Thursday evening rolled in the way most of them did, grey, slightly damp, streetlights flickering on half-heartedly like they weren’t fully committed to the idea yet. Garrett left campus behind him without much ceremony. No Daniel trailing along complaining about something. Just him, his bag, and the walk home he could do at this point with his eyes shut.
He took the stairs up to his floor two at a time out of habit rather than energy.
Freya’s door came before his.
He slowed without deciding to.
He hadn’t seen her properly since the corridor thing, since Daniel had dropped that "I’ve been noticing her" line on a bench like it was nothing, and Garrett had gone looking back through the last week and come up with exactly that.
His hand actually got as far as being near the door before he stopped it.
Check she’s alright, Simple enough thought. Knock, ask how she’s doing, be done in two minutes.
Then the rest of the week reasserted itself. Emiliana was Tomorrow. Raymond, somewhere out there presumably still deciding how he wanted to "deal with him." The small mountain of things he was currently, badly, keeping upright.
One problem at a time.
He kept walking.
His own door stuck slightly the way it always had, needing a shoulder more than a key, and then he was in.
The flat greeted him the way it usually did now, quiet, a bit cool, smelling like nothing in particular, which after the version of this place that used to exist was practically an achievement on its own.
He dropped his bag by the sofa. Kicked his shoes off without looking where they landed.
It wasn’t much to look at. The sofa had a slightly odd dip on the left cushion from months of him always sitting in the same spot. The coffee table was the flat-pack one his dad had bought when he first moved in, scuffed at the corners now, one leg very slightly shorter than the others if you looked hard enough. The lighting did its job and nothing more, one overhead bulb, a lamp by the window that flickered if you turned it on too fast.
Clean, though. Properly clean, floor to actually-visible-surface clean, the kind of clean that had taken him a full day and several bin bags to earn back in October and that he’d more or less kept up since. Functional. Comfortable enough that he didn’t dread being in it anymore.
Not depressing. Just, decent. The word that came to mind and stayed there.
He stood in the middle of it for a second, doing nothing in particular, and something occurred to him that hadn’t occurred to him before.
The flat hadn’t changed since he had.
He glanced at the sofa. Fine sofa. Would’ve been a fine sofa two years ago too. The coffee table that wobbled slightly if you put a mug down too firmly on the wrong corner. The duvet on his bed that had gone thin in one specific patch from years of use, cheap when he’d bought it and cheaper now.
Nothing wrong with any of it, exactly. It just all belonged to a version of him that had counted every pound before spending it, and that version of him currently had over five grand doing nothing more useful than sitting in an account.
Could get a proper sofa. One without the dip.
Coffee table that doesn’t need a coaster to survive contact with a mug.
New duvet. Better bulb. Maybe an actual picture on a wall instead of the blank rectangle currently taking up space above the telly.
Nothing outrageous. He wasn’t about to start ordering furniture he’d seen in adverts for people with actual money. Just enough. Enough that walking in here didn’t feel like walking into a slightly better-organised version of where he used to be.
He hadn’t thought about any of it properly until right now, standing in his own living room at nine on a Thursday, looking at a coffee table that had survived almost three years purely out of spite.
’I can actually do something about this now.’
It sat there for a second, simple and slightly strange, before he let it go and went to put the kettle on.
The kettle clicked off behind him. Garrett made the tea, didn’t drink half of it, and somewhere around the second mouthful his brain wandered off toward tomorrow without asking permission.
’What do you even do at a park hangout.’
Not a date. He’d been fairly firm with himself about that distinction all evening, mostly because the alternative made his stomach do something unhelpful. Just, two people, a bench, no particular plan. Which was, in its own way, harder to prepare for than an actual plan would’ve been.
He opened the wardrobe like it might have rearranged itself since Monday.
It hadn’t. Same six or seven shirts. The hoodie with the small burn mark near the cuff that he’d never explained to anyone because the explanation was boring. A jacket that did the job without doing anything else.
Nothing terrible. Also, if he was being honest with the wardrobe, nothing that was going to win any awards.
He held up a plain navy shirt, considered it, put it back. Took out a different one that was functionally identical to the first, considered that too, and had the distinct sense he was rearranging the same four shirts in a circle without making an actual decision.
It’s a park. Not a runway.
He left the jacket out anyway. Just in case.
The cologne situation was, if anything, worse.
He had three bottles, total, two of which had been gifts he’d never have bought himself and one of which he’d bought in a mild panic before a family thing two years ago and used approximately four times since.
He picked up the first one. Sprayed it once onto his wrist, out of habit more than plan, and immediately regretted it, too much, too sweet, the kind of thing that announced itself from across a room.
"No," he said out loud, to an empty bathroom, which didn’t make the verdict any less final.
The second one was better. Less of an announcement, more of a suggestion. He held his wrist up, smelled it again like a second opinion might change the first one, and put the bottle down on the side where he’d actually remember it in the morning.
He caught himself doing this. Standing in his bathroom at half seven on a Thursday, seriously weighing the merits of two nearly identical bottles of cologne, for a hangout that wasn’t a date, with a girl he’d definitely and absolutely not spent the last twenty minutes thinking about instead of finishing his tea.
’Huh.’
That was it. That was the whole thought. No fanfare attached to it, no internal speech about feelings, just the small, blunt recognition of something that had apparently been sitting there for a while, waiting for him to actually look at it directly.
He wasn’t doing any of this because the objective needed him to. There was no line on his phone telling him to have an opinion about aftershave. He just wanted tomorrow to go well, for reasons that had stopped being about the System roughly around the time she’d laughed at something stupid he’d said and he’d noticed himself wanting to make her do it again.
He was looking forward to it. Actually looking forward to it. That was probably enough information for one night.
Great. Now it matters.
He put the second bottle where he’d picked it up from, laid the shirt and jacket over the back of the chair without folding either of them properly, and went to finish his now lukewarm tea, faintly annoyed at himself in a way he didn’t try particularly hard to shake.
Garrett woke up before his alarm, which almost never happened, and lay there for a second working out why his body had apparently decided today deserved a head start.
Right. Today.
Not tomorrow anymore. That distinction mattered more than it probably should have.
He got up, went through the usual motions, shower, teeth, the general business of turning himself into a functioning human, and found himself standing in front of the wardrobe again with the same jacket and shirt laid over the chair from the night before, looking at them with slightly more attention than either garment had ever received in its life.
He put the shirt on.
"This is genuinely the same shirt, Garrett." He said to mirror
He kept it on anyway.
The cologne from the night before got exactly one spray, applied with the specific caution of someone who’d already decided, alone, in a bathroom, on a Thursday, that this mattered more than he wanted to admit out loud. Not enough to announce himself walking in. Just enough that it would still be there if she happened to notice.
He caught his own reflection doing something he didn’t immediately recognise, not quite a smile, more the shape one made when it hadn’t fully arrived yet, and looked away from the mirror before he had to think about that too.
Breakfast was quick, mostly because his stomach had apparently signed up for the same nervous energy as the rest of him and wasn’t much interested in food. He ate half of it anyway, because skipping meals because of a girl felt like exactly the kind of thing that would get him mocked later if it ever came up, and he wasn’t giving anyone the material.
He checked the time, grabbed his bag, patted his pocket for his keys the way he always did even though they were always there, and left.
The walk to campus felt shorter than it usually did, which made no logical sense given it was the exact same distance it had been every other day this term. He noticed it anyway, the specific way a walk stretches or shrinks depending on what’s waiting at the end of it.
He wasnt thinking of anything, none of the last few weeks’ worth of complications that had somehow become his normal life.
He was just walking to campus on a Friday morning, looking forward to something, uncomplicated for once in a way none of this had been in a long time.
The gates came into view.
Garrett picked up his pace slightly, and didn’t examine why.