You know, I usually prefer smelling my covers by being shoved down into them with some dude’s palm on my scalp. But right now I’m sniffling and can barely even get a whiff of them, I’ve got the blanket all stuffed up in my face, and I’m curled on top of it. Tears are wetting the fabric, and I’m pretty sure at the rate I’m snotting up the thing I’m going to have to do laundry just to sleep tonight without vomiting. That said, shoving my face in the blanket is all I can do to keep myself from wailing enough to wake the whole floor up, so it’s worth it. Kinda.
I curl up even closer into myself and take another wet and shaky breath. It feels sort of gross, but it’s better than unleashing another round of sobs, so it can’t be all that bad. Tears are still flowing onto my covers, but I can’t really help that. I’m still sad.
I lay there like that for a few more minutes, the world just spinning, until I hear the door click behind me. Noah shuffles in, laughing and shouting behind him.
“Catch ya later, you assface,” he shouts, though the door closes behind him and I’m pretty sure that I’m the only one who heard the “assface” part. He yawns and stretches, then walks the rest of the way in. I can see from where I’m sitting, though I’m fairly sure he can’t tell I’m watching. His abs peek out from beneath his shirt when he stretches, and the image of myself licking them while he moans above me is enough to pause my shuddery breathing for a brief moment.
He grabs a book and flops on his bed, the entire thing squeaking in discomfort at his weight, and he opens it to read, then puts his thumb in it to keep his place and turns to look at me. I pull some covers over my face so he can’t see me, but my body is definitely still shaking from my breathing.
“Hey, Lee? What’s up?”
I don’t answer. His bed screeches as he stands up off of it, and he comes over and yanks a blanket off of my face. I roll over and pull another one over me. So he yanks that one off, too, and the force of it sends me tumbling into the wall. He leans over to look at my face, but I pull the sheet around my head to cover my face. I can feel a smile coming on. He’s just like that.
“You little shit… Take the damn sheet off your face!”
I shake my head beneath the sheet and giggle like a little kid playing hide-and-go-seek. It’s amazing how much better it makes me feel to be around him. I missed him over break.
“That’s it,” he says, then leans over and dead-drops on top of me, my bed not only screeching but also screaming and begging for mercy as the force of his plummet hits both me and the springs. I groan in pain and he just bounces up once to push down even harder than me. “Take off the sheet if you want mercy!” His voice is a wicked, sarcastic growl, and it makes me giggle again. God, I love when he’s like this. Even if I’m… you know. A wreck at the moment. I even try to pull the sheet free, but his weight has both my arms and the sheet trapped, so I don’t make much progress. This only makes me laugh more, and he starts to laugh with me.
“I can’t get the sheet off of me because you’re on top of it and me, you ass...face,” I say, and he does another little shake just to jostle me a bit.
“Too bad! You have incited another round of wrath from the evil NOAH! AHHH HAHAHAAAA!” he shouts, then shifts up and then leans back down again, sending his weight crashing down in a just as painful, albeit slightly gentler, way than before. I groan again, and snake my fingers through the covers to reach his weakness: his sides. He’s off me before my fingertips even barely ghost over the spot where he’s most ticklish, squealing all the way.
I pull the sheet off my face to watch his horrified grin gradient into concern.
“Hey? Tears? Why didn’t you text me? What’s up?”
Oh, no reason. My parents just neglect me, I’m never going to go anywhere in life, I don’t have half as many friends as I did in high school, I’m worried that I’ve already hit my peak and will never accomplish anything, I failed an anthropology test yesterday despite that being my major, and, OH, RIGHT, I’m in love with you but you’re dating this really awesome girl and I don’t want you to break up with her because that would suck because she’s really cool but also I really wish we could push our beds together and share our room in a more intimate way because I’ve never felt the way I feel about you ever before in my life, like your smile doesn’t just light my world up, it makes me wanna smile back just so I can pretend to share an ounce of your glow with other people, and your kind heart literally makes me cry sometimes because you’re just that remarkable, and also I saw your dick once because I peeked when you were changing and it was so nice and I want it in me and your abs are nice and your face is nice and you’re just so hot and perfect and like, I want you. But I’m good! Totally fine!
“Oh, I thought you were studying with Sofia. Didn’t wanna bother you.”
“Nah, I was out with the boys. You’re like… Well, I’m not gonna say you’re more important than the boys, but I will say that I could easily step away for a minute to make you feel better. You’re worth missing a few minutes of guy time for.”
“I mean, you could say that I’m more important than the boys. It wouldn’t hurt my emotional state at all, that’s for sure.”
He rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling.
“Fine. You, my freshman roommate, are more important than my frat brothers that I have been friends with for the last two and a half years. Does that make you happy?”
I grin down at him and try to imagine he’s kneeling to suck me off rather than just sitting casually at the foot of my bed. Then, I feel kinda guilty about that, so I just give him a wickeder grin and nod. He rolls his eyes again, but he’s still smiling.
Then, his expression goes deadly serious on the drop of a dime.
“Why don’t we go for a walk?”
I nod. Walks are deadly serious. I now understand the expression.
Walks for us are sacred. It’s kind of become our thing. I’m not really sure when, but over the last few months, we’ve gone on a lot of walks. We go all around campus, usually in the dark, and we just chat. We talk about life and what we’re going through, and I must say, talking to Noah is like, eighteen times better than the therapist Mom and Dad hired for me a few years ago. At least Noah makes me feel validated. That therapist made me feel like he was going to break into my house and dissect me in the middle of the night sometime.
“I’d like that,” I reply to him, and he nods, grabbing a sweatshirt and pulling it over his shoulders, then tugging a coat on over his sweatshirt. January in the city is cold as shit, so I don’t really blame him.
“Only rule?” he says, tossing me my coat as I reach my feet. “You have to tell me why you were crying.”
My heart sinks, and my head starts working at diluted ideas I can present to him as to why, exactly, I was crying. “Existential dread and a really bad one-sided crush” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. I wish he would roll something off of my tongue.
We step out the door and jog down the stairs in yet another silent race. Nobody ever calls it a race, but the way both of us move down the stairwell, it’s pretty clear that it is a race. I nearly trip on the way down and imagine for a moment that he catches me in his thick arms and looks up at me to proclaim his love. Then I keep walking. He waves to the girl working the desk--I recognize her face but can’t remember her name--then we burst out into the bitterly cold January air and I start to wonder why I agreed to be a part of this.
Then I look over at Noah, grinning and leaping through the billowing smoke exiting from the ground from a grate, close to where the laundry room is held, and I realize exactly why I’d ever agree to be a part of something so stupid: because I get to be around him when he’s like this.
“Hey, Lee, let’s go, buddy, what the hell are you just standing around for?”
I shake my head and do my best to carefully rush after him as he practically skates down the frozen sidewalk. I almost fall with just about every step I take. He’s graceful and perfect, just like he is with everything. I catch back up to him, since his polite ass has decided to wait for me, and then I choose instead to body check him with all of my might. I lose my balance, though, and he ends up turning in time to catch me. I look up at him, though it’s awkward as hell, and I imagine he says something charming and witty and hot to me, like “Looks like you just fell for me,” or “I’ll always be there to catch you. Just try not to be such a dummy next time,” and I melt then and there. But instead he just smiles a smile that turns my legs into even more jelly than they already are.
He uses my forearms to pull me back all of the way up, and then my face is all up close to his, and his hot breath is steaming up my face. I make a face like I’m blushing, maybe to hide the fact that I totally am behind a joke, and step back, shrinking my posture.
“Aww, shucks, Noey. Keep acting like that and you’ll fog up my glasses,” I murmur in a whiny tone as I push my imaginary glasses back up my nose. Granted, I do wear glasses, but not very often, and never in public. If I wear them in public I look like a bargain store Peter Parker. I swear I hear him mutter back, “That’s not the worst I’ll do,” but I’m also fairly sure that’s just what I wanted him to say in my head, so I’ll just write it off as my imagination.
Now that we’ve separated, he starts walking again, and I trot to keep pace with him. Like always. We puff out clouds of moisture from our mouths and stomp through disgusting slush beneath a cold and unforgivingly black sky, and the cars and busses and trucks whiz by on our right. Every once in a while, one of them catches a bit of leftover water by the curb and it splashes our way. Noah’s gonna be wet.
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