Callahan had always hated small rooms, but yours made it worse.

Too warm, too lived-in, too much of you everywhere. Your jacket thrown over the back of the chair like you’d shrugged out of it mid-thought, books stacked in crooked towers on the floor, a half-dead plant leaning toward the window as if it had given up trying to survive in your chaos. He stood just inside the door, tall enough that the ceiling fan felt uncomfortably close to his head, broad shoulders filling the space in a way that made everything feel tighter, more dangerous.

You locked the door behind him.

The soft click scraped along his nerves.

Callahan—Callie to the few people who knew him well enough to risk it—dragged a hand through his dark hair, already messy from the drive, from the argument, from the way you’d been looking at him all night like you were daring him to do something stupid. He was still wearing his glasses, thin metal frames sliding slightly down his nose, the kind that made professors trust him and girls underestimate him. Underneath them, his eyes were sharp, restless, meaner than they had any right to be.

Hot nerd, people called him. Brilliant, insufferable, arrogant as hell.

And right now, completely, disastrously focused on you.

You moved past him without a word, crossing the room barefoot, your steps quiet against the floor. He watched the sway of your shoulders, the careless confidence in the way you existed inside your own space, like the world had never once told you to be smaller. That alone pissed him off. You pissed him off. The way you argued with him, the way you rolled your eyes when he corrected you, the way you never seemed impressed by the things that made everyone else stare.

And still— he kept showing up.

You turned to face him, leaning back against the edge of your bed, arms folded loosely across your chest. Close enough now that he could see the tiny crease between your brows, the one that appeared whenever you were trying not to smile or trying not to lose your temper. He couldn’t tell which.

“You’re staring,” you said.

Your voice was calm, but there was something underneath it—heat, challenge, the same dangerous current that had followed them all the way here from the car.

Callahan exhaled slowly through his nose, jaw tightening.

“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

He didn’t look away.

God, you were infuriating. You had a boyfriend—everyone knew that. A decent guy, apparently. Reliable. Safe. The kind of person who remembered birthdays and texted good morning and probably never said anything cruel on purpose. The kind of person Callahan should have respected.

Instead, he hated him on principle.

Because you kept choosing him.

Because you kept choosing him and still looking at Callahan like this.

Like you were curious.

Like you were tempted.

He stepped further into the room, the door clicking shut behind him with a finality that made the air feel heavier. His height forced you to tilt your head back just slightly to meet his gaze, and the movement sent a flicker of satisfaction through him that he refused to examine too closely.

“You shouldn’t have asked me to come up,” he said, voice low, rougher than usual.

It wasn’t a warning. It was an accusation.

You shrugged one shoulder, casual, maddening. “You didn’t have to say yes.”

That did it.

Something sharp twisted in his chest, hot and irrational. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, a habitual gesture that usually meant he was about to dismantle someone’s argument piece by piece. But there was no logic here, no clean equation to solve. Just you, standing in front of him in your own room, looking like trouble and acting like you had no idea what you were doing to him.

“You drag me halfway across town,” he said, taking another step closer, voice dropping. “You sit next to me in the car like that. You keep touching my arm every time you laugh. And now we’re in your bedroom.”

His mouth curved into something that wasn’t quite a smile.

“And you want me to pretend this is nothing?”

The silence that followed was thick enough to choke on.