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Alhaitham met Kaveh in the second semester of his freshman year. They had a seminar together. Alhaitham needed an elective to round out his course load and Bright Lights, Global Cities had seemed at least somewhat relevant. There’s nowhere to sit on the first day of class, so he sits in the aisle seat next to a boy with a backwards baseball cap that he doesn’t know.
The class is held in the gargantuan art building that looks a lot like a postmodern minimalist snake trying to swallow its own tail. It is, even Alhaitham has to admit, an incredibly beautiful lecture hall. This is his first time in the art building, and the floor-to-ceiling windows that line the front of the hall, warming everything in morning sunlight, are breathtaking.
Also, their professor is late.
Alhaitham turns back to his notebook, reviewing his notes from his linguistics class. Class started ten minutes ago, and Alhaitham has better things to do than sit here staring out the window until someone decides to show up. The students to the right of him are starting to get noisy.
“You know, I heard that if your professor is more than fifteen minutes late, you’re, like, legally allowed to leave.”
“For real?”
“Yeah, my roommate told me about it. It’s in the student handbook and everything. I think it was fifteen minutes? Or maybe it was twenty.”
“Tch. Is it fifteen or twenty?”
“Fifteen, for sure.”
He does not sound sure.
“Hell yeah. Let’s get out of here. I have Geo homework to finish.”
The two of them collect their things noisily and then tramp down the aisle and out the side door. Alhaitham sighs and pulls his noise-canceling headphones tighter around his head.
He’s mostly annoyed at how stupid this seems, but the Director of Undergrad Studies had mentioned that he should ‘manage his expectations’ at one of their meetings. Alhaitham is stubborn but not impossible to teach. He is learning, against his will, that there are idiots everywhere, and even institutes of higher learning are no exception.
“There isn’t a university-wide policy on absences,” Alhaitham mutters to himself.
Annoyed, he picks fussily at a fleck of pulp on his paper.
After thinking about it for a second, he picks up his bag and places it on the folding seat next to him before anyone else can get any bright ideas about disturbing him. With a quiet sigh and a wish that the tension he’s starting to feel building at the base of his neck will go away, he takes a deep breath and turns his attention back to his reading.
A boy sits several rows behind him, watching the irritable little freshman in the front row. He takes off the glasses he wears for lectures and stuffs them in his bag.
“Ready to go?” asks the boy next to him. He’s no one Kaveh knows well, but they’ve had a couple classes together, and he’s not a bad sort. He sees Kaveh packing up, and it’s an understandable misunderstanding.
“No,” Kaveh says. “You can leave if you want. I’m going to get a little closer.”
Maybe it’s because they’re not close that Kaveh’s friend doesn’t question it. He shrugs a shoulder and starts packing up his own stuff. “Whatever you want. Email me your notes later if the teacher shows up, hey.”
“Mmhm,” Kaveh agrees easily, eyes sharp as they watch a tuft of slate-grey hair in the front row, already distracted.
Whatever, Chongyun thinks to himself.
Alhaitham has finally managed to shake off the irritation snaking around his throat. He’s focusing once more, flipping through the pages of his textbook when he’s disturbed again, this time by a tap on the shoulder.
He turns around, glaring, to face a tall, blonde boy standing in the aisle.
“What.”
“Hey,” says Kaveh who is determinedly sunny even in the face of Alhaitham’s hostility.
Alhaitham takes down his headphones begrudgingly.
“Sorry, I can’t really see the board. I forgot my glasses at home. Do you mind if I sit next to you?”
Alhaitham is on the verge of saying no for some petty reason. Aren’t there other places to sit?
“Fine,” he says, reluctantly moving his bag.
“Thanks,” the boy says with a smile. “My name is Kaveh.”
“Alhaitham,” he says grudgingly, after too long.
“Nice to meet you, Alhaitham.”
And then Kaveh noisily relocates all his things piecemeal. He’s got a cutesy pen holder with neat pens and pencils in various colors nestled inside, which he doesn’t bother to zip up, a paper cup of coffee, a gummy eraser, a bookbag, a spiral bound notebook folded over, and a haphazard stack of textbooks. By the time he’s finished moving all his things, people are looking at them.
Before Kaveh can manage to say anything more, their teacher hustles in twenty minutes late. He apologizes briskly and then takes down the automatic window shades, dimming the room into a cool, dark cave so he can start his PowerPoint presentation.
Alhaitham never did finish copying that last set of problems.
Through the whole lecture, Kaveh sits attentively by his side, his unusually perfect profile catching the cold light from the screen. From his nose to his lips, everything seems sharply carved. Not severe, but precise the way that dollmakers’ carvings are precise. One of Kaveh’s legs is crossed over the other, ankle over knee, jiggling softly in an unconscious habit, and his bared ankle is as slender and shapely as the rest of him.
Contrary to Alhaitham’s first impression of this person as unserious and frivolous, Kaveh pays attention to their professor throughout the entire introductory lecture. It’s somehow Alhaitham who can’t pay attention. His attention wanders. When class ends, Alhaitham blinks, startled by the lights coming back up.
“Thanks for the seat,” Kaveh says on his way out.
* * *
“You haven’t fallen in love with any boys with guitars or girls with tattoos in weird places, have you?” Kaveh asks in a voice that Alhaitham is still a few years off from recognizing as Kaveh trying to be cool and upperclassmanly.
Presently, Alhaitham’s brow is furrowing as he tries to figure out what Kaveh thinks constitutes a ‘weird place.’ He decides it’s irrelevant.
“Where would I even meet any people like that?”
“Huh?” Kaveh blinks a few times. “I mean, in your dorm? In your classes? Just kind of ambiently around? I always see that one senior with the bleached tips in the engineering quad. Doesn’t he usually have a guitar?”
Kaveh squints as he tries to remember if the pipsqueak usually has a guitar. He’s sure he’s seen it at least once.
“Well,” Alhaitham says, “I’ve never met them.”
So of course I’ve never fallen in love with them, stop being weird goes unspoken.
Kaveh is a little too good at people in a way that Alhaitham isn’t. He reads whatever language Alhaitham’s body and face are making without his permission, and something seems to dawn on him.
“Alhaitham, do you have any friends?”
Alhaitham scowls and shuts down, turning away from this inane conversation.
That’s so sad, Kaveh’s face says.
Kaveh has a very expressive face. Alhaitham doesn’t have any problem reading it. It’s a very attractive face, and it’s currently making Alhaitham kind of want to blush, or scream, or run out of the building, and none of those are normal, helpful, or reasonable impulses. He feels certain he should feel insulted by Kaveh’s current wave of pity, but the thing about Kaveh looking like he does and being older than Alhaitham and spending that much energy and attention on Alhaitham, unwanted or not, is that it mostly results in a kind of humid mash of confusion. It feels sticky. He realizes he has a crush on his senior.
When Kaveh won’t stop pestering him and won’t drop it, he says, “I talk to you,” but that somehow only makes whatever seizure Kaveh is currently having even worse.
“You don’t know anyone? Didn’t you get to meet people in Frosh 101?”
Alhaitham scoffs. Like he was going to waste his time on a bullshit undergrad course.
“Like I was going to waste my time on a bullshit undergrad course,” comes out of his mouth.
“But it was two free units.”
Alhaitham is on a co-terminal track, and his schedule is stuffed. He doesn’t need two free units. But the way Kaveh talks makes it sound like Alhaitham is missing out on something, and so he can’t help but be just a little curious despite himself.
“…what did you do in the class, anyway?”
Kaveh shrugs. “Get to know the people in your dorm, do some team-building activities, talk about your feelings.”
“That sounds horrible.”
“It wouldn’t kill you to have some fun now and then. Plus,” Kaveh’s expression turns a little sly. “Then we would have met sooner. I was one of the facilitators for Frosh this year.”
He teases Alhaitham, and Alhaitham gets a little flustered. It doesn’t really show. Alhaitham has thick skin, the kind that never really blushes.
Maybe Kaveh can tell, or maybe he can’t. He smiles at Alhaitham and hums a little, tunelessly, under his breath and then goes back to his pile of research materials. It takes Alhaitham another beat, another moment of rapidly blinked eyes, to pull his attention back to his own homework.
He’s having trouble focusing. His eyes somehow just seem to gloss over the pages, slipping over black ink marks without managing to decode any meaning into his brain.
It’s so much later that Kaveh probably doesn’t even remember what he said, and the music in his earbuds is turned up so loud that Alhaitham can hear it from across the table, so he definitely doesn’t hear it when Alhaitham says softly, “I have fun.”
Kaveh chews the end of his mechanical pencil, expression sharp and focused. He doesn’t look up at Alhaitham as Alhaitham watches him turn the page.
* * *
There are twenty-two libraries on campus, and by his second month in school, Alhaitham had tried most of them. He’d given up his search after he’d discovered the philosophy department library, which is small and quiet and clean. There’s never anyone in it, which suits him just fine.
Alhaitham’s headphones are down around his neck as he collates responses to an assignment for his Semantics course. He’d collected translations of simple phrases from as many languages as he could find speakers. His task is to pick out semantic determiners from truth-conditional equivalents. It’s a process of mining, picking out valid inferences from systematic ground: Most children laughed. Therefore, most children are children who laughed. If most A are B is true, then over half of the things which are A are also B.
He looks at the sheet of Indonesian adverb equivalents again.
Basically, children are happy. Pada dasarnya, anak senang.
Generally, children are happy. Pada umumnya, anak senang.
Children are usually happy. Anak biasanya senang.
Looking at what he’s written, his wrist pauses, hovering above the page. Somehow it seems like it suits Kaveh more than himself.
Time elides itself. By the time knuckles rap themselves twice against the edge of his desk, he’s sunk far enough inside his own work that he startles. He looks up into Kaveh’s face, blinking uncomprehending for a moment.
While his brain is still trying to pull itself out of deterministic phrases, Kaveh smiles a little and says, “Sorry I scared you.”
“What are you doing here?” Alhaitham asks dumbly.
“I needed somewhere to study.”
“Where do you usually study?”
“In the architecture building.”
While they’ve been talking, Kaveh has already claimed the chair beside Alhaitham. He tosses down his bag and sits down, flipping open a sketchbook with graphite drawings of buildings and volumetric diagrams flooding both sides of the page. He flips through them until he gets to a clean sheet, props open a textbook, and picks up a pencil. Alhaitham gets caught peering over his shoulder.
“I’m analyzing the ways buildings curate their form,” Kaveh says to Alhaitham’s unvoiced curiosity.
With his pencil, he makes soft, sure lines across the page that scratch softly at Alhaitham’s ears. Alhaitham waits to be bothered, but Kaveh doesn’t. Every so often, Kaveh picks up an X-acto blade and shaves graphite and wood off his pencil and into a small tin. They work together in silence for a while.
After some indeterminate amount of time, Kaveh tosses down his pencil, reaching his arms up above his head in a stretch that cracks one of the vertebra in his spine. His shirt rides up over his slender belly, and he looks around like he’s just seeing the library for the first time.
“Isn’t the decor in here kind of… bad?”
Alhaitham looks around the room with cool green eyes. He honestly hadn’t noticed.
“It’s quiet,” he says.
“It’s ugly,” Kaveh replies firmly.
Their voices sound loud in the quiet room, and Alhaitham has a moment of worrying whether they’ll get kicked out. It’s never been a problem before. He’s never had anyone to talk to.
Alhaitham doesn’t answer him, just turns back to his paper. After a few moments of silence, Kaveh picks his pencil back up, too. Alhaitham wonders if Kaveh minds that he’s quiet. It’s a small thought, easy to miss.
At 5 p.m., they get kicked out of the library, and Kaveh stretches again in the hallway. Alhaitham is starting to wonder if he has back problems.
Kaveh shakes out his wrists and says, “Oh look, we can’t study in that absolute travesty of an interior anymore, what a shame. Guess you’ll have to come with me now.”
He grabs Alhaitham by the wrist and pulls him along. Alhaitham is startled, blinking, by the sudden touch. He doesn’t know why Kaveh wants to go anywhere with him. He stumbles forward before catching his balance.
Kaveh looks at Alhaitham like someone who’s just remembered that you shouldn’t pull cats’ tails or pet their fur backwards. He lets go of Alhaitham’s wrist, but the skin that had been underneath his hand still burns.
“Why would I do that?” Alhaitham asks.
“Because I’m going to take you to a nice library.”
Alhaitham hesitates. He’s about to say no.
“You’re not done with your paper yet, are you?”
It isn’t actually due until Thursday. For some reason, Alhaitham swallows that down.
“There’s a library in the dorm,” Alhaitham says slowly.
He doesn’t know why he says it. He doesn’t like the library in the dorm. If he goes back now, he won’t use it.
Kaveh makes a derisive sound. “Branner, right? No, it sucks there.”
He wonders, if he plants his feet, if Kaveh will pull on his wrist again.
He doesn’t, but when Alhaitham digs in his heels, Kaveh digs right back, telling Alhaitham it’s his sworn duty to show him a better place, come on, it won’t bite. If you hate it there I’ll buy you a coffee and never drag you anywhere ever again.
Kaveh takes him to the library in the art and architecture building that’s still humming with people even as the sun sets.
Alhaitham has actually been in this library before. It’s one of the first ones he’d tried, considering it’s in the same building as one of his morning lectures, but he’d felt out of place in the wide, cavernous space. There’s too much glass and too much chrome. There are too many people who look like Kaveh, the same long, lean proportions in fashionable clothes who seem perfectly like they belong here.
Standing at the top of the stairs, Alhaitham has a recurrent urge to plant his feet, this time without the subsequent desire to be pushed.
Kaveh is blithe and unconcerned, walking through the space like he owns it, chatting at Alhaitham all the while. Beyond the tall, yawning windows, lamps flicker to life against the dusk on the lawn. Kaveh leads him to an alcove in the back with opaque walls that actually close and colorful soft, squishy furniture.
Alhaitham sits as far as possible from the picture windows, and Kaveh sinks into the seat next to him, pulling out his laptop to work on something else.
The feeling of being put on display makes Alhaitham’s skin crawl. It’s no less quiet here than in the Tanner library, but the acoustics make Alhaitham’s skin crawl. After a little while of fighting with himself, Alhaitham pulls his headphones up around his ears and sighs when the comforting buzz of white noise makes the echoes of distant, whispered conversations stop.
He’s alerted with a light tap on his shoulder when he’s almost done with his paper.
“Is it interesting?” Kaveh asks, and because he seems genuinely interested in the answer—in whatever it is Alhaitham has to say, which is not a thing that, generally speaking, is true when a lot of people talk to Alhaitham and vice versa—Alhaitham actually gives him an honest answer. Not yes or no, but,
“What do you think you know about the language you speak?”
“It’s English. And a little bit of French. And. Huh.” Kaveh’s nose scrunches a little. “I mean, it’s communication, isn’t it?”
Alhaitham hums. “Yes, but why do you know the things you know? How do you know what order the words go in, and how do you infer meaning from the relationships between them? How do you know that your inferences contain truth?”
“Truth is truth regardless of the means used to express it. You can check inferences against facts.”
“What about when you can’t? Not every truth can be independently verified by every person. So then we rely on communication.”
He wants, in this moment, to be understood. There’s a soft desperation that he’s unused to, a quiet ache radiating out through his chest.
“I see,” Kaveh says. “I can see why you like it. But do you think all truth can be codified?” Kaveh props his chin on his hand, leaning in. The motion traps the longer wisps of his hair into a bough that cradles the lightly tinkling metal of his earring. “Isn’t there something intangible? Transmission without language, or else what is art for?”
“Art is a kind of communication. An imprecise kind.”
“And therein lies the artist’s skill, to close the gap.”
“But art will never be as precise as language.”
“If language were that precise, we’d never have misunderstandings, but people misinterpret and miscommunicate with each other all the time.”
“Is that a failing of language or a user error?”
“Both,” Kaveh says. “Art communicates on a different level. Why do you feel comfortable in one room but uncomfortable in another? Why do some places have the ability to put you at ease, while others make your skin crawl? Design is also a form of language, maybe the purest kind.”
They’re close enough that Alhaitham can smell Kaveh’s hair and the lightly spiced perfume on his skin.
“I disagree,” Alhaitham says.
“So then make your point,” Kaveh says, leaning in with his garnet-colored eyes dancing.
It makes Alhaitham feel dizzy.
* * *
“So, did you hate it?” Kaveh asks when they leave for the night.
Alhaitham remembers Kaveh’s ridiculous promise—that if he hated it, he would buy Alhaitham a coffee and never drag him anywhere ever again.
“Your library is a design travesty,” Alhaitham says. “The acoustics are a war crime.”
Kaveh laughs, bright, with all his teeth. Alhaitham can’t remember the last time someone laughed at one of his jokes.
“Sorry,” Kaveh says. “For ruining your night. I know you were busy.”
The path away from the art and architecture building is lit by wrought iron lamps that cast an ochre glow, but they’re standing in a blind spot, just far enough away for the light to catch in the golden threads of Kaveh’s hair while the black night softens everything around them.
You didn’t, Alhaitham thinks.
Kaveh doesn’t come looking for him again, and the empty philosophy library loses its appeal.
These things are probably unrelated.
The next time Alhaitham has a full load of homework to take care of—an upsetting amount, considering he’d selected his schedule with the idea to suffer now in exchange for higher quality of life later—his brain just clicks off.
He finds himself standing on the lawn, the mist of rain on his face, with no real recollection of how he got there. So of course the sensible thing is to keep walking. There’s a sharp pain in his foot, and he feels something stinging as it hits his face, dripping into his eyes.
“What. What are you doing?”
There’s a voice that sounds high-strung, vibrating with anxiety.
Alhaitham blinks heavily. His field of vision fills up with cream and gold. Kaveh is standing in front of him on the field, blurring into focus, looking straight at him. He looks angry, and Alhaitham wonders why he’s angry.
“You’re all wet! Didn’t you notice it’s raining?”
Kaveh furrows his brow, peering at Alhaitham’s face. He raises a hand and wipes the raindrops off the side of it, his palm sliding wetly against Alhaitham’s skin, and Alhaitham shivers. Kaveh’s palm feels burning hot against his cheek, which has gone numb from the cold and the rain.
“No,” Alhaitham says. He shakes himself, gaze sharpening as his own straight, slate-grey eyebrows pull down. He pulls his face away from Kaveh’s touch, and Kaveh drops his hand.
Alhaitham stands there numbly.
Kaveh feels anxious. He’d come from Tighnari’s dorm, and his head is still buzzing with the drinks they’d had. He doesn’t know why he’d noticed Alhaitham on the field the way he had. It’s almost full dark now. The lamps haven’t flickered on yet, and everything is smothered in the thick navy black of twilight. The rain makes everything a blur. Kaveh is already wet from standing here waiting for Alhaitham to move.
He’d just been a dark smudge on the field, kind of small for their age. Kaveh had recognized him from the way he moved, what the fuck. He hadn’t even been able to pick out the silvery grey of Alhaitham’s hair from that distance, and up close it’s been drowned in rain, the water around them staining it dark.
“Are you just going for a walk? Didn’t you think to bring an umbrella?”
Kaveh sounds kind of angry, his voice going up in pitch and in volume.
“I don’t know,” Alhaitham says.
“You don’t—”
Is repeating it supposed to make it better?
The rain is coming down hard. By now, Kaveh is almost as soaked as Alhaitham is. He wants to get in out of the rain. If he leaves, is Alhaitham going to keep standing here?
“You shouldn’t stand out here in the rain. You’re going to catch a cold. Come on, let me walk you home.”
Alhaitham’s thoughts feel like they’re churning through mud. He allows Kaveh to march him in the direction of his dorm for a minute before the correct thought clicks.
“I don’t have my key. It’s. My bag. It’s in the library.”
Well, the library is definitely closed by now, Kaveh thinks.
Alhaitham’s voice sounds hoarse, like he hasn’t spoken for days. He frowns at the sound, licking his lips, which are wet—Kaveh wasn’t wrong. He doesn’t remember when it started to rain.
Kaveh is starting to shiver. It’s really cold out here, and they’re both drenched.
“Can your roommate let you in? I’ll give you my phone to call them.”
“I don’t have a roommate.”
Kaveh is a little too drunk to do this. Should he help Alhaitham find campus security? Does he even have his student ID on him? This is too hard.
“Come home with me,” Kaveh says. The words sound a little off, but his brain just steamrolls right over that. “I’m not going to leave you outside in the rain.”
“Why not?” Alhaitham asks.
The rain is really loud. He doesn’t know if Kaveh doesn’t hear him or only pretends he doesn’t.
* * *
Kaveh takes Alhaitham to his house, which is an actual house and not a dorm. Alhaitham doesn’t even register the huge, towering columns that bracket the front porch as Kaveh leads him up the stairs.
“Careful, don’t fall.”
The stairs are slippery, and Kaveh grabs Alhaitham’s arm to steady him. Alhaitham lets himself be touched. The roar of the rain pouring down around them diminishes as soon as they step under the eave of the porch, dripping onto the floorboards as Kaveh digs around in his pockets for his keys, praying to god he didn’t accidentally forget them at Tighnari’s again. He really doesn’t want to talk to his roommates right now.
He finds them and opens the door, glancing worriedly at Alhaitham who seems really out of it. The hall inside is dark until Kaveh reaches out and turns on a light, and Alhaitham stands frozen on his front porch, looking at him like he’s confused.
It freaks Kaveh out, who’s only ever really seen Alhaitham sharp as a tack.
“Hey, come inside,” he says, reaching out to pull Alhaitham through the door by the hand.
His skin is as cold as ice, and Kaveh thinks better of letting go. He leads Alhaitham through the house to his room. The window is open when he gets there, the wind howling loudly from outside, making a high-pitched, eerie noise that seems to bother Alhaitham from the way he shivers. The curtains are blowing wildly, rain pouring over his desk, and Kaveh swears and closes the window.
Alhaitham stays where Kaveh put him, standing in the middle of Kaveh’s room in a way that would break anyone’s heart. Like he’s lost.
“Your headphones?” Kaveh asks, and the statement takes Alhaitham long moments to parse.
Why is Kaveh talking about his headphones?
“Did they get ruined in the rain?” Kaveh prompts.
Alhaitham touches the skin around his neck, which is wet but bare. His ears, too, are bare.
Kaveh’s brow furrows. “Here, let’s get you into the shower.”
Kaveh grabs some clothes out of his drawer, bundling them up and grabbing a clean towel, glad he’d just done a wash recently. He and Alhaitham drip their way to a communal bathroom. Little hexagonal tiles line the floor, and there’s an ancient-looking clawfoot tub beside a slightly less ancient looking shower.
“Do you think you can shower alone?”
Alhaitham wonders why Kaveh is asking him that. He wonders what Kaveh would do if he said no.
He says yes, and Kaveh leaves him with a bundle of his clothes and a clean towel stacked on a chair.
“I’ll be right down the hall. Just… yell at them if one of my roommates bothers you.”
Alhaitham stares after him blankly.
When he’s alone, Alhaitham peels off his heavy clothes that fall to the ground with wet slaps against the tile. He leaves them in a pile and then feels cold and uncertain, naked in someone else’s bathroom. There’s a small, narrow window that’s paned with frosted, corrugated glass. The wind blows raindrops against it, and they drip down like running tears.
He turns on the hot water and steps into the spray, crying out when the water hits his skin. The pain is unexpected. His frozen skin, fingers pale and pruned, hurts as it thaws. The thin spray plays a discordant symphony against his nerve endings, and Alhaitham grits his teeth and bears it.
Eventually, he thaws, and most of his sense comes back, as well. With it comes a sense of chagrined embarrassment. He reaches out to turn off the water, not looking forward to facing Kaveh again in this condition. He drips onto the white tiles, picking up the towel Kaveh had given him to dry himself off.
The clothes Kaveh gave him are warm. They’re a little big on Alhaitham, which means they must be big on Kaveh. He pulls on the baggy sweatpants and the equally baggy sweatshirt, thinking that he’s never seen Kaveh wearing clothes like this. All of Kaveh’s clothes are slim and sleek, just like him. The terry fabric on the inside of the sweats drags against Alhaitham’s bare legs, his arms and belly, making his hair stand on end. As soon as he puts them on, he’s wrapped in an unfamiliar scent.
He smells like Kaveh, like his laundry soap and shampoo and the slightly sweet, spicy smell that clings to him whenever they’re in the library together. It fully turns Alhaitham’s stomach, which feels miserable aside from being empty.
Lingering here in the damp bathroom won’t change anything, and he doesn’t actually want to run into one of the roommates Kaveh mentioned. With no other options, he lets himself out of the bathroom, finding his way back to where he remembers Kaveh’s bedroom being.
He pauses outside the door, which is cracked open. He raises his fist to knock and holds it there, indecisive.
On second thought, he just lets himself in.
The lights are off in Kaveh’s room, the only bare light coming in from outside the window. Kaveh is lying on his bed, on his back with an arm flung up over his eyes. He isn’t moving, and for a second, the picture looks so lonely.
Alhaitham shifts uncomfortably, realizing that Kaveh hasn’t heard him come in. He clears his throat, feeling awkward.
“Alhaitham,” Kaveh says, sitting up so fast he seems to startle himself. His head spins, and he ignores it. It takes some time for his eyes to adjust. The light from the hall is bracketing Alhaitham from outside, highlighting the tips of his silver hair and making his face impossible to read.
He’s so flustered and caught wrong-footed that Alhaitham collects himself and speaks first.
He clears his throat again. “Thanks. For letting me use your shower.”
Kaveh sighs tiredly and nods, shoving his hand through his damp hair. He remembers himself and hates himself a little bit for sighing—more than a little.
“I’m just glad you’re alright,” Kaveh says and means it down to his bones.
He’s changed his clothes too, probably when Alhaitham was in the shower. He isn’t wearing a pair of sweats like Alhaitham, instead wearing a loose Stanford tee that drapes around his thin frame. He’s got a pair of flannel pants on the bottom, some indeterminate color in the low light. The moment stands too still when neither of them are speaking.
Kaveh asks if he’s eaten, and for a moment, Alhaitham is tempted to lie.
He shakes his head, though, and Kaveh bustles to the kitchen to get him something to eat.
Alhaitham sits himself on Kaveh’s bed instead of following him to the kitchen where he hasn’t been invited and feels a wave of exhaustion engulf him. He sinks into the mattress, feeling like he’s being pulled toward the earth. Has he been this tired all along and just never noticed it?
He doesn’t think he falls asleep sitting up, but the warm, quiet darkness of the room lures him into such a soporific trance that it feels like he’s only blinked by the time the door widens and Kaveh reappears at its mouth. He has a plate of wheat crackers, cheese, and grapes and hands it to Alhaitham, who tries to blink a little more awareness into his brain.
“Here. I don’t have a lot of food in the house, but you should eat something.”
Kaveh sits next to him, close enough that Alhaitham can feel his warmth. He wants to lean into Kaveh’s side but doesn’t. He sets the plate in his lap and starts to eat slowly. The cheese is chalky and cold, broken up by the bland crunch of crackers and the sweet, cold tartness of the green grapes. Alhaitham didn’t think he was hungry, but he finishes the plate of food, and some of the dizzy buzzing in his head starts to fade.
Kaveh sits quietly beside him, watching him eat in the dark. When he’s finished, he takes the plate and sets it on his nightstand. He’s too tired—he’ll deal with it in the morning.
When Alhaitham is finished eating, he just sits there, swaying a little woozily and blinking his eyes. He should probably get up now. The walk back across campus—he lives on the other side of it from Kaveh. He’ll get wet again unless Kaveh has an umbrella he can borrow. Maybe he does. Alhaitham should ask.
“I don’t have a roommate right now,” Kaveh says, clearing his throat and breaking the silence. “He just moved out, so you can sleep here if you want.”
Kaveh eyes the bare mattress across the room dubiously. Given what he knows of his last roommate, who had been a lovely person but somewhat lacking in the hygiene department, he doesn’t trust it not to be full of bedbugs. Besides, he’d found Alhaitham wandering dazed on the lawn, about to freeze to death.
“You can sleep in my bed,” Kaveh says. “I’ll sleep over there.”
Alhaitham is feeling better after his shower and a meal to pad his stomach. Vital parts of his brain have been subject to a thaw, and he feels aware and alert to time and place. But maybe part of him is still in a daze. Maybe that’s why his arm darts out, reaching across the short distance to snag the hem of Kaveh’s shirt.
Kaveh makes a sound and turns to look at him, an open question on his face, lined by the faint light from the window.
“Don’t sleep in the unmade bed,” Alhaitham says tiredly. His fingers twist in Kaveh’s shirt, gripping it tightly and not letting him leave for some unknown reason.
Kaveh stares at him like he’s looking for some hidden meaning on Alhaitham’s face. Alhaitham lets go of his shirt and moves away, pushing himself to the inside of Kaveh’s bed. He lies down and turns toward the wall to hide his face.
Kaveh looks at his back, at a loss for words.
Alhaitham’s ribs rise and fall with his breath, which comes a little too fast and hard for sleep.
“At least get under the covers,” Kaveh murmurs, his voice low.
He pulls open the covers on the opposite side of the bed, sliding beneath them. After a while, Alhaitham, still breathing fast, sidles under the blankets as well.
The bed is small enough that they’re pressed close to each other’s sides, sharing warmth as the storm rages on outside. Alhaitham feels a jolt as the slender ankle he’s noticed so many times brushes against his.
“Sorry,” Kaveh murmurs sleepily.
There’s a thought on the tip of Alhaitham’s tongue, but sleep pulls him under before he can manage to think it.