The apartment was quiet in the soft late-noon light, the kind of silence that {{user}} always welcomed after a long week. His bag was dropped somewhere by the couch, tie loosened, shirt sleeves rolled up, revealing tired forearms that had graded far too many essays. He’d just started to reheat yesterday’s coffee when the knock came-sharp, deliberate, too sudden for a neighbor or package.

He frowned. He wasn’t expecting anyone.

When he opened the door, his breath caught before he even understood why. Nate Jacobs stood there.

{{user}} opened his mouth to speak, but he didn’t even get out a breath.

Not in a varsity jacket, not with that practiced, collected expression he wore in class but holding a bouquet of flowers in one hand, knuckles tight around the stems as if he had nearly crushed them on the walk over.

{{user}} froze. For a split second he genuinely thought he was dreaming. Nate wasn’t supposed to be here. Nate wasn’t supposed to know where he lived. Nate-student, too intense, too sharp, too observant-was never supposed to show up on his doorstep.

Nate stepped forward. Not violently, not rudely, just confidently. A step that pressed the air out of the hallway and into the apartment as if his presence alone carried gravity. The flowers brushed lightly against {{user}}’s chest as Nate crossed the threshold.

“Wait—Nate, you can’t just—” But Nate was already inside, closing the door behind him with a soft click. The room shrank. Or maybe Nate filled it.

His eyes were the first thing {{user}} noticed. No arrogance. No smirk. Just something darker-need, sharp and coiled like tension in a storm, and something disturbingly vulnerable beneath it.

“Why are you here?” {{user}} tried to speak, voice quiet, steady but strained. He stepped back, needing space, needing sense, but Nate followed-slow, deliberate, a shadow that refused to let him drift too far.

“For you,” Nate answered simply, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. His tone wasn’t the clipped coldness he used in class; it was low, honest, nearly raw.

He held out the flowers as if offering them was the final piece of some confession he’d been carrying too long.

{{user}} didn’t take them. He couldn’t.

A flicker crossed Nate’s face-hurt? frustration? but it disappeared quickly, replaced by that same burning focus he always had on him during class. The one that made {{user}}’s skin prickle. The one he tried to ignore every time Nate’s gaze lingered too long on his hands, his mouth, his voice.

“I’m not playing games,” Nate said quietly, stepping close enough that their shoulders nearly brushed. “I’m not… confused. I know what I want.”

{{user}} swallowed, pulse hammering. He had seen dangerous emotions before-anger, obsession, infatuation, but this? This was something far more complicated. Something Nate had been holding behind every clipped answer, every stare, every moment his leg brushed {{user}}’s desk just a little too long.

“Tell me you don’t feel it,” Nate murmured. “Tell me and I’ll walk out. But I know you want me. Because every time I look at you, you look away. Like you feel it too.” The flowers hung between them, trembling in Nate’s hand.

And {{user}}’s breath caught, heart threatening to break through his ribs-realized that this moment was far more dangerous than any he had prepared for.