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Kaveh does the math on a Tuesday.
He’s elbow-deep in rejected blueprints and half-finished project proposals, three days late on a commission he swore would be “transformative,” and halfway through a bottle of fermented peach wine that expired four months ago—yet somehow tastes better for it. He’s hunched over the battered drafting desk in the corner of his house (technically still Alhaitham’s house, technically still shared living quarters, technically still a battlefield of passive-aggression and bathroom schedule skirmishes), muttering to himself and doing complex trigonometry in the margins of a receipt from Puspa Café.
He is not, under any circumstances, doing this for emotional reasons. He is simply—objectively, mathematically—trying to prove a point. The point is not that he’s in love with his allegedly heartless, rationality-worshipping, smugly dimpled bastard of a roommate. That would be absurd. That would be bad. That would be—
“Unacceptable,” he mutters aloud, stabbing the tip of his pencil through the paper. “Statistically unsound. I’ve isolated the wrong variables.”
From the other room, Alhaitham says, without looking up from his book, “Have you tried isolating your delusions instead?”
Kaveh throws the pencil. It hits the doorframe. Not Alhaitham. He’s not that lucky. He’s also not that stable, if we’re being honest.
Unfortunately, the numbers do not lie. The numbers are cruel and exact and merciless in their tally. And the numbers say:
- Alhaitham makes him coffee every morning (even when Kaveh is “not speaking to him” out of principle).
- Alhaitham adjusted the water temperature of the shower to match Kaveh’s preferences without ever commenting on it.
- Alhaitham once reached over during a heated philosophical debate and tucked Kaveh’s hair behind his ear without breaking eye contact or interrupting the rebuttal.
- Alhaitham has dimples.
Dimples should not be admissible evidence. They are not intellectually rigorous.
And yet.
Kaveh has created an entire subsection in his notebook titled “Re: Dimples – Weaponized?” There are graphs. There are marginal annotations. There is a smudge from when he spilled tea on the page after accidentally looking directly at Alhaitham mid-smirk.
He should have known. He should have known the moment he started quantifying emotional damage like it was a construction estimate. He is so doomed.
“I’m not doomed,” he tells the window, mostly because the window doesn’t talk back.
He immediately hears Alhaitham call out from the other room, “Confirmation bias.”
Kaveh flings an entire folder of paperwork across the room. It explodes into a flutter of schematics and receipts and a very unflattering charcoal sketch of Alhaitham labeled “Annoying Bastard (See Footnote 5).”
Alhaitham appears in the doorway two seconds later with his hair unbothered and shirt unwrinkled. Facial expression that special brand of unbothered neutrality Kaveh has been trying and failing to define since the first month of cohabitation. “What did the folder do to you this time?”
“Betrayed me,” Kaveh says grimly. “Like everyone else in this house.”
“There’s only two of us.”
“Exactly.”
Alhaitham sighs the way only someone who genuinely believes in logical fallacies as emotional weapons can sigh. He steps over the exploded folder debris, stoops, picks up the “Annoying Bastard” sketch, and gives it a once-over.
“I don’t think you captured my jawline correctly,” he says.
Kaveh screams into a pillow.
It’s a process. The thing is, it’s not just the dimples. Kaveh could forgive dimples. Kaveh could possibly even survive dimples. But there are other factors at play, more dangerous ones, things like—
—how Alhaitham always lets Kaveh win exactly one argument a week, like a treat.
—how Alhaitham only ever speaks in his low, lazy, bored-academic tone unless Kaveh is upset, and then it gets quiet. Careful.
—how, last week, Kaveh dropped a roll of blueprints and Alhaitham caught them without looking, mid-sentence, and passed them back like it was nothing, like he’s always ready, always aware of where Kaveh is, always—
This isn’t love, he thinks. It’s war. Alhaitham is simply trying to gaslight him into a permanent state of flustered intellectual disarray.
Well, it won’t work. He’s survived worse. He survived the Academia’s mandatory logic classes, his thesis presentation in front of four professors who thought “romantic architecture” was an oxymoron, and a full month of sharing a kitchen with someone who alphabetizes their spices but leaves the milk on the counter.
He can survive this. He will survive this. He’s not doing the math again.
(He does the math again.)
Worse, he converts it into a table. Then a bar graph. Then a multi-dimensional relational map of conversational interaction over time, with color-coding for flirtation versus vitriol versus that strange neutral tension that feels like standing on the edge of a very tall building during a thunderstorm while a violin plays in the distance. He names the violin tension “variable V.” He tries to label their Tuesday coffee conversations as platonic. He fails.
There is nothing platonic about the way Alhaitham says “you’re impossible” while pouring him creamer. There is nothing platonic about the way Kaveh finds himself responding with “and you’re insufferable” in a tone that has somehow, inexplicably, evolved from murderous to affectionate over the course of twelve identical mornings. He’s pretty sure there’s something in the creamer. Poison. Or, worse—intent. Worse than that—affection.
There’s a moment, one night, when everything tilts just a little too far.
They’re seated on the floor, because the couch is still being used as a storage zone for Kaveh’s latest overambitious redesign of a civic theater that absolutely no one asked for. There’s wine. There’s a terrible documentary playing on the tablet about ancient ruins and historically inaccurate furniture placement. Kaveh is ranting.
“And it’s just—blatant historical slander. The Shahr-e Reghal never used wood carved seating like that. It was all stonework. The lumbar support—”
“You should do something about it,” Alhaitham says mildly. “Write a paper. Demand a retraction.”
Kaveh snorts. “Oh yes, let me channel my rage into academic discourse, like some sort of rational adult.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“I say that like you invented it and cursed me with it.”
Alhaitham glances at him. For a fraction of a second, something glimmers in his eyes, something like fondness, sharp and edged and too bare. “You’re not cursed, Kaveh.”
Kaveh means to respond with something witty, something vulgar and offhanded and theatrical, but then Alhaitham’s hand brushes his, just barely, just enough to make the universe glitch a little. And Kaveh forgets what the hell a punchline is.
Instead he says, “You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“Looking at me like that.”
Alhaitham raises an eyebrow. “You’ll have to be more specific.”
Kaveh swallows. “Like I’m… something you want to write a footnote about.”
Alhaitham doesn’t smile. Not really. But his eyes do something. His mouth tilts just slightly. “I would never relegate you to a footnote.”
“Oh gods, that’s worse,” Kaveh says, and pretends to die on the rug.
It doesn’t help. The look stays. Like he’s something Alhaitham is studying. Memorizing. Maybe even—
No. Not that.
Kaveh buries his face in the carpet and groans. He is doomed. So, so doomed.
He does not, in fact, die on the rug, though it’s a near thing. Instead, he lies there for a long, shuddering moment of intellectual and emotional crisis, his face mashed into the carpet fibers like a martyr felled by academic flirtation. Which is not a real phenomenon, mind you, except maybe it is now, and it has dimples and a smirk and a doctoral thesis in weaponized detachment.
“I’m ignoring you,” he says, voice muffled.
“You’re talking to me.”
“I’m ignoring you aloud.”
Alhaitham, predictably, says nothing. This would be fine, except it’s not silence. Not really. It’s that other thing. The tension-thing. The V variable. The violin-on-a-ledge, wine-dark sea of a silence that isn’t absence but rather presence held in breathless stasis, the kind of quiet that hums.
Kaveh is allergic to that kind of quiet. It gets in his joints.
He lifts his head and glares blearily across the carpet, hair in his eyes, dignity somewhere under the coffee table. “I can feel you thinking.”
“I can assure you,” Alhaitham says, dry as the Sumeru desert in drought, “I am doing no such thing.”
Liar, Kaveh thinks. But then again, Alhaitham doesn’t lie. He just… reframes truth until it walks out wearing entirely different shoes.
Kaveh pushes himself upright with the air of a condemned man facing a firing squad made of syllogisms and statistically improbable eye contact. He is, unfortunately, still within touching range. And Alhaitham is still watching him with that impossible gaze, like he’s composed entirely of parentheses and curiosity and something unspeakably ancient, as if wanting is a concept he’s dissecting under a microscope in real time.
Kaveh narrows his eyes. “What is it?”
“What is what?”
“That look.”
Alhaitham blinks. “You’ll have to be more specific.”
Kaveh throws a throw pillow at him.
It is caught. Effortlessly, and offhandedly. Like Kaveh’s emotional outbursts are just another household hazard to catalog between dishwashing and watering the succulents.
“You look like you’ve already written a thesis on me and you’re now quietly reviewing the footnotes for errata,” Kaveh says. “With smugness.”
“Now you’re just being paranoid.”
“You smiled.”
“I twitched.”
“You smiled. That’s practically sedition.”
Alhaitham sets the pillow aside with infuriating calm. “You’re overanalyzing.”
“I am literally a professional analyzer. It is, tragically, my job.”
“Then you’re overperforming.”
“That’s rich,” Kaveh snaps, “coming from a man who once rewrote an entire treatise on intertextual epistemology because the page margins offended your sensibilities.”
“They were inefficient,” Alhaitham says, like it’s a religious truth.
“You’re inefficient! Emotionally!”
Silence.
Kaveh realizes, too late, that he has thrown open the door to Emotional Things, and now they are here, uninvited, like tax collectors or affection.
He tries to claw it back. “Not that I care,” he says quickly. “About your emotional inefficiency. You’re perfectly suited to the sterile void of academic existence. Like a very tall cactus. Emotionally arid with glasses.”
“That was oddly poetic.”
“It was venomous,” Kaveh says, with feeling. “There was metaphorical sand involved.”
Alhaitham hums. “Cacti store water, you know.”
Kaveh stares at him. “Is this a metaphor?”
“Are you asking if I’m secretly emotionally abundant?”
Kaveh flounders. “I—no—I’m asking if you just compared yourself to a houseplant.”
“Succulent, technically.”
“You’re impossible.”
“And you’re loud.”
“Oh, that’s rich! I am loud because I am alive, unlike you, who operates on fossil fuel and indifference!”
Alhaitham raises a brow. “You’re calling me emotionally inefficient while engaging in emotional pyrotechnics over a documentary on pre-Celestial seating arrangements.”
“That’s different! That’s architecture. Everyone knows architecture is love made stone.”
Alhaitham’s gaze flickers. It’s nothing. It’s not a reaction. It’s not—
No, wait. That’s a twitch in his lip. That’s—
“Are you smiling again?” Kaveh gasps. “Are you doing the dimples? Stop that. This is a serious moment.”
“I’m simply fascinated,” Alhaitham says. “By your capacity for dramatic overinterpretation.”
“It’s not overinterpretation if it’s correct,” Kaveh hisses. “You’re practically dripping subtext.”
Alhaitham’s voice drops, just slightly. “And what, exactly, am I subtexting?”
Kaveh opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. There are equations in his brain. Dangerous ones. The kind that involve glances that last just a heartbeat too long, the way Alhaitham’s fingers linger on a teacup after Kaveh’s used it, the precise angle at which he always stands just within arm’s reach. Ratios. Variables. Hypotheses.
Doom.
He says, with the bravado of a man barely holding the line between bickering and spontaneous emotional combustion, “You tell me.”
A beat.
“I’m not,” Alhaitham says, too quiet, “relegating you to a footnote, Kaveh.”
Kaveh’s breath catches.
“You said that already,” he whispers.
“I know,” Alhaitham says. “I meant it.”
Kaveh looks at him. Really looks at the steady gaze, the unsmiling mouth, the infuriating aura of calm, and the hands—those traitorous hands that passed him tea and caught his blueprints and brushed his hair from his face like it meant something, like any of this meant—
“Don’t,” Kaveh says, voice too thin. “Don’t say things like that unless you’re—unless you’re doing it on purpose.”
There’s a pause. Then—
“I am,” Alhaitham says. “Doing it on purpose.”
Kaveh hates this. He hates the way his whole body heats like a fever dream. He hates the way his mind, architect to his own doom, runs simulations of what it would be like to lean forward half an inch.
He hates the way his voice shakes when he says, “You’re joking. You’re making fun of me.”
“I’m not.”
“You don’t even like people.”
“I like you.”
Oh.
Oh no.
That wasn’t math.
Kaveh blinks. His hands are shaking. His brain has blue-screened. He is rebooting. He is rebooting with errors.
“That’s not a rational statement,” he croaks.
“I’m not rational,” Alhaitham says, “around you.”
Kaveh doesn’t say anything. He can’t. He is too busy melting into component atoms. Too busy recalculating the constants of his emotional infrastructure. Too busy trying not to lean in.
(He fails.)
But if he leans in, then Alhaitham will know. Then Kaveh will know. Then there’s no going back.
So instead he blinks and straightens up. He grabs a nearby textbook and flings it across the room.
“THIS IS FINE,” he yells.
Alhaitham just watches him, expression unreadable. Then, after a long pause, says mildly, “You threw my copy of Discourse Analysis in Hermeneutic Semiotics.”
“Good!” Kaveh shouts. “Let the record show that I have declared a crisis.”
“I believe,” Alhaitham says, “that the crisis was declared some time ago.”
Kaveh sits down again, hard, cross-legged and wide-eyed and emotionally ruined.
They sit in silence.
The documentary loops back to the beginning.
“I need,” Kaveh says, “a drink.”
“You have half a bottle of expired peach wine.”
“I need,” Kaveh corrects, “a plan.”
Alhaitham hums. “You could try not overthinking.”
Kaveh glares at him. “You could try not being secretly emotionally invested.”
“I’m not secretly anything.”
“You’re a menace.”
“You’re dramatic.”
“You’re—”
“You’re—" Kaveh starts again, but the sentence collapses under the weight of too many possible endings. Infuriating. Infatuating. Inescapable. Impossible.
You’re everything I can’t factor out of the equation.
You’re what breaks the curve.
You’re the reason my heart sounds like an unsolved proof.
He opens his mouth again, but all that emerges is a flustered strangled noise that sounds like an academic dying in a field of sunflowers.
“You’re infuriating,” he lands on, weakly, vaguely, as if it’s a placeholder he’ll revise later. Draft One of a heartbreak. Draft One of something worse.
Alhaitham, for his part, remains unbothered. Seated, composed, spine a line drawn with a ruler and mouth a straight plane intersecting Kaveh’s will to emotionally regulate. “You’ve said that already.”
“And yet it remains true,” Kaveh hisses. “If I keep saying it, maybe it’ll form a shield against your ridiculous face.”
“Interesting hypothesis. How’s that working out for you?”
“Poorly! Like everything else in this house!”
They’re both still sitting on the floor. Neither of them gets up. Kaveh is vaguely aware of the fact that he has been emotionally self-immolating in the presence of his worst mistake for the better part of an hour. That his legs are numb. That the rug has turned into a battlefield and the couch has become a fortress and the documentary has looped again and is now talking about Mesopotamian loveseat ergonomics with worrying enthusiasm.
And still. They remain.
“Let me guess,” Kaveh mutters. “Now you’re going to quote some obscure philosopher about love being a logical paradox and then say it’s all irrelevant because emotions are an inefficient variable in the human condition.”
“No,” Alhaitham says. “I was going to ask if you’ve eaten today.”
Kaveh blinks.
“What?”
“You haven’t moved from that spot in three hours.”
“I’ve been doing the math.”
“Yes, I noticed. You re-created our shared coffee schedule as a relational matrix and color-coded it by flirtation density.”
“I was trying to find patterns.”
“You assigned me a rating system.”
“You keep weaponizing the dimples!”
Alhaitham leans back against the couch, arms folded. “And?”
“I’m not feeding into this,” Kaveh says, standing suddenly with the grandeur of a man preparing to leap off a rhetorical cliff. “I am a professional. A scholar. An emotionally repressed academic disaster with an excellent jawline and a rapidly deteriorating sense of dignity.”
“Correct on all counts,” Alhaitham murmurs.
Kaveh points a finger at him, trembling with righteous indignation. “Do not validate me with facts! That is entrapment!”
“Do you want me to lie to you instead?”
“Yes!”
Pause.
“Wait—no—”
Alhaitham stands. Kaveh watches him rise like an ancient column of terrible decisions and accidental affection, all clean lines and devastating calm. He hates him. He hates him so much. He hates that he’s waiting for him to say something. Anything. Hates that his own heart is pounding like a thesis deadline in his chest, irrational and insistent and utterly unproofed.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” Alhaitham says, too gently.
Kaveh backs up instinctively, bumping into the coffee table, which he is pretty sure is metaphorical somehow. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t look at me like that. With… with math in your eyes.”
“I thought you liked math.”
“I like my math! Not… not your smug, emotionally destabilizing math that proves I’ve been in love with you since the fourth time you alphabetized the spice rack!”
There it is.
The words fall out like bricks from a collapsing building, and the silence that follows is catastrophic. Kaveh freezes and Alhaitham says nothing. The documentary is now detailing the sexual practices of ancient Inazuman nobles and Kaveh is pretty sure the phrase “spiritually charged upholstery” is being used unironically.
Kaveh wants to die.
“I—” he starts, but he doesn’t know how to finish that sentence without igniting into actual flame.
“I see,” Alhaitham says, softly.
“No, you don’t! That wasn’t—I didn’t mean—I meant hypothetically! A variable! A statistical exaggeration! Hyperbole for dramatic effect! I’m not—”
Alhaitham takes a step forward. Kaveh backpedals so fast he nearly trips over his own dignity, which is lying somewhere on the floor next to the expired wine and his emotional stability.
“Stop that,” he croaks. “I’m trying to emotionally spiral in peace.”
“You’ve already spiraled. You’re just refusing to land.”
“Well, what would you have me do? Fall directly into your emotionally constipated arms and confess that my entire neural network is wired around your godforsaken face?!”
Alhaitham tilts his head. Considers.
“…Yes.”
Kaveh short-circuits.
“That wasn’t an actual suggestion!”
“I know.”
“Then why did you—”
“Because,” Alhaitham says, and his voice drops an octave into something so calm it is practically criminal, “I’ve been waiting.”
That shuts Kaveh up. He goes still. Something in his chest does a seismic backflip and lands face-first in longing.
“You—” he tries, but words are failing him now, like faulty scaffolding. “How long?”
Alhaitham’s eyes soften. “Since you used the term ‘neoclassical emotional repression’ to describe my flirting technique.”
Kaveh makes a sound. It’s small, mournful.
“That was a three years ago,” he whispers.
“I know.”
Kaveh is shaking. “You never said anything.”
“I didn’t want to interfere with your denial.”
Kaveh groans, grabs the nearest pillow, and screams into it. Again.
“That’s the fifth time tonight,” Alhaitham notes.
“I’m going to punch you in the metaphor.”
“I’d like to see you try.”
They’re close now. Too close. One breath. Half a sentence.
Kaveh says, “If I kiss you, everything will change.”
“Yes,” Alhaitham says.
“And if I don’t, I’ll combust.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re sure this isn’t a ploy to destroy my last brain cell?”
“No. That part’s just a bonus.”
Kaveh stares at him. Then stares some more. Then, very softly, says, “I hate you.”
“I know,” Alhaitham murmurs. “I hate me too.”
And then he leans in. On purpose.
And then Alhaitham leans in. He leans in like an argument. Like the opening clause of a thesis. Like the beginning of a sentence so long and fraught with dependent clauses that you forget how it began halfway through.
And Kaveh doesn’t move. His eyes go wide. His breath stutters. His hands clench in the fabric of the rug like it’ll anchor him to reality, like anything could. His entire nervous system is screaming. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands. He doesn’t know what to do with his heart. He especially doesn’t know what to do with the look on Alhaitham’s face, which is focused and soft and terrifying in its precision. Like he’s decided on something. Like he’s already written the footnote.
And then—
Just as they are close enough to tilt into something irreversible, Alhaitham stops.
He sees the flicker. That tremor. The exact millisecond when Kaveh flinches. It’s not big. It’s not dramatic. It’s not even visible to someone who hasn’t been calibrating his entire emotional barometer to Kaveh’s every twitch for the past few years.
And so Alhaitham stops. He doesn’t retreat, but doesn’t advance either. He just hovers there. In the breath between heartbeats. In the space where wanting becomes too much to bear and too dangerous to name.
Kaveh doesn’t notice at first. His eyes are half-lidded. His lips parted. He’s trembling.
“I—” he starts.
And then his voice catches.
“I can’t,” he says, too quietly.
Alhaitham exhales. Then, with a gentleness that shouldn’t be possible from someone who once called empathy an inefficient neural quirk, he says, “I know.”
Kaveh’s eyes fly open.
“You do?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not upset?”
Alhaitham raises an eyebrow. “Did you think I was going to give you a deadline?”
Kaveh bristles. “That’s a low blow, even for you.”
“I’m being serious.”
“I’m being terrified!”
“That’s clear.”
Kaveh glares. “I hate how understanding you’re being. It’s making me more nervous.”
“You prefer me cold and emotionally unavailable?”
“Yes! It’s easier to handle!”
“You’re irrational.”
“You’re smug!”
“You’re beautiful.”
Kaveh makes a sound like a dying crow. “Don’t say things like that!”
“Why not?”
“Because I haven’t emotionally prepared for the fallout!”
Alhaitham sits back slightly, giving him space. “Prepare then.”
Kaveh opens his mouth. Shuts it. Opens it again. Points at Alhaitham. Points at the floor. Waves his hands around like he’s conducting a symphony composed entirely of poor coping mechanisms. Then, finally, he collapses backward onto the rug again.
“I need six to eight business weeks,” he declares. “Maybe months. Maybe forever. Maybe I’m just going to build a small house out of pillows and live here until the shame dissipates.”
Alhaitham doesn’t laugh, but his mouth twitches.
“Should I submit a formal proposal for visitation rights to your pillow fortress?”
“Only if it’s double-spaced and written in iambic pentameter.”
“Coward,” Alhaitham says, with too much fondness.
“Manipulator,” Kaveh counters, burying his face into a throw pillow. “You knew I wasn’t ready.”
“I suspected.”
“And yet you still....”
Alhaitham shrugs. “I had to test the hypothesis.”
“Oh my gods, you are the worst,” Kaveh groans. “You try to kiss me and then immediately turn it into a research model.”
“You responded with a literary citation.”
“That’s different!”
“How?”
“Mine was about fear! Yours was about temptation!”
Alhaitham considers. “Interesting. So you’re afraid of being wanted.”
Kaveh shoots bolt upright. “I am not afraid of being wanted. I’m afraid of being wrong. Of reading it wrong. Of this being some long, elaborate philosophical prank where I wake up in the middle of an ethics lecture and you’re holding a chalkboard that says ‘EXAMPLE OF HUBRIS.’”
Alhaitham hums. “Tempting.”
“See?!”
“But no.”
Kaveh stares at him. “You’re serious.”
“Yes.”
“You actually want me.”
“Yes.”
“In the human way, not the academic control group way.”
“Yes, Kaveh.”
Kaveh stares harder. “You’re sure you’re not doing this for a bet with Cyno?”
“Yes.”
“And this isn’t some strange Sumeru academic courtship ritual where we argue until we die and then marry posthumously through thesis defense?”
“Not unless you want it to be.”
Kaveh whimpers. “I don’t know what to do with you when you’re like this.”
“Would it help if I resumed being emotionally opaque and mildly insulting?”
“Yes!” Kaveh shouts. “That’s the only language I speak!”
“Noted.”
And then Alhaitham stands up. He reaches out—not to touch—but to offer. A hand. Palm open.
Invitation, not expectation.
“I’ll make tea,” he says. “You can hide under the table while you sort through your existential crisis.”
Kaveh looks at the hand. At the man. At the heart of the problem.
And he doesn’t take it, but he also doesn’t look away.
“Okay,” he says, voice quiet. “But only if it’s that weird cinnamon blend I hate.”
“I know,” Alhaitham says. “It’s your favorite.”
And just like that, he walks into the kitchen, leaving Kaveh sitting on the floor, surrounded by chaos, soaked in denial, vibrating with confused attraction, and wondering how the hell he got here.
He thinks, distantly, he might be in love. He thinks, distantly, that he might already be doomed.
But for now, he crawls under the table. It’s not a large table. It’s technically an old drafting table that he rescued from an alley behind the Akademiya when they were getting rid of “outdated spatial resources,” which is how he now has a workspace with a leg that squeaks like a dying gull and a top carved with decades of mathematical graffiti. It is etched with longing. It is a monument to denial. It is, presently, his bunker.
He adjusts the nearest chair to shield himself from any possible line of sight. Grabs the throw pillow from earlier and shoves it between his knees like a tactical emotional buffer. Breathes. Closes his eyes.
He is doing his best. The floor is cool against his calves. The scent of cinnamon and passive-aggression drifts from the kitchen. The world is quiet. Too quiet.
He opens one eye and glares at the floor.
“I am not in love,” he says aloud, to the table leg.
The table leg does not argue, which is unfair, because everything else in his life does.
So, naturally, he pulls out his notebook. The private one. The spiral-bound horror of a logbook that looks like a conspiracy theorist broke into a statistics lab and started charting dopamine levels during emotionally repressed eye contact.
He flips to the most recent entry. The page is titled:
“Statistical Evidence of Ruin, Possibly Love (Unclear).”
Below that, there are two columns: Alhaitham Said and Kaveh Felt. The lines between them are jagged. Intersected with arrows. Annotated with footnotes. There’s an entire tangent graph labeled “DIMPLE EFFECT ON VOCAL PITCH” with a red underline reading “INCONCLUSIVE BUT SUSPICIOUS.”
He adds a new line:
Alhaitham made tea → Kaveh’s soul threatened to abandon body
Then underlines it twice, violently. Then flips to the previous page and adds a multiplier to the variable V (for violin-silence-tension) and writes an equation that goes:
V = (E × L × F) / (T − D)
Where:
E = Eye Contact Duration (s)
L = Lip Parting Frequency
F = Frequency of Unexpected Fondness
T = Total Distance (cm)
D = Degree of Emotional Denial (Kaveh Standard Units)
He stares at it. It’s not a good equation. It has emotional bias. It has deeply flawed assumptions. It’s completely subjective.
...It feels correct, however. Which is the worst kind of correct.
“Kaveh,” comes Alhaitham’s voice from the kitchen.
Kaveh shrieks and smacks his head on the bottom of the table.
“I brought the tea,” Alhaitham says, unbothered.
“Leave it at the threshold,” Kaveh croaks, rubbing his scalp.
There’s a clink of porcelain. Kaveh cautiously peeks around the chair leg. A mug sits three feet from him. Just far enough that he has to crawl to get it. Just close enough that Alhaitham clearly knew he’d do it.
“Manipulative bastard,” Kaveh mutters, and does, in fact, crawl.
He grabs the mug and sips. Immediately scalds his tongue. Yelps. Whispers something profane to the nearest table leg in apology for yelling earlier. Crawls back under and retreats into notebook war crimes.
A new chart forms. A line graph titled:
"Level of Emotional Stability (Kaveh) vs. Proximity of Alhaitham"
It’s not encouraging. The line dips sharply every time Alhaitham enters a room. There is an anomalous spike labeled “Alhaitham was gone for two days (felt weirdly empty???)” and another note next to it that just says:
???
DO NOT ANALYZE
BURN THIS PAGE EVENTUALLY
“Kaveh,” Alhaitham calls again, annoyingly fond.
“Don’t make me have an emotion,” Kaveh snaps. “I’m busy quantifying my own downfall.”
Another pause. Then: “Are you journaling your feelings in a math notebook again?”
Kaveh shrieks. “GET OUT OF MY BRAIN.”
“That would require entering it.”
“I’M REVOKING YOUR SPOON PRIVILEGES.”
A beat.
“…You never gave them to me.”
“Well, I was going to! Eventually! As a gesture of peace!”
“I prefer chopsticks.”
“SEE, THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS.”
They lapse into silence again. The kind of silence that lives in the bones. The kind that echoes with all the things unsaid, unsolved, unsolvable.
Kaveh takes another sip of tea and scrawls across the top of a blank page:
Reasons Why This Is Terrible And Must Be Avoided
- Emotional entanglement compromises intellectual integrity
- Possible regression into high school crush behavior (already began kicking my feet once—this is a crisis)
- What if he doesn’t actually like me and this is just an elaborate experiment in human behavior and I’m the variable marked “Bait”
- I cannot kiss someone whose thesis on post-structural objectivity contains the phrase “romantic delusions as cultural narrative fallacy”
- The way he says my name should be illegal
- The way I say his name is already illegal and I’ve arrested myself
Kaveh drops the pen. He presses his forehead to the rug and breathes. This is unsustainable. He’s an architect. He knows about structural collapse. He knows when a foundation is cracked. He knows when a pressure point is being stressed past capacity. And right now—
His whole emotional blueprint is failing inspection.
He hears Alhaitham move. Hears the soft clink of his own mug being set down next to his. Hears the rustle of fabric as someone else—a menace, a monster, a man who alphabetizes battle plans—sits down on the other side of the table.
An equation forms in his mind.
Let H = Alhaitham proximity coefficient
Let K = Kaveh’s emotional entropy
If H increases by 1 unit → K increases exponentially
But also—
K(H) = Steady when accompanied by Silence (S), Tea (T), and Respectful Distance (D)
K(H) = ∫[(S+T+D)/V] dx as t →∞
(∴ Doom is delayed)
Kaveh lets out a long, slow breath.
“I’m recalibrating my psychological resistance,” he mutters.
“Take your time,” comes the voice from the other side of the table.
“You’re still the worst.”
“I know.”
“You’re not even trying to deny it.”
“It wouldn’t be statistically sound.”
Kaveh lets out a strangled laugh. Then glares at his notebook and throws it aside like it’s personally betrayed him. The notebook lands on a discarded pillow, which is now part of his newly christened Pillow Citadel.
“I need a new variable,” he says.
“For what?”
“For hope,” he murmurs, too quietly.
Let Hf = Hope factor
Let Dm = Doom modifier
Then: L (Love) = Hf − Dm + (Tension × Tolerance) × Proximity²
He doesn’t write it down. The math is already carved into his ribs.
He just sits under the table and drinks his terrible tea like it’s penance. The taste is familiar, slightly burnt—over-steeped cinnamon with that strange undertone of smoke Alhaitham insists is “intentional.” Like all things Alhaitham: unnecessarily sharp, secretly warm, and somehow worse when you notice you’ve grown fond of it.
Outside the table’s border, the world continues spinning in its usual, physics-bound indifference. But under here? Time has stopped. The air is thick with unresolved tension, metaphysical awkwardness, and the palpable weight of things Not Said.
And on the other side of the table, Alhaitham is also drinking the tea. Kaveh knows this because he can hear it. The maddening, contemplative, slow sip of a man who thinks too much and says too little, who watches a house burn and critiques the architecture mid-combustion.
Kaveh narrows his eyes at the table leg again.
“I’m not speaking to you anymore,” he tells it.
“I’m not the one who gave you a hope factor,” Alhaitham responds.
Kaveh chokes on his tea. “Were you reading my soul again?!”
“You said it out loud.”
“Spitefully and under duress!”
“Which,” Alhaitham replies mildly, “is how most of your emotional growth occurs.”
“Take that back.”
“No.”
“I’ll scream.”
“I have noise-cancelling headphones.”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
Alhaitham sips again. It’s the sip of a man who absolutely would dare.
Kaveh throws a pillow against the underside of the table. It bounces weakly and flops to the floor like his emotional dignity.
“You are emotionally bankrupt,” he declares, crawling further into the shadows. “You are a dried-up philosophical fruit leather. A dehydrated, smug, devastatingly hot academic husk.”
“You’re projecting.”
“I’m metaphor-ing.”
“You’re flailing.”
“I am creating emotionally rigorous metaphors for my unspoken yearning, thank you.”
“You’re dramatizing avoidance.”
Kaveh throws another pillow. “I’m processing.”
“I can’t tell if this is grief, desire, or intellectual indigestion.”
Kaveh stills. Then slowly—slowly—peers out from behind one of the chairs.
“You said ‘desire.’”
Alhaitham’s mug halts midair.
“I did,” he says.
Kaveh blinks. “Why?”
Alhaitham sets the mug down on the floor next to him, the motion careful like he’s afraid the ceramic will shatter if he moves too fast.
“Because that’s the correct word.”
Kaveh stares. And stares. And stares.
“That is—that is not—a word you’re allowed to use! Not in this house! Not in this dimension of reality! You are forbidden from saying things like that unless you’re prepared to back them up with either a kiss or a ten-page literature review!”
“I have both ready.”
Kaveh lets out a screech that may or may not qualify as academic misconduct.
“You are a menace! A menace with cheekbones and a PhD in seduction-by-vocabulary!”
“I don’t have a PhD.”
“You emotionally do!”
Alhaitham shifts, just slightly. Kaveh doesn’t look—refuses to look—but he feels it. The way the energy shifts. Like something’s happening. Like something’s close. Like he’s on the edge of a thesis defense and the question from the back row is about to undo his entire worldview.
“Do you want the kiss or the literature review?” Alhaitham asks quietly.
Kaveh presses his palms flat to the floor. “I want to go back in time and punch myself for falling for you.”
“That’s neither an answer nor a denial.”
“I hate you.”
“I know.”
Kaveh groans and drags himself across the floor like a man possessed. He flops onto his back beside the discarded notebook and stares up at the underside of the table, as if the ancient Akademiya carvings there will explain the unexplainable. They do not. They only say things like Ratio is the harmony of the universe and Zirconia is not a valid substitute for emotional fulfillment.
He throws an arm across his face.
“Is it normal,” he says, voice muffled, “to want someone so badly it ruins your architectural standards?”
“No.”
“Helpful.”
“I meant—it’s not normal. But it’s us.”
That silence again.
“Us,” Kaveh says, trying not to sound like he’s having a coronary episode. “Is that… what this is?”
“I don’t know,” Alhaitham replies. “But it’s something.”
“That’s not very precise.”
“It’s not a thesis.”
“It feels like one.”
“Then write it.”
“I already have.”
Alhaitham hums, and Kaveh thinks it might be the closest thing to a smile he can make with his soul.
“I want a citation,” Alhaitham says.
“You’ll get a footnote of fire,” Kaveh snaps.
“Acceptable.”
They lapse into a tense détente, both holding their teacups like fragile emotional bombs.
Then Kaveh says, “You should know. There’s an entire statistical appendix in my notebook devoted to your hands.”
“I assumed.”
“Your touch radius correlates almost perfectly with my emotional implosions.”
“Fascinating.”
“You broke three of my charts.”
“Would you like me to autograph them?”
“I’d like you to go ten seconds without being the embodiment of subtext.”
“I could lie.”
“That’s worse!”
Alhaitham chuckles softly.
Kaveh thinks it’s a chuckle. It might be a seismic event. It might be an auditory hallucination born of years of repression and an unfulfilled desire to be held while screaming.
Kaveh drags the notebook back to him and opens it to a blank page. He draws a heart and then tears it up.
Then starts scribbling a new formula:
Let R = Readiness to emotionally combust
Let U = Unspoken tension, squared
Let C = Crippling fear of reciprocation
Let K = Kiss potential (measured in mm)
Then: H (Heart) = √(R + U) − C / K
He stares at it. It stares back. Then he tears it out, crumples it, and eats the corner.
“Kaveh,” Alhaitham says, amused. “Are you eating your math?”
“I’m neutralizing it.”
“You’re an adult.”
“Allegedly.”
Alhaitham exhales and shifts again. Kaveh looks up—and immediately regrets it. He’s there. Just there. Just across the table. Hair a little tousled. Eyes too sharp, too kind. Knees pulled up, hands resting loosely.
And it hits Kaveh again. He doesn’t have to be ready. He just has to be willing.
He just has to say—
“Come under the table,” he whispers.
Alhaitham blinks. “I am under the table.”
“No, like properly. Come in. Sit beside me. We can call it an observational study.”
“And what are we observing?”
Kaveh looks away.
“…Hope.”
Alhaitham doesn’t say anything. He just moves.
And the space beside Kaveh is no longer empty. Which is a mathematical nightmare, honestly. He was doing so well. So well, in fact, that his emotional volatility was contained to a measurable quadrant. He had his own side of the under-table universe. His pillow fortress. His tea of dubious temperature. His traitorous math notebook currently covered in graphite fingerprints and tear-adjacent smudges. He had distance, but now there is proximity. And proximity, he is learning, is not a neutral value. Proximity is a catalyst. Proximity is a war crime. Proximity is the echo of every decision he hasn’t made yet whispering directly into his inner ear that he might be—just possibly, statistically—safe.
Alhaitham sits with the calm of a man who knows exactly what chaos he’s walking into and has already filed paperwork to annex it. His knee bumps Kaveh’s. Kaveh flinches, but he does not move. Then panics internally at not moving.
“So,” Alhaitham says, in a calm voice, like he’s commenting on a textbook misprint and not about to upend Kaveh’s understanding of reality, “what are the variables?”
Kaveh stares forward, into the heart of the wooden table leg. “Of what.”
“Of this observational study.”
Kaveh sucks in a breath. “I—well, that depends on the scope.”
Alhaitham nods. “Narrow or broad?”
“Emotionally ruinous.”
“I see.”
“Independent variable,” Kaveh mutters, “is you.”
“And the dependent?”
Kaveh gestures at himself with all the theatrical despair of a man dying in an opera. “My sense of identity.”
Alhaitham hums thoughtfully. “And the constants?”
“Shame. Panic. The overwhelming urge to make out with you and then fake my death.”
“Control group?”
“Any sane person not currently under this table.”
“Hypothesis?”
“That I am doomed.”
Alhaitham leans back against the opposite table leg, crossing his arms. His knee is still against Kaveh’s. Still warm. Still statistically devastating. “And how do you intend to test it?”
Kaveh is vibrating. Actually vibrating. His fingers twitch against the ceramic of his cup like it might anchor him to any law of reality that isn’t bending around the shape of Alhaitham’s attention.
“I don’t,” he says. “I observe. I suffer. I document. I build a shrine from the ruins.”
“That’s not very scientific.”
“Neither is love, but here we are.”
Alhaitham looks at him then. Really looks. The way a theorem looks at its unsolved sibling. The way a man looks at something he already understands, but wants to hear explained anyway.
Kaveh cannot breathe. He clears his throat. “You, uh. You always sit like that?”
“Like what.”
“Like you’re composed of calm spite and post-structural tension.”
“I’m comfortable.”
“You’re dangerous.”
“You’re the one conducting an emotional thesis under a piece of furniture.”
“I’m protecting my sanity.”
“I’m in your control group. You’re failing.”
“Don’t test me, Alhaitham, I will start crying on your foot and call it qualitative data.”
“I’ve accounted for that.”
Kaveh gapes. “You factored in my breakdowns?!”
“I’ve built my whole emotional infrastructure around them.”
“I—what?!”
Alhaitham shrugs. “It’s efficient.”
Kaveh makes a noise. It is no longer human. It is no longer academic. It is a sound previously only captured in wild documentaries about male peacocks realizing their romantic competition can read.
“I hate you,” he says, voice cracking.
“I know.”
“You’re so calm.”
“You’re not.”
“You’re never thrown.”
“I’ve been thrown for many years now. I just recover quickly.”
Kaveh stills.
Years.
Years of post-tea lingering glances and “accidental” hand brushes and rearranged furniture optimized for side-by-side reading and exactly two centimeters less space on the left side of the couch because someone always leans a little closer when Kaveh sits down.
“You—what—”
“Is this a surprise?” Alhaitham asks, one brow rising.
“I—yes?! How—how is this not a bigger deal to you?!”
“Because I already made my peace with it.”
“You WHAT.”
“I already fell.”
Kaveh feels his soul leave his body. It gets up. Walks out. Files a motion to remove itself from this narrative.
“You’re—you—” he gestures at Alhaitham like the mere idea of him is an affront to logic. “You can’t just casually admit to having been in love with me for yeras while I’ve been over here performing emotional calculus with crayon and bleeding onto spreadsheets.”
“You could’ve asked.”
“You could’ve said something!”
“You would’ve fled.”
Kaveh opens his mouth. Then closes it. Then opens it again and points a trembling finger. “True, but beside the point!”
They stare at each other.
Then—very quietly—Alhaitham says:
“I’m not asking for the conclusion, Kaveh.”
Kaveh freezes.
“I’m just asking,” Alhaitham continues, “if you’ll keep running the study.”
Kaveh forgets what lungs are for.
“You don’t want an answer?”
“I want a process.”
“You want me like this?”
“Yes.”
“Emotional chaos, dramatics, screaming into throw pillows?”
Alhaitham shrugs. “I’ve adjusted the margin of error.”
Kaveh curls in on himself. Then un-curls. Then leans his head back and laughs.
“You’re unbelievable.”
“You’re underestimating me.”
“I don’t even have a conclusion.”
“Neither do I.”
“I’m still compiling data.”
“I have a spreadsheet.”
“You—you would—”
“I made a separate tab for your ‘math of doom’.”
“Did you adjust for emotional sabotage?”
“Every Tuesday.”
Kaveh stares at him, breathless, wide-eyed.
“Say it again,” he whispers.
“Which part?”
“That you fell.”
Alhaitham, still infuriatingly composed, reaches out gently. He places a single hand—callused, calm, real—on the floor beside Kaveh’s. Doesn’t touch yet.
“I fell,” he says.
Kaveh doesn’t move. His fingers do.
They shift, slide over, until they brush Alhaitham’s.
And neither pulls away.
The table becomes cathedral. The floor, altar. And the table—gods help them—is holy now.
Somewhere in the living room, the seventh loop of the documentary drones on about the architectural implications of the Fontainean pleasure colonnade, but Kaveh doesn’t hear it anymore. Doesn’t care. He is beneath a table in the presence of a man who has rewritten the laws of thermodynamics with a single sentence: I fell.
And he touched back.
He did. He did. Kaveh touched back.
His fingers slide further now, uncertain, like he’s afraid they’ll be revoked. Like if he goes too fast, the moment will vanish, skitter away like faulty chalk on wet stone. But Alhaitham doesn’t pull away. He does the opposite. Tilts his wrist. Lets their palms meet, barely. A soft contact, skin to skin, warm and unbearably human.
The math is wrong now. Kaveh knows that. It’s all wrong. The margins are ruined. The variables are singing. The constants are collapsing. The formula is no longer measurable, because this is not quantifiable.
He breathes out a laugh, cracked and crooked and full of everything he’s been trying not to feel since the first time Alhaitham looked at him like he mattered.
“I hate this,” he says, very seriously, very earnestly.
“I know,” Alhaitham murmurs.
“I hate you.”
“I know.”
“You’re smug and cold and emotionally arsonist and you smell like your pillowcases are scented with books and citrus oils and betrayal.”
Alhaitham hums. “You’re shaking.”
Kaveh looks down at their hands.
“I know.”
A pause.
Then, with exquisite, deliberate quiet, Alhaitham says, “Are you going to kiss me, or should I continue letting you monologue into emotional oblivion?”
Kaveh snarls like a cornered cat. “You can’t say that! You can’t just—accuse me of foreplay via academic deflection!”
“I’m not accusing you. I’m citing observable data.”
“Oh my gods—oh my gods—you’re going to ruin me, do you know that?!”
“Yes.”
“And you’re okay with that?!”
“Very.”
Kaveh launches himself forward with the energy of a man who has made exactly one correct decision in his entire life and is determined to see it through even if the emotional scaffolding collapses on top of him.
Their mouths crash.
It’s a disaster. It’s noses bumping and teeth clashing and breathless, frantic pressure, like they’ve both been wound too tightly for too long and the tension has snapped and now they’re falling—no, free-falling—into the space where physics and feeling dissolve into yes.
Kaveh’s hand fists in Alhaitham’s shirt. Alhaitham tilts his head, adjusts, recovers, kisses him again like he’s memorizing the angles of fury and affection braided into the same breath.
Kaveh gasps. “You’re a menace—”
“Correct.”
“I’m going to kill you.”
“Later.”
“Do not multitask this kiss like it’s a group project—”
But Alhaitham kisses him again, and Kaveh loses his train of thought entirely.
Because gods, he’s good at this. Focused like everything else. Like he’s studied the shape of Kaveh’s mouth in private and annotated the blueprint for future implementation.
Kaveh melts. Actually melts. Slumps into Alhaitham’s lap with the structural integrity of a collapsed gazebo and moans like a man who’s forgotten his own name. Alhaitham wraps an arm around his waist and pulls him closer. Kaveh scrabbles at his shoulder, biting his lower lip just to hear what he sounds like when cracked. He sounds like a miracle.
Kaveh pulls back with a gasp, forehead pressed against Alhaitham’s, shaking.
“This is insane,” he says.
“Agreed.”
“This shouldn’t work.”
“No.”
“Yet—”
Alhaitham kisses him again. It’s slower this time. Surer. Deep and deliberate, like a thesis statement punctuated with longing.
Kaveh groans. “I hate that you’re good at this.”
“I studied.”
“You—what—”
“Your mouth. Your hands. The way you linger on vowels when you’re tired. The tilt of your head when you’re furious. I’ve been memorizing you for months, Kaveh. I just didn’t know when I’d be allowed to speak the language.”
Kaveh lets out a whimper that could probably shatter glass.
“You are not allowed to be poetic. That’s my job.”
“You weren’t doing it fast enough.”
“I hate you—”
“You’re kissing me again.”
“I know—”
They fall back onto the floor in a tangle of limbs and heat and breathless laughter. Kaveh’s notebook is crushed beneath Alhaitham’s thigh, and somewhere, a line graph dies a noble death.
The math has failed. The blueprint has burned. And Kaveh—gods, Kaveh—is freefalling into the space between his ribs, into a future he hasn’t calculated, into the hands of a man who never once stopped catching him.
He gasps against Alhaitham’s lips, “What do we call this variable?”
Alhaitham breathes, “Ours.”
And Kaveh doesn’t run. He kisses him again.
And again.
And again.