Chapter Text
There are about eight thousand ways to embarrass yourself during the first week of a new semester.
You know this because you've already accomplished several of them. You've walked confidently into the wrong classroom, held a door open for someone who was nowhere near close enough to justify it, and spent an entire elevator ride pretending the guy next to you wasn’t staring at your boobs before noticing you were just wearing the same shirt. Albeit, you would argue, you wore it better.
Still, none of those feel particularly catastrophic. College is basically one prolonged exercise in freezing of embarrassment and then pretending no one saw what you just did, and you're getting pretty good at it.
You haven't done anything bad enough to permanently alter the course of your life, but who knows, it’s only ten in the morning. There's plenty of time.
Which is probably why you're not particularly paying close attention when you round the corner of the science building and walk directly into someone. It’s not one of those moments where you brush shoulders or get caught in an awkward dance where you both keep choosing the same direction.
Forehead first, you hit something solid enough to make you question whether you've walked into a person or an unfortunately placed support beam. Your chai jerks in your hand, the lid popping up just enough to threaten everything you love. You hear the person in front of you make a startled noise as you stumble backward.
“Whoa—”
A hand catches your arm before gravity can add passing out to this morning's growing list of humiliations. Your other hand immediately clamps over the lid of your drink, priorities arranging themselves with remarkable speed.
“Oh my God.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” You look down at your cup. “More importantly—”
Your eyes shoot down to the treasure in your hand. The lid is still firmly attached, and, thank God, not a single drop has spilled.
You exhale. “She's okay.”
There's a beat of silence before he asks, “Your coffee?”
“My chai,” you clarify, finally looking up.
Oh.
The guy you've just used as a human wall is cute. Really cute, actually, which feels like an unfair complication when you're still close enough to count his eyelashes and have just demonstrated that walking in a straight line is beyond your current abilities.
Brown curls fall messily across his forehead, flattened in some places and sticking up in others as if he's already spent half the morning running his hands through them. His backpack hangs from one shoulder, forgotten for the moment, while he studies you with wide brown eyes and an expression caught somewhere between concern and confusion. One of his hands is still wrapped loosely around your arm.
His eyebrows lift.
Right. You're staring at the stranger you just body-checked before ten in the morning. What an excellent recovery so far.
“She's been through a lot.” You point at the little panda someone at the coffee shop drew on the sleeve, the corner of your smile twitching to hold back from drooling at the man in front of you.
He follows your finger to the panda, and the concern in his face gives way to a reluctant smile. “I can tell.”
Your attention drops to the hand still holding your arm, which he seems to also notice.
“Oh.” He lets go so quickly you'd think you'd burned him. “Sorry.”
“You're good.”
“No, I should've been paying attention.”
“So should I.”
“Yeah, but I was the one who—”
“You know, we can probably split liability on this one.”
That stops him. “Liability?”
“Fifty-fifty. Neither party admits fault. Saves us both a lot of paperwork.”
He ducks his head, but the laugh escapes anyway. “Okay. Yeah. I can agree to that.”
“Perfect.”
With the collision legally settled and your dignity only moderately injured, you take another step back and prepare to continue toward class. Then something near his feet catches your attention. “Uh.”
He follows your gaze.
A pigeon stands approximately two feet away with its chest puffed out and its beady eyes fixed on him. He stares back with the wary concentration of someone who suspects this isn't their first encounter, even if you’re almost certain it is.
You look between them. “Do you know him?”
“What?”
“The pigeon.”
His eyes snap toward you. “No.”
The denial comes fast enough that it would never survive cross-examination, and the pigeon chooses that exact moment to take a deliberate step closer.
You raise your eyebrows, empty hand fisted up against your lips to hold in a laugh. “Because he seems to know you.”
“He doesn't.”
The guy shifts half a step to the side. Without breaking eye contact, the pigeon corrects its course and follows him.
“Did you do something to him?”
“No.”
“Steal his girlfriend?”
“W-what? No.”
“Disrespect his family?”
“I don't have any problems with his family.”
“So you do know him.”
“I don't know the pigeon.”
His insistence would be more convincing if he weren't slowly being herded toward a concrete planter. You lose the fight against your smile.
“You're enjoying this,” he says.
“A little.”
“Great.”
The pigeon advances again. He points at it
“Don't.”
You stare at him. The pigeon, apparently, does too.
“Did you just tell it not to?”
“I panicked.”
The full-belly laugh escapes before you can stop it, and his offended expression lasts only a second before he gives in too. It changes his whole face when he smiles properly, softening the worried pull of his eyebrows, and for a moment neither of you makes any effort to leave. Apparently, harassing a stranger over his relationship with a bird is all it takes to make you forget you have somewhere to be.
Then your phone vibrates in your hand.
Anna: if you are not sitting beside me in two minutes im selling your seat
“Oh, shit.”
“What?”
“Class.” You check the time. 9:58. You groan at the realization that plenty of time has apparently become some time, which is pretty much no time at all. “I have to go.”
“Yeah. Me too, actually.”
“Good luck with your enemy.”
He glances toward the pigeon. “I think we're making progress.”
“You're doing great.”
“Thanks.”
You back toward the entrance as you both shout due to the new distance between you. “Try diplomacy!”
“I did!”
“And?”
“It didn't work!”
You're still laughing when you push through the doors.
You don't get his name.
Fuck.
The omission occurs to you somewhere between the entrance and the stairwell, right around the time you nearly take the first step two at a time and remember you aren't coordinated enough to risk it. You could've asked before running away. He could've asked too, you decide, which makes the failure mutual and therefore less embarrassing.
Besides, there are thousands of students here. Odds are, you'll never see him again.
—--------------
You make it to class with maybe thirty seconds to spare.
Not gracefully, either. By the time you push through the classroom door, you're slightly out of breath, your bag strap has slipped down to your hand, a sheen of sweat from the stairs forces your sleeve to your forehead, and your phone is putting up a surprising amount of resistance to being shoved into your back pocket. You manage to win all four fights before anyone looks too closely, which is about as successful an entrance as you can hope for today.
“Over here!”
A familiar voice cuts through the low chatter in the classroom, followed by a hand waving erratically near the back. Anna has claimed two seats at one of the long tables, one hand raised high enough to guide an aircraft while the other remains wrapped around an iced coffee she definitely does not have time to drink. The second she spots you, she drags her backpack from the chair beside her with her foot.
You hurry over just as Professor Warren steps toward the front of the room.
“I saved you,” Anna whispers.
“My hero.” You said dreamily.
“I know.” She grins, rolling her eyes and smacking your arm as your bag lands beside the chair, and you begin digging for your supplies.
“Do I smell fine? Those stairs messed me up.” Anna laughed a bit before sniffing the air around you, confirming you actually smell pretty good.
“Please send me a link to that, oh my god.” You nod.
By the time you've located a notebook, rescued a pen from the bottom of your bag, and arranged everything into something resembling academic preparedness, Anna already has a fresh document open. She somehow looks significantly more put together than you, despite having spent the last ten minutes composing increasingly threatening messages about your impending “lateness.”
“You realize you told me class started at ten.”
“It does.”
“It is ten.”
“Exactly.”
“You made it sound like I was missing something.”
“You were about to.”
“But I didn't.”
“Because of me.”
You turn your head and give her the long, unimpressed look the argument deserves. Anna accepts it without shame, taking a leisurely sip of her coffee as if she personally held back time until you arrived.
You've known each other since high school, which means most of your conversations have stopped requiring context for years. It also means you know better than to question the confidence with which Anna presents an opinion, regardless of whether she's right. She's one of the busiest people you know, constantly balancing work, classes, and whatever else she's managed to wedge into a schedule that should've stopped accepting new appointments months ago, but she still finds time to monitor your punctuality like it's a second job.
“You have work after this?” you whisper.
“During this.”
Your eyebrows pull together, and Anna nods toward the clock.
“I have to leave ten minutes early.”
“You just got here.”
“I know.”
“That sounds like a personal problem.”
“It is.”
Professor Warren glances toward the back of the room, and both of you immediately find something fascinating at the front.
You manage to behave for perhaps thirty seconds before your attention slips away from the syllabus. The classroom is different from most of the others you've been in so far, with wide six-person tables replacing the usual rows of individual desks. Presumably, someone in the department decided calculus wasn't painful enough on its own and needed the added intimacy of failing in front of five witnesses.
Four of the six seats at yours are already occupied. Well, five if you count yourself.
Anna sits to your left, leaving one empty chair on your right.
Across the table, a girl with curly brown hair has a paperback tucked beneath the edge of her notebook and keeps inching it farther into view whenever Professor Warren looks away. Whatever is happening in those pages is apparently more urgent than the attendance policy, and based on the attendance policy so far, you can't blame her.
Beside her, a guy in a NASA shirt has spent the last minute peeling the label from his water bottle in one perfectly continuous strip. Only a narrow section near the seam remains attached, and you've become more invested in his success than you are comfortable admitting.
The final stranger sits diagonally across from you, one arm resting along the edge of the table. Your eyes meet while you're surveying the room, and instead of looking away, he gives you an easy little smile that lingers just long enough to feel intentional before returning his attention to the professor.
You return it automatically. A second later, Anna nudges your knee.
You ignore her, so she does it again. When you finally turn, she subtly tilts her head toward the guy across from you.
‘What?’ you mouth.
Her eyebrows lift. You glance across the table and find him looking at you again. The second you catch him, his attention drops to his notebook.
Oh.
You look back at Anna. ‘Stop.’
She smiles into her coffee, entirely too pleased with herself.
Whatever Anna thinks she's noticed, you're not interested in encouraging her. You've been in this classroom for less than five minutes and don't even know the guy's name. Letting her manufacture a love life for you before Professor Warren finishes the attendance policy feels reckless, especially when Anna treats the smallest interaction with an attractive man as the opening scene of a romantic comedy you never agreed to star in.
Besides, you've already met your quota for strange interactions with men this morning.
Professor Warren moves on to grading policies, so you pull up the syllabus and make a genuine attempt to follow along. Anna makes that increasingly difficult. Every few minutes, she highlights a new percentage on her screen and angles the laptop toward you, her expression growing more horrified as the portion of your grade controlled by exams climbs toward something personally offensive.
When Professor Warren reaches the final exam percentage, Anna silently mouths, ‘What the fuck?’
Your hand flies over your mouth at the exact moment the classroom door opens.
Professor Warren stops talking. Every head in the room turns, including yours.
A boy stands in the doorway looking as if the morning has personally wronged him and plans to continue doing so. His brown hair sticks up in several directions, more disheveled than it had been outside, and his backpack hangs half-open from one shoulder with a notebook threatening to escape. One of his shoelaces has given up entirely. There's also a dark streak near the bottom of his sweatshirt that looks suspiciously like the result of losing an argument with public transportation.
You recognize him immediately.
Oh, you've got to be kidding.
Pigeon Guy.
He doesn't notice you. To be fair, he's a little preoccupied with the fact that an entire classroom has turned to observe his humiliation, and unlike you, he doesn't even have a surviving chai to comfort him through it.
“Sorry,” he says.
Professor Warren waits.
“The train was delayed, and then there was this whole thing with a pigeon.”
Your lips press together.
So diplomacy failed.
Across the table, the girl with the book doesn't grant him the same mercy. She snorts.
He looks at her. “It makes more sense with context.”
It does not.
“I don't want the context.”
“That feels unfair.”
“It probably isn't.”
“Mr. Parker,” Professor Warren says.
So. Pigeon Guy has a name.
“Right. Sorry.” Parker hurries farther into the room in search of an empty chair.
There's exactly one.
Beside you.
Of course.
For someone you were destined never to see again, Parker is doing a terrible job of staying out of your path. He starts toward the table without looking at you, too busy trying to close his backpack as he walks. He's almost reached the empty chair when his eyes finally lift and land on you.
Parker stops.
You smile and lift two fingers in a tiny wave, with a smirk. Recognition flashes across his face, followed by such open disbelief that you nearly laugh. His lips part, but before he can say anything, his backpack catches on the corner of the chair.
The chair scrapes loudly against the floor.
Parker freezes. Professor Warren stops talking again.
“Sorry.”
She stares at him.
“Sorry,” he repeats, quieter this time.
The sound is so violently out of place in the quiet classroom that you have to bite the inside of your cheek. Parker shoots you a look that very clearly says, "Don't," which naturally makes not laughing about ten times harder. You lower your eyes to your notebook, clear your throat, and pretend the blank page requires your complete attention.
He makes another attempt at sitting, moving with the exaggerated care of someone approaching a wild animal. The still-open zipper of his backpack betrays him anyway, releasing a notebook onto the floor with a flat slap. He crouches to retrieve it, only for his pencil to roll beneath the table as if trying to distance itself from the situation.
Beside you, Anna whispers, “Oh, buddy.”
The guy in the NASA shirt abruptly becomes very interested in his water bottle.
At that point, even Professor Warren seems to decide there are limits to how much one person can be publicly punished and resumes the lecture.
Parker retrieves the pencil and finally lowers himself into the chair beside you. Up close, his cheeks are flushed from rushing across campus, and a curl has fallen directly between his eyebrows. He looks as though he has just completed a small but emotionally taxing obstacle course. You give him a few seconds to remember how breathing works because, after witnessing all of that, it feels like the least you can do.
“Good entrance.”
His head turns, startled. “You.”
“Me.”
His eyes flick toward the front of the room before returning to you. “You're in this class?”
You glance around. “Unless I've done the wrong-class thing again.”
For a second, he studies you as if he's trying to decide whether you're serious. Then recognition settles over his face, and the beginning of a smile tugs at his mouth.
You lean a little closer. “How'd diplomacy go?”
His expression falls. “You saw that?”
“I was there.”
“No, I know you were there for the beginning. I was hoping you missed the rest.”
“I heard the whole ‘thing with a pigeon.’”
Parker closes his eyes for a second. “It escalated.”
“Clearly.”
“I had it handled.”
“You're late.”
“That was unrelated.”
You give him a look.
“No,” he admits.
You press your lips together, cheeks puffing up, before the laugh can escape and draw Professor Warren's attention back to the two of you. It doesn't do much to contain your grin, but Parker's reluctant smile suggests he isn't nearly as annoyed as he'd like you to believe.
Parker shakes his head and pulls a notebook toward himself. “I like to establish dominance early.”
Your eyes drop pointedly toward the backpack still tangled around the leg of his chair. “It's working.”
He follows your gaze. “Yeah. Okay. Fair.”
You turn back toward Professor Warren and reach for your pencil. A few seconds later, Parker leans closer.
“What'd I miss?”
Several pages of notes already sit open on your screen. “Nothing important.”
His shoulders loosen.
“Except the surprise quiz.”
His head snaps toward you with such immediate alarm that whatever self-control you had left abandons you. The smile spreads across your face before you can pretend innocence.
“I'm kidding.” You put your hands up in surrender with a small giggle.
“I'm starting not to like you.”
“You liked me before?”
Parker opens his mouth, then stops. “That's not what I said.”
“Sounded like it.”
“It wasn't.”
The tips of his ears turn pink, the color creeping in so quickly that you have to look down before he notices you noticing. You return to your notes with a private little spark of satisfaction. Beside you, Parker does the same, though not before you catch him pressing his lips together around a smile.
Forty minutes in, you learn almost nothing about the people sitting at your table. While Parker, on the other hand, is becoming increasingly easy to study.
His notes are ridiculously neat, which feels unfair considering everything else about him suggests complete chaos. His backpack remains half-open on the floor, his hair looks like he's made an active decision not to introduce it to a brush, and fifteen minutes into the lecture, he finally notices that his shoelace is still untied. The page beneath his hand, meanwhile, looks like it could be photographed and dropped directly into a textbook. Even his equal signs are level.
Impressive.
Yours aren't bad. His are just annoyingly organized.
Apparently, staring at someone's handwriting for too long eventually becomes noticeable.
Parker glances over. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“You're looking at my notes.”
“No, I'm not.”
His eyes drop to the notebook, then return to you. “You literally are.”
You need an excuse for why you've spent the last several seconds examining his handwriting, and one of his equations offers itself up like a sacrifice. “Your seven looks weird.”
He stares at it. “My seven?”
“Yeah.”
“What's wrong with it?”
“You put the line through it.”
“That's normal.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
You glance around for support, but Anna is busy typing, and everyone across the table seems equally occupied with their own notes. No one is going to help you defend a position you invented three seconds ago, but backing down now would suggest you recognize how r
“I don't trust it.”
“You don't trust my seven?”
“It looks pretentious.”
His laugh slips out before he can stop it, warm and startled enough to make you grin in response. When Professor Warren looks toward the table, Parker attempts to disguise the sound with a cough that wouldn't fool anyone. You lower your face toward your laptop, suddenly fascinated by a sentence you haven't absorbed a single word of.
A minute later, the corner of a notebook nudges your elbow. Parker has turned the page slightly toward you without lifting his attention from the front of the room. Another seven sits in the margin, carefully written and conspicuously missing its line.
“Better?” he whispers.
Poker-faced, you consider it with the seriousness the question deserves. “Much better.”
He shakes his head and turns the notebook back around, but the smile stays. The fact that he actually rewrote it for you settles somewhere warm and inconvenient beneath your ribs.
Interesting.
An hour into class, your attention is still finding its way back to Parker with enough regularity that pretending it's accidental is becoming difficult. In your defense, he gives you too many entertaining things to notice, and Professor Warren has spent the last ten minutes explaining a concept with the emotional intensity of someone reading appliance instructions. After working all summer, it just isn’t settling into your brain properly.
His leg begins to bounce whenever Professor Warren moves too quickly through an example, stopping only when his pencil catches up with whatever his brain has already figured out. When he's concentrating, he chews the inside of his cheek and taps the pencil twice against the page before beginning a new problem. He doesn't seem aware of any of it. Sitting completely still simply doesn't appear to be an option his body has considered.
He also knows every answer.
Professor Warren asks a question, and the room goes silent as it always does in college classrooms when a professor makes the mistake of expecting voluntary participation. Twenty people suddenly remember urgent business elsewhere. Your attention drops to your notes while someone across the room studies the ceiling with the concentration of a structural engineer, neither wanting to lock eyes with the professor and get picked out.
Professor Warren waits. Parker shifts beside you, and you catch sight of the answer already written in his notebook.
You nudge his arm and point subtly toward the front.
His eyes widen. He shakes his head.
You nod.
He shakes his head harder.
Fine. If he isn't going to volunteer himself, you will.
Your hand jolts up.
Professor Warren points toward you. “Yes?”
You turn to Parker, leaning away and pointing at the cutie. “He knows.”
A couple of people at the table laugh. Parker stares at you in horror, but Professor Warren is already looking at him expectantly.
“You—” He cuts himself off and gives the answer.
Professor Warren nods. “Exactly.”
As she continues, Parker slowly turns toward you.
“I really don't like you.”
“You're welcome.”
“I didn't ask for that.”
“You were depriving the class of your brilliance.”
“I was minding my business.”
“Not anymore.”
Parker shakes his head and goes back to writing, but his pencil hovers uselessly over the same spot for several seconds. He glances over to see you in the corner before he quickly flicks his eyes back to his notes, noticing you caught him. The tips of his ears have turned pink again.
You're starting to enjoy that.