Chapter 2
Chapter
Two
THEN
September, Freshman Year
W hen Zayn arrived at his new dorm room, he found the door propped open. He stopped in the doorway and blinked at the sight that greeted him.
A guy was in there already, bent over, using incorrect lifting form as he set down a box. Not that Zayn could formulate a complaint when it meant he was getting the perfect view of some excellent musculature in sweatpants.
The guy seemed to be trying to fit the box under the bed on the right, but it was a fraction of an inch too tall. Instead of giving up, he simply lifted the side of the bed about a foot off the floor with one hand and no apparent effort, slid the box under it with the other, then casually set the bed back down.
Zayn blinked harder. There was no way he’d just seen that. Not even with how impressive this guy’s arms were.
The guy spun around, looking startled to find Zayn standing there, then grinned, his wide smile shining with the absolute magnitude of a blue supergiant, and Zayn forgot everything he knew about weight and force and leverage and logic.
“Hey! Are you Zayn Parvin?”
Zayn shook his head frantically. “Wrong room.” It came out as a high-pitched squeak, and he would have been embarrassed about that, but he was too busy turning on his heel to escape.
This could not be his roommate. He’d gotten an email the day before explaining that there’d been an administrative error regarding his room assignment, and the computer science major he’d been messaging for the last month would, in fact, not be rooming with him. Instead, he’d be living with an Aiden Lucas, major unknown, last-minute attempt to contact so far unanswered. Googling him hadn’t produced any useful information either.
But this couldn’t be Aiden Lucas. The college wouldn’t do that to him. Raid his fantasies and assign him a roommate who looked like this—all tall and muscular, with sun-kissed skin and golden blond hair, the poster boy cliché of a popular high school quarterback, the football team captain with a smile that threatened to vaporize Zayn on impact.
There must have been a mistake. He’d likely have to go to an office somewhere and fill out a bunch of forms to get this straightened out, because he couldn’t live with someone this attractive for an entire year without making a complete fool of himself.
Except his exit was foiled by his parents’ arrival. His mother’s gaze caught on Hopefully-Not-Aiden. “Oh, are you Zayn’s roommate?” she asked as she hustled Zayn inside.
The guy’s brow furrowed in confusion. “He said he’s not in this room.”
Zayn’s mother peeked her head out of the door to double-check the number. “No. This is the room Zayn’s supposed to be in.”
Well, there went his chance to escape nine months of pretending he wasn’t drooling over his plasma-hot roommate. He should have tried harder to convince his parents he didn’t need any help moving.
His mother set her box on the desk, then his father did the same.
“Aiden.” The guy extended a hand, and they exchanged greetings.
Zayn edged over to shake his hand as well. “Zayn,” he said, then swallowed in a way he hoped wasn’t audible to every single person in the building. Did Aiden’s hand have to be so warm and big?
“Is your family here to help you move in?” his mother asked, but Aiden shook his head.
“No, ma’am, I’m by myself today. I didn’t have that much stuff, and it’s a couple days’ drive, so I didn’t want to drag everybody down here with me.”
“Ah, a bit of a lone wolf, are you?”
An expression of sheer panic crossed Aiden’s face. “What? No. I’m not a wolf, lone or otherwise.”
“Well,” she said with a laugh. “In that case, we’ll help you.”
Aiden hesitated, like he was searching for a polite way to say no, but then he grinned that bright, easy smile. “Thank you. That’s very nice of you to offer.”
Between the four of them, they finished unpacking both cars in no time, and then Zayn’s mother was bundling them off to a nearby restaurant for an early dinner, refusing to take no for an answer when Aiden tried to insist he could just use his cafeteria meal plan.
Given his luck for the day, Zayn wasn’t surprised to find himself on the same side of the booth as Aiden. The booth wasn’t small, but the only thing he could focus on was the space between them, how close they were sitting, how Aiden seemed to possess a special brand of gravity that was trying to pull Zayn closer to him still.
After the waitress had taken their order, Zayn’s mother looked at Aiden. “What are you majoring in?”
Aiden immediately sat up straighter, energy radiating from him. “Astronomy.”
Zayn’s eyebrows rose. He must have heard that wrong. Aiden, with his muscles and his height and his arms and his everything, was not an astronomy major.
“Oh, that’s lovely,” his mother said. “Zayn is too.”
Aiden turned toward him, and Zayn was going to have to develop an entirely new classification system for luminosity, because Morgan and Keenan had not taken into account a smile like Aiden’s when they developed theirs.
“You’re an astronomy major? Nice! My high school was super rural, so I’ve had to study as much as I can on my own, but I’m so excited. When are you taking Astronomy Lab this term? Tuesday? Mine’s on Tuesdays. Do you think they’ll cover detecting exoplanets? I know it’s not really introductory material, but exoplanets are so cool. Even if we only got to analyze simulated light curves to identify exoplanet candidates, it’d be amazing .”
Oh god. Aiden was a big geek. A big smart geek who knew about astronomy. No. This was not okay. It was one thing when he was just gorgeous, but now he was talking about exoplanets with his eyes glittering like the stars on a moonless night in a dark-sky location. Zayn didn’t have the mental fortitude to deal with this.
He managed to nod. “I’d love it if they covered microlensing, but I think that won’t happen until maybe third year. We’ll have to get through general relativity first.”
“You’re probably right. Which are you looking forward to learning more, the transit method or the radial velocity method? Ooh, or transit spectroscopy? I mean, obviously the answer is ‘all of them,’ but I can’t wait to study the transit method. It’s been used to detect so many planets, and it’ll be fascinating to learn how to calculate a planet’s size and orbital distance.”
What? No. Hot or not, Zayn needed to make sure Aiden knew how ridiculous he was being. “The follow-up studies are going to be way more interesting. Like using transit spectroscopy to analyze the composition of a planet’s atmosphere? How cool will it be to learn to detect signs of potential habitability?”
“Yeah, it’s gonna be awesome .”
Damn right it was.
Somewhere between the finer details about dependence on specific instrument capabilities and contributions to the overall understanding of exoplanetary population, their food arrived.
Zayn realized both his parents had the same indulgent, if completely baffled, smiles on their faces that they always got when he talked about astronomy, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. For the first time in his life, he had someone to talk to in person who truly understood. Even if Aiden had some mistaken priorities when it came to learning exoplanet detection and characterization techniques. Clearly, using radial velocity to help characterize a planet’s orbit would be more fun than observing periodic dips in a star’s brightness with the transit method. But that was forgivable when Aiden seemed so passionate about detecting Earth-sized planets in habitable zones.
And if, after his parents dropped them off at their dorm, they spent the rest of the night talking about the limitations of ground-based observatories instead of unpacking, well, he’d survive a day or two without putting his underwear and socks in a drawer.