Chapter Text
After that first seminar, you started noticing Ryland Grace everywhere. Not intentionally. At least, that was what you told yourself.
The biology buildings on campus formed their own ecosystem anyway. Graduate students circulated between labs and lecture halls like overworked migratory birds, crossing paths often enough that eventually everyone became familiar whether you wanted them to or not.
Still, Ryland somehow stood out. Maybe because he moved through campus like his brain was always two conversations ahead of his body. Or maybe because after that first argument in the seminar, your attention kept snagging on him automatically.
A passing familiarity formed first. A nod in crowded hallways. Half distracted waves while balancing coffee and papers between classes. The occasional sarcastic comment traded before a lecture started.
You learned quickly that Ryland was chronically late in a way that somehow never seemed entirely his fault. Every appearance looked as though he'd been swept there by circumstances beyond his control—windblown hair, an untucked shirt collar, a messenger bag hanging half-open while loose papers threatened escape.
Meanwhile, you arrived early everywhere out of habit. He found this endlessly amusing.
“You know they legally have to start whether or not you’re here fifteen minutes early, right?”
You didn’t look up from your notes. “Some of us respect structure.”
“Some of us respect sleep,” he replied, moving past you to sit a few seats down the row you occupied.
“You’re literally carrying two coffees,” you observed, finally glancing up.
“One of them is for emotional support.” He drew one cup protectively against his chest with exaggerated seriousness.
You rolled your eyes and looked back down at your notes, but you were unable to keep your mouth from twitching into a small smile.
By the third seminar of the semester, he dropped into the seat beside you without asking.
"There you are," he said lightly.
The greeting came so casually you almost missed it. Ryland set his coffee down, shrugged out of his messenger bag, and immediately started searching through a stack of papers that looked as though they'd been organized by a tornado.
You watched him for a moment before opening your notebook. The decision seemed to have been made somewhere between your last seminar and this one. The seat beside you had simply become his. You didn't question it.
Professor Adler had barely started discussing adaptive resistance mechanisms when Ryland leaned slightly toward you and muttered, “This entire paper ignores environmental stress variability.”
You whispered back before thinking, “No, it accounts for it poorly. That’s different.”
His mouth twitched like he was trying not to smile. By the end of the seminar, the two of you were still debating quietly while students packed their bags around you. Professor Adler eventually looked up from his notes and sighed dramatically.
“You know there are office hours specifically designed for this behavior.”
Ryland didn't look embarrassed in the slightest.
You did. Slightly.
After that, it became routine. If you arrived first, you saved him a seat. If he arrived first—which happened approximately twice all semester—he saved one for you with sprawling papers and a coffee cup occupying enough space to discourage anyone else from sitting there.
The biology lab came later.
You walked in one evening carrying a tray of sample cultures, the familiar scent of ethanol and agar already lingering in the air. Fluorescent lights reflected off rows of equipment and stainless steel workstations. Then you stopped short. Across the room, Ryland was already there. Apparently the molecular biology department had partnered with microbiology for shared lab access that semester.
Ryland looked up immediately. The moment he spotted you, his attention shifted away from whatever he'd been doing. His gaze dropped briefly to the cultures in your hands before returning to your face, curiosity arriving almost instantly. You could practically see the question forming.
“Absolutely not,” you said before he could speak.
He blinked. “What?”
“You’re going to contaminate something eventually,” you said, tightening your grip on the culture plates as you crossed to an empty workstation.
A grin tugged at the corner of his mouth. “You say that like it hasn't already happened.”
You stared at him. “That is deeply concerning.”
His grin widened. And somehow that was that. The lab became another orbit point.
You worked on different projects at different stations, but over the following weeks conversations began threading naturally between pipetting samples, labeling cultures, and recording observations. Some nights the discussions stayed practical. Other nights they wandered far from whatever work sat in front of you.
The room always smelled faintly of ethanol and disinfectant. Refrigeration units hummed beneath the fluorescent lights, and the ventilation system carried a constant rush of white noise through the ceiling. By the end of every evening, everyone looked slightly sleep deprived.
Most nights, the lab emptied by early evening, but you and Ryland usually stayed long after, sometimes talking, sometimes working in an easy, companionable silence.
Over time, you learned the shape of his concentration.
The way he pulled his glasses off his face while reading only to spend the next ten minutes searching for them. The half-finished thoughts he muttered under his breath while troubleshooting a result. The habit he had of dragging both hands through his hair whenever something wasn't working, leaving the sandy ends sticking up in increasingly impossible directions.
You also discovered that Ryland apparently refused to swear like a normal person. Every frustrated exclamation emerged strangely sanitized. "Shoot," after walking straight into a lab bench like it had appeared out of nowhere. "Gosh darn," when an experiment failed. Once, after knocking an entire stack of annotated papers onto the floor, he stood there staring at the mess for a full second before sighing, "For fudging's sake," with such heartfelt frustration that you had to bite the inside of your cheek to keep from laughing.
The best part was that none of it seemed performative. He said every word with complete sincerity, entirely oblivious to how ridiculous they sounded coming from a grown man working toward a graduate degree, and you found yourself looking forward to whatever sanitized profanity would come out of his mouth next.
He learned the shape of your habits, too.
How your pen clicked steadily whenever you were analyzing data, the click echoing repeatedly in the small space of the lab. How you picked absently at the skin beside your thumbnail when an experiment refused to cooperate. How your entire posture changed when you disappeared too deeply into a project and forgot basic human requirements like food, water, and reasonable sleep.
Though, according to you, that last one wasn't entirely true. You always kept a stash of candy and gummy snacks hidden in your workstation drawers, insisting they counted as a temporary solution until you reached a good stopping point. More than once, the quiet hum of the lab would be interrupted by the unmistakable crinkle of plastic wrappers.
"That's not dinner," Ryland would call from across the room without even looking up.
"It's not dinner," you agreed, tearing open a pack of gummy bears. "It's just something to hold me over until dinner."
Ryland eyed the candy. "And that something is gummy bears?"
You ignored his comment as you tossed a second, unopened pack in his direction. Without missing a beat, he caught it one-handed. A moment later, the sound of a second wrapper joined yours.
"Thought so," you said.
Ryland only smiled as he grabbed a handful of the candy.
One evening, you sat hunched over a data report, eyes fixed on a column of results as you worked through the analysis. Your pen clicked steadily beneath your thumb without you noticing, the repetitive motion an unconscious habit whenever you were deeply focused and needed somewhere for the restless edge of your energy to go.
“You’re doing the thing again,” Ryland said without looking up from his microscope.
You frowned at your computer screen. “Doing what?”
“You've clicked that pen seventeen times in the last thirty seconds,” he said absently, adjusting the microscope's fine focus.
Your thumb froze mid-click. “…You counted?”
“You make me count.”
You narrowed your eyes at him before setting the pen down with exaggerated care.
Two days later, he tossed something onto your workstation without warning. You looked down from the data sheet you were reviewing.
A black pen rested beside your notebook, unremarkable in every way. There was no label or note. Just a plain black pen that looked exactly like the dozens scattered throughout the lab. At first glance it seemed completely ordinary. You picked it up and pressed the clicker.
Silence.
There was no sharp plastic snap. No familiar clicking sound echoing across the workstation.
You frowned and clicked it again. Still nothing. The mechanism moved smoothly beneath your thumb, but it was completely soundless. You stared at it for a moment before realization began to dawn.
Ryland had found a silent pen.
Across the room, Ryland continued typing as if he hadn't just placed a thoughtfully engineered solution to one of your habits directly in front of you.
“You’re unbelievable,” you muttered.
“I’m solving problems,” he replied.
“That wasn't a problem,” you protested, turning the pen over once between your fingers before looking back at him.
“It absolutely was,” he replied, still typing without so much as looking in your direction.
You rolled your eyes, but you slipped the pen into your lab coat pocket anyway.
The next time you caught yourself absentmindedly clicking it during data analysis, you glanced up. Ryland was already looking. The pleased little smile he tried to hide gave him away immediately.
One night near midterms, the centrifuge in the shared equipment room malfunctioned halfway through your sample run. You stared at the blinking error message while an unpleasant grinding noise echoed from inside the machine.
“Please tell me that sound is normal,” Ryland called from across the lab.
“It's making a grinding noise,” you answered without taking your eyes off the flashing error message.
“That feels scientifically bad.”
“It is scientifically bad,” you confirmed, already reaching for the emergency shutoff.
He appeared beside you seconds later, still wearing gloves and safety goggles pushed up into his hair.
The equipment room felt even smaller with both of you crouched beside the centrifuge. Metal shelving lined the walls, and the air carried the faint warmth of machinery that had been running all day. Ryland balanced the maintenance manual across one knee while you examined the rotor assembly.
The issue turned out to be simple—a misaligned rotor—but the two of you spent nearly forty minutes fixing it together anyway, shoulders bumping occasionally in the cramped equipment room. At one point, Ryland handed you the correct screwdriver before you'd even asked for it, your fingers brushing for only a moment before you both turned back to the machine without comment.
It happened like that more and more after. One shared task led naturally into another, conversations stretching beyond whatever had first brought you into the same room until it became difficult to remember whose idea it had been to stay.
The library was no different.
One rainy evening, you spotted him hunched over a table beneath the far windows, surrounded by an alarming amount of papers and empty coffee cups. Rain tapped steadily against the glass behind him, turning the world outside into shifting gray streaks.
There were easier places to sit, plenty of open tables. You still crossed the room and dropped into the chair opposite him anyway. Ryland looked up immediately.
“Oh, good,” he said. “You can explain this figure because I’m about thirty seconds from accusing the authors of scientific misconduct.”
You set your bag down on the table. “That’s your solution to everything.”
“It's efficient.” He tapped the offending graph with the eraser end of his pencil.
Outside, rain continued sliding down the windows while students whispered between shelves and keyboards clicked steadily throughout the library. You studied together until closing.
Somewhere along the way, you stopped being surprised to find Ryland along your path. You began expecting to find him wherever your days happened to overlap, and without ever discussing it, the spaces between those meetings seemed to shrink.
Neither of you acknowledged it. You simply kept falling back into each other's orbit until, somehow, it no longer felt like coincidence at all.
By late November, the campus had settled into that strange quiet that only arrived after midnight in winter.
Snow drifted softly past the lab windows in lazy spirals, blurring the yellow glow of streetlamps outside into watercolor smudges against the dark. Most of the biology building had shut down hours ago. Somewhere around eleven, the hallway lights beyond the lab had dimmed automatically, leaving the room wrapped in the sterile glow of fluorescent overheads and the cooler light spilling from computer monitors.
Your shoulders ached. Not enough to stop. Just enough for your body to keep reminding you it existed.
You ignored it and leaned closer to the screen.
Your lab coat had been abandoned over the back of a chair hours ago. The clip holding your hair up had long since lost the battle, loose strands escaping around your face while the rest hung in a messy knot at the base of your neck. One knee was tucked beneath your chair as lines of simulation data crawled steadily across the monitor.
Statistical models layered over culture adaptability projections. Three separate windows of notes remained scattered across your desktop in a system that would have looked chaotic to anyone else but perfectly logical to you.
You clicked through another set of results, your thumb drifting automatically to the skin beside your nail. A sharp sting finally made you stop.
You looked down. A small bead of blood welled where you'd torn the skin. You frowned at it like the injury had personally inconvenienced you.
Beside your notebook sat a growing pile of candy wrappers, bright scraps of evidence marking several hours spent replacing actual food with sugar and caffeine. An empty coffee cup occupied the corner of your workstation. Another sat beside it with only a swallow left at the bottom. Your water bottle remained untouched near the edge of the desk.
You ignored both.
One more run.
One more comparison model.
One more—
“There you are.”
Ryland's voice drifted from somewhere behind you.
The words were familiar enough that you recognized them before your brain fully caught up. Your hand slipped off the mouse as you startled, yanked abruptly out of whatever tunnel your thoughts had disappeared into.
You twisted around in your chair.
“You know the building technically closes at midnight, right?” Ryland asked, though from the look on his face it was clear he already knew the answer.
He stood near the lab entrance with snow melting into the shoulders of his dark coat. His glasses had fogged slightly from the temperature change, and damp strands of sandy hair curled around the edges where the weather had gotten to them.
You hadn’t heard him come in.
“You scared the hell out of me,” you muttered.
“You’re welcome.”
You rolled your eyes and turned back toward the monitor, though your concentration had already fractured.
“What are you doing here?” you asked.
Ryland wandered farther into the lab as though he belonged there, dropping his messenger bag onto a neighboring workstation with a dull thud.
“You never showed up at the library,” he said. “I texted you like two hours ago.”
Your stomach sank slightly.
Right. The library. You'd planned to meet him there after dinner. Or maybe before dinner. Honestly, you couldn't remember anymore. You hadn't checked your phone in hours.
“…Oh.” The realization landed all at once. You finally looked up from your screen, guilt settling across your face.
Ryland glanced over at you then, expression softening slightly around the edges. “That’s never a promising response.”
“I got distracted. I’m sorry,” you said with an apologetic grimace.
He made a quiet sound that might have been a laugh. Behind you, another model finished loading. Ryland moved around the workstation while you clicked through the results. You heard the rustle of papers, the squeak of a drawer opening, the soft knock of something being shifted aside. Then everything went quiet. A second later, curiosity finally won. You glanced sideways.
Ryland stood beside your workstation, surveying the evidence—the candy wrappers, the abandoned coffee cups, the untouched water bottle, the stack of reports spread across half the desk.
His gaze eventually returned to you, slower this time. Taking in the way you were curled toward the monitor, shoulders tight with fatigue. The absent way your thumb kept drifting back toward the torn skin beside your nail between bursts of typing.
“When’s the last time you ate something that wasn’t made entirely of processed sugar?” he asked.
You clicked another file open. “I had a granola bar earlier.”
Ryland stared at you. “That doesn’t count.”
“It was technically food,” you replied.
“It was technically oats held together with sugar glue.” He sounded thoroughly unconvinced.
The corner of your mouth twitched, but another red flash from your screen pulled your focus back.
“I’m almost done,” you murmured.
Ryland leaned lightly against the counter beside your desk, arms folding loosely across his chest.
“If that were true,” he said, “you would’ve shown up at the library hours ago.”
A little guilt twisted low in your stomach. You stared harder at the screen instead. The numbers blurred together for a second before snapping back into focus.
"I know," you admitted quietly. "Sorry."
He shrugged one shoulder easily, like it wasn’t a big deal. Still, he didn't leave. Instead, he looked toward the screen, following rows of data neither of you had the energy to fully process at nearly two in the morning. For a moment, the only sounds came from the steady hum of the ventilation system and the soft tapping of snow against the windows. Then Ryland tipped his head toward the monitor.
"Hey." Ryland's voice softened just enough to pull your attention away from the screen.
You glanced over.
He nodded at the data. “The data’s still gonna exist tomorrow.”
Immediately, instinctively, you shook your head. “No, I need to rerun the last comparison because the variance—”
“You’re doing it again,” he interrupted gently.
Your jaw tightened faintly. The thing was, Ryland rarely said that lightly anymore. Not after months of shared seminars, late nights in the lab, and library sessions that somehow turned into conversations about everything except the material you were supposed to be studying. He knew what it meant. You were spiraling into hyperfocus. You'd stopped paying attention to everything outside the work. And somehow, annoyingly, he always seemed to notice before you did.
“I’m fine,” you said automatically.
“You have blood on your hand,” he said gently, his gaze dropping toward your hands.
You looked down. Right. Your thumbnail again.
Ryland pushed away from the counter and began tidying the disaster zone that had become your workstation. He tossed the empty coffee cups into the trash, gathered a handful of candy wrappers, and stacked a few scattered reports into something resembling order.
“There’s this diner down on Roosevelt,” he said casually. “Open all night.”
You looked back toward your monitor. “Ryland—”
"Come get food," he said.
"I said I'm almost—"
“The data,” Ryland interrupted, “will still be there in the morning.”
You stared at the monitor. Rows of numbers stretched across the screen. Three unfinished notes sat open in separate windows. A dozen things still needed your attention. At least, that was what your brain insisted. But the longer you looked, the harder it became to ignore the dull ache behind your eyes.
Ryland remained patiently silent beside you, waiting. And unfortunately, you knew him well enough by now to recognize that particular kind of patience. He'd already decided how this conversation was ending.
Your shoulders sagged slightly.
"Alright," you muttered. "But I need five minutes to save all of this."
Ryland grinned immediately.
“Wow,” he said. “Personal growth. I’m impressed.”
You shot him a look. “You’re insufferable.”
“So I’ve been told.”
Despite yourself, a tired laugh escaped. The pleased expression that crossed his face looked less like victory and more like satisfaction that you hadn't completely disappeared into your work for the night.
He reached over, grabbed your abandoned bag from the desk, and handed it to you.
“C’mon,” he said gently. “Before you start trying to survive exclusively on gummy bears again.”
The walk to the diner was quick. Mostly quiet, too.
The campus felt hushed beneath the snowfall, wrapped in that peculiar stillness that only existed after midnight. Fresh snow softened the edges of everything, muffling distant traffic and swallowing the usual sounds of student life.
Your shoes crunched softly across the sidewalks. Beside you, Ryland walked with his shoulders hunched against the cold, his hands buried deep in his coat pockets. Neither of you seemed particularly interested in talking. Exhaustion had a way of stripping conversations down to the essentials. By the time the neon diner sign appeared through the falling snow, your fingers had gone numb. The bell above the door jingled softly when Ryland pulled it open for you.
Warmth hit immediately. Real warmth. The kind that carried the scent of coffee, butter, and decades of fryer oil permanently embedded in the walls. Somewhere behind the counter, an aging refrigerator hummed steadily. An old radio crackled faintly overhead, too quiet to make out more than fragments of a song.
Faded red booths lined the walls. Black-and-white tile stretched across the floor. Chrome trim reflected the fluorescent lights in dull, worn flashes. Near the register, a pie display held a handful of lonely slices beneath fogged glass.
Only two other customers occupied the place—an older man nursing coffee near the windows and a college student asleep facedown in the corner booth over an open textbook. A waitress with tired eyes glanced up from behind the counter when you entered.
“Sit wherever, honey.” She gestured vaguely toward the empty booths before returning to refilling coffee mugs without waiting for an answer.
Ryland slid into a booth near the windows and you followed, shrugging out of your coat slowly as the warmth started pulling the exhaustion fully back into your body all at once. The vinyl seat creaked beneath you as you settled in, shoulders sinking instinctively against the booth backing. Ryland shrugged off his own coat and pushed his glasses higher on his nose while studying the menu with the seriousness of someone reviewing experimental methodology.
“You look about thirty seconds from falling asleep sitting up,” he said.
You reached automatically for the laminated menu anyway. “That’s because you kidnapped me out of my natural habitat.”
Ryland snorted softly. “The lab is not a habitat.”
“It practically is at this point,” you muttered.
"You had gummy bears for dinner," he said. "There's nothing natural about that."
“They were sour gummy bears,” you replied absently, still scanning the menu as though that somehow strengthened your defense.
“Oh,” he said dryly. “Well, nutritionally that changes everything.”
A faint smile tugged at your mouth despite yourself.
The waitress returned with coffee before either of you even ordered. The mug she set in front of you steamed gently beneath the fluorescent lights, rich and bitter smelling enough to cut through the lingering fog in your head. Ryland looked deeply relieved by the arrival of caffeine.
You wrapped both hands around the mug immediately, soaking in the warmth before reaching automatically for the sugar caddy beside the napkin dispenser. You added one packet, then another. And after a brief moment of consideration, you added a third.
Ryland watched the process in silence while pouring absolutely nothing into his own coffee. Normally, he would have commented. Tonight, he just took a sip from his mug instead, like getting you out of the lab counted as enough of a victory already.
“What are you getting?” he asked.
You skimmed the menu lazily. “Pancakes, probably.”
Ryland looked at you over the top of his own coffee mug. “At two in the morning?”
“It’s basically time for breakfast.”
“It’s definitely not time for breakfast.” Ryland cradled his coffee mug between both hands, shaking his head with quiet disbelief.
You glanced toward the windows where snow drifted softly past the neon glow outside.
"It's cold out. Pancakes feel like the right decision," you said.
One corner of Ryland’s mouth twitched upward slightly at that. The exhaustion sitting heavily behind your eyes must’ve shown more than you realized, because he didn’t argue further.
When the waitress returned, you ordered a stack of pancakes with hash browns and extra bacon after a brief moment of internal negotiation with yourself. Ryland ordered a cheeseburger without looking up from the menu for more than half a second.
You waited until the waitress disappeared again before asking, "How did you even find this place?"
Ryland shrugged slightly, settling deeper into the booth. “Got lost after leaving the library one night freshman year. Ended up here instead.”
“That sounds about right,” you said absently, wrapping your hands back around your coffee mug.
“I have a terrible sense of direction,” he admitted.
You glanced up at him over the rim of your cup. “I know.”
Ryland looked mildly offended for all of half a second before a quiet laugh slipped out of him, softer than usual beneath the late hour and low diner lighting.
Silence settled between you after that, easy and unforced. Outside the windows, snow drifted beneath the streetlights in slow white currents. Somewhere behind the counter, dishes clinked together while the radio switched songs through a burst of static.
Across from you, Ryland rubbed absently at one eye beneath his glasses before reaching for his coffee again. You realized then that he looked tired, too. Not just tonight, but in general. As though the two of you had gradually developed the same bad habits without noticing. Too many late nights. Too much caffeine. Entire days spent disappearing into work until somebody else dragged you back into the real world.
The difference was that tonight, Ryland had been the one to notice first.
The warmth of the diner settled deeper into your bones. Now that you were sitting still, exhaustion began creeping back in around the edges. Your thoughts felt slower somehow, less neatly arranged than they had an hour ago in the lab.
Ryland watched you quietly for another moment before asking, “You okay?”
You nodded automatically before realizing he was actually looking at you, waiting for a real answer.
“…Yeah,” you admitted after a second, exhaling softly through your nose. “Just tired.”
He didn’t push. He didn’t brush it off with a joke either. And maybe that was why the words kept coming after that.
“The cultures weren’t stabilizing right,” you said, staring down at the steam curling from your mug. “And then the third comparison set started skewing the variance again, which shouldn’t’ve happened because the environmental controls were identical, but every time I reran it something shifted slightly and—”
You stopped briefly to rub at your forehead.
“I don’t know. I think I just got stuck on it.” You pinched the bridge of your nose before letting your hand fall back into your lap.
Ryland leaned back slightly against the booth, listening with the same focused attention he gave seminars or lab results.
“The thing about microbiology,” you continued quietly, more to the coffee than to him now, “is everyone acts like adaptation should behave predictably. But half the time microbes just…” You gestured vaguely with one hand. “Do whatever they want anyway.”
One corner of Ryland’s mouth lifted slightly at that. "You sound personally offended."
“I am personally offended. Their entire purpose is to ruin my life,” you deadpanned, finally looking up from your coffee.
“That does sound biologically accurate,” he agreed solemnly.
A breath of laughter escaped you, tired around the edges. You shook your head. “I kept thinking if I reran it one more time, maybe I’d finally figure out where the shift was happening. Then suddenly it was after midnight.”
For a moment, Ryland said nothing. The waitress passed carrying a tray of food to another table. Snow tapped softly against the windows.
Then he looked at you and said, gently, "Would another four hours have actually given you a different answer?"
You opened your mouth, then closed it again, because the truth was obvious: maybe, but probably not. And you both knew it. Ryland's expression softened slightly.
"Sometimes," he said, "the experiment's done talking for the day."
You looked down at your coffee again, watching the steam rise from the chipped ceramic mug between your hands.
For a moment neither of you spoke. And suddenly you became painfully aware of what this actually was. Ryland sitting across from you at two in the morning because you forgot to leave the lab. Because he noticed you hadn’t shown up. Because he came looking.
A small knot of guilt twisted unexpectedly in your chest.
“I—uh.” You glanced up briefly before looking back down almost immediately. “I am sorry about the library.”
Ryland frowned slightly, as though it took him a second to figure out what you were talking about.
“You waited around for me and I just…” You shook your head faintly. “I don’t usually lose track of time like that.”
Something in his expression shifted then. “I wasn’t upset.”
You finally looked at him properly. Ryland shrugged one shoulder lightly, fingers tapping against the side of his coffee mug.
"I figured if you disappeared, there was probably a reason." His gaze drifted briefly toward the snowy windows before returning to you. "But when you weren't answering your phone, I got a little concerned. I guessed if you were anywhere, you'd be in the lab, so I checked."
The sincerity in his voice caught you off guard. There wasn't anything dramatic about it—no expectation attached, no attempt to make you feel guilty. Just concern, simple and straightforward.
For a moment, you found yourself oddly unsure what to do with that. Apparently Ryland noticed, because he let the silence linger for a second before rescuing you from it.
"Besides," he said, leaning back against the booth, "the evening wasn't a total loss."
You blinked once. “No?”
"No," Ryland said. "I got extremely invested in a paper about fungal communication networks."
That surprised a tired laugh out of you.
Ryland nodded seriously. “Turns out mushrooms are apparently plotting against us.”
"That tracks, honestly," you said.
“See? Exactly my thought.”
The waitress appeared a minute later, balancing plates up both arms. She set down an enormous stack of pancakes in front of you, followed by hash browns, bacon, and Ryland's cheeseburger with a mountain of fries balanced alongside it.
The smell hit first. Butter and maple syrup mingled with the rich scent of fresh coffee, and your stomach clenched in immediate recognition.
“…Oh my god,” you breathed.
Ryland looked amused. “You were starving.”
"I was not," you protested.
“You just got emotional looking at pancakes.” Ryland watched you with barely concealed amusement, one eyebrow lifting as you reached immediately for the syrup.
“This looks incredible.” You ignored him completely.
You poured a completely unreasonable amount of syrup over the stack. Ryland watched without comment until you added a generous helping of whipped cream.
"That is an irresponsible amount of sugar," he sighed, though there was a touch of laughter in his voice.
You cut into the pancakes anyway. “Mind your business.”
The first bite nearly made your eyes close. It was warm. Sweet. Actual food after hours of stale coffee and candy. A soft sound of approval escaped you before you could stop it.
Across the table, Ryland looked vaguely smug now. “You’re making pancakes seem life changing.”
“Right now they kind of are,” you admitted.
He shook his head quietly and finally started on his burger.
After that, conversation softened naturally between bites of food and the steady hum of the diner around you. You talked about nothing particularly important—a professor who consistently assigned impossible reading loads, a graduate student who somehow managed to spill coffee on himself three separate times in one week, and the increasingly concerning state of the department microwave.
It was the kind of conversation that wandered without purpose and never seemed to need one. Comfortable pauses settled easily between topics, and neither of you rushed to fill them.
By the time your plate sat mostly empty, warmth had settled fully back into your body. Not just from the food. From being here. From the strange quiet comfort of sitting across from someone who knew exactly how to pull you out of your own head without forcing you out of it. You still felt tired, but no longer hollowed out by it.
Eventually, the check appeared. Ryland reached for it immediately.
You narrowed your eyes immediately. “Absolutely not.”
“I dragged you here,” he said.
“That doesn’t mean you’re paying.”
“It kind of does.” Ryland pulled it just out of reach with an expression that suggested he'd already decided the conversation was over.
You reached for your wallet anyway while Ryland looked deeply unconvinced by the entire concept.
In the end, you split it after a brief argument that neither of you cared enough to fully commit to. By the time you both shoved your arms back through your coats and stepped toward the door again, the diner had grown even quieter than before.
Outside, snow still drifted softly through the dark. And for reasons you couldn’t fully explain yet, the walk back to campus didn’t feel quite as cold anymore.