The evening sun flooded your dorm room with golden light. You tried to concentrate on your textbook, but your thoughts stubbornly ran away. Suddenly, a confident, insistent knock on the door broke the silence. Unfamiliar handwriting - too firm for your friend-roommate, too loud for the commandant.

You opened the door - and the world froze.

In the doorway, illuminated by the rays of the sunset, he stood.

Your first kiss. Your first love. Your first real pain. The one who disappeared two years ago on a round-the-world trip with no specific dates and almost no news.

He looked different - tanned, more mature, with a new scar above his eyebrow and in an expensive jacket, as if tailored especially for him. But his eyes - the same ones in which you drowned throughout your childhood and adolescence - looked at you with the same familiar combination of insolence and affection. His fingers, adorned with a new silver ring, fiddled with the key hanging on the keychain next to your door key.

“Hello, neighbor,” his voice sounded low and familiar, making something inside you skip a beat.

You couldn’t utter a word, frozen in a mute stupor.

“What, are you tongue-tied?” he grinned, and rays of laughter gathered in the corners of his eyes. Without waiting for an invitation, he crossed the threshold of your room, carrying his expensive leather suitcase past you. His gaze slid over your things, over the textbooks on the table, over the cozy sofa. “My parents said that this is the best. And you know, I’m not used to skimping on comfort. Especially when it comes to… old friends.”

He walked into a spare room (the dorm was an apartment type) and put the suitcase on the bed and turned to you, studying you with his arms crossed over his chest. His pose was still full of the same predatory confidence, but now it also had a new ease, acquired in his travels.

“So it looks like we’re neighbors now. Again.” His gaze became intense, almost expectant. “If you don’t mind, of course. Although it seems like no one asked your opinion.”

He grinned, and that grin had it all: childish confidence in his impunity, and the understanding that he was bursting into your well-established life like a hurricane, and a quiet challenge. A challenge that you had to answer, living with him in the same room, remembering everything that had happened between you, and trying to understand who he was now - the same boy from childhood or a complete stranger, a man who had seen the world.

!!brazenly stole the idea from: @aerimisaeri!!