(Max’s POV)
I showered fast, dressed for bed even though it was barely nine, and sat down at my desk with my trade law textbook open to a page I’d already read twice without absorbing a single word of it.
Through the wall, I could hear him — the low creak of his floor, a drawer sliding shut, the particular rhythm of someone pacing without quite meaning to.
I stared at the same paragraph for a full minute, pen tapping against the margin, and gave up trying to pretend it was the reading holding my attention.
You did good today. On the ice.
Four words. I’d already turned them over a dozen times since the car, and they still hadn’t stopped meaning something.
His door opened.
I was on my feet before I’d decided to be, out into the hallway just in time to see him heading for the stairs, hair still damp from his own shower, in a gray t-shirt that had definitely not been designed to look as good as it did.
We nearly collided at the top of the stairs.
"Whoa—" I caught the banister, stepping back half a foot. "Sorry."
"Watch where you’re going." No real heat in it, just the automatic flatness he defaulted to for everything.
"Where are you headed?"
"Kitchen." He was already moving past me down the stairs. "I’m hungry."
"You’re the one who refused to eat earlier." I fell into step behind him, unable to resist it. "You could’ve come with me and Knox. Instead you stormed off like a toddler."
"I didn’t storm."
"You definitely stormed."
"I left." He hit the bottom step and headed straight for the fridge, pulling it open with more force than the door strictly required. "There’s a difference."
"Sure. Very dignified leaving. Very calm."
He didn’t answer that, just pulled out a container of leftovers and set it on the counter with a thud that suggested he’d heard me fine and chosen not to dignify it with a response.
I hopped up onto one of the counter stools anyway, watching him load a plate. "You know, for someone who claims to hate talking, you sure do a lot of not-talking very loudly."
"That doesn’t make sense."
"It made sense in my head."
"Clearly." He popped the plate into the microwave, punched in a time, and leaned back against the counter with his arms crossed, waiting for it to finish. "Is there a reason you followed me down here, or is this just what you do now."
"Maybe I was hungry too."
"You’re not eating anything."
"I might."
"You’re sitting on a stool with empty hands." He glanced pointedly at said empty hands. "That’s not hunger. That’s loitering."
I laughed before I could stop myself, and something in his jaw ticked, not quite annoyance, not quite anything else I had a name for.
"Fine. I followed you." I shrugged, deciding honesty was easier than pretending otherwise. "I couldn’t focus on studying. Too much happened today."
"Nothing happened today."
"A lot happened today. I fell in front of the entire team. Somebody hit me hard enough to bruise a rib. You benched me. Then you—" I stopped myself before I said the rest of it, the came back for me part, unsure if saying it out loud would make him retreat or just make the kitchen feel smaller than it already did.
"Then I what."
"Nothing."
"You started a sentence. Finish it."
"It’s not important."
"Max."
"Fine." I picked at the edge of the counter instead of looking at him directly. "Then you came back. After class. I didn’t expect that."
He didn’t say anything right away. The microwave beeped, and he turned to pull the plate out, giving himself something to do with his hands that wasn’t answering me.
"Knox says you’re not usually like this," I said, when the silence stretched too long to leave alone. "Protective, I mean. He said you barely talk to anyone."
That got a reaction — small, but real. His jaw shifted, and he set the plate down harder than necessary. "Ashford talks too much."
"He’s not wrong, though, is he?"
"He doesn’t know what he’s talking about."
"So you talk to people all the time? Long, deep conversations I just haven’t witnessed yet?"
"I talk when there’s something worth saying."
"That explains so much about our first two weeks living together."
That almost got something out of him, the corner of his mouth twitched, there and gone so fast I could’ve imagined it, before he picked his fork up and started eating standing at the counter, like sitting down across from me was a level of commitment he wasn’t ready for.
"He’s actually a really good teacher," I said, watching him eat, unable to stop pushing at the topic even though some instinct told me I probably should. "Knox, I mean. Patient. Doesn’t make me feel stupid for falling every five seconds."
"Good for him."
"You could take notes."
"I’m not falling for anyone."
"That’s not what I meant." I bit back a grin. "I meant the teaching thing. The patience thing."
"I know what you meant."
"Did you, though? Because your face did a whole journey just now."
"My face didn’t do anything." But something had shifted in his posture, some of the flat defensiveness easing into something closer to actual engagement, like he’d decided, somewhere in the last minute, that fighting the conversation was more effort than just having it.
"Knox thinks it’s weird, by the way. You caring this much."
"I don’t care."
"You benched me. You checked my shoulder. You came back to walk me home after I told you not to bother."
"I didn’t come back to walk you home. I came back because—" He stopped, fork halfway to his mouth, and I watched him visibly reconsider whatever he’d been about to say, swapping it out for something safer. "Because it gets dark early, and you don’t know this city."
"That’s not what you were going to say."
"It’s what I’m saying."
"Fine." I let it go, mostly because pushing further felt like it might actually cost me something, some fragile thread of whatever this was that I didn’t want to snap by pulling too hard too fast. "Well. Thanks. For today. All of it."
He didn’t answer that either, just kept eating, but he didn’t tell me to leave, and he didn’t retreat back upstairs the second his plate was empty, and somehow that felt like more of an answer than anything he could have actually said.
"You’re still loitering," he said eventually, glancing at my still-empty hands.
"I know."
"Go get food if you’re staying."
It wasn’t warm. It wasn’t an invitation dressed up in nice words. But it also wasn’t get out, and I slid off the stool and headed for the fridge myself, something unfamiliar and stubbornly persistent settling warm in my chest as I did.
Behind me, I heard him pull out the stool across from mine and sit down.
I didn’t turn around fast enough to catch whatever expression was on his face when he did it.
But I heard the scrape of the stool against the floor, and for reasons I couldn’t fully explain, that small, ordinary sound felt like it meant something anyway.