“Adrian…”

“Adrian?!”

Said person in question snapped out of his trance with a jump, he himself immediately trying to dry his eyes of any evidence that he had been crying, but the two other people in the room had obviously already seen it so any attempt at getting rid of the tears now was purely due to his own embarrassment and denial.

“Bro….” Harukas voice was closer now, and he jumped yet again as he felt her hand pat his shoulder. “Are you okay? Did urban dictionary really fuck you up that bad?”

Adrian bit his bottom lip and swatted her hand away. “shut up, I'm just… emotional.”

Well it wasn’t a lie.

"Well that's obvious."

It was the other man in the room that spoke next, and he should have been surprised when he heard the smallest hint of an accent but he wasn’t, in fact there was familiarity in each little hint of it that showed.

“Is your friend alright?”

Haruka shook her head and turned towards the man. “Yeah, he’s just.. fragile. Get used to it.”

Haruka made a show of trying to smoothen out her messy bun that had no hope before she spoke again. “Allow me to introduce you two, because my friend here is too into his feelings to be polite.” She pointedly stared up at Adrian before looking at Dante. “Adrian this is Dante. Hes a transfer student… Dante this is Adrian. He’s an idiot.”

Adrian tried to shake off the weird feeling deep within him that told him that he wanted—no needed to kiss this man and instead took a few steps closer to him only to hold out a hand because that was more socially acceptable.

“Hey, sorry about earlier… and by earlier I mean like two minutes ago. You didn’t need to see me like that.”

Dante gave him a small smile and even though the action was nowhere close to a laugh or even a smile wide enough to break the steady bout of hesitance that he obviously had, it was just enough for Adrian to spot a hint of a dimple and that made him almost want to start crying all over again.

What was wrong with him today?

“It is fine, everyone needs to cry sometimes, I do not judge.” Dante took his hand and gave a polite but fleeting shake of it.

Adrian nodded, pulling his hand away at the same time that Dante did and hoping—praying—that the other man hadn’t felt how sweaty his hands had turned within their 1.5 seconds of physical contact.

He needed to make this less awkward. “So… you’re majoring in the Arts like that demon over there?” He gestured towards Haruka to which Haruka only gave a snort but did not proceed to look up from her phone.

“Ah.. yeah, I am. I’ve always wanted to be an artist and have my paintings in museums, you know… arts my thing.”

Adrian watched as Dante looked off to the side, and Adrian couldn’t tell if he was uncomfortable, or if he was shy, but there was something in him that told him that the other man was just shy and extremely slow in terms of opening to people.

He would blame that idea on his own intuition but he knew that on a normal day, he couldn’t even tell if someone was angry unless they explicitly told him so.

“Well that’s cool, I’d love to see your paintings one day.” As he said that very sentence, both men faltered but perhaps for different reasons.

Adrian faltered because his sentence had been so familiar that it triggered a memory, a memory that didn’t come with a distinct recognition of when it had happened, just that it had happened.

“You know Dante…” The voice was feminine upon memory and playful, “I would love to see your paintings one day. “

And that was it. That was all the memory gave him, but it was weird because it was not his mouth that spoke the words but a woman. And yet despite that, it felt so familiar… like it was his very own.

What was going on with him?