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By day he walks past you on campus like you are furniture. At one in the morning, the stranger whose voice you cannot place is him.
This afternoon · Swim Pavilion Water runs from my hair into my neck as I push open the door to the spectator area with my shoulder. "Kirchhoff! Saturday under forty-two or I'm ending our friendship." I throw Nate a look over my shoulder. "Then you should probably start looking for new friends." "Asshole." "Slow asshole." Piers laughs behind us, Nate flips me off, and I pull the towel from my shoulders as we come out of the damp chlorine smell of the pool into the noticeably cooler entrance area. Training was good. Not perfect. So not good enough. I'm just in the middle of explaining to Nate why his last turn had roughly the elegance of a sinking refrigerator when somewhere to our right metal rattles over tiles. "Oh, shit." A rolling cart tips over. Crates of drinks slide against each other, plastic bottles jump across the floor, and within two seconds the entrance area looks like someone decided to blow up a vending machine. A bottle bumps against my shoe. I stop it with my foot. "Everything okay?" The employee behind the cart nods frantically. "Yeah. Yeah, just— damn." "Then we're still alive." I crouch down and start gathering the bottles. Piers grabs the overturned crate, Nate comments on something completely useless, and gets a bottle pressed against his upper arm from me. Only when I straighten up again does my gaze drift across the area. you. Just for a moment. Then I look away. Exactly like always. "There's another one," says Piers. I follow his gaze. Under one of the benches lies a single purple sports drink bottle, rolled so far back that I have to kneel down and reach for it with my arm. "Of course." My fingertips barely catch it. I pull it out, toss it back into the crate, and stand up. When we leave the building a few minutes later, I don't look at you again. I don't need to. ≋ ≋ ≋ Several weeks earlier · 12:47 a.m. The first time is coincidence. I'm lying diagonally on my bed, one hand behind my head, headphones on, and actually already too tired to talk to some stranger. LULLABY connects anyway. A quiet signal. Then a voice. I answer without thinking much about it. It starts with some trivial topic. One of those conversations where you could hang up at any time without anyone caring. Except I don't hang up. Ten minutes become twenty. Twenty become forty. At some point I pull the second earphone properly over my ear and stop staring at the ceiling. The voice seems familiar. Not immediately enough to place it anywhere. Just that annoying feeling of having heard something before. Then a detail about Harrow University comes up. Another one. I go quieter. Listen more closely. And suddenly something fits together that probably should have stayed separate. The voice. The campus. A detail I know. Shit. you. I slowly sit up. My display only shows my alias. VESPER I could say my name. This would actually be exactly the moment for it. Instead I lean back against the headboard of my bed and keep listening. Just a little longer. Just this one conversation. ≋ ≋ ≋ The weeks in between It doesn't stay at just that one conversation. Of course not. At some point I no longer need the random matching. Vesper has a saved contact. And I develop a pretty shitty habit. I check my phone after training. After lectures. Sometimes at night, even though my alarm goes off a few hours later. Not constantly. Just often enough that at some point I stop telling myself it's coincidence. On campus nothing changes. I train. Study. Argue with Nate about which of us drank the last coffee. Sit over architecture drafts at night until my eyes burn. And when you crosses my path somewhere, I keep walking. No smile that could give too much away. No conversation I don't want to explain. Nothing. Hours later I sometimes sit with headphones on my bed and listen to the same voice. At some point I know the little sound the connection makes better than I'd like. At some point I look forward to it. At some point there are things I want to tell, and my first thought isn't Nate, not Piers, not my sister. But you. That would probably have been the moment to tell the truth. Instead I tell myself I'll do it tomorrow. Tomorrow becomes next week. Next week becomes someday. And someday I sit there at night and no longer have to ask myself whether I've fallen in love. Only how the hell I'm supposed to explain that the man you spends so much time with at night walks past you during the day as if there were nothing there. I don't find a good answer. So I keep Vesper. ≋ ≋ ≋ Tonight · 12:18 a.m. "You won't believe what happened after training today." I'm lying half propped against my headboard, the room dark except for the lamp next to my bed. My laptop is open on the desk, architecture plans lying beside it, and I should have been working on them for at least an hour. Obviously I'm not. The headphones are over my ears. you is on the other side. And with that, my productivity for today is probably done. I grin and run one hand through my still slightly damp hair. "Some poor guy completely wrecked a drink cart at the Swim Pavilion." I let my head sink against the wall. "Okay, wrecked is unfair. The thing tipped over on him. But you should have seen the floor." I laugh quietly. In my mind's eye I see Nate again standing around with three bottles in his arms acting like he was seriously helping. "We must have spent five minutes picking everything up afterward." A short pause. My fingers brush absentmindedly over the edge of my phone. "And right at the end there was still this one purple sports drink bottle under the bench." The corner of my mouth lifts. "Of course so far back that I almost had to crawl under the damn bench to get it out."