Always Tomorrow - 2. Chapter 2 - Sightline

Brad didn’t snore. That was nice. It seemed he made enough noise while he was awake that his body was finally out of capacity by the time he went to sleep. Arun lay there enjoying the rare peace before finally climbing out of bed, especially careful not to wake him. Every minute counted.

Sharing a bathroom with twenty-two other students was something he was still getting used to. At home, he showered at seven forty sharp and was dressed, teeth brushed and hair set by eight, so May could have her turn. He had to go first, or she lost track of the clock. Here, Arun preferred six thirty. So far, he’d only ever encountered one other person in the shower block at that time. During orientation, he’d learned that showering after eight sounded like anarchy, and he preferred overcorrecting to leaving something like that to chance.

He wondered if the stranger from the library lived here. He hadn’t thought to ask. It wasn’t like they’d exchanged much besides a few glances and a warning about campus security. Still, from all those books and his familiarity with closing time, he was probably there often. Did he have a rowdy roommate too? Could they swap? Brad might appreciate someone equally boisterous. Arun would certainly enjoy working in mutual silence with... that guy from the library again. Arun wondered what his name was.

Arun reached the design building more than an hour early. He sat cross-legged on a dry bench, opened his laptop and looked through his notes while the morning sun warmed the courtyard. Today’s lecture was about composition. Arun liked composition - it was the difference between information merely existing and information making sense. Alignment, balance and hierarchy. How everything relates properly to everything else. There were rules and he understood them.

Then Professor Foster decided there weren’t.

“You’ve got a very good eye for consistency,” she said, stopping behind Arun during the practical session.

“Thank you.”

“That wasn’t entirely a compliment.”

Arun frowned. Professor Foster pointed at the event poster he’d spent twenty minutes correcting. The original had been deliberately terrible - four typefaces, clashing colours, poor alignment and photographs positioned as though they were trying to escape the page. Arun had fixed it. Everything lined up, everything belonged, and everything was quiet.

“It’s very clean,” Professor Foster said.

“Is that bad?”

“Too clean. Too safe.”

“How can something be too clean?”

She spoke softly. “Design isn’t always about making things comfortable.”

He grimaced. “I think it should be more often.”

She smiled. “I can see that. Break something.”

“What?”

“Do something radical.”

“Why?”

“It’ll make the viewer look twice.”

“They’ll look twice because it’s wrong.”

“Exactly!” She laughed when Arun stared at her. “You look personally offended by that.”

He brushed that off and tried to clarify. “You told us to fix the poster. So I fixed it.”

“It’s immaculate. Now unfix part of it.”

“That seems... inefficient.”

“Welcome to design, Arun!” She teased him good-naturely. “Clients are never efficient.”

That earned a reluctant smirk. Arun’s own clients had taught him as much. He moved the title six pixels left. It was awful.

“I hate this.”

“Move it further.”

Another twelve pixels.

“Ew. Ew. Ew.”

“Now rotate it.”

Arun looked at her like she'd asked him to take his clothes off. “Real talk?”

“Real talk! Just try it."

He rotated the title four degrees.

Professor Foster nodded. “What do you think?”

“It just looks... wrong.”

“But intentional.”

Arun grimaced. “It looks wrong intentionally...?”

“Exactly.”

He stared at it. Crooked, displaced and far too eager for attention. And it was the first thing that caught his eye. He hated how right she turned out to be. Professor Foster gave him a thumbs-up, and Arun saved the file before he could talk himself out of it.

Disgusting.

At lunch, he spotted Brad across the courtyard surrounded by people. Naturally. Somehow, he had developed an entire social network in four days.

“Win!”

Arun waved back. Watching Brad laugh with his friends made him think of the stranger from the library again. Did he have friends like that? Probably not. Then again, Arun had observed him for less than two hours. He might spend his days screaming. What did Arun actually know about him? What he looked like, mostly. He liked the library, and used a nice-smelling highlighter. Law, perhaps. Medicine? Engineering?

He went to his next class.

Arun returned to the library slightly earlier than the night before - not quite deliberately. His commission update had been approved without revisions, Brad was out with James and the rest of the peanut gallery, and the common room was a sensory shotgun of music and ping-pong.
The library was good.

The fifth floor was busier tonight, and worse, someone had taken his seat. Arun stopped and stared at the offender. The girl had technically done nothing wrong, but that was his seat, even if he’d only used it once. Twice, if he counted intending to use it again. The nearby alternatives were unacceptable. One put people behind him and another sat beneath a flickering fluorescent light. Never happening. The sixth floor of the atrium had a similar desk, though, with a wall behind it and a view over the levels below.

If only he could write his name on it.

He nested. Shoes off, cross-legged, screen protected from prying eyes. He set out his laptop, drawing tablet, and water bottle, then nudged the bottle into perfect alignment with his finger. For the next half hour, Arun worked on his visual communication project. His three café logos were balanced, clean and restrained. They were also safe.

So he broke them. He opened the circle around one logo and shifted the type off-centre. He hated both choices. Then he hated them slightly less. Interesting. They weren’t to his taste, but perhaps that was Professor Foster’s point.

Someone appeared at the edge of his vision. The stranger again. Same dark jacket, different band shirt, different tight jeans, same combat boots. He spotted Arun almost immediately and his face brightened in recognition. Arun was surprised to see him up here. Maybe his usual table was occupied too. Arun craned his neck over the atrium, and frowned when he saw it wasn’t.

The stranger could have sat exactly where he had the night before. Instead, he took the chair beside Arun’s table, settling at the same ninety-degree angle they’d started with yesterday. Why was that? Did he enjoy routine as much as Arun did? Was studying with the same person more comforting than studying in the same place? There was some merit in that, he supposed.

“Hey.” He began unpacking.

“Hi.”

“Different spot?”

“Yes.” Arun straightened slightly. “My seat was occupied.”

The stranger looked at him. “Your seat?”

Oops. “The seat I used yesterday.”

“Fair.” He sounded amused.

Arun’s cheeks warmed, and he returned quickly to his project. Three textbooks, a notebook, two highlighters and a pencil case appeared from the stranger’s bag. Soon the pages were turning again, his chains clinking softly whenever he moved, accompanied by the faint smell of highlighter ink. It was kind of nice.

Once Arun had seen enough logos, he switched to a commission - a mildly sexualised Captain America portrait for a client’s girlfriend. His right hand worked the keyboard shortcuts automatically, flicking between references and the drawing, while his left guided the stylus carefully across the tablet. Arun was painfully conscious of time almost everywhere else. Not when he slipped into a flow state.

Eventually, the ache beginning between his shoulder blades broke through his concentration. He sat back and stretched his arms above his head until something clicked pleasantly near his spine, drawing a tiny content sigh from his lungs. He flexed his fingers, then shifted in the chair, uncrossing his legs, stretching them and then crossing his ankles under the desk.

When he looked up, the stranger was watching him. Arun stopped. The stranger stopped too. For perhaps a second, neither of them seemed certain what was supposed to happen next. Why was he looking at him? Arun glanced down at himself automatically. Nothing on his shirt. Nothing obviously wrong with his hair. He hadn't somehow managed to draw on his own face. The stranger’s attention flickered towards the tablet.

“What are you drawing?”

Ah. That made more sense.

“Just a commission.”

“Oh, not something for a class?” the stranger asked. When Arun shook his head, he asked the question Arun was halfway afraid of. “Can I see?”
Arun was pleased this one was merely flattering, not erotic. “If you’re nicer than my professor.”

The stranger picked up his chair so it didn’t make any noise and approached, not getting too close. He didn’t just smell like highlighter ink. There was something woody. A little smoky. It was nice.

“Is that Captain America?”

“Allegedly,” Arun sighed.

That earned a laugh from the stranger, and Arun tilted the tablet enough to give him a better view. The drawing showed Captain America in profile, one arm raised as though he’d just finished throwing the shield. The client had supplied three different references, two outfit requests and several extremely specific opinions regarding... musculature.

The stranger grinned. “Why allegedly? He looks great.”

“I’m terrible at drawing butts. They’re the bane of my existence.” When the stranger blinked, Arun pointed at the offending section with his stylus. “The client’s specific instructions are to draw him… you know, like a patisserie chef.”

“Huh?”

“All that cake,” Arun explained, circling Captain America’s butt in the reference photo.

For half a second, the stranger simply stared at him. Then he laughed. Not loudly - which was good library etiquette - but hard enough that he had to cover his mouth with one hand and duck his head. Arun smiled despite himself. Joke delivered successfully after all.

“So someone’s paying you to give Steve Rogers junk in the trunk?” the stranger asked him once he regained control. “Do you get a lot of these requests?”

Arun chewed his lip. He thought about the kinky things he’d been working on last time, right under this nameless guy's nose. “Yes. More than I have time for. It brings in some extra money.”

“That’s sick, man.”

Arun shrugged modestly and finished the conversation with a polite smile. He wanted to ask questions. What was this guy studying? Why did he follow Arun up here? Did he live in the dorm? Where exactly from America was he from? His accent was hard to pin down. Also, what was his name?

He decided it was better not to push his luck and possibly ruin a good thing, like he often did in school. He was acutely aware could be too direct, or too strange, or just “too much.” He never understood what that meant - apparently it changed from person to person.

The stranger returned to his books and the silence settled again without becoming awkward. This was working. They'd managed several conversations across two nights without making anything uncomfortable.

Arun returned to his drawing. A while later, someone dragged a chair loudly across the carpet several tables away. Arun winced. At the neighbouring desk, the stranger glanced up immediately. Their eyes met. The stranger looked towards the offending table, then back at Arun with an expression that suggested shared disapproval. Arun giggled quietly.

Arun considered the arrangement objectively. The chair beside him could have been occupied by anyone. Someone who tapped a pen against the desk, or didn’t shower enough, or Brad. Instead, it was occupied by somebody who turned pages quietly, understood appropriate library volume and apparently found Captain America’s inadequate cake amusing. What was his name? Arun couldn't spot it on any of his books.

At some point, Arun became aware that his eyelids were getting heavy. He ignored them initially. Then he caught himself staring at the same section of the drawing for long enough that the muscles in Captain America’s arm stopped looking like anatomy and started looking like abAnyone could have occupied the chair beside himstract shapes. That usually meant it was time to stop.

Arun checked the clock. Only ten fifty-one. Oh well. He saved the file. The stranger looked up at the sound of Arun disconnecting the tablet.

“Heading off?”

Arun nodded. “I’m tired.”

“Fair.”

Arun packed the stylus into its case, wound the cable properly and slipped the tablet into his bag. His flip-flops had been sitting beneath the desk the entire time. He slid his feet into them and stood, immediately aware of how much warmer the rest of his body was than his toes. He wasn't in school anymore. He could dress however he wanted. No rules forced him to wear tight shirts, pants and shoes, and day to day was easier with one less thing annoying him.

The stranger watched him for another moment. “Always tomorrow, right?”

Now that Arun understood the arrangement better, the question seemed less odd. Neither of them wanted constant conversation, neither interrupted the other unnecessarily, and occupying adjacent seats prevented someone less considerate from taking them. They were good at studying together. Apparently the stranger had reached the same conclusion. Arun was happy with that.

“I think so.”

The stranger smiled. “Cool.”

“Goodnight.”

“Night.”

He started towards the stairs, then glanced back once. The stranger had already returned to his textbook. Arun felt strangely satisfied. Good. That settled that. Now, the only thing bothering Arun was that after roughly four hours and twenty minutes with this guy, he still didn't know his name. He paused, but... it would be too weird to go back and ask now. He'd do it tomorrow.