Chapter 3: The Roommate's Interrogation
The stale air of the dorm room hit Leo like a wall after the clean, cold night. It smelled of microwaved noodles, unwashed socks, and the ghost of Marcus’s cologne. He closed the door softly, the latch clicking into place with a finality that made the last two hours feel like a dream.
A glow came from the far side of the room. Marcus was propped up in his bed, the blue light of his phone washing over his face. He didn’t look up.
“And he returns,” Marcus said, his thumbs flying over his screen. “I was three minutes from filing a missing persons report. Thought you’d fallen into a bush and decided to live there.”
Leo kicked off his shoes, his movements quiet, trying to hold the night’s silence inside him for just a little longer. He made for his desk.
“So?” Marcus pressed, finally dropping his phone onto his chest. “Where’d you vanish to? You just evaporated after that backyard panic attack. Did you find a nice quiet closet to code in?”
“Went for a walk,” Leo said, his back to Marcus as he pretended to organize the already chaotic stack of printouts on his desk. The paper felt alien under his fingertips. All he could feel was the cool, rough stone of the ledge and the warmth of Abby’s skin.
“A walk. Right.” The bedsprings creaked as Marcus sat up. Leo heard the shift in his posture. “You know, for a guy who just took a contemplative midnight stroll, you look… different. You’re standing weird. You’re all…” Marcus made a vague, swirling gesture with his hand.
Leo froze. He could feel the phantom pressure of her lips, the slight, lingering sting. He unconsciously ran his tongue over his lower lip.
“Oh, shit,” Marcus breathed.
Leo turned. Marcus was staring, his head tilted, a slow grin spreading like a crack in his face.
“Dude,” Marcus said, his voice dropping to a theatrical whisper. “You’ve got… is that lipstick?”
Leo’s hand flew to his mouth. He rubbed at the corner, and when he pulled his fingers away, they held the faintest smudge of something dark and waxy. Black cherry. Not lipstick. Lip stain. The detail was incredibly specific, and it made his face ignite.
Marcus let out a low, delighted whistle. He swung his legs off the bed and padded over. He didn’t ask. He just snatched Leo’s phone from where it was peeking out of his hoodie pocket.
“Hey!”
“Proof of life, man. Standard protocol.” Marcus tapped the screen. It lit up, bathing his triumphant face in its glow.
He went very still. His eyes widened. The joking demeanor evaporated, replaced by pure, unadulterated shock. His mouth actually hung open.
He turned the screen slowly, holding it up like an artifact. There they were, pixel-perfect. Leo’s dazed, flushed face. Abby’s sharp features, her white-blonde hair stark against the dark sky, her arm hooked possessively around his neck.
“No way,” Marcus whispered. He looked from the phone to Leo’s burning face and back again. “No. Fucking. Way. The goth girl? Abby Holloway? The one in the leather… everything? The human tattoo parlor?”
“Don’t call her that,” Leo said, the words coming out with a defensive edge he didn’t know he possessed.
Marcus ignored him, his curiosity shifting into high gear. “Where? How? I saw you talking to her and then you both just ghosted. I figured she ate you alive and left the bones.”
Leo took his phone back, his thumb stroking the edge of the case. The photo was real. It had happened. Saying it out loud would make it real in here, too, in this messy room that smelled of his old life.
“We left,” Leo started, his voice barely audible. “She… she took me to that old chapel. Behind the Pi Sig house.”
“The creepy crackhouse church? Dude, that’s where people go to do meth.”
“We just talked,” Leo said, and then corrected himself. “Well. We talked on the bell tower. On the ledge. Like, legs dangling over.”
Marcus’s eyebrows disappeared into his hairline. “You have a panic attack in a crowded backyard but you’re cool dangling your feet off a death drop? Explain the logic.”
“It was different,” Leo said, struggling to articulate the quiet that had settled between them up there. “Then she… she kissed me. There.”
A stunned silence filled the room, thick enough to taste. Marcus just blinked.
“And then,” Leo continued, the words gaining momentum now, tumbling out, “we went back down. Into the chapel. And we… yeah.”
Marcus’s brain visibly short-circuited. “You made out with Abby Holloway in a graffiti-covered crack-den chapel?” He let out a single, sharp bark of laughter that held no humor, only disbelief. “On a pew?”
Leo nodded, unable to stop a small, shaky smile from breaking through.
Marcus sank down onto his own desk chair, running a hand through his hair. He looked genuinely winded. He stared at the floor for a long moment, then up at Leo.
“I talked to three girls tonight,” he said, his tone flat. “One thought I was her Uber. One asked if my friend was single. The third told me my shirt was ‘trying too hard.’” He shook his head, a slow, incredulous motion. “I spent four hours working the room. You spent twenty minutes looking like a scared rabbit, then got adopted by a feral art student and taken to her apocalyptic makeout cathedral.” He let out a long, shuddering breath. “I am… I am genuinely impressed. I am in awe. This isn’t a backhanded compliment. This is a monument being erected in your honor.”
He stood up, crossed the room, and clamped a hand on Leo’s shoulder. The grip was firm, solid. “You, Leo Vance, you quiet, weird, coding bastard… you actually did it. You pulled the most impossible girl on campus.”
The pride in Marcus’s voice wasn’t mocking. It was real. It was brotherly. It warmed the last of the chapel’s chill from Leo’s bones.
Leo looked at the photo on his phone again. The guy in the picture still looked like him—same baggy hoodie, same anxious eyes—but he was someone else now. He had evidence.
“So,” Marcus said, squeezing his shoulder before letting go. He was grinning again, the familiar, scheming glint back in his eyes. “What’s the plan? When’s the date? We need to get you out of those jeans. Like, permanently. We’re going shopping. My treat.”
Leo locked his phone, the screen going black. But the image was seared into his mind, brighter than the LED strip pulsing under his bed. He had a plan. He had a number. He had the faint, sweet stain of black cherry on his lips, and for the first time, the messy, closed-in room felt like a launchpad, not a cage.
“Tomorrow,” Leo said, and his voice didn’t shake at all. “I’m texting her tomorrow.”
Abby’s dorm room smelled of vanilla candle, sweat, and sex. The candle was still guttering on the windowsill, the sweat was fresh, and the sex hung in the air, a pungent, physical echo. Her roommate, Chloe, was a tangled lump of sheets in her bed, her blonde hair a frizzed halo on the pillow.
A muscular arm, tattooed with a generic tribal band, was slung possessively across Chloe’s waist. The guy—Chloe’s current flavor, a soccer player named Drew or Troy—snored softly into her shoulder.
Abby moved quietly to her own side of the room, the platform boots suddenly feeling absurdly loud. She began carefully unbuckling the stiff leather corset, her fingers fumbling with the cold clasps.
“Mm. You’re back.” Chloe’s voice was thick with sleep. She shifted, dislodging the arm, and blinked over at Abby. “What time is it?”
“Late. Or early.” Abby shrugged the corset off, the cool air hitting her bra and skin. She hung the leather on the bedpost with a practiced gesture.
“Where’d you disappear to?” Chloe asked, propping herself up on an elbow. The sheet slipped, and she yanked it back up without much concern. The guy didn’t stir. “I saw you talking to that skinny kid in the yard. Then you both ghosted.” A sly, knowing smile spread across her face. “Let me guess. You found some jock with a secret poetry fetish behind the garage. Or was it two jocks?”
It was the usual script. Abby would usually roll her eyes, offer a crude, hilarious summary, and they’d laugh. The words stuck in her throat now. She sat on the edge of her own bed, facing away, and started working on the laces of her boots.
“No jocks,” she said, her voice quieter than she intended.
The silence from Chloe’s side of the room became different. Curious. The mattress creaked as Chloe fully sat up.
“Okay,” Chloe drew the word out. “So, who was it? That kid from the yard? The one who looked like he was waiting for a bus to anywhere else?”
Abby nodded. The boot came off with a heavy thud. She peeled the fishnet tights down her legs, the material snagging on the ink on her calf.
“You hooked up with him?” Chloe’s tone wasn’t judgmental, just deeply, profoundly confused. “Why? Was it a dare? Were you trying to, like, collect a new genre?”
“It wasn’t a hook up.” The second boot thumped to the floor. Abby stared at the chaotic collage of postcards and concert flyers on her wall. “We just talked. Mostly.”
“Mostly.” Chloe pounced on the word. “Abby Holloway. Are you blushing? I can’t see in this light but I swear I can feel you blushing from over here.”
Abby pressed her cool palms to her warm cheeks. She was. It was infuriating. She felt sixteen again, caught doing something naive.
“We went to the chapel,” Abby admitted, the confession feeling strangely weighty in the sex-heavy air.
“The crackhead chapel? Romantic.” Chloe snorted. “And? Did you give him a tour of the graffiti? Show him the best spots for existential dread?”
“We went to the bell tower.” Abby lay back on her bed, staring at the ceiling where glow-in-the-dark stars formed no recognizable constellations. She described the ledge, the view, the way he’d admitted he felt invisible. She left out the gentleness of the kiss, the way his hands had hovered. She mentioned the pew.
Chloe listened without interrupting, a rare event. When Abby finished, the room was quiet except for the stranger’s snoring.
“Holy shit,” Chloe whispered finally. “You like him.”
“I don’t know,” Abby said, too quickly.
“You do. You absolutely do.” Chloe’s voice was gleeful, astonished. “You didn’t even sleep with him. You took him to your weird ruin and you talked. You made out on church furniture like a teenager. You’re smiling at the ceiling right now. I can hear it in your voice.”
Abby touched her own lips. They felt normal. They felt completely changed.
“What’s his name?” Chloe asked.
“Leo.”
“Leo.” Chloe tested the name. “Not a Brayden. Not a Chase. Leo. He’s, like, a computer guy or something, right? Quiet.”
“Yeah.”
Chloe let out a long, low breath. “Well, fuck me. Abby Holloway is going on a date with a quiet computer guy she met on a bell tower. This is the most interesting thing you’ve done all year.”
The guy in Chloe’s bed, Drew-or-Troy, grunted and rolled over, his back a wall of muscle. The conversation was a closed loop now, a shared secret that made the familiar room feel temporarily new. Abby reached for her phone on the nightstand. The screen was dark. She didn’t unlock it.
She just held it, waiting for the morning, knowing that for once, she was the one hoping for a text.