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“Sorry, but all of our study rooms are occupied,” the librarian said from behind the reception desk.
“Really?” Your shoulders slouched. “Is there not even an available spot in any of them?”
“Oh, I should have clarified that! My bad. Study room 105 only has a boy in it right now.”
You sighed. Expecting the study rooms in the library to be empty with finals approaching was dreaming big. If only your dorm room wasn’t a shoebox and the campus’ library wasn’t crowded with other students watching brainrot on the computers, you wouldn’t need to come all the way here.
“That’s fine, it will do,” you reassured the librarian, giving her a small nod.
The woman gave you another nod in return. “Feel free to call me if you need anything.”
After thanking the librarian, you headed for the stairs and made your way up. You couldn’t wait to reach that room and put down on a table the books and notebooks you had been carrying all the way from campus. The library isn’t that far away, you thought. Holding all these things during a fifteen-minute walk won’t be a problem, you thought as well. Your burning biceps begged to differ.
You headed right and the doors to the various study rooms came into view. Next to them, minimalistic white signs with bold black numbers. Your eyes were fixed on them until you finally passed by the one you were looking for. When you moved your arm towards the doorknob, you lost your balance and stumbled forward. You had been enduring the brick-like weight of your study material for so long that the lightness in your arm took you by surprise. You only hoped the same wouldn’t happen once you finally let go of the books.
You turned the doorknob and walked into the room, closing the door behind you and managing to do it without a sound. Modern shelves in steel and pale wood populated the area, all of them crowded with books of all colors and thicknesses.
As the librarian had told you, there was only a boy there. His head was down, eyes fixed on whatever was in his open notebook. The array of books around him told you he was taking this study session to heart.
“Hi,” you muttered, not expecting an answer. Sure enough, he didn’t even look your way.
You approached the table and situated yourself opposite to the stranger, picking the chair left to the seat across from him; you didn’t want to invade his space, nor did you want him to invade yours. The test you were studying for was as important as his. You put your books down on the table and, despite how hard you tried not to, you let out an audible sigh of relief. Knowing how fussy some people could get over small noises in libraries, your shoulders shrank right away, but you got no response either. Damn, you thought, giving the white-haired young man a glance. He must have been wearing earplugs or something.
You sat down, opened a couple of books, one of the notebooks, and took out your pencil case from your shoulder bag; trusty and practical, but not big enough to be used as an alternative backpack.
You were neck-deep in the ins and outs of the Industrial Revolution. By now, you were used to having images of cotton spinners, steam engines, iron furnaces, and factories flash before your eyes every time you blinked. You were lucky you found history as a whole fascinating. Otherwise, you would have pulled all of your hair out by now.
You opened your pencil case and took out your favorite highlighter, a pastel purple one that deviated from the usual colors. You had to take notes on what the Industrial Revolution entailed for workers. The books in front of you—which were of your ownership—had great chapters on the subject. You’d be making an amazing summary thanks to them.
You highlighted away, the words on the page putting on a pastel purple coat that contrasted with the realities the text informed about: dirty working and living conditions, illnesses that didn’t deter employers from exploiting their workers, never-before-seen levels of pollution… You skipped redundant words and adverbs, leaving only the most relevant information. Many of your classmates admired your ability to pick up what mattered from what didn’t.
The tip of the highlighter glided across the page until its ink lost steam, much like the machines you were reading about. You huffed. This couldn’t be happening. Your other highlighters were in your desk’s drawer. You knew the pastel purple highlighter didn’t have that much ink left, but you trusted it to last at least until the finals. How could it let you down like that? You weren’t about to highlight the text with your pencil; you couldn’t trace a straight line with it for the life of you. It wouldn’t look pretty,
Then, you glanced over at your unplanned study partner and a desperate idea formed. He had a couple of highlighters out and he wasn’t using either of them.
You cleared your throat. “Hey.” The boy continued to scribble in his notebook. “Excuse me, could you lend me one of your—”
He looked at you and you found yourself face to face with the bluest eyes you had ever seen. Despite the black oversized glasses framing them, they dazzled you like when sunlight reflected on the sea’s surface on a summer day and made it shimmer like a thousand tiny lightbulbs had lit up at the same time.
“Yes?” he asked, encouraging you to continue with a hint of a smile on his plump, soft-looking lips.
“Uh…” You had barely heard him over your heart’s frantic beats. “If it’s not an issue, could you lend me one of your highlighters? Mine has just run out of ink and I kinda need one.” You giggled, trying to calm yourself down.
Wait, why did you need to calm down? Was it because you didn’t feel worthy of being in the presence of that living work of art? Not even the so-called most handsome guy in your college could hold a candle to him.
“Sure, here you go.” He extended one of the highlighters towards you. It was a neon blue one, but it somehow failed to match his eyes’ vibrancy.
“Thank you,” you said, taking the marker from him.
You went back to your previous task. The bright blue picked up where the pastel purple left off, coloring the texts with precision. Your notes had been saved thanks to the gorgeous stranger sharing the study room with you.
A few minutes later, you had highlighted all of the necessary information. It was time to give everything a read, close the book, and write down in your notebook everything you remembered. That study method had granted you some of the best grades in your class and you hoped it’d do the same for the finals.
You read from the top of the first page, your eyes following along the purple-coated words… until they drifted towards the boy on the other side of the table, who was still as focused as he could be on his own work. The baby blue pullover he was wearing clung to his arms in a way that hinted at some muscle beneath all of that cotton. Could it be from carrying so many books? Maybe. Your own arms were threatening to greet you with an ugly muscle fever when you woke up tomorrow morning.
You turned your attention back to your book, but you raised your head not long after because you thought you had seen him move out of the corner of your eye. That wasn’t the case. Deep down, you were just trying to think of excuses to eye that guy. Hopefully he wouldn’t notice because if that happened, the floor should open under your chair and swallow you up.
The neon blue highlighter he had lent you was now hanging out in the back of your mind, overshadowed by thoughts about the living conditions of factory workers and the unfairness of having literal children work themselves to exhaustion. With how focused you were, you’d be writing a compelling and informative set of notes once you closed the b—
“Excuse me, could you give the highlighter back to me?” The gorgeous young man was looking at you with those impossibly blue eyes of his, leaning forward on the table.
Processing his words took you a second because your focus had shifted to his harmonious features. Before he could ask you why you were staring at him like he had just handed you the answers for all of your upcoming tests, you giggled like a fool and handed him his highlighter.
“Here you go.” You kind of hoped his fingertips would brush yours, but that didn't happen.
“Thank you.” And he went back to his homework, notes, or whatever he was working on.
Your gaze lingered on him for a couple of seconds, just like the silly smile on your lips. Who could blame you? Not only was he cute, he was also polite and looked like someone you could have a nice conversation with.
You returned your attention to your text. The paragraph where you had left off detailed the horrors of tuberculosis in British cities; your lungs constricted just from reading about it. You turned the page and in doing so, you shot your study partner another glance. Maybe because you needed a breather—never better said—or because you were feeling bold all of a sudden, you made your voice heard again.
“What are you studying for?”
Still holding the neon blue highlighter, the young man raised his head.
“Math,” he answered. “Statistics, to be exact. They’re a walk in the park.”
You chuckled and leaned forward without even realizing. “I’ve never heard anyone call anything related to math ‘a walk in the park’. I always struggled with them,” you admitted, averting your gaze.
He gave you a small and reassuring smile that triggered butterflies so intense you almost took your hand to your chest.
“It must be because you didn’t have the right teachers. When explained properly, math feels like a game.”
“A game?” You snorted. “Yeah, a game that makes me want to rage quit.”
And he laughed, loud and lighthearted. You laughed along with him and for a moment, the smoking factories and the people coughing up a lung vanished from your thoughts. When your laughter subsided, the young man still looked at you, his expression relaxed and a bit contemplative. You couldn’t take your eyes off him now and, luckily for you, he didn’t seem to mind.
After a few seconds of light silence, he said, “What about you? What are you studying for?”
“History, the Industrial Revolution.” You showed him your book, with the purple and blue lines forming a neat pattern on the pages. “I love history, it’s like watching a show or reading a book, except everything you’re hearing about is… a true history.” You chuckled at your own stupid joke just in case the white-haired boy didn’t.
But he did, and it was music to your ears.
“You’re right. I liked history classes when I was in high school, although they weren’t too in-depth.”
“Yeah,” You ran your hand over your hair. “I guess they didn’t want to overwhelm our teenage minds with too much information.”
After that, the study session could no longer be called such. In between glances at your respective books and notebooks, you and the attractive math lover shared various anecdotes about your high school years. He told you about the time his PE teacher yelled at him and his best friend for involving the throwing of basketballs in an argument they had during recess; you told him about when you tried to leave school because it was your last class of the day and the teacher wasn’t coming, but she walked into the building just as you were going to sign out.
The clock struck quarter to eight in the afternoon and a chime was heard in the study room. It signaled that the library would be closing soon and people in it should finish their businesses and leave. You and your study partner still stayed seated for a few minutes more before he closed his notebook.
“Looks like this is the end of our study session,” he said, looking at you while zipping his pencil case closed.
“Yeah, I want to say it was a productive one.”
You said that although you spent most of it talking to the guy and laughing with him, but you didn’t regret a thing.
“When’s your history test happening?”
“Next week, on Wednesday,” you answered right away, the date circled in red appearing before your mind’s eye. Then, before he could put anything else in his backpack, you clasped your hands together. “Um… Will you be here tomorrow?”
The young man’s hands hovered over his statistics book and he let them rest over its cover. He shook his head. “No, my test is tomorrow.”
“Oh, I see.” You lowered your head and forced out a smile that tried to wish him good luck.
“Although–” he opened his pencil case again and fetched a random piece of paper from his backpack. He wrote something on it “–I know of a numerical sequence that will ensure we meet again.”
He gave the slip of paper to you. On it, you found his phone number and his name, Satoru. You had to clench it between your thumb and index to try and mask the shaking of your hand.
“Satoru…” you read the name out loud, and after putting his number into your pocket, you reached for a piece of paper yourself. “I happen to know about another numerical sequence with the same effect.”
You wrote your phone number and name and handed it to Satoru. He took a look at it and grinned.
“I’ll call you tomorrow if you don’t mind, after my test.” He carefully slid the slip of paper inside his pocket.
You nodded, although in your mind, you were pumping your fists into the air. “That’s fine. If you catch me studying, I’ll use it as an excuse to take a break.”
Satoru smiled again. You could watch him smile for hours and you wouldn’t get tired. It’d be even more enthralling than a documentary on the Middle Ages.
“Alright. Good luck with your upcoming history text.” He leaned forward and, despite the table standing between the two of you, he reached out his arm and patted your shoulder. The young man added, “Although I don’t think you’ll need it.”
While you were wearing a sweater that covered all of your skin, your shoulder still tingled in the area Satoru had touched. You blinked a couple of times and bit back a stupid-sounding giggle, the one people make in movies when their crush says “Hi” to them.
“Thanks, and same to you. I’m sure you’ll do great tomorrow.”
He thanked you with a gesture of his head. You rushed to pack up all of your stuff so Satoru wouldn’t see the growing blush spreading across your cheeks and forehead. With your shoulder bag on and your books in your arms, you passed by him and said goodbye with a fleeting look; Satoru said it back.
If only you had looked at him one last time, you would have seen that he watched you leave with dreamy eyes, already looking forward to sharing another study session with you. Both you and he knew this one was only the first of many.