“Call it film study,” he says, and his mouth curves.
I strum something lazy, a chord that’s not a chord, more a question. He finishes the string, gives the tuner a quarter turn, and then, like we didn’t both walk here looking everywhere but at each other, we start playing. Nothing heavy. Nothing new. Just sound to make room for us. The room brightens-dims-brightens with the vent’s rattle; it feels like the light’s breathing with us.
We steal hours like this. Not whole ones—those are too obvious, too suspicious. We take the broken kind: forty-seven minutes between film and weights, fifty-three after my shift when the café shuts down early because two baristas called insick and the manager gave up. We live in the cracks of calendars, sending times like contraband, moving pins on maps only we see.
When he looks up over the curve of the guitar, it’s the quiet face. The one I’m a little stupid for. The one that isn’t the interview smile. He watches my hands. I watch his mouth. The song finds a groove, and so do we.
I set the guitar aside first, because I’m weak and we both know it. I cross the room and sit beside him on the low bench, our knees lining up. We stay facing forward for a beat, like this is just another duet, nothing to notice here. Then he turns his head and the air changes shape.
“Hi,” I say again, softer this time.
He doesn’t answer with words. He tilts forward, just enough that his forehead almost touches mine, and the match we carry everywhere lights without sparks.
I kiss him. Not to be clever, not to win a point. Just because I needed to all morning—despite it still being ridiculously early for a strung-out songwriter who’s been poring over song lyrics since six this morning—and the ability to delay gratification atrophied with everything else that isn’t him. He eases down—four inches of him folding to meet me. His lips are warm and a little chapped. The first breath he pushes into me shivers. The second steadies.
He tastes like the chocolate protein shake he swears is “medically necessary.” I make a mental note to bully him into better choices and promptly forget it when his hand finds the back of my neck. The kiss deepens a fraction, then a fraction more. We stay careful. Not careful enough to pretend it’s nothing. Careful enough to pretend we’re still people who remember doors exist.
A floorboard squeaks in the hallway. We break—soundless, practiced, full of sin we refuse to name. The fluorescent flickers. We stare at the door, not breathing, counting in place of words.
Footsteps pass. Voices, a burst of laughter. The muffled thud of a case being set down, someone complaining about reeds. The hallway swallows them. We look back at each other at the exact same time and then both start to laugh—quiet, helpless, the nervous kind that’s one more millimeter away from panic.
“We’re idiots,” he whispers.
“Idiots with good taste,” I whisper back, and his eyes flash, the closest he gets to cocky in a room without a court.
He sobers quickly. “How’s the song?”
“Vicious,” I say. “In a patient way.”
He nods like that’s what he hoped to hear. “Play me the bridge?”
He’s thrown me a rope. We use music like that—for cover, for cooling, for saying things sideways. I pick up my guitar and play him the new bridge to “Crimson High,” the one that fell out of my hand when we first met. He listens with that focus that made me write a chorus the first time I saw him. There’s a part where I lift into a higher vowel; his eyes close for half a bar and open again like he just made himself do it.
“Again,” he says when I stop.
“You’re bossy.”
“Effective,” he says, and I love him for stealing Miles’s line without knowing it.
I play it again. The last note fades. He’s close enough that I could count the flecks in his eyes. He chews the inside of his cheek, head tilted.
“You make sounds feel like choices,” he says, and I pretend that compliment doesn’t set up residence in my ribs. “Like they’re not accidents.”
“They aren’t,” I say, and set the guitar down a second time because I’m tragically single-minded.
The kiss this time starts slower. He meets me halfway before I do something dramatic like stand on my toes. He’s gotten better at leaving the first stunned beat behind; the tremor in his hand still shows up, but now it remembers where to go: my jaw, my hair, the hinge of my shoulder.
There’s a click in the hall.
We fly apart like teenagers in a sitcom.
I grab the guitar. He stands too fast, bangs his knee on the bench, swears under his breath, and then—because he’s a goddamn star—drops into a crouch and pretends he’s inspecting the leg like that was the plan. I turn my head away and start playing the worst, most innocent chord progression of my career. It sounds like a lullaby for geese. The door handle rattles. The lock holds. A beat. Another. Then knuckles rap twice.
“I’ve got this room till ten,” I call, calm as you please, like I wasn’t about to climb him like a ladder thirty seconds ago.
A voice through the door, bored and nasal, says, “Facilities. Leak check.”
Ollie’s eyes widen: panic, confusion, the calculus of Risk vs. Shame vs. I Really Want To Stay.
