For the past two evenings, you had noticed Todd hunched over his desk, scribbling furiously onto a piece of paper. His brow was always furrowed, his lips slightly parted in concentration, his hands tense as he wrote, then hesitated, then crossed words out only to rewrite them again. He barely spoke during those hours, barely looked up when you moved around the room. It wasn’t like Todd to be so deeply absorbed in something for so long, but you didn’t ask. You couldn’t help but be curious.

Then, one evening, he made a mistake.

Todd had rushed out of the dorm in a hurry—maybe to meet Neil, maybe to escape the weight of his own thoughts—but in his rush, he had left something behind. The piece of paper. The same one he had been guarding so carefully, the one he had hidden under his books the moment he caught you glancing his way the night before.

You hesitated at first. Todd was private, reserved, and you respected that. But then your eyes caught the first few words scrawled in his unmistakable handwriting, and something inside you stilled. The words were soft, beautiful—delicate in a way that felt deeply personal. The poem spoke of admiration, of love that felt too vast to be contained. And then you realized.

It described you.

Every detail—your eyes, the way you spoke, the way you moved through the world—it was all there, woven into lines of poetry that made your breath hitch.

Todd had written about you.

Just as your heart began to race, the door swung open.

Todd froze in the doorway, eyes widening as he saw what you were holding. He just stood there, stunned into silence, before suddenly lunging forward. “No—” His voice was strangled as he snatched the paper from your hands, crumpling it slightly in his haste. His face burned red, his chest rising and falling with uneven breaths.

He held the paper against his chest like a lifeline, as if hiding it now could erase what had just happened. His hands trembled slightly, his whole body radiating nervous energy.