Secret Love

Chapter One

The taxi fare came to less than Levi had expected. He stood half in, half out of the cab — one hand already on the handle of his suitcase, the other reaching back through the open window to collect his change from the driver. He counted it without thinking, the coins cold and small against his palm, and dropped them into the right pocket of his denim jacket where they settled against his keys with a dull clink.

The taxi pulled away.

Levi didn't move straight away. He stood on the pavement and looked up at the university the way you look at something you've been anticipating for so long it has stopped feeling real. The gates were tall and iron-grey, each spike at the top filed to a sharp point that caught the flat afternoon light. Beyond them, the campus unfolded in both directions — wide footpaths cutting between old stone buildings, students moving in loose groups across the lawns, a world already in motion that had not waited for him to arrive before getting started.

He exhaled once, slow and quiet, the kind of breath that doesn't count as a sigh if nobody hears it.

Then he grabbed his suitcase and walked through the gates.

He found the building without difficulty, followed the corridor to the third floor, and stopped in front of a door marked 301. The numbers were slightly uneven, the last one tilted a few degrees to the right as if it had been knocked and never straightened. Levi looked at it for a second, then turned the handle and pushed the door open.

He stopped in the doorway.

The room looked like the aftermath of something. Papers covered most of the floor in uneven, overlapping drifts — some loose, some folded, some crumpled at the edges as though they'd been read in a hurry and discarded. Books were stacked in precarious columns beside the desk and fanned open across the bed on the left-hand side, their spines bent back hard. A half-empty mug sat on the windowsill with a ring of dried coffee underneath it. The curtains were only half open.

Levi stood in the doorway and took it all in without expression.

"Ah — God, I'm sorry." The voice came from the left, through the narrow gap of what appeared to be a small adjoining study or storage space. A figure emerged from it a moment later, ducking slightly under the low frame of the doorway. He was tall — noticeably so — with the kind of lean, broad-shouldered build that came from years of discipline rather than effort. He pushed a hand through his hair and looked at Levi with an expression that was more resigned than embarrassed. "I was trying to find something. A set of notes from last semester. I made things considerably worse." He paused. "You're my roommate?"

"Yeah." Levi stepped over a small pile of loose pages and set his suitcase upright beside his bed. "I'm Levi."

"Dylan." He crossed the room and extended a hand. Levi took it — firm grip, brief, two seconds at most — and let go. Dylan had the kind of easy, unhurried manner that suggested he was comfortable in most situations, not because everything came easily to him, but because he'd decided somewhere along the way not to let discomfort show. "I'll leave you to get settled. Fair warning, my half of the room is going to look like this for at least another hour."

"That's fine."

"You sure? I can —"

"It's fine," Levi said again, not unkindly.

Dylan studied him for a brief moment, seemed to decide that the answer was genuine, and retreated back into the chaos he'd come from.

Levi sat on the edge of his bed.

It was a double, which he hadn't expected. The mattress was firm and the pillow smelled faintly of something clean and institutional — the same smell every new place had, every first night somewhere unfamiliar. He'd gotten used to it over the years without ever growing fond of it.