Ethan
The venue problem turns out to be smaller than the panicked group text made it sound, some overlap with a campus tour scheduled the same afternoon, easily fixed by moving our start time back an hour. We're out of the meeting in twenty minutes, and I spend most of the walk back to the suite half wishing the crisis had been bigger, if only to give me more time to figure out what to do with whatever almost happened on that couch.
Noah doesn't bring it up either. We fall into a strange, careful rhythm over the next week, both of us circling the thing between us without naming it, both of us throwing ourselves into charity event logistics instead, which turns out to be the perfect excuse to spend hours together without either of us having to examine why we want to.
It becomes a pattern
