Chapter Text
Avery stared at his phone, thumb hovering over the send button for an embarrassing amount of time. He'd already rewritten the message twice. The first version had a heart emoji. The second had an exclamation point that felt too desperate. The third was simple, clean, and gave absolutely nothing away.
|Avery|: Hey, meet me at Linden's at 4?
He hit send before he could talk himself out of it again.
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again. Then:
|Derek|: Ok.
Avery snorted. One word. No punctuation beyond the period. No emoji, no question, no "sounds fun" or "what's the occasion?". Just "Ok". He could practically hear Derek's voice behind it, flat and certain, already filing the plan away in whatever impossibly organized mental calendar he kept.
"I adore you," Avery muttered to the glowing screen of his phone, "but sometimes you text like a robot."
He pocketed his phone and checked himself in the bathroom mirror one more time. The ginger at his roots was growing in again, warm against the pale ends of his waves. He pushed his hair back, then forward, then gave up and let it do whatever it wanted. He looked fine. He looked like someone going to a café with someone he liked. That was the whole point.
Linden's was a ten-minute walk from campus, tucked between a used bookstore and a place that sold overpriced candles. It had mismatched chairs, good lighting, and a lavender latte that Derek pretended he didn't love but ordered every single time. Avery had picked it on purpose.
He got there early. Grabbed a table by the window where the afternoon sun came through soft and golden. Ordered two lavender lattes because he already knew. Sat down, folded his hands on the empty table, and waited.
Derek walked in at 3:46, because Derek was constitutionally incapable of being late to anything. He had his backpack slung over one shoulder and a second, smaller bag in his other hand, and Avery's stomach did something complicated when he noticed Derek had changed out of the hoodie he'd been wearing in their morning class into a dark green button-down with the sleeves rolled to his elbows.
Then Derek sat down across from him, unzipped the smaller bag, and pulled out a thick binder, two highlighters, and a German-English dictionary.
"I brought the some notes," Derek said, setting everything in a neat row. "And the practice problems from last week, since you said the verb conjugations were giving you trouble."
Avery looked at the binder. Looked at the highlighters. Looked at Derek's face, which was calm and expectant and completely, devastatingly sincere.
He thinks this is a study session.
Of course he did. Avery had been struggling with his German elective for weeks, and Derek—who could slip between five languages like he was switching tabs on a browser—had been helping him through it without a single trace of condescension. That was the thing about Derek. He never made Avery feel stupid for not getting something. He just found a different angle, explained it again, waited. Patient in a way that made Avery's chest ache if he thought about it too long.
"You didn't have to bring all that," Avery said carefully.
"You've been stuck on dative prepositions for a week." Derek clicked one of the highlighters open, then closed, then open again—a habit he probably didn't know he had. "Figured we could knock it out."
Avery glanced down at his own side of the table. No bag. No notebook. No laptop. Just his phone, his wallet, and two lavender lattes.
Derek followed his gaze. A small crease formed between his brows and he tilted his head in an owlish manner. "Did you forget your stuff?"
No, because I wasn't planning on studying. I was planning on sitting across from you in nice lighting and watching you drink something you love and pretending for one hour that this was a date.
"Must have left it in my room," Avery said lightly. He pushed one of the lattes toward Derek. "Got you this, though."
Derek looked at the latte. The crease smoothed out, replaced by something softer that he probably didn't know was showing on his face either. "You didn't have to do that."
"Wanted to."
Derek wrapped both hands around the cup like it was something precious. He took a sip, and Avery watched the tiny shift in his expression—the way his shoulders dropped half an inch, the way his eyes closed for just a beat longer than a normal blink.
"Okay," Derek said, setting the cup down and flipping the binder open with renewed purpose. "We can share my notes. Come on, scoot your chair over."
Avery scooted his chair over. Their elbows bumped. Derek smelled like laundry detergent and something warm underneath, and he was already pointing at a conjugation chart, voice low and steady as he walked through the dative case like it was a story he was telling just for Avery.
And Avery listened. He actually listened, because that was the other thing—Derek made it interesting. He'd throw in etymologies and weird historical footnotes, and his whole face would change when he got excited about a linguistic pattern, animated in a way he rarely was around anyone else.
"See, once you stop thinking of it as memorization and start hearing the rhythm, it clicks," Derek said, tapping the page. "German has a logic to it. You just have to trust the structure."
"Trust the structure," Avery repeated, watching Derek's profile in the warm light.
Yeah, I can do that.
It wasn't the date he'd planned. But Derek was here, relaxed, close enough that their shoulders almost touched, explaining something he loved to someone he cared about. And Avery thought, not for the first time, that part of loving this man was paying attention and patience.
He had time.