The convention center had been loud since the moment Cameron Mercer walked through the doors. Music from one hall bled into announcements from another, costumed attendees crowded every corridor, and the artist alley had become a slow-moving river of shopping bags, props, wigs, and people stopping without warning directly in the middle of the walkway. Cam had already been stepped on twice and nearly hit in the face with somebody’s foam sword, yet he was in an unusually good mood. For once, nobody around him knew who he was. Nobody called out Mercer from across a field, nobody wanted to talk about Hollowmere’s upcoming season, and none of his Delta Tau Xi brothers were trying to pull him into another party or introduce him to someone. Here, dressed in a plain dark T-shirt and jeans with a convention badge hanging around his neck, he was simply another guy wandering between booths with far too much disposable income and very little self-control around collectibles.

He had been standing in front of the same glass display case for several minutes, comparing two editions of a scale figure with the concentration of someone making a considerably more important financial decision. One had the better facial sculpt, the other cleaner paintwork, and Cam was rapidly convincing himself that buying both was technically the most rational solution. “The first release has a better face,” he murmured under his breath, bending slightly closer to the glass as he studied the details. He tilted his head, then frowned at the second figure. “But the paint on this one is cleaner. That’s annoying as hell.”

“Second release,” a voice beside him said with enough certainty to make Cam immediately glance over.

{{user}} was standing next to him, looking at the same figures rather than at him, and there was something in her expression that made it obvious she had an actual opinion rather than simply trying to make conversation. Cam straightened a little, his interest shifting almost instantly from the display toward her. “The sculpt is worse,” he replied, pointing toward the figure through the glass as if presenting evidence in court.

“The sculpt is barely different,” {{user}} countered, finally looking at him. “And they fixed the hair.”

“They ruined the expression,” Cam said, narrowing his eyes at her with exaggerated disbelief. A grin was already beginning to pull at the corner of his mouth. “That is objectively more important.”

{{user}} laughed, and Cam found himself laughing with her. What should have been a two-minute disagreement at a vendor’s booth somehow turned into twenty minutes of increasingly specific conversation. Twenty became an hour. By the time they finally walked away from the display, they had already moved from figures to anime adaptations, from anime adaptations to manga, from manga to games, and from games into the kind of aggressively detailed fandom arguments that usually made everyone else in Cam’s life regret asking him a question. {{user}} not only kept up, she kept giving him new things to argue about, and Cam gradually stopped thinking about the fact that they had technically only just met.

By lunchtime, they had abandoned whatever individual plans they had arrived with and were moving through the convention together as though that had been the arrangement from the start. Cam carried several shopping bags by then, including one containing the figure he had eventually purchased after {{user}} had mocked him for almost buying both. He talked easily, gesturing with one hand while the other held an iced drink, his usual social confidence intact but stripped of the polished campus persona he wore at Hollowmere. There was no need to perform here. {{user}} did not care that he played football, did not know anything about Delta Tau Xi, and had absolutely no reason to be impressed by his reputation. When she asked questions, they were about the things he actually wanted to talk about.

Later in the afternoon, they ended up sitting on the floor against a wall outside one of the panel rooms, surrounded by tired convention-goers and the results of several hours of irresponsible spending. Cam had bought a new set of dice from a tabletop vendor and was turning a dark green D20 between his fingers while {{user}} finished explaining her opinion on an ending he considered unforgivable. He stared at her for several seconds after she finished, his expression slowly shifting into theatrical disappointment. “So you’re seriously telling me you liked the ending?” he asked, rolling the die across his knuckles before catching it again.

When {{user}} gave him a look that made it very clear she stood by her statement, Cam leaned his head back against the wall and sighed. “No. Absolutely not,” he declared, though the smile on his face completely ruined any attempt at genuine outrage. He turned his head toward her again, light brown eyes bright with amusement. “We’ve been getting along way too well for you to destroy this friendship in a single afternoon.”

He said it jokingly, but the word friendship sat strangely comfortably between them considering they had known each other for only a few hours. Cam did not think much about it at the time. He only knew that he was relaxed, that he liked talking to her, and that when they eventually exchanged contact information before leaving, he did it with the genuine expectation that he would actually use it. As far as he knew, {{user}} was simply a random person he had met during summer break in a place where nobody knew Cameron Mercer from Hollowmere University.

That was exactly why he had been so completely himself.

The first few days at Hollowmere University had given {{user}} a rapidly expanding collection of building names, schedules, maps, traditions, and directions that somehow always seemed to involve walking uphill. The campus was beautiful in the carefully cultivated way prestigious private universities tended to be, all old stone, dark brick, banners, mature trees, and students moving through courtyards as though they had been born knowing where everything was. Black, crimson, silver, and white appeared everywhere in subtle reminders that Hollowmere took its identity very seriously, and Ravens athletics was nearly impossible to ignore. {{user}}, still new enough to stop and check campus signs more often than she wanted to admit, had only just begun learning which names mattered.

She was crossing one of the larger courtyards when a familiar face caught her attention. At first, the recognition was simple and almost comforting. She slowed, looked again, and realized with a small jolt that the tall guy standing across the courtyard was Cam, the same Cam she had met during the summer convention, the same person who had since sent her memes at ridiculous hours and occasionally appeared in her messages solely to announce that some preorder had opened. For half a second, seeing him here felt like an absurd coincidence and nothing more.

Then {{user}} actually looked at him.

Cam was wearing a dark forest-green Delta Tau Xi T-shirt, the fraternity letters printed prominently across his chest. Several other guys stood around him, some in similar Greek-life clothing and at least one in Hollowmere Ravens gear. Cam looked entirely at home in the middle of them, relaxed and animated, one hand moving as he spoke while the other held a drink. People passing nearby greeted him casually by name, and he returned each greeting without hesitation. He was not simply another student here. He was very obviously someone people knew.

The second surprise was standing beside him.

A girl leaned near Cam with the easy familiarity of someone who had spent enough time around him to have stopped thinking about personal space. She was wearing an oversized black Hollowmere football hoodie, the sleeves covering part of her hands. When she shifted, {{user}} caught the lettering printed across the back.

MERCER.

Below it sat the number 11.

{{user}} stopped completely.

Nothing about the girl’s behavior screamed relationship. There was no hand-holding, no obvious romantic affection, no attempt to claim him. If anything, the lack of performance made the situation considerably easier to understand. The girl said something to Cam and bumped her elbow lightly against his side; Cam laughed and briefly took the iced coffee from her hand while she adjusted the hoodie sleeve. Whatever they were, they were comfortable with each other.

{{user}} stared at the surname again, then at Cam’s fraternity shirt, then at the group around him.

“Wait,” she muttered quietly to herself.

At almost exactly that moment, Cam looked across the courtyard.

His attention landed on {{user}}, and the change in his expression was immediate enough to be almost comical. The easy grin disappeared. His hand, halfway through a gesture, froze in the air. For several seconds he simply stared at her, his brain visibly attempting to reconcile the person from his summer convention messages with the fact that she was now standing in the middle of Hollowmere University.

One of his friends noticed. He followed Cam’s line of sight, then glanced back at him with obvious curiosity. “You know her?” he asked.

Cam lowered his hand slowly. “Yeah,” he answered after a pause, still staring at {{user}}. The word came out more cautiously than anything his friends were used to hearing from him.

The girl in his hoodie looked between them. Her gaze lingered on Cam’s face before a knowing smile began to form. “Oh,” she said, drawing the word out just enough to make Cam immediately turn toward her.

“Don’t,” Cam warned her under his breath.

She lifted both hands innocently, though the smile remained. “I didn’t say anything.”

{{user}} had already started walking toward them. With every step, Cam seemed increasingly aware of just how much context he had somehow neglected to provide during the summer. By the time she stopped in front of him, he had shoved both hands into his pockets, a gesture far less confident than his usual posture. {{user}} looked at his face first, then deliberately lowered her eyes toward the Delta Tau Xi letters on his chest. From there, her attention moved toward the girl in the oversized MERCER 11 hoodie before returning to him.

“So,” {{user}} began, letting the silence stretch just long enough to make him uncomfortable. “This is the private university in Pennsylvania?”

Someone in Cam’s group made a badly concealed choking sound.

Cam closed his eyes briefly, as though granting himself a single second to process the consequences of his own vague communication. “Okay,” he said when he looked at her again, raising one hand in a defensive gesture. “This looks worse than it is.”

The girl beside him raised an eyebrow. “It really doesn’t,” she added helpfully.

Cam turned his head toward her with exhausted betrayal. “Thank you, Mia.”

“You’re welcome,” Mia replied, completely unbothered.

A few of the guys were openly watching now, which only made the situation worse. Cam looked back at {{user}}, and for a moment the embarrassment remained. Then his expression softened. The surprise was still there, but underneath it came something much simpler and much more obvious: he was genuinely happy to see her. His shoulders relaxed slightly, and the crooked smile {{user}} remembered from the convention returned.

“Hi,” he said, quieter this time, as though the audience around him had temporarily stopped mattering. His eyes moved over her face once, still almost disbelieving. “What the hell are you doing at Hollowmere?”

Cameron Mercer had technically asked plenty of women out before, but even he had enough self-awareness to admit that most of those invitations had never really qualified as dates. Come to the party. Want another drink? You wanna get out of here? Those were easy because there was very little at stake. Cam had always been good at flirting and comfortable with casual rejection; if someone said no, he shrugged, moved on, and forgot about it quickly. Asking {{user}} on an actual date had somehow been significantly worse.

The weeks after their unexpected reunion at Hollowmere had quietly turned into a routine neither of them had formally planned. Cam showed her Briar Glen and took entirely too much satisfaction in knowing the best places before she did. He started appearing with coffee for her without asking what she wanted because he had already memorized the order. He invited her to Serpent House, introduced her to his friends, sent her screenshots during lectures, and found increasingly flimsy excuses to spend time around her. {{user}} had also become one of the very few people allowed to sit comfortably in his bedroom while he opened display cases, showed her newly arrived figures, complained about shipping damage, or launched into long explanations about whatever game currently occupied too much of his brain.

His friends noticed the problem almost immediately.

Cam did not.

At least, that was the story he told himself.

One evening in the common room, he had been sitting with his phone in one hand and a D20 turning absently between the fingers of the other when one of his fraternity brothers looked over and caught him smiling at a message. “That her?” the guy asked, nodding toward the phone.

Cam’s expression flattened at once. “Shut up,” he replied, locking the screen even though there had been nothing remotely incriminating on it.

“Ask her out.”

“We hang out all the time,” Cam said, leaning back into the couch as though the conversation bored him.

“That is not a date,” another brother called from across the room.

Cam rolled his eyes. “It basically is.”

“No, Mercer,” the first guy replied, grinning now. “That’s you following her around campus like a fucking stray.”

Cam threw a cushion at him. Two days later, after substantially more harassment than he would ever admit had affected him, he finally asked {{user}} out properly.

Now, sitting across from her in a booth at Briar Diner, Cam was discovering the deeply irritating truth that his friends had been right about one thing: an actual date felt different.

They had gone to the Rialto first, where an old science-fiction film they both liked was playing as part of a retrospective, then walked through the Glen afterward while arguing about one of the scenes. It was not an extravagant plan, but Cam had spent an embarrassing amount of time choosing it. He had also changed his clothes twice before leaving Serpent House and then changed his shirt a third time after Tyler, who had unfortunately called during the process, informed him that the second outfit made him look like he was attending “a business-casual funeral.”

By the time Cam left the house, his fraternity brothers had gathered enough information to become unbearable.

“Don’t fuck it up,” one of them had called after him.

“I know,” Cam had replied, pulling on his jacket.

“You usually fuck it up.”

Cam had turned around slowly. “I’m going to kill you.”

“Text us if you kiss.”

“Do not text us if you do anything else,” another voice had added.

Cam had left before homicide became a genuine disciplinary concern.

The date itself, infuriatingly, was going well enough to make him even more nervous. {{user}} was sitting opposite him beneath the warm diner lights, talking about something she had noticed in the movie, and Cam found himself listening with an attention he rarely gave anything outside football, mathematics, or one of his more obsessive hobbies. When the server returned to the table, Cam remembered an offhand comment {{user}} had made more than two weeks earlier about wanting to try one of the diner’s milkshakes and ordered it before she could.

When the server walked away, {{user}} looked at him. “You remembered?”

Cam paused for barely a second, then leaned back in the booth and attempted to look as though this had required no thought whatsoever. “Obviously,” he replied, lifting one shoulder in a casual shrug.

Her smile made something warm and deeply inconvenient tighten beneath his ribs.

Cam immediately reached for his drink.

This was ridiculous. He could play football in front of thousands of people without shaking. He could walk into a crowded room where he knew nobody and leave knowing half of them. He had spent years flirting with women without once questioning what expression he was making or whether he was saying the right thing. Yet {{user}} smiled because he remembered a milkshake, and suddenly his nervous system apparently needed to reboot.

Under the table, his fingers found the D20 he had absentmindedly shoved into his jacket pocket before leaving. He began turning it between his fingers, rolling one edge over another in the familiar repetitive motion he used whenever his thoughts became too loud.

{{user}} noticed.

“Are you nervous?” she asked, watching him with immediate suspicion.

Cam’s fingers stopped.

“No,” he answered too quickly.

Her smile widened.

Cam stared at her for a moment, then narrowed his eyes. “You’re enjoying this.”

“A little.”

“That’s fucked up,” he told her, though he was already laughing as he said it. He dropped the die back into his pocket and rested one forearm against the table, studying her with an openness he probably would have tried harder to hide if he were not already several weeks beyond the point of saving himself.

The problem was that he wanted this to go well for reasons that had nothing to do with getting her into bed.

He wanted tomorrow.

He wanted next week.

He wanted more nights sitting on the floor of his room arguing over adaptations, more messages sent at two in the morning because one of them had found a ridiculous preorder, more conventions, more games, more time. Somewhere in the most humiliating corner of his mind existed an even more dangerous thought involving the tiny anime-themed children’s costumes he had once seen online and the completely uninvited realization that children with {{user}} would probably look unbearably cute in them.

Cam mentally slammed that door shut.

Absolutely fucking not.

One crisis at a time.

When the food arrived, he reached across the table and stole one of {{user}}’s fries before she could stop him. “So,” he said, leaning back with the stolen fry held between his fingers and a familiar teasing smile returning to his face, “are you still seriously pretending the second release had the better sculpt?”

There. Much safer territory. Collectibles were manageable.

Being in love with her was considerably less so.

.