The call came late at night. I was in the middle of a high-intensity multiplayer match, my headset on and my fingers flying across the mechanical keyboard, when my phone began vibrating violently against the wooden desk.

Jason.

I didn’t even need to pick up to know this wasn’t going to be good news. Good news never arrived through Jason at 11:30 PM. Good news from Jason usually took the form of an early email template or a zipped folder of clean lecture notes sent during normal business hours.

I sighed, letting my character idle in a safe corner of the map, and swiped to answer. “What’s up, Jase?”

“We should join a coaching tuition for the advanced theory paper,” Jason said, cutting straight to the point without a greeting.

I closed my eyes, leaning my head back against the headrest of my chair. *There it is. The bad news.*

“No,” I said flatly.

“You don’t even know which subject I’m talking about yet, Ethan.”

“I don’t care. The answer is still no.”

“It’s highly important,” Jason insisted, his voice entirely steady, unaffected by my resistance. “The failure rate for the final-term embedded systems theory exam is over forty percent. Our practical coding skills won’t save us if we can’t pass the written paper.”

“Everything is life-or-death according to you, Jase.”

“It’s our final semester. We can’t afford a single mistake.”

That argument ended up lasting nearly twenty minutes, mostly because Sam suddenly joined the voice call and immediately took my side. For once in his life, Sam didn’t let himself be swayed by Jason’s structural logic. The reason for his fierce rebellion was entirely simple: the extra coaching classes started at six o’clock in the morning.

Six. In the morning. A time that, in my professional opinion, should not legally exist. Especially not during the dead of winter.

“You’ve officially lost your mind,” Sam declared through the speaker, the sound of his blanket rustling in the background. “Six AM? The sun isn’t even awake yet, Jason.”

“The professor running the institute only takes the honors batch at that hour,” Jason replied, unbothered. “Everyone from the top ranks is joining.”

“I don’t care if the entire university student body joins,” Sam fired back. “My brain doesn’t boot up until noon.”

“It’s only for three days a week,” Jason pleaded, delivering his final, calculated pitch. “Just one tough subject. We clear this, and we’re officially safe for graduation.”

Jason let out a heavy sigh through the microphone, the sound of his disappointment hanging heavily in the conference call. It was a classic guilt trip, and after far too much exhausting discussion, Sam and I somehow found ourselves agreeing to it. Even as I hung up the phone and crawled into bed, I still wasn’t entirely sure how Jason had successfully debugged our defenses.

The first morning of the tuition class was absolute misery.

The alarm shattered the quiet of my room while the sky outside was still a deep, ink-black void. I lay perfectly still for five minutes, staring up at the dark silhouette of my ceiling fan, seriously questioning every single life choice that had led me to this exact moment. *Why did I agree to this? I could be sleeping right now.*

Defeated by my own sense of responsibility, I dragged myself out of bed and into the freezing air.

By the time I rode my bike to our usual crossroads meeting point, Jason was already waiting by the curb. He looked neatly dressed, perfectly alert, and entirely awake—a terrifying sight that genuinely annoyed me at that hour. Sam arrived a few minutes later, coasting in on his scooter, looking like a zombie that had been forcefully dragged out of a fresh grave.

He didn’t even take off his visor before murmuring, “I hate both of you. Deeply.”

“You agreed to the schedule, Sam,” Jason pointed out, his breath forming a white cloud in the freezing air.

“I was heavily manipulated while my cognitive functions were low,” Sam grumbled, his shoulders slumped over his handlebars.

Jason just let out a soft laugh, starting his engine.

The winter air made every spoken word visible, floating between us like brief smoke signals. Winter mornings had a unique way of making the world feel entirely deserted. The major roads were nearly empty, the streetlights cast long, eerie shadows across the pavement, and even the city architecture looked exhausted under the heavy morning mist. By the time we parked our bikes outside the commercial tuition building, the stinging chill in my fingers had me questioning whether an engineering degree was worth this level of physical suffering.

The rented classroom was much larger than I had expected. Rows of long wooden desks filled the space, already packed with students from various neighboring technical colleges. Some looked reasonably awake, but most were slumped over their notebooks, nursing insulated travel mugs.

The three of us found a cluster of empty seats near the absolute back row, slipping into our familiar comfort zone. The tutor, a sharp man with a booming voice, began writing complex formulas on the whiteboard almost immediately.

I tried to focus. I really did. I pulled out my notebook, uncapped my pen, and stared at the whiteboard for at least five minutes. But my exhaustion, combined with the unfamiliar environment of a crowded room full of strangers, made my attention drift.

I let my eyes wander lazily across the back of people’s heads. Students from different departments, different social circles, different timelines. Some were frantically taking notes, while others were merely pretending to write while keeping their eyes half-closed.

Then, my eyes stopped dead in their tracks.

For a split second, I was entirely convinced that my sleep-deprived brain was hallucinating the data.

Ava.

She was sitting right near the middle of the room, a few rows ahead of our section, flanked by two girls I didn’t recognize. She was wearing a thick winter jacket, her hair pulled back into that familiar, unbothered style, entirely focused on the tutor’s lecture.

I snapped my eyes away immediately, fixing my gaze on my own blank notebook page, my heart taking a sudden, violent leap against my ribs. After a tense ten seconds, I cautiously raised my head to look again, half-expecting the image to dissolve.

She was still there.

My first thought was a wave of pure disbelief. *What are the actual mathematical odds of this? Of all the extra coaching classes in the city?*

My second thought was much simpler, a quiet, resigned realization. *Of course she’s here. She’s hardworking, responsible, and actually cares about passing the theory paper on her first try. Of course our paths would cross here.*

For the remainder of the two-hour class, my concentration was completely fried. It wasn’t because Ava was doing anything distracting—at least, that was the logical lie I kept feeding myself to keep from panicking. I told myself I was just surprised by the sheer coincidence of the situation. That was all. A random statistical anomaly. Nothing more.

But as the tutor continued to explain the logic parameters of embedded systems, the words on the board turned into background noise. Outside the massive glass windows, the sky slowly transitioned from a heavy black to a pale, misty gray. And every few minutes, independent of my willpower, my gaze would inevitably drift toward her row.

When the final bell rang, signifying the end of the session, the room erupted into sudden, chaotic noise.

Bags zipped shut in unison, heavy wooden chairs scraped against the floor, and a low drone of casual conversation filled the air as everyone moved toward the exit stairs. Jason immediately began dissecting a specific formula from the lecture, while Sam was already calculating how many minutes of sleep he could squeeze in before our regular college schedule started.

I heard almost none of it.

As the three of us walked out into the stinging morning air, I noticed Ava standing near the building’s main entrance, waiting near the steps as her friends adjusted their gear. The cold wind was sharp enough to make my ears burn, and students were hurrying past her to get to the parking lot without stopping.

For one brief, unprotected moment, she looked up from her phone.

And our eyes met.

It didn’t last long. A single second. Maybe even less than that. But it was long enough.

It was long enough for me to see the slight shift in her expression—the quiet flash of recognition that told me she had registered my face. And it was long enough for my introverted panic to override my system, forcing me to look away first and accelerate my pace down the concrete steps.

My heart immediately decided to turn into a bass drum, thumping wildly against my chest. I kept walking in a straight line, staring intensely at the gravel parking lot, desperately pretending that absolutely nothing had happened. Pretending I hadn’t noticed her. Pretending I was a perfectly normal student navigating a normal winter morning.

Which I definitely, absolutely wasn’t.

The ride to our main campus felt significantly longer than usual. Jason’s voice drifted back to me over the engine noise as he discussed the upcoming lab submissions, and Sam pulled up next to us at a red light to complain about the frost on his mirrors. I nodded along automatically, but my brain was locked in a processing loop.

That one second of eye contact replayed in my head far more times than it had any logical right to.

It wasn’t a special interaction by any standard definition. People made eye contact with strangers thousands of times a day. Millions of times, probably, across the city. It was a standard human reflex. Yet this specific instance felt fundamentally different.

She hadn’t smiled, and she hadn’t raised a hand to wave. She had done neither of those things. But it felt monumental because, for the first time since our repeat year had started, Ava wasn’t just a distant figure I observed from the safety of the back row. For one brief, undeniable second, we had both occupied the exact same frame. We had both existed in the same shared moment.

And somehow, for an overthinker like me, that was enough to keep my internal compiler running for the rest of the day.

That night, while sitting at my desk trying to parse through a programming manual, the memory returned with flawless clarity. The crowded classroom, the freezing fog, the concrete steps, and that sharp, unexpected moment of eye contact.

I let out a quiet, breathless laugh and closed my notebook with a soft thud. *This is getting entirely ridiculous,* I thought, staring at the closed cover.

The terrifying problem was that, for the first time, I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted it to stop.