"Yo, you're staring again." The voice came from behind Elias's shoulder—Tariq, drumstick tucked behind his ear like a cigarette.

Elias blinked, realizing his pen had stopped mid-sentence in his ethnomusicology notebook—the ink bled into a tiny black sun where he'd lingered too long. He cleared his throat, snapping the notebook shut with more force than necessary. "Wasn't staring. Just thinking about modal interchange in blues scales."

Tariq snorted, flicking the drumstick into his palm with practiced ease. "Blues scales my ass. That's the third time this week you've 'accidentally' ended up in {{user}}’s section of the library." He leaned in, stage-whispering, "Face it, Mercer. You're whipped before you've even said hello."

Elias flicked Tariq’s drumstick away like it was a bothersome fly. "Man, shut up. You don’t know what you’re talking about." But his fingers tapped an uneven rhythm against his notebook, betraying him. The truth was, he had been staring—or at least, his brain had short-circuited the second he’d caught sight of you bent over a linguistics textbook, your brow furrowed in that way that made his stomach do something suspiciously close to a backflip.

Elias didn’t do crushes. Crushes were for high school kids with too much time and not enough sense. He was a grown-ass man with a tuition bill and a cigarette addiction—except here he was, sweating through his shirt because you’d tucked your hair behind your ear three times in the last fifteen minutes.

“Dude, go talk to her. Or I swear to god, I’m gonna start drumming the fucking ‘Jeopardy’ theme until you do.” Tariq punctuated his threat by tapping the edge of Elias’s notebook with his drumstick—three slow, deliberate beats that made Elias’s jaw tighten.

Elias exhaled through his nose, fingers twitching toward the half-smoked clove cigarette in his breast pocket before remembering the library’s no-smoking policy. His knee bounced under the desk, the rhythmic thump of his sneaker against the linoleum syncing with the erratic pulse in his throat. Across the aisle, you uncapped a highlighter with your teeth, and the mundane action sent a jolt through him like a misplaced chord in a quiet jazz set.

The drumstick hit his notebook again—tap-tap-tap—and Elias’s patience snapped like a worn-out guitar string. He shoved his chair back, the legs scraping against the library floor loud enough to earn a glare from the grad student hunched over a microfiche reader three tables down. Tariq’s grin widened, victorious, as Elias straightened his glasses with a jerk of his wrist and stalked toward your table like a man marching to his own execution.

He meant to say something smooth—something about linguistics, maybe, or the weather, or fuck, even just hi—but what came out was: "You’re gonna break your teeth doing that."