What did someone do to you that makes the prospect of wearing a jersey again feel like walking back into a room where the worst night of your life is waiting to repeat itself?
I do not ask.
Not because I do not want to know. Because I held him in a locker room without demanding an explanation, and that silence was the only gift I had that was valuable enough for the moment. Asking now, on a campus path in the fading light with his walls barely rebuilt and his knuckles still bleeding, would be the conversational equivalent of pulling a bandage off a wound that has not yet formed a scab.
He will tell me when he is ready.
Or he will not. And I will be here regardless, because I did not track his cedarwood scent through three corridors just to earn the right to his story. I tracked him because the alternative was leaving him alone in a room with a locker he had already punched and a mind that was clearly preparing to punish itself further.
His right hand hangs at his side as we walk, the knuckles visible in my peripheral vision. Swollen. The skin split in two places along the ridge. The bruise spreading beneath freckled tissue with the gradual insistence of damage that will look worse tomorrow than it does today.
I need to get him ice.
The thought is practical, grounding, the specific variety of concern that converts emotional helplessness into actionable logistics. I cannot fix whatever broke him. Cannot undo whatever history turned a talkative child into a silent Alpha who hides behind glasses and a grade point average. But I can reduce the swelling in his hand if the dorm has a functioning freezer, and right now, that tangible, achievable goal is the only thing preventing my own emotional processing from spiraling into territory I am not equipped to navigate while walking beside a man whose pain I can feel radiating through the November air like heat from a surface that has been absorbing sunlight all day and is releasing it now that the source is gone.
We reach the residential wing.
My dorm building materializes through the bare trees, the warm glow of its lobby windows casting rectangles of amber across the darkening path. The oak door with the brass number plate and the electronic keypad that the residence staff demonstrated on move-in day with the patient cadence of a flight attendant explaining seatbelt mechanisms.
I stop at the threshold, turning to face him.
"I'm sure they finished the repairs with the flooding situation." My voice is lighter than my thoughts, pitched to carry the specific reassurance of a woman who has decided that normalcy is the medicine this moment requires. "But let me grab you an ice pack real quick before you head back."
He frowns. The expression creases his brow above the wire-rimmed frames, his green eyes narrowing with the evaluative focus of a man whose brain is processing the non sequitur of an Omega offering him frozen water treatment after a locker room encounter that neither of them has verbally acknowledged.
I can tell he wants to ask what I mean. Can see the question forming behind his teeth, the conversational impulse building in his jaw. But he holds his tongue, and the silence that follows is so characteristic of him that I almost smile.
Either he answers or he is silent. In this case, I was confident he would choose the latter.
I tap the keypad. The lock disengages. The door swings inward.
I take three steps into the suite.
And walk directly into a stream of water descending from the ceiling with the enthusiastic volume of a waterfall that has decided my common room is a suitable river basin.
The cold is instantaneous. Arctic. A full-body baptism delivered by campus plumbing that has apparently decided my residential experience requires a recurring aquatic theme. The water hits the top of my skull and cascades down my face and neck and shoulders, soaking through my shirt and my compression tights and my socks in the span of a single, gasping, profanity-generating second.
"FUCK!"
The curse erupts as I stumble backward, my sneakers sliding on the flooded tile, my arms pinwheeling, my center of gravity dissolving beneath the combined assault of cold water and thespecific indignity of being drenched by your own ceiling for the second time in the same week.
My spine connects with a firm chest.
Archie. Standing directly behind me in the doorway, his body positioned with the reflexive proximity of a man whose protective instincts engaged before his conscious mind evaluated the threat level. His arm wraps around my waist, pulling me backward out of the water's trajectory with a grip that is firm without being restrictive, his body absorbing my stumble the way a wall absorbs a tennis ball, with minimal displacement and complete structural integrity.
We stand in the doorway together, his chest pressed against my back, his arm anchoring my waist, both of us staring at the interior of my dorm suite.
The ceiling is crying.
That is the only description that captures the visual. A stream of water pours from a crack in the plaster directly above the common room, the flow heavy enough to produce a puddle that has already claimed the kitchenette tile and is advancing toward the couch with the patient, unstoppable momentum of a natural disaster that operates on geological time and cannot be hurried.
The carpet in the hallway connecting the bedrooms is saturated. Dark patches spread across the institutional fiber in an expanding map of moisture that tells me this has been happening for significantly longer than the twenty minutes since I left this building to chase Archie through campus corridors.
I gawk.
"My dorm is flooding." The statement exits my mouth in the flat, dissociated cadence of a woman who is processing a home insurance claim while standing in the rain. "Again. My dorm is flooding. Again."
Archie blinks behind me. Three times, the rapid flutter of eyelids belonging to a man whose analytical brain is reconcilingthe visual data with the probability that a university-maintained residential building could experience the same catastrophic plumbing failure twice in the same week.
