I give up on the phone. Sit up. Swing my legs off the mattress and pad to the washroom on bare feet that register the cool hardwood with grateful clarity. I brush my teeth with the aggressive efficiency of a man whose morning routine has been compressed by an unknown quantity of oversleeping and who does not yet know the magnitude of the compression. I strip my shirt, keeping my boxers on, and debate the shower question with the focused pragmatism of someone weighing hygiene against hunger and discovering that hunger is winning by a margin that makes the democratic process feel rigged.
Protein shake. Green smoothie. Fuel first, shower second, cafeteria for a proper meal before lectures begin.
I walk into the living room.
The aroma reaches me before the visual data does. Sweet. Warm. Carrying the specific, comforting frequency of a kitchen that has been occupied by someone who has been awake long enough to prepare food and is now waiting for the other occupant to arrive. Beneath the food scent, her pheromone signature fills the common area with the thorough, atmospheric coverage that I catalogued last night: peppermint threading through cherry blossom threading through the specific, clean note that is uniquely Sage and that my brain has been filing under increasingly inadequate labels since the first collision on a forest trail.
My eyes widen.
Sage is sitting at the kitchen island, her posture settled into the casual lean of a woman who has been in this position long enough to achieve comfort. Two bowls occupy the counter in front of her, flanked by two glasses of orange juice that catch the morning light with the amber glow of freshly poured citrus. A book is open beside her elbow, the same cozy romance she was reading upside down last night, her eyes traveling acrossits pages with the focused absorption of a reader who is using fiction as a waiting room while reality assembles itself.
She lifts her head. As if the weight of my gaze produces a physical sensation she can register across twenty feet of open-plan living space. Her green eyes meet mine, and the redness that blooms across her cheekbones is instant, vivid, the physiological evidence of a woman whose memory of last night's sleeping arrangement is both intact and producing a thermal response.
"Morning." The word arrives with a casual confidence that the blush undermines. "Uh. I didn't know what to make, and I didn't want to burn your dorm and leave us both homeless, so I opted for cereal." She gestures at the bowls with the presentation flourish of a chef revealing her signature creation. "To make it special, it's protein cereal."
She beams.
The expression is radiant. Unguarded. The full-wattage, crinkle-eyed, dimple-adjacent grin of a woman who is genuinely proud of her cereal and wants the pride to be shared. Her navy-and-emerald hair is spiked in the controlled chaos that I am learning constitutes her styled look, the boyish presentation carrying a charm that my brain processes as aesthetic data and my hindbrain processes asthis is the cutest fucking expression I have ever witnessed on a human face.
I smirk. Run my hand through my ginger hair, the gesture buying time for my facial muscles to settle into a configuration that communicates amusement rather than the full, devastating tenderness that her cereal-based pride has produced in my chest.
I walk to the island. Examine the bowls with the clinical assessment of a man who has been offered a meal and intends to evaluate it properly. The cereal is my preferred brand. The protein variety that I stock for mornings when a full meal is notfeasible and a caloric baseline needs to be established before training. The milk is the protein-enriched version from my fridge, which means she identified the correct carton among the three options in the door and selected the one that matches the cereal's nutritional intent.
She paid attention to my pantry. To the brands. To the organizational logic that I apply to my food storage because my brain requires systems in every domain it occupies, including the one that governs refrigerator management.
"Thank you," I say, settling onto the stool beside hers. The proximity places our elbows within inches, our scents overlapping in the shared airspace above the island, cedarwood and peppermint conducting their negotiations.
"Why didn't you go to morning training?"
She cringes. The expression compressing her features with the specific guilt of a woman delivering news she has already processed and resolved but which she anticipates will produce a reaction in its recipient.
"Well. Uh. It's kind of ten thirty."
I frown. The information arriving without context, my brain searching for the clock I have not yet located, the morning light offering no reliable temporal data because November sunrises do not carry timestamps. I scan the common room until my eyes find the microwave display.
10:34 AM.
My eyes widen.
"I never fucking sleep in." The words carry genuine alarm, the disruption of a pattern that has been consistent for years registering as an anomaly that my brain flags with the same priority it assigns to unexpected formations on the ice. "Never. Not once since..." I trail off, pinching the bridge of my nose. "That's a first. Probably the gummies."
She arches an eyebrow.
"Gummies as in weed gummies or sleep gummies?"
I smirk, opening my eyes to meet her gaze with the deliberate transparency of a man deciding how much personal information this question warrants.
"You smoke?"
She pouts. The expression deploying her lower lip with the defensive innocence of a woman who has been asked a question she did not expect and is calculating the social cost of honesty.
"Occasionally. Do you?"
"Once in a while. Though it's harder to hit me compared to just drinking alcohol. Alpha metabolism burns through THC at a rate that makes most edible dosages feel like placebos."
She nods. The exchange settling between us with the specific comfort of a shared vice disclosed without judgment, the mutual admission functioning as a small, additional brick in the structure of trust we have been building without a blueprint.
We share a look. The variety that contains an entire paragraph of communication compressed into a single glance, the kind that people who are learning each other's frequencies produce when the verbal channel is temporarily unnecessary because the visual one is carrying sufficient bandwidth.
