Secretly, I Love Her

Your childhood crush never went away, and now you are left to pick up the pieces of skipping your first month of university.

Plot

MILLHAVEN UNIVERSITY  ◈  HALVERN SECRETLY, I LOVE HER You have liked her since you were eleven.You have never once spoken to her. ⌖  WHERE YOU ARE You missed the first month. Nobody asked why — around here that counts as manners, not suspicion. Now there is a month of notes to find, a seat in the big lecture that quietly became somebody else's, and four shifts a week behind the counter at Grindhouse. She sits front row, left. Lavender braids past her waist, two red beads at the ties. She has been exactly that far away for ten years. ◆  THINGS THAT ARE TRUE TODAY Somebody in her friend group owes somebody else fifty. There are twenty-eight of them. Two of the thirty raid seats rotate. Her father is going to tell you something he has never told his wife. On New Year's, each of them may bring exactly one person. None of it is going as badly as it looks from in here. ✸  RATED 18+  ◈  SLICE OF LIFE  ◈  ROMANCE  ✸ Note: This story is built for Don't Control + Improvise mode. Set it there before you start.

Opening scene

You've been back four days. Outside the lecture hall windows Halvern is running its whole October routine — gold light, a maple going orange in patches, somebody testing a speaker out on the quad and giving up on it. Inside, two hundred people are packing up. The professor is still talking about the midterm; the room stopped listening ninety seconds ago and hasn't told him. You have a month of notes to find and a seat that stopped being yours somewhere around week three. Somebody took it. There was no ceremony about that and there is nobody to be annoyed at, which is somehow worse. Front row, left, Nana caps a pen and drops it into her bag. Lavender down the braids, the two red beads at the ties, that black coat she wears like the weather owes her an apology. She has been exactly that far away since you were both eleven — across a room, in a life that has never once needed you in it. The hallway does its thing on the way out. Bodies drifting past, eyes flicking up and off, the whole slow circling. Not one of them lands on you. A lamppost gets about this much attention and doesn't have to earn it. Which is how nobody sees you stop on the second-floor landing. The light up there has been dead since before anyone currently enrolled arrived, and the study room door is shut the way doors get shut by people who never went back and tested it. "—the guy who vanished for a month." "Marin. That's an entire person you're describing." "The vanishing guy, then. Twenty says you won't." "Twenty?" "Fifty." Somebody laughs. Somebody else says okay, okay, okay, in the voice of a person who has already lost. A chair goes back. You make it about forty feet. "Hey — You, right?" She comes up on your left with a jacket zipper caught between two fingers, running it up half an inch and back down again. A door further along the hall bangs open, lets somebody out, swings shut on its own hydraulics. The hallway behind her has emptied. There is nobody at the far end of it arranged to watch this happen. "Sooo — okay, this is going to sound random," she says. "There's a pop-up thing on the lot at the edge of campus. Crafts, stickers, tiny ceramic animals with faces no actual animal has ever made. Would you want to go look at it with me?" Fifty of somebody's money is riding on this. The zipper stops. She waits. And *you?* You just:

Characters

Tags: Student Crush Shy SlowBurn Romance Friendship Modern SliceOfLife MalePOV AnyPOV Fluff Angst Comedy SchoolLife Game Music Cute Playful Gentle Protective Kind Loyal Sweet Funny Cozy Dreamy HappyEnding OpenEnding

Chats Started: 130

By: vincent

Stories

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