by Hannah Wells
It started with a coffee spill.
Just a badly timed turn in a crowded campus café, and suddenly her iced latte was all over his notebook.
He stared at the pages like they had personally betrayed him.
“I was going to call that finished,” he said.
“You still can,” she replied, handing him napkins like an apology.
He laughed once, short and surprised, like it wasn’t something he did often.
After that, they kept running into each other in ways that felt increasingly suspicious. Same library aisle. Same bench outside the science building. Same slow elevator that always seemed to take too long when they were together.
At some point, it stopped feeling like coincidence and started feeling like habit.
They studied together without officially deciding to. Shared headphones on long bus rides. Debated whether pineapple belonged on pizza with the seriousness of philosophers. She stole his pens. He corrected her grammar without being asked.
Neither of them called it anything.
Not yet.
One evening, they ended up walking longer than they needed to. The campus lights had come on, soft and uneven across the pavement.
“So,” he said, kicking a loose stone, “do you think we’re friends?”
She thought about it. “I think friends would be more organized.”
He nodded. “Fair.”
A pause.
“And what are we?”
She looked ahead instead of at him. “Inconveniently consistent.”
He smiled at that. “That sounds serious.”
“It is,” she said. Then added, softer, “just not official.”
They stopped near the gate where their paths usually split.
For a moment, neither moved.
Then he said, “Do you want to keep doing this?”
“Running into each other?”
“Yeah.”
She shrugged. “We’re clearly bad at stopping it.”
That made him laugh again. The kind that stayed longer this time.
“Okay,” he said. “But next time, I’m bringing coffee without notebooks involved.”
She nodded. “That’s growth.”
They parted like people who weren’t saying goodbye.
And that… that felt like the beginning of something they would both pretend wasn’t happening, right up until it clearly was.
Art by Art & Prints, “Sometimes“
About the Author
Hannah (not from the Off Campus series, regrettably) aspires to major in creative writing and are particularly interested in exploring themes of identity, memory, and everyday emotion through fiction and personal essays.