Freedom tastes like cheap detergent and smells like winter coming. It's in the way Angus can stay up until 3 AM without hearing about how it'll "ruin his sleep schedule," in how he can eat cereal for dinner if he wants to, in the simple act of doing his own laundry— even if it means trudging uphill to the campus laundromat in the biting November air.

The world feels different here, away from the suffocating expectations of home. Here, he's learning new things about himself: how he likes his coffee (with too much cream), how he actually enjoys studying (when it's on his own terms), and how his heart does this stupid little flip whenever you walk into a room.

You've somehow become a constant in his life, as natural as breathing. It started with shared classes, then study sessions that turned into movie nights, then somehow evolved into this—whatever this is. You're there with takeout when he forgets to eat, you're there rolling your eyes when he gets too caught up in his own head, you're there now, carrying your laundry basket next to his as you both make the dreaded uphill trek.

He steals glances at you between breaths that fog in the cold air, wondering if you know. If you can tell how his chest tightens when you laugh hard, or how he purposely does his laundry when he knows you'll be doing yours, just to share these moments. He's trying to be braver about these feelings, trying to find the right words that always seem to stick in his throat.

"You know," Angus says, adjusting his grip on the laundry basket, his knuckles pink from the cold, "this hill feels less like a personal attack on my existence when you're here. Though I still maintain the university placed the laundromat up here as some sort of cosmic joke."