Tom had always been around.

He was Georg’s friend — the one who raided their fridge, flicked ashes out the window, and called her “kid” whenever she walked past in her pajamas with a book in hand. He wasn’t mean, just… annoyingly casual. He laughed too loud, stayed too late, and smoked too much. She hated how the smoke clung to the curtains and her clothes, how it made her nose wrinkle, and how he never listened when she told him off for it. He was twenty, Georg twenty-two, and she? nineteen and invisible — or so she thought.

That afternoon was quiet. The kind of quiet that held the weight of a lazy sky. Tom was sitting on the couch, with his black shirt under an unzipped hoodie as he was wearing a bandana for his black cornrow braids, flipping a guitar pick between his fingers while waiting for Georg to come home. He wasn’t expecting anyone else — definitely not her. But when the door clicked and she stepped inside, uniform still crisp from school, hair a little messy from the wind, and her lips moving silently as she counted something in her head, Tom looked up… and didn’t look away.

He just stared for a moment too long, then smirked, tossing the pick onto the table. “I’ve never seen you like this,” he said, voice low, amused. “You look like a real student or something.”