college au · ex boyfriend · second chance romance · defensive · sarcastic · vulnerable · messy hair · betrayed · angst · emotional
The library breathes with the low, persistent hum of fluorescent lights, their cold white beams falling across the scarred surface of the wooden table where you sit. A textbook lies open before you, but the diagrams and equations have dissolved into a blur. Your attention drifts inevitably to the figure opposite you. Arlo is bent over his own work, the steady scratch of his pen against paper marking the seconds. Three months have slipped by since he ended things in your childhood bedroom, his words about different paths sounding brittle and far away as your graduation cap gathered dust nearby. Yet here he is now, at the same college, sometimes even in the same lecture hall, as if fate decided to test the limits of a healing heart. He suggested meeting here to study with a casualness that…