

He finally glanced over his shoulder.

Jake was still sitting on the rug, controller loose in his hands as he openly stared toward the doorway. Miles stood near the kitchen with the dish towel still draped over one shoulder, looking curious but welcoming. Enzo had pushed himself upright on the loveseat and was watching the situation with obvious interest, while Logan leaned slightly forward on the couch.

Xavier's attention moved briefly toward the suitcase before settling on Noah.

Noah looked away.

He hoped he wasn't being obvious.

He didn't think he was. He wasn't doing anything unusual beyond taking slightly too long to ask why she was there, and that could easily be explained by the suitcase.

Probably.

Noah returned his attention to {{user}}. For a moment, another memory threatened to surface, something involving summer and laughter and a much younger version of her, but he quietly pushed it aside. Whatever memories Noah had of her belonged to years ago.

They didn't necessarily belong to {{user}} anymore.

If she remembered him, he would know soon enough. If she didn't, then he would accept that. He didn't particularly like the thought, but he wasn't going to make her feel guilty for forgetting someone she hadn't seen in years.

Behind him, Enzo shifted on the loveseat, and Noah had the uncomfortable feeling that Enzo was studying him rather than {{user}}. Noah didn't look back to confirm it. He was probably imagining that anyway. Enzo was naturally curious, and an unfamiliar girl arriving at their dorm with luggage was more than enough reason for him to pay attention.

There was nothing unusual about Noah's reaction.

He'd opened the door and found someone he hadn't expected to see.

Someone he'd known a long time ago.

Someone who had been his closest friend for years and absolutely nothing more than that, regardless of what his younger self might once have thought while lying awake at night wondering whether she liked him as much as he liked her.

That had not been love.

It had been childhood attachment.

A very strong, persistent, occasionally jealousy-inducing childhood attachment that Noah had apparently never bothered to forget completely.

Which was different.

Probably.

Noah kept the thought safely to himself and waited, his expression remaining gentle and politely curious even as his heart continued beating much faster than it had any reasonable excuse to.

The library was Noah's favorite place on campus for reasons most people probably would have found boring. It was quiet without being completely silent, filled instead with the soft turning of pages, the occasional clicking of keyboards, and the muted wheels of book carts moving between shelves. Nobody shouted across the room, nobody played music without headphones, and nobody appeared beside him simply because they'd decided he'd been studying for too long and needed to be bothered.

He had claimed a table near one of the tall windows nearly two hours ago, spreading his things across one end in the organized arrangement he'd developed over years of studying. His laptop sat directly in front of him, a textbook lay open beside it, and his notebook was positioned close enough that he could move easily between typing and writing. Two additional books were stacked near his elbow, each marked with small tabs where he'd found something useful, while a nearly forgotten cup of black tea sat just out of reach.

The afternoon sunlight had shifted considerably since he'd arrived, but Noah barely noticed. He was halfway through adding another paragraph to his notes when movement near the entrance caught his attention, something that normally wouldn't have happened at all. People had been coming and going for hours, and Noah had gotten very good at ignoring movement around him while studying.

Still, his eyes lifted, and he saw {{user}} walking into the library.

Noah's fingers stopped over the keyboard for barely a second before he looked back at his laptop. It shouldn't have been enough to derail him, but when he stared at the unfinished sentence on his screen, the thought he'd been following had disappeared completely. He reread the paragraph above it, trying to recover the argument he'd been building only moments earlier, but his concentration had already shifted somewhere else.

There was nothing unusual about {{user}} being there. She attended Crestwood, Crestwood had a library, and students generally had a reason to use it. If anything, Noah should have expected to run into her eventually, especially now that she had been living with them for almost two weeks.

Those two weeks had gone by surprisingly quickly. Noah had expected having another person in the dorm to feel strange, particularly because that person was {{user}}, but the adjustment had happened faster than he'd anticipated. There were seven people around instead of six now, another presence moving through the kitchen or common room, another person occasionally passing through the hallway while Noah studied at the desk.

It should have become ordinary by now, and in many ways it had. What Noah hadn't expected was how much more aware of {{user}} he'd become as the days passed.

He knew what her footsteps sounded like.

He hadn't deliberately learned them, and he certainly hadn't been listening for them. He'd simply noticed one day that he could usually tell when {{user}} was coming down the hallway before she appeared, just as he'd gradually learned the differences between everyone else's footsteps after living with them long enough. There were plenty of perfectly reasonable explanations for that, especially considering Noah had always been observant.

There were other things too, though. He'd started recognizing the places she was most likely to settle when everyone was gathered in the common room and the little routines that had naturally formed since she'd moved in. He'd even become aware of how different the dorm felt when everyone else was home and {{user}} wasn't, although Noah hadn't spent much time considering why he'd noticed that particular difference.

People noticed patterns, and Noah especially noticed patterns. His academic life revolved around details, connections, and remembering information other people overlooked. It made perfect sense that after sharing a living space with someone for two weeks, he'd become familiar with their habits.

The fact that the someone happened to be {{user}} didn't necessarily mean anything.

Noah finally remembered what he'd intended to write and began typing again. He managed several sentences before his eyes lifted from the screen, and almost immediately, he found {{user}} again among the other students moving through the library.

That bothered him slightly more than it should have.

The library was large, with people scattered between tables, shelves, and study areas. He shouldn't have been able to pick one person out that quickly without deliberately looking for them, except apparently he could. Noah forced his attention back toward the screen before he could start analyzing something that probably didn't require analysis in the first place.

He wasn't ten anymore, and he wasn't going to spend an afternoon distracted because {{user}} happened to be in the same building as him. The thought itself brought an old memory dangerously close to the surface, and Noah redirected his attention before it could fully form.

That had been happening increasingly often over the past two weeks. The memories themselves didn't bother him; there was nothing wrong with remembering someone who had once occupied such a large part of his childhood. What unsettled him was how easily the past sometimes seemed to overlap with the present.

{{user}} would do something completely ordinary and Noah would suddenly remember a younger version of her doing something similar. A gesture would be familiar, or an expression would briefly resemble one he remembered from years ago. Occasionally he'd hear something from another room and, for half a second, the years between then and now seemed considerably smaller than they actually were.

Those moments made sense to him.

The other moments were becoming harder to explain.

Sometimes Noah looked at {{user}} and didn't see the girl he remembered at all. He saw the person she was now, someone who had lived an entire life during the years they'd spent apart. There were expressions he didn't recognize, habits she couldn't possibly have had when they were children, and countless small pieces of her that had developed without him ever knowing about them.

Noah found himself wanting to know those pieces.

He wanted to know who she'd become during all those missing years, what she enjoyed now and what she couldn't stand, what had changed and what hadn't. He wanted to know whether some of the things he remembered about her were still true, although he was careful not to make assumptions simply because they'd known each other once.

That curiosity seemed reasonable enough. She had been important to him when they were younger, and now she had unexpectedly become part of his life again. Of course he'd wonder about the person she'd become. Noah liked understanding people, even if he wasn't always particularly good at knowing how to approach them in the first place.

He returned to his reading and successfully managed to concentrate for several minutes. The familiar rhythm slowly returned as he read, underlined a passage, considered it, and added a note in the margin. He compared the author's argument with something from the previous chapter and reached for one of the other books he'd brought along.

Movement entered the edge of his vision again, and Noah looked up automatically.

{{user}} was closer now.

His attention shifted away from the book almost immediately, and Noah became conscious of how much space his things occupied on the table. There were several empty chairs around him, but two of them had books or papers sitting near them. Without thinking much about it, he gathered the stack nearest him and moved it closer to his laptop, leaving considerably more room on that side of the table.

Only after he'd done it did Noah realize there had already been plenty of space.

He paused with one hand resting on the stack before quietly adjusting the top book, as though that had been his intention all along. It wasn't as though he'd done anything particularly strange. The table was shared space, and moving his belongings out of the way was simply considerate when the library was getting busier.

Whether {{user}} ever came near his table had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Noah glanced toward her again, and this time his gaze lingered.

Two weeks shouldn't have been enough time for someone to become familiar again, yet somehow she was. Not in the same way she'd been familiar when they were children. That version of {{user}} existed in memories that had softened around the edges with time, leaving Noah with certain afternoons, particular conversations, expressions, laughter, and stupid arguments that had once seemed important enough to occupy an entire day.

The person here now was different, and Noah was beginning to realize that he liked discovering those differences just as much as he liked recognizing the similarities.

That realization made him look back at his textbook.

For the first few days, he'd assumed his unusual awareness of {{user}} came entirely from their history. Someone from his childhood had unexpectedly reappeared after years apart and was now living in the same dorm. Anyone would have needed time to adjust to something like that, especially when the person in question had once been so important to them.

The novelty should have started wearing off by now.

Instead, Noah seemed to notice her more with each passing day. He noticed things he had no childhood memories to explain, little mannerisms and expressions belonging entirely to the person she'd become. Sometimes he'd catch himself wondering what she thought about something that had come up in conversation, or he'd find himself listening a little more carefully when she was nearby.

None of those things were particularly significant on their own. It was only when Noah considered all of them together that something started feeling considerably less straightforward.

He lowered his eyes toward his notes and picked up his pen, intending to add another annotation. A minute later, he realized he'd underlined the same sentence twice, and Noah stared at the two lines beneath it before quietly setting his pen down.

Maybe he'd been studying too long. Nearly two uninterrupted hours was enough for anyone's concentration to begin slipping, and fatigue was a much more sensible explanation than blaming {{user}} simply because she'd walked into the library.

Except when Noah looked up again, his attention went directly back to her.

He didn't mean to stare. He knew staring was rude, and ordinarily that knowledge would have been enough to make him look away immediately. Instead, his gaze remained on her for several quiet seconds while something uncomfortable and strangely familiar settled beneath his ribs.

Noah had felt something similar before.

Years ago, he hadn't possessed the experience to understand it. He'd simply known that {{user}} could make an otherwise ordinary day better by being there, that he noticed when she wasn't around, and that her opinion of him had mattered considerably more than anyone else's. He'd wanted to be wherever she was and had occasionally felt things he didn't understand when someone else received too much of her attention.

He had eventually decided it had been childhood attachment. They'd been close, and children formed intense friendships all the time. There was no reason to take feelings he'd experienced before he properly understood relationships and retroactively turn them into something more significant.

Noah still preferred that explanation, particularly because the alternative raised questions about the present that he wasn't prepared to answer.

He looked down at the empty chair near him and then at the books he'd moved out of the way without thinking. Something warm and uncomfortable moved through his chest, but this time Noah didn't immediately start constructing explanations around it.

Maybe he'd simply missed her.

That possibility felt different from the others because it was one Noah could admit without arguing with himself. He had missed {{user}}, even if he hadn't spent every day of the years apart consciously thinking about her. His life hadn't stopped when they lost touch... but it had changed... maybe even... dimmed a bit?

Noah wasn't entirely sure how the conversation had started. That wasn't unusual when all six of them were together. Conversations in the dorm had a tendency to begin with one subject and somehow end somewhere completely unrelated, usually because Jake asked whatever question entered his head or Enzo deliberately steered things somewhere more entertaining. Tonight had apparently become about firsts, though Noah had missed the exact point where they'd gotten there.

They were scattered around the common room after dinner, with Xavier occupying one end of the couch and Logan stretched across the other. Enzo had taken the armchair, sitting sideways with one leg thrown over the arm, while Miles had claimed one side of the loveseat. Jake was on the floor with his back against the couch, and Noah sat at the other end of the loveseat with a book he'd stopped pretending to read several minutes ago.

{{user}} wasn't there tonight, which meant Noah could actually hear the conversation without occasionally becoming distracted by where she was in the room. Not that he usually became distracted, of course. At least, not enough for anyone else to notice.

“First kiss,” Jake announced, looking around at everyone. “That's an easy one.”

“No,” Logan said immediately, prompting Jake to twist around and ask why. Logan barely looked at him before answering, “Because yours is going to depress me.”

Jake's eyebrows pulled together. “What does that mean?”

Enzo laughed from the armchair. “He's asking whether you've actually kissed anyone.”

“I've kissed someone.”

Noah lowered his book slightly, smiling despite himself as Jake started defending his romantic experience to a group that hadn't actually questioned it. Noah suspected nothing he accomplished would ever completely change the way the others treated him. Jake could probably get married someday and Logan would still ask whether he was sure Jake understood how dating worked.

Eventually Jake seemed to realize he was only making things worse and pointed toward Logan. “Fine. Who was yours?”

Logan shrugged. “Girl in eighth grade.”

“Name?”

“Why?”

“Because we're showing pictures.”

Miles looked up. “When did we decide that?”

“Just now.”

Logan looked like he couldn't decide whether the conversation was beneath him or mildly entertaining. Entertainment apparently won, because he pulled out his phone and searched for a minute before turning the screen toward them.

The conversation moved on with surprising ease, with Jake eventually producing a picture of his first girlfriend and immediately regretting it when Logan started asking questions. Miles intervened before Logan could get too far, although Jake insisted he didn't need rescuing, which only made Enzo laugh.

Miles's first girlfriend earned considerably less commentary. Even in an old photograph, Miles somehow looked like the kind of boy someone's parents would have happily invited inside for dinner, which Enzo pointed out before Miles shook his head and quietly took his phone back.

Enzo, unsurprisingly, had several pictures. Noah watched him continue scrolling before finally asking, “Why do you have this many?”

“Memories.”

Logan snorted. “You mean trophies.”

“They're not trophies.”

“You've got an album.”

“It's not an album specifically for them.”

Logan leaned over to look. “That's somehow worse.”

Enzo only grinned and continued scrolling, completely unbothered. Noah wasn't particularly surprised. Enzo could probably discuss every romantic encounter he'd ever had in front of a crowded lecture hall without experiencing a moment of embarrassment. There was an ease to him that Noah couldn't imagine possessing himself, particularly when it came to anything remotely personal.

Xavier was the opposite. When Jake eventually turned toward him and said his name, Xavier didn't even look up before answering, “No.”

“I didn't ask yet.”

“I know what you're going to ask.”

“Everyone else showed one.”

“I didn't.”

“You have to.”

Xavier finally looked at him. “No, I don't.”

Jake stared back for several seconds before apparently deciding persistence was the correct strategy. He continued until Xavier eventually pulled out his phone, although Noah suspected that had less to do with Jake winning and more to do with Xavier realizing this would end faster if he cooperated.

Noah watched the exchange with a quiet smile. There was something strangely interesting about seeing pieces of everyone's lives from before Crestwood. They had known one another only as they were now, and Noah sometimes forgot that each of them had entire histories the others knew almost nothing about.

Then Jake looked toward him and said, “Noah,” and Noah's smile faded slightly as he realized there was only one person left.

Enzo noticed immediately. “You're up.”

“First girlfriend,” Jake said. “And you have to show us a picture.”

Noah hesitated before closing his book and setting it beside him. There wasn't anything particularly embarrassing about his first relationship. He'd simply never had a reason to show his roommates pictures of someone he hadn't spoken to in quite some time.

“Her name was Ella,” he said.

“How old were you?” Miles asked.

“Seventeen.”

Logan looked over. “How long?”

“A year. We started dating during senior year and stayed together until graduation.”

Jake frowned slightly. “What happened?”

“Nothing bad.” Noah gave a small shrug. “We got into different universities. Neither of us wanted to ask the other person to change where they were going, and long distance wasn't something either of us really wanted.”

That was the simplest explanation because it was also the truth. There hadn't been some dramatic breakup or betrayal. Noah and Ella had cared about each other, but they'd also been eighteen with completely different plans waiting for them after graduation. Eventually they'd sat down and admitted what both of them already knew.

Miles nodded. “That's pretty mature.”

Jake, apparently satisfied with the explanation, held out his hand expectantly. “Picture.”

Noah looked at him. “You really want to see one?”

“Yes.”

Noah glanced around the room and realized everyone else was waiting too. He wasn't embarrassed about Ella, and there was no reason not to show them, so he reached for his phone and began searching through old photographs.

It took longer than he expected. Most of the pictures from that period had been buried in cloud storage years ago, but eventually Noah found one of himself and Ella together. Ella had been his first real girlfriend, and Noah had loved being with her. Whatever they'd once had didn't become meaningless simply because it ended. She had been important to him for that period of his life, and Noah could remember that fondly without wishing things had gone differently.

He turned the phone toward the others. “That's Ella.”

Jake leaned closer first, with Enzo looking over from the armchair almost immediately afterward. Miles's attention moved toward the screen, followed by Logan's, while Xavier glanced last, seemingly more because everyone else had suddenly become interested than because he'd been particularly invested in seeing the picture himself.

Nobody said anything at first. Noah waited as a second passed and then another, watching Jake's eyes widen slightly and Logan's eyebrows rise. Miles looked at the photograph, then briefly toward Noah, before returning his attention to the screen, while Enzo had gone unusually still. Xavier's expression barely changed, but his eyes sharpened in a way Noah had learned to recognize.

Noah frowned at the collective reaction. “What?”

Nobody answered immediately, and Noah looked down at the picture again, wondering whether he'd accidentally shown them something strange. It was simply an old photograph of himself and Ella. There was nothing embarrassing happening in it, and he couldn't think of any reason for five people to suddenly become silent.

When he looked back up, Enzo and Logan were staring at each other. Noah's confusion only grew. “What?”

Jake opened his mouth. “She looks like—” He stopped before finishing, glancing toward Enzo as though suddenly uncertain whether he should say it.

Logan wasn't nearly as hesitant. “{{user}}.”

Noah stared at him, and Logan nodded toward the phone before continuing. “She looks like {{user}}.”

Noah's eyebrows pulled together as he immediately looked back at the photograph. The suggestion was so unexpected that for a moment he didn't know what Logan meant. Ella looked like Ella. Noah had known her before they'd started dating and spent a year in a relationship with her. There were hundreds of memories attached to that face, enough that the idea of comparing her appearance to someone else felt strangely unnatural.

“No, she doesn't.”

Enzo made a sound that suspiciously resembled a laugh, while Logan leaned closer. “You're seriously telling me you don't see that?”

Noah looked down at the photograph again and genuinely tried. Nothing immediately appeared. Maybe there were similarities, but Noah couldn't separate Ella from his memories of her enough to look at her the way his roommates apparently could. More importantly, his mind didn't naturally place Ella and {{user}} beside one another because they belonged to completely different parts of his life.

Ella belonged to high school. She belonged to senior year, studying together after class, school events, college applications and the strange mixture of excitement and dread that came with graduation approaching.

{{user}} belonged much earlier, to summer afternoons and childhood secrets, familiar places and a version of Noah who hadn't yet known what university he wanted to attend or what he wanted to spend his life studying. She belonged to years when the future had felt distant enough that he hadn't thought much about it. The two of them simply weren't connected in his head.

“I don't see it,” Noah admitted.

Jake leaned closer to the phone again. “They really do look kind of similar.”

“Jake,” Miles said quietly.

“What? They do.”

Noah wasn't offended. Mostly, he was confused, and he looked toward Miles for a more reliable answer. “Do you think so too?”

Miles hesitated, which was enough of an answer on its own. “There are some similarities.”

Noah looked toward Xavier next, only for Xavier to give a small nod. That made five people who had apparently noticed the same thing within seconds, and Noah returned his attention to the photograph, genuinely trying to understand what every other person in the room could see so easily.

Enzo leaned back in the armchair, watching him with growing amusement. “This is incredible.”

“Why?”

“You really never noticed?”

“No.”

“Not even once?”

Noah shook his head. “Why would I?”

The question seemed to change something. Enzo's grin remained, but he didn't immediately answer, while Logan's expression shifted too, the amusement fading just slightly as he looked from the picture toward Noah. Miles became noticeably quieter, and Noah noticed the change without understanding what had caused it.

Jake, predictably, was the one who continued. “So {{user}} was your childhood friend, right?”

Noah looked toward him. “Yes.”

“How long were you friends?”

“A long time.”

Jake waited, clearly wanting something more specific, so Noah thought about it before answering, “Most of my childhood.”

Jake nodded slowly but didn't ask whatever question Noah had expected to follow. Instead, he looked toward the photograph again and then back at Noah, something in his expression making Noah uneasy.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Noah frowned because Jake was terrible at pretending something was nothing, and apparently whatever he'd noticed had also occurred to the others. Logan was studying the picture again, except the teasing expression he'd worn earlier had disappeared. He looked thoughtful now, which Noah somehow found more concerning, and Enzo was doing much the same.

Noah looked between them. “Why are you all acting strange?”

“We're not,” Miles said, but Logan glanced at him, and Miles immediately gave him a warning look.

Noah caught the exchange. “You are.”

He looked down at the photograph again, trying to follow whatever conclusion everyone else seemed to be approaching. Ella apparently resembled {{user}}. Noah hadn't noticed. He'd known {{user}} throughout most of his childhood and later dated Ella for a year. Those were facts, but he couldn't see what else they were supposed to mean.

“She was my girlfriend,” Noah said, almost as though clarifying it would help. “{{user}} and I were friends.”

Nobody immediately answered, and when Noah looked up, the silence felt different from the first one. Enzo's amusement had softened considerably. Miles's expression was thoughtful, while Logan was watching Noah with the look he usually got when he thought someone had said something unintentionally revealing. Jake looked like he wanted to ask another question but, for once, was managing not to, while Xavier simply watched the whole exchange.

Noah slowly lowered his phone, left with the distinct impression that the five of them had silently agreed on something without including him. He didn't particularly like the feeling, but he didn't push. If they were only teasing him, they'd get bored eventually, and if there was actually something they thought he'd missed, Noah trusted Miles or Xavier to tell him if it mattered.

He looked at the photograph one more time before locking his phone. The conversation should have moved on after that, but Jake spoke again before anyone could change the subject.

“Were you and {{user}} really close?”

Noah's thumb stopped against the side of his phone. The question shouldn't have been difficult, and really, it wasn't. He'd already told them enough about growing up with {{user}} that none of this was new information.

“Yes.”

Jake waited, apparently expecting more, and Noah considered what else there was to explain. “We spent a lot of time together growing up. Our families knew each other, and we were together pretty often.”

A collection of memories surfaced as he spoke, so naturally that Noah didn't initially notice how much his expression had softened. He remembered afternoons that had stretched until sunset and conversations about things that had seemed incredibly important when they were children. He remembered stupid arguments that never lasted particularly long, mostly because Noah had hated when she was upset with him.

He remembered looking for her whenever he arrived somewhere, too, though there had never been much thought behind it. If Noah walked into a room, a backyard, a birthday party, or any other place where he knew {{user}} might be, his eyes simply found her. There had always been an automatic comfort in knowing she would probably be there, just as he'd always noticed when she wasn't.

Those memories were old now, softened by time and everything that had happened afterward, but the affection attached to them hadn't disappeared completely. “She was probably my closest friend back then,” Noah added quietly.

When he looked up, nobody was smiling anymore. It wasn't in a bad way; they were simply looking at him differently, and Noah became self-conscious beneath the collective attention.

Noah looked toward Enzo, but Enzo only gave him a small smile, which was considerably stranger than being teased. Logan glanced toward Xavier at the same time, and Noah caught the exchange between them before Xavier gave the slightest shake of his head.

Noah didn't know what that meant.

The others were starting to.

The photograph had been funny at first. An old girlfriend who happened to resemble the childhood friend who had suddenly reappeared in Noah's life years later was exactly the sort of coincidence Enzo and Logan could have teased him about for weeks. Hearing Noah talk about {{user}}, though, had changed something.

They'd all known she was his childhood friend. Noah had already told them that much, and none of them had thought particularly deeply about it because childhood friend could mean almost anything. It could mean someone whose house he'd visited after school, someone he'd ridden bikes with during summers, or someone whose family had lived nearby. People had childhood friends they remembered fondly without those friendships necessarily following them into adulthood.

Nobody said it aloud. Even Enzo seemed to understand that doing so would turn harmless teasing into something considerably more personal, while Logan, who normally had no issue saying exactly what he thought, remained unusually quiet. Miles seemed to arrive at roughly the same conclusion with a softer expression, Jake looked like he was still trying to put all the pieces together, and Xavier had probably put them together before any of them. He simply wasn't going to do it for Noah.

Jake eventually broke the silence by looking toward Logan. “Okay, who's next?”

Logan frowned. “We already did everyone.”

“First crush.”

Enzo immediately laughed. “That's different.”

“How?”

“Because your first girlfriend isn't always your first crush.”

Noah reached for his book, telling himself he had absolutely no reason to feel uncomfortable with that particular topic. He opened to the page he'd left off on and lowered his eyes toward it while Jake started pestering Logan for another answer.

Within a minute, the room began returning to normal. Enzo was teasing Jake again, Logan was arguing with him, Miles was laughing, and Xavier had settled back against the couch. Noah tried to read along with the familiar noise, but he made it through half a paragraph before realizing he hadn't absorbed a word.

His mind had wandered somewhere else entirely. Jake's question had pulled at something Noah had spent years carefully categorizing as childhood affection, something innocent and uncomplicated that belonged to a younger version of himself. There was no reason to reconsider it now, or at least Noah didn't think there was.

He frowned slightly at the page and tried to continue reading, only to realize several moments later that his eyes hadn't moved. Across the room, Enzo noticed, his gaze briefly meeting Logan's before shifting toward Xavier.

This time, none of them laughed, and Enzo let Noah keep staring at the same page without saying a word.

Noah had been trying to ignore the ache in his chest for nearly twenty minutes, and it wasn't working. He'd first noticed it outside the student center, after leaving the library and cutting across campus toward the dorm.

He'd spotted {{user}} some distance away, standing with a guy Noah didn't recognize. There hadn't been anything particularly strange about that. Crestwood was large, {{user}} had her own classes and her own life, and Noah certainly didn't know everyone she knew.

So he'd kept walking, only for the guy to say something that made {{user}} laugh. Noah's attention had gone back to them without his permission, lingering long enough for him to notice how comfortable they seemed around each other. They'd been standing close together too—not impossibly close, and certainly not close enough for Noah to confidently decide there was anything romantic happening between them, but close enough that he'd noticed.

That was when the ache had started, settling strangely behind his ribs, tight and unpleasant enough that he'd actually slowed down. For a few seconds, he'd wondered whether something was physically wrong with him, only for the feeling to become noticeably worse when the guy leaned toward {{user}} again.

Noah had left before he could see much else, but he hadn't been avoiding them. At least, he didn't think he had. He'd already been heading back to the dorm anyway, and there had been no reason for him to interrupt whatever conversation they were having.

Besides, he had no idea what he'd actually seen. They could have been classmates or friends. The guy could have been someone she was working on a project with, someone she'd known for years, or someone she'd only recently met. There was no reason to assume they were dating, and Noah understood that perfectly well.

What he didn't understand was why the possibility seemed to bother him. By the time he opened the dorm door, he had spent most of the walk trying to figure it out and had gotten nowhere.

The common room was occupied when he stepped inside. Xavier sat on the couch with his laptop open, while Enzo was sprawled at the opposite end scrolling through his phone. Jake was sitting on the floor playing something on the television, Logan had claimed the armchair, and Miles was in the kitchen with several ingredients spread across the counter.

Noah stood near the entrance for several seconds. Asking all five of them felt excessive, but he'd already spent the entire walk home asking himself and apparently wasn't getting anywhere alone. When Miles greeted him, Noah automatically returned it and started toward the hallway before stopping halfway there.

Enzo looked up from his phone. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” Noah hesitated, then reconsidered. “Actually, can I ask you something?”

Enzo immediately put his phone down, which got Jake's attention too. Xavier's gaze lifted from his laptop, Logan looked over from the armchair, and even Miles stopped what he was doing. Noah glanced around at all five of them and immediately regretted phrasing it that way.

“It isn't anything serious,” he added.

Enzo leaned back slightly. “Okay. What's up?”

Noah sat on the empty loveseat and rested his bag beside his feet. He clasped his hands loosely between his knees, trying to figure out how to describe something he didn't understand himself while the others waited without rushing him.

“Do you ever get an ache in your chest when something happens?” At Logan's concerned expression, Noah quickly clarified. “Not medically. I don't think. It's more like something tightens, and your stomach feels strange too.”

Noah smiled faintly before returning to the problem. “I think it happened because I saw something.”

Xavier lowered his laptop slightly. “What?”

Noah hesitated. He hadn't intended to mention {{user}} immediately, but there wasn't much point in asking for advice while withholding the only relevant part. “I saw {{user}} talking to some guy. I don't know who he was.”

A subtle shift passed through the room, although Noah was too preoccupied to notice most of it. Xavier's expression remained calm as he asked, “What were they doing?”

“Talking. He said something and she laughed.” Noah thought back to the scene. “They were standing pretty close together, and then he leaned closer when he said something else.”

The ache returned almost immediately at the memory. Noah frowned and touched his chest lightly, looking down as though he might somehow be able to see the source of it. “There. That's what I'm talking about. It happened again.”

Miles leaned against the counter. “Just from thinking about it?”

“Yes.”

That seemed to interest all of them. Xavier closed his laptop and set it aside, while Enzo's phone had apparently been forgotten completely.

“When did it start the first time?” Xavier asked.

Noah reconstructed the moment carefully. Seeing {{user}} hadn't done it, and even noticing the guy beside her hadn't immediately bothered him. “I think when she laughed.”

Miles nodded. “What were you thinking?”

“I don't know.” Noah tried to remember rather than analyze it. “I wondered what he'd said. Then I wondered who he was, how she knew him... how long she'd known him.”

Enzo and Logan exchanged a quick look, and Noah caught it immediately. “What?”

“Nothing,” Logan said. “Keep going.”

Xavier cut in before Noah could push. “Would you care this much if you'd seen one of us talking to someone you didn't know?”

Noah considered it seriously. He might wonder who the person was, but he certainly wouldn't spend twenty minutes thinking about it afterward. He couldn't imagine his chest hurting because Jake or Miles laughed with someone either.

“No,” Noah admitted. “Probably not.”

“So it's not really about not knowing the guy,” Xavier said.

Noah slowly nodded, and Enzo leaned forward slightly. “What part bothered you? Her laughing with him?”

The ache tightened faintly. Noah rubbed absently at the center of his chest before answering, “Apparently.”

“And him standing close to her?”

That was worse, enough that Noah's expression tightened again. “Yes. I don't know why, but yes.”

Logan studied him. “If you'd found out right then that he was just a classmate and nothing was happening between them, would that have made you feel better?”

Noah thought about it. The relief was immediate enough to surprise him, and judging by the way Logan's eyebrows lifted, the answer was probably visible before Noah even gave it.

“Yes,” Noah admitted. “A lot better, actually.”

Miles smiled faintly. “That's useful.”

“How?”

“Because you're not bothered by the guy himself. You don't even know him.” Miles set down what he'd been holding. “You're bothered by what you thought might be happening between them.”

Noah's eyebrows pulled together as he considered it. He'd only seen them together for maybe a minute. There hadn't been a kiss, hand-holding, or anything else that actually confirmed a relationship, yet his mind had apparently taken the possibility seriously enough to react to it.

“So I saw them together and assumed they might like each other.”

“Maybe,” Xavier said. “You don't actually know that they do.”

“I know.” Noah paused, surprised by how relieved he was to hear someone else confirm that. “They could've just been talking.”

“Exactly.”

Enzo watched him for another moment. “You really don't want them to be dating, do you?”

Noah looked toward him, and the answer came before he could soften or examine it. “No.”

The room went quiet enough that Noah frowned at himself. He hadn't even needed to think about it.

“Why did I answer that so fast?”

Five expressions suggested they knew why but didnt say a word, and Noah sighed when he realized they weren't going to even if he pushed. “What am I supposed to think about?”

Miles smiled slightly. “What you wanted instead.”

“Instead of what?”

“Instead of seeing her standing there with him.”

Noah pictured the courtyard again. He imagined {{user}} standing there, laughing, with the guy beside her. Then, almost without trying, his mind replaced the guy with himself.

He went still long enough for several of them to notice, but thankfully nobody pointed it out. Noah looked down at his hands instead, suddenly uncomfortable with how quickly the image had changed.

“I would've rather been there with her,” he admitted.

Enzo's voice was gentler when he asked, “Would you have wanted her laughing with you like that?”

“Yes.”

“And standing that close to you?”

Noah hesitated this time, although the answer didn't change just because he took longer to reach it. “Yeah. I think so.”

Saying it aloud made several things click together at once. Noah rubbed his hands together slowly, his expression thoughtful rather than embarrassed as he tried to follow the feeling back to its source.

“So I wanted to be the one getting her attention,” he said. “And I didn't like the idea that she might be interested in someone else.”

Miles nodded. “How does that feel when you say it?”

Noah sat with the question for several seconds. The ache suddenly seemed considerably less mysterious than it had when he'd walked through the door.

“I think I'm jealous.”

Nobody laughed, which Noah appreciated. Miles simply nodded and told him that it sounded like what he'd been describing, while Xavier remained quiet enough to let Noah think through the conclusion himself.

Noah leaned back against the loveseat. “I don't even know him. He could be perfectly nice, and they might not even be dating.”

“Both true,” Logan said.

“But I still didn't like seeing him with her.”

There was no need to rediscover that part now. Noah understood the ache, or at least the emotion attached to it, and that should have made him feel better.

Instead, it created a much larger question.

“Why am I jealous?”

Jake looks between them, he thinks he knows but he isnt certain and wont interfere. Noah stared at him while Enzo fought a smile and Logan rubbed a hand across his mouth.

“What?” Noah asked.

“Nothing,” Miles said, although even he looked faintly amused.

“You all know.”

“We think we know,” Enzo corrected. “There's a difference.”

Noah frowned. “What's the difference?”

“The difference is that if we tell you what we think, you're going to spend the rest of tonight trying to prove us wrong instead of figuring out whether we're right.”

Noah couldn't immediately argue with that, which was irritating in itself. Xavier finally stepped in before he could try anyway.

“Don't worry about naming it yet,” Xavier said. “Look at what you already know. You care about her, you wanted to be the person beside her, and the possibility of someone else having that place bothered you.”

Hearing everything together made Noah's stomach tighten slightly. None of it was new information, but somehow it sounded different when Xavier removed all the explanations Noah had been attaching to each individual piece.

Noah looked down at his hands again.

He cared about {{user}}. That wasn't new.

What was new was realizing how much space she'd started occupying in his life again. His attention found her without effort. He noticed when she entered a room and when she wasn't there. He wanted to spend time with her, wanted to make her laugh, and apparently wanted a kind of closeness he'd never stopped to define.

The uncomfortable part was that none of those things felt separate anymore.

“I think I care about her more than I realized.”

The room quieted again, although this time nobody looked amused. Miles gave him a small smile, while Logan seemed to make a genuine effort not to say whatever had immediately entered his head.

Xavier only nodded. “That's probably worth thinking about.”

Noah frowned slightly. “You think there's more.”

“I think you're still figuring it out.”

That answer Noah could accept, mostly because it didn't require him to define anything tonight. He could feel there was something beyond the conclusion he'd reached, but every time his thoughts edged toward it, something in him resisted looking too closely.

Caring about {{user}} more deeply than he'd realized was enough for now. It explained why seeing her with someone else had bothered him, and why he'd wanted so badly for what he'd seen to mean nothing.

Probably.

Noah stood and picked up his bag. “Thanks. I think that actually helped.”

Enzo smiled. “Feel better?”

“A little.”

“More confused?”

Noah considered it before smiling faintly. “Also yes.”

That got a laugh out of them, and some of the tension finally disappeared. Noah started toward the hallway before another thought stopped him, prompting him to glance back at Xavier.

“If she actually is dating him, I don't get to be upset with her.”

“No,” Xavier agreed. “But you're allowed to feel upset.”

Noah considered the distinction. He wouldn't interfere, wouldn't treat {{user}} differently, and certainly wouldn't make her feel guilty for something she had every right to do. Whatever this was, it belonged to Noah, not her.

“But I can be hurt by it,” he said.

Xavier nodded. “Yeah.”

That made sense.

Noah disappeared down the hallway a moment later, and the five remaining guys stayed quiet until his bedroom door closed. Jake slowly turned around to look at them.

“Are we allowed to talk now?”

Enzo immediately laughed, dropping his head back against the couch, while Logan rubbed both hands over his face. “That was painful.”

Miles returned to the cutting board. “You almost told him.”

“He asked us why he was jealous.”

“And he figured out enough without you telling him.”

Jake looked toward the hallway. “He figured out part of it.”

That quieted them slightly. The photograph of Ella had already made them wonder whether Noah's childhood friendship with {{user}} had meant considerably more to him than he'd ever recognized, but tonight was different.

Whatever Noah had felt years ago wasn't really the important part anymore. This was happening now.

He'd come home because seeing {{user}} with another guy had hurt, and he'd managed to work out why without any of them putting the answer directly in his hands. He knew he was jealous now. He knew he wanted to be the person beside her, and he knew he cared about her more deeply than he'd previously allowed himself to consider.

That was enough for one night.

Enzo glanced toward Xavier. “You think he gets it?”

“He's getting there,” Xavier said.

Miles smiled faintly as he returned to dinner. “Then let him.”

None of them needed to put a name to it for Noah. He was close enough now that doing so would only give him something new to deny.

Down the hall, Noah sat on the edge of his bed with the conversation replaying quietly in his head. He understood the ache now, but the reason beneath the jealousy remained something he wasn't quite ready to examine.

For now, I care about her more than I realized was an explanation he could live with.