Chapter 69 Chapter 69

Chapter 69 Chapter 69
Fabian
The silence in room was loud enough to give a guy a headache.
It had been twenty-four hours since Colton Harris walked through the door with his expensive leather bags and his annoying smirk. I was still annoyed about the whole assignment. The housing office had officially ruined my year, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. It wasn’t that we hated each other anymore. We had moved past the stage of wanting to throw punches, but we definitely weren’t friends. We didn’t have anything to say to each other. The only thing we actually had in common was a girl in York, and that was the one topic we both knew we couldn’t bring up.
So, we just sat in the awkward quiet. Colton was on his bed with some massive textbook about modern political theory and I was at my desk trying to figure out my schedule. The only sounds in the room were the ticking of the wall clock and the scratch of my pencil. It was brutal.
By three in the afternoon, I couldn’t take the weird energy anymore. I stood up and grabbed my bag from under my bed. Colton didn’t even look up from his book, but I knew he was watching me from the corner of his eye. I zipped the bag open and pulled out a thick roll of black duct tape.
“What are you doing, Smith?” Colton asked. His voice was smooth and careful, like he was trying to decide if I was finally losing my mind.
“Fixing the room,” I said shortly.
I dropped to my knees near the doorway and pressed the edge of the tape against the cold tiled floor. I pulled the roll back, stretching the black adhesive in a perfectly straight line right down the exact center of the room. It divided the space evenly, cutting between the two desks and ending right at the bathroom door.
I stood up and ripped the tape off with a sharp snap. “That’s the border. You stay on your side and I stay on mine.”
Colton stared at the black line on the floor for a long moment and then he let out a dry chuckle. He closed his textbook with a soft thud.
“Are we in primary school, Fabian? Do I need to ask permission to go to the loo?”
“Ground rules,” I said, ignoring his sarcastic tone. “We don’t touch each other’s stuff. We don’t share food. If you bring a girl back here, you give me a twenty-four-hour warning. And most importantly, you don’t talk to me unless the building is on fire.”
Colton raised an eyebrow and leaned back against his pillows. He looked at the tape again and then he shrugged. “Fine by me. But for the record, my dad’s the one who pulled the strings to get me into this specific hall. He thought I needed to focus on my studies instead of partying, so you can blame him for the mix-up. I didn’t ask to share a box with a brooding mechanic.”
“Good. Then we agree,” I said.
It was a silent, weird agreement, but it worked. For the rest of the evening, the tape did its job. Colton stayed on his side of the room with his politics notes and I stayed on my side. We didn’t argue and we didn’t clash, but the atmosphere was heavy. It was like living with a statue that occasionally checked its phone.
I tried to focus on my own studies before school officially started, but my eyes kept darting to the clock on my laptop screen. The hours were dragging by like molasses. I hadn’t talked to Paris in a while, and the distance was already rubbing my nerves raw. I wanted to see her face. I wanted to hear her laugh at my jokes.
By 10:30 PM, the tension in the room was peaking. Colton was still awake, sitting at his desk and typing something on his laptop. The clicking of his keyboard was starting to drive me insane.
I looked at the clock. 10:55 PM. Five minutes until eleven. Five minutes until my pact call with Paris.
I glanced at Colton and then I looked at my phone. There was no way in hell I was going to sit on my bed and have an intimate, romantic conversation with my girlfriend while her former crush was sitting five feet away, probably listening to every single word I said. The thought made my chest tighten with pure awkwardness. I could already imagine the smug look on Colton’s face if he heard me using a soft voice or calling her ‘Skates.’
“I’m going out,” I muttered as I stood up.
Colton didn’t look away from his screen. “Don’ stay out too late now,” he drawled mockingly.
I didn’t answer him. I grabbed my black leather jacket from the back of my chair and shoved my phone into my pocket. I swiped my key card off the desk and stormed out of the room, letting the heavy door click shut behind me.
The corridor was empty and quiet. I didn’t want to go down to the common room because there were still groups of freshers down there drinking and playing drinking games, and I was in no mood to be social. Instead, I pushed open the heavy fire door at the end of the hall and stepped into the concrete stairwell.
It was freezing. The air was draughty and cold, and the concrete walls seemed to trap the winter chill. I shivered instantly as the wind caught the back of my neck, but I didn’t care. It was the only place in the entire building where I could get some actual privacy.
I leaned against the cold metal railing and pulled my phone out. The screen lit up my face in the dim stairwell light.
10:59 PM.
I watched the digital numbers change, my heart doing a strange little flip in my chest. It was ridiculous how desperate I was just to hear her voice after one day. I felt like a teenager waiting for a text back, but Paris was my only connection to the world I actually liked. Manchester felt big and grey and lonely, but she was the light.
The clock flipped to 11:00 PM.
I didn’t even wait for her to call me. I tapped her name on my screen and hit the FaceTime button, lifting the phone up so she could see me. The line clicked and the screen spun for a second as the connection went through.
Then, her face appeared on my screen. She was sitting in her bed with her duvet pulled up to her shoulders, and her room was lit by those dim amber fairy lights she loved. Her hair was a bit messy and her eyes looked tired, but she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
“Hey,” she whispered. Her voice was soft and a little raspy from sleep, and it hit me right in the chest.
“Hey, Skates,” I said, and for the first time all day, the tight knot in my stomach finally started to loosen. I ignored the freezing cold of the stairwell and leaned into the railing, completely forgetting about Colton and the black tape on the floor. “I missed you.”