Chapter 4

Noah built his day like a trap.

Not for anyone else.

Just for himself.

He laid it out in long, empty paths, timed to avoid doorways and crowds. Woke up before the sun, dressed in the half-light, and didn’t check his phone. Took the back route behind the biology labs — the one lined with cracked pavement and condensation-slick walls. Cold air pressed under his collar and smelled like copper and wet moss.

He didn’t care.

He cared too much.

His breath fogged faintly in the chill, and he told himself: 

They won’t see you if you don’t look.

This is fine.

You’re fine.

Avoidance wasn’t weakness.

It was discipline.

And discipline meant control.

He kept his head down, eyes on bricks, windows, gravel. Refused to let himself glance toward the far staircase in the art wing, where Adrian sometimes stood like a shadow pretending to be a statue. Refused to listen for Elián’s laugh — the kind that slipped sideways through narrow hallways like watercolor smoke.

By the time his 10:30 lecture approached, his pulse was already too fast.

He arrived early. Slipped into the back row of the amphitheater-style hall and chose a seat two rows higher than his usual. Hoodie up. Headphones in. No music.

He didn’t need music — the blood in his ears was loud enough.

The room filled slowly.

Voices murmured, backpacks zipped, a girl coughed three rows down. Every sound felt sharp. Irritating. Close.

Noah stared down at his notebook. Wrote three words. Scratched them out. Rewrote them. They blurred.

He didn’t look at the door.

He felt it instead.

Like a barometric drop — a shift in air pressure, the second before rain.

Footsteps entered, soft and late.

Then a voice: “Sorry.”

Casual. Warm. Too warm.

Elián.

Noah stared harder at his notes. His handwriting looked foreign — slanted, wrong. His pen was trembling.

His body recognized the name before his mind let it mean anything.

They don’t see you.

They don’t know you.

You’re just another face.

His hands were cold.

The professor’s voice began — something about fragmentation and form. He heard none of it. Only fragments of something else:

The shape of Adrian’s shoulder in that coat.

The way Elián said his name like it was a familiar key.

The echo of Emrys saying, “You’re not being watched. You’re being invited.”

He dug his nails into the heel of his hand until it stung.

The lecture dragged. He didn’t retain a second.

When it ended, he stayed seated as the room emptied. Pretended to check his phone. Waited until most of the footsteps faded.

And then—

“Hey.”

The word struck him sideways.

Quiet. Intimate. Directed.

He didn’t turn. Didn’t respond.

Just kept moving.

Out the door, into the hall, down the staircase.

His feet carried him fast, too fast, like they weren’t entirely his.

He didn’t stop walking until he’d crossed the library courtyard and rounded the far side of the building, where ivy choked the stone and the only sound was wind rattling brittle leaves.

Only then did he exhale.

Only then did he let his hands shake.

**************

Noah’s fingers had begun to tremble halfway through the lecture, and they hadn’t stopped since.

He sat hunched near the aisle, one leg jittering beneath the desk, every muscle in his neck knotted like a pulled wire. His head throbbed in pulses — not a sharp pain, but the heavy, pressure-filled kind, like his skull had grown too small for his thoughts.

The lecture droned on — Art History this time —  something about iconography, Venetian masks, the use of opulence as a form of concealment. The words slipped past him, weightless and useless.

His throat was dry.

He hadn't eaten since yesterday. Hadn’t slept more than three hours. But his chest felt full — full of noise, of heat, of something rising too quickly with no place to go.

He tried to breathe.

Did.

But it wasn’t enough.

The air didn’t settle. It came in shallow bursts. Like his lungs had forgotten how to open properly.

He pressed his fingers into his thigh — hard. Focused on the pressure. On the scratch of his jeans against his skin. On the fact that he was still here, still upright, still—still—

He glanced to the side.

A row behind. A silhouette.

He didn’t have to turn fully to know.

Elián.

His posture was always the same — spine fluid, head tilted slightly like he was always listening for music no one else heard. He was writing. Or maybe just drawing. The rhythm of the pen against the notebook was too graceful to be note-taking.

Noah looked away before he could see more.

Then stared at the projector screen, trying to memorize the slide just to distract himself.

But his stomach was turning.

And the longer he sat there, the more unreal the room began to feel. The light above flickered slightly — not enough to notice if you weren’t watching for it. But he was.

Everything was too bright. The walls too close.

His skin itched, but he didn’t dare scratch. Didn’t want to move. Didn’t want Elián to notice him. Didn’t want him to not notice either.

You are straight.

You are fine.

You are tired. That’s all this is.

You need to sleep. To stop spiraling. Stop acting like—

Like what?

Like he wasn’t in control anymore?

Like someone had unscrewed the world half an inch to the left and he was the only one who noticed?

The hour crawled.

When the lecture ended, Noah waited. Let most of the room file out. He breathed through his nose, slow and shallow. Tried not to think. Tried not to feel.

When he finally stood, the edges of his vision darkened briefly — a flash of vertigo. His hand caught the edge of the desk to steady himself.

That’s when his notebook slipped from under his arm and fell to the floor with a muted slap.

He crouched instantly, head pounding.

And someone else crouched too.

He didn’t see the hand first — he saw the shadow.

Then the fingers.

Ink-stained. Slender. Unmistakable.

Elián.

Their hands brushed over the notebook.

And Noah forgot how to breathe.

The contact wasn’t long. It wasn’t deep. But it wasn’t accidental either.

Elián didn’t pull back. Just held the notebook between them, like a shared secret.

Noah’s fingers hovered a moment too long. His pulse thrummed at the back of his throat.

Then Elián met his eyes.

Not with heat. Not with teasing.

With gentleness.

That was worse.

No words. No smile.

Just something warm. Something real. Something that shattered Noah’s carefully constructed cage of denial like a soft, slow swing from the inside.

He took the notebook.

Didn’t say thank you.

Didn’t say anything.

Elián stood.

Noah stayed on one knee, breath caught like a fishhook in his ribs.

Elián walked away.

And Noah sat there on the floor for a moment too long, eyes stinging, chest aching in that strange way that had nothing to do with illness and everything to do with breaking open from the inside.

Noah didn’t remember walking out of the lecture hall.

One second he was kneeling there, heart knocking in his ribs like it was trying to claw its way out, Elián’s fingers still burning phantom warmth across his own—

And then he was outside.

Moving. Fast. Down a hallway. Then another.

Breathing hurt. Not because of his lungs — because of everything else.

His vision blurred at the edges. His bag strap cut into his shoulder. His legs didn’t feel connected to the rest of him.

He turned corners without looking.

Avoided faces. Light. Words.

He needed—

He didn’t know what he needed.

Somewhere quiet.

Somewhere dark.

Somewhere with no one, and nothing, and certainly not the kind of gentle eye contact that made his whole body rebel against its own programming.

He ducked through the far studio door and down the narrow maintenance stairwell — the one no one used, the one that still smelled like wet plaster and old turpentine. The walls sweated. The light flickered overhead like it was shivering.

He reached the bottom and hesitated only a second before pushing through the metal door.

The Archive Room exhaled around him — still, heavy, and full of the kind of cold that came from underground and neglect.

He didn’t turn on the main light.

Just left the door half-open, let the hallway light pour in enough to give him dim visibility.

Dust hung in the air like sleep not shaken off.

He moved between metal shelves and dented filing cabinets. Boxes half-labeled. Binders too full to close.

The silence here wasn’t comforting. It was thick, like a held breath. Like the whole place had been waiting for someone to notice it still existed.

He wandered without purpose until he saw the cracked label:

UNCLAIMED

He stood in front of it too long.

The hum in his skull wouldn’t go quiet.

Inside the drawer: overstuffed portfolios, mismatched folders, someone’s old coffee-stained sketchbook that smelled like mold and lavender.

And one file only slightly ajar.

A binder.

A sketchbook inside.

Thick. Worn. Overhandled.

He opened it like it might bite.

The name:

Julien C.

The first page was clean.

The second was not.

Noah turned pages slowly.

Then faster.

Then stopped.

Hands.

Drawn again and again — sketched in charcoal, ink, pencil — always in pairs. Sometimes touching. Sometimes restrained.

One set bruised. One set pristine.

“Kissing one is kissing both.”

“You just don’t realize it until you dream about the wrong mouth.”

Noah’s throat tightened.

He kept going.

Drawings of faces, but never full.

Elián’s eyes — always watching.

Adrian’s mouth — always silent.

Over and over.

“The more you look at them, the harder it is to look away.”

“You stop asking who you’re talking to. You just talk.”

One page had a crude mirror sketched on it, with the words:

“There is no ‘either.’

There’s only when they’re looking at you together.”

Noah’s breath hitched.

He clutched the edge of the drawer and bent forward, trying to calm the burn in his chest.

The room tilted — or maybe it was his balance slipping.

He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth.

He should put it back.

He should walk away.

He should—

But his body wouldn’t move.

There was something about the desperate edge of the drawings — the handwriting, the spirals in the margins, the fevered layering of pencil over pencil — that felt too familiar.

Not like he’d seen it before.

Like he was already living it.

A final page:

Two figures. Back to back.

One made of flowers. One made of knives.

Below it:

“I thought I could keep them separate.

That’s how they trick you.”

Noah shut the book.

Hard.

The sound echoed against the concrete like a threat.

He stuffed it back into the drawer with too much force and stumbled backward, knocking into a metal cabinet.

He didn’t leave right away.

He stood there, panting.

Eyes hot.

Skin crawling.

And for one terrifying second, he thought he could hear breathing behind him.

He turned.

No one.

Just air.

Just cement.

Just a hallway that had always been too long.

He looked back at the cabinet — at the thin pane of glass on its door.

His own reflection stared back at him.

And behind it—

A second silhouette.

Faint. Unfocused. Out of sync.

Standing just behind him.

He turned again. Nothing.

The reflection remained.

Just long enough to make his pulse stutter.

Then, just him again.

But something inside him refused to believe it had been a trick of the light.

He walked away without looking again.

And the silence followed him like a second pair of footsteps.

**************

Noah told himself he just needed to print something.

A simple excuse. A reason to move.

Keep walking. Stay functional.

The printmaking wing was always quieter after sunset — colder too. The long studio corridors were lit by dull industrial fluorescents that buzzed like fluorescent veins in a dying animal.

He could hear his own footsteps too clearly.

He hadn’t eaten. Still hadn’t slept. The skin under his eyes was tight and thin and hot, like bruising from the inside out. But printing something — doing something — felt safer than sitting alone in a dorm full of mirrored glass and questions he didn’t want to ask.

He pressed through the side stairwell, fingertips trailing along the concrete wall for no reason at all except that it made him feel here. Physical.

The hallway unfolded ahead of him like a long spine, vertebrae of flickering ceiling lights spaced too far apart.

At first, it looked empty.

And then — a shape.

Still.

Dark.

Human.

A figure leaned against the wall near the last door before the emergency exit — one foot flat against the concrete, arms folded across his chest.

Long coat. Hands gloved. Collar turned slightly up.

Noah’s stomach lurched.

Adrian.

He knew even before the recognition hit. There was no mistaking the geometry of that posture — relaxed and rigid at once, like every inch of him was designed to wait without waiting.

Noah slowed his pace before he realized it.

But stopping would’ve been worse.

Keep moving.

He adjusted the strap of his bag on his shoulder and forced himself forward.

Fifteen meters.

Ten.

Seven.

He could feel the air change.

It wasn’t cold exactly — just thick. Electric. Like the static that builds before a storm finally breaks against glass.

Adrian hadn’t moved.

Not an inch.

No shift of weight. No change in expression. His head tilted slightly, like he was listening for something Noah hadn’t said yet.

Noah didn’t look at him.

Couldn’t.

He stared straight ahead, heart hammering like a trap door was being pounded from below.

He’s not doing anything.

He’s not even speaking.

He’s just… watching.

But that was worse.

No flirting. No cruelty. No curiosity.

Just that stare — intense and utterly still.

Noah’s hands clenched at his sides. He kept walking, steps too loud on the polished floor.

Six feet between them.

Three.

He passed within arm’s reach.

The heat of Adrian’s body was real — a presence even without contact.

Still no movement.

No word.

No nod.

Just... that gaze.

And then—Noah glanced.

It wasn’t a choice.

Something inside him snapped sideways for just a second — his head turned.

And Adrian was looking at him with the kind of focus reserved for art under glass. For things being studied. Preserved. Claimed.

Noah’s breath caught.

Because it didn’t feel cruel.

It didn’t feel kind either.

It felt... inevitable.

Like Adrian had already imagined this moment.

Had already decided something about him.

Noah swallowed hard.

And that’s when Adrian’s eyes flicked — not away, but down.

To Noah’s chest.

To his mouth.

Back up.

Just once.

A scan.

A decision.

Then nothing.

No expression. No smirk. No reaction.

Just silence.

Noah yanked the studio door open harder than he meant to and slipped through like he was escaping a room on fire.

The door shut behind him with a click that felt too loud in the quiet.

He leaned back against it.

Shaking.

Heart still pounding in that offbeat, untrustworthy rhythm.

His mouth was dry.

His chest ached.

And the worst part wasn’t the fear.

It wasn’t even the watching.

It was the fact that for one suspended, shame-soaked moment—

—he hadn’t wanted Adrian to stop.

**************

The dorm light was too bright when he switched it on.

Noah winced. Shut it off again, instantly.

The dark that followed was softer. But not comforting. Not tonight.

He dropped his bag and peeled off his hoodie with stiff fingers. It clung to him like he’d been sweating — though he hadn’t felt warm all day.

He sank onto the edge of the bed, hunched forward, elbows to knees.

The room wasn’t spinning. But it wanted to.

The corners of his vision kept catching at the edges of shadows that weren’t there.

He rubbed his palms against his thighs. Hard. Just to feel something solid.

The air was too quiet.

Not peaceful.

Suspicious.

No music. No voices. No phone buzzes. Just the hum of blood behind his eyes.

He pressed his thumbs into his temples.

Tried to breathe evenly.

You’re overreacting.

You’re tired.

It’s just lack of sleep. Just your nerves playing tricks.

You’re not crazy. You’re not—

A sharp knock in his chest — like his heart had hiccupped.

He stood too fast.

And turned toward the mirror.

It sat there, still and narrow across the room. The same cracked antique frame. The same surface he hadn’t paid attention to in weeks.

But now—

Now it felt like the only thing in the room.

Like it had been watching him all along.

He stepped closer.

Slower than he meant to.

The reflection that met him was… off.

It looked like him. Of course it did. But not entirely.

The eyes were too wide.

The skin under them darker.

The mouth — slightly parted like it was catching breath he hadn’t taken.

Noah stared.

His skin crawled.

He tilted his head — a reflex. A test.

The reflection followed.

But just a half-second too slow.

He froze.

The lights from the hallway flickered in from the door crack, just enough to catch the glint on the glass.

He took one more step forward.

Close now.

So close he could see the blood vessels in his own eyes, the faint pulse in his throat.

He raised a hand.

The reflection mirrored him.

This time — perfectly.

And yet—

He couldn’t shake the feeling it was waiting.

Not for him.

But for something.

Someone.

His breath hitched.

He pressed his fingertips to the glass.

Colder than it should be. Like touching the inside of a refrigerator.

He leaned forward. Watched his breath fog against it — faint, like ghostglass.

“There is no either.”

The words from Julien’s sketchbook echoed so clearly he flinched — almost expecting them to be written on the mirror this time.

But no. Just his own reflection.

He backed away. Fast.

Too fast. His calf hit the edge of his desk chair, and he dropped onto it like a collapse.

Sat there.

Head in his hands.

Palms slick.

Chest tight.

His whole body was buzzing — not pain, not panic, just wrongness. Like a song playing too softly to hear but loud enough to upset your bones.

Tears built behind his eyes.

He didn’t let them fall.

But they burned.

He pulled his knees up. Sat cross-legged on the chair, like a child, like someone trying to take up less space in the world.

He stared across the room.

The mirror stared back.

He told himself not to look again.

He looked anyway.

And for a breathless, stuttering second — just one flash of a moment — he thought the reflection smiled.

Not fully.

Just a twitch of the lips.

But not his.

He blinked.

Gone.

Just him again.

Just his exhausted face and the shaking in his arms and the way the air in the room felt thinner than it should.

He buried his face in his hands.

And stayed that way.

Alone with the silence.

And the feeling that something had started,

and would not let him go.