Roommates With Benefits [BL]

I had been alone for precisely fourteen hours and thirty seven minutes.

Not that I was keeping track or anything.

Okay, I totally was, counting the minutes like someone preparing for finals or timing leftover pizza in the microwave.

The digital clock on the microwave had become an unwilling accomplice, its glowing numbers ticking forward with what felt like deliberate cruelty.

Damien took up way more space than one tall guy really should. Not just physically, though that’s true too...but in all those little ways I’d never noticed before, like how your tongue keeps finding the gap when you lose a tooth, even after you tell it to stop.

The absence of his quiet presence left strange hollows in the morning routine, small empty spaces that somehow felt louder than noise.

Walking into the apartment, I wasn’t greeted by the smell of coffee because he wasn’t up before me. There were no complaints about me hogging the bathroom first.

No one nudged me to eat breakfast. And no one was there to steal a kiss while I packed my bag. Honestly, the quiet was so eerie it made me check twice to make sure I hadn’t accidentally walked into some alternate dimension where I had no roommate.

I stood in the kitchen for a solid minute just staring at the coffee maker before letting out a dramatic sigh. The machine sat there, shiny and unhelpful, reflecting a slightly disheveled version of my face back at me.

”...Traitor.”

The machine didn’t respond, which was unsurprising, even with all the chances I gave it. I pressed the button anyway, just to hear something mechanical and familiar fill the space for a few seconds.

Classes went by slower than usual.

I took notes, answered questions, and pretended to pay attention in lectures. My pen moved across the page in barely readable scribbles while my brain wandered off in the direction of a black sedan and a house I’d never seen.

The lecture hall felt oversized somehow, the professor’s voice drifting past me like background noise. Every time my phone buzzed, I found myself glancing at it way faster than I wanted to admit.

My hand would twitch toward my pocket before I could stop it, hope flaring for half a second before I forced it back down.

But it wasn’t Damien texting me. Just those useless campus emails...like a friendly reminder about a project with a deadline I wasn’t ready to think about yet.

And there was Joey, sending a picture of a dog in sunglasses with zero context. Classic.

I didn’t bother asking for context anymore; some things were better left as mysteries. Still, I saved the photo. It felt like the kind of ridiculous thing Damien would have snorted at if he’d been sitting next to me.

After class, I headed straight to the flower shop. It was oddly therapeutic. Flowers didn’t care that my roommate had ditched me for a mansion staffed better than my entire apartment building.

They still needed trimming, and customers still agonized between lilies and roses as if the world depended on it.

Life went on. It just felt quieter, like someone had turned the day’s volume down a couple notches.

The soft scent of fresh blooms and damp soil was almost comforting in its indifference, a small reminder that some things continued whether or not Damien Lockwood was currently in the same city.

By the time I returned to Preston Hall, the hallway lights had already dimmed to that soft amber glow that always seemed to set a mood nobody asked for. The carpet muffled my footsteps, making the walk to our door feel longer than usual.

I unlocked the apartment, and silence greeted me the moment I stepped inside. It wasn’t the peaceful kind. It was the heavy, waiting kind...like the rooms themselves were listening for a key that wouldn’t turn.

”...Yeah, yeah,” I muttered. ”I guess miss him too.”

I tossed my keys into the bowl by the door, the sound oddly loud.

I changed into comfy clothes and wandered into the kitchen. Cooking felt like a default setting, rice, veggies, chicken.

My hands moved through the routine without much help from my brain, chopping and stirring on autopilot while I thought about anything but what I was actually doing.

When everything was done, I carried dinner to the table and froze.

Two plates.

I blinked. The second plate sat there, perfectly ordinary and completely wrong, as if my body had simply refused to accept the new reality.

”...Seriously?”

One sat at my usual spot. The other... right across from me. Waiting for someone who wasn’t there, as if my hands had forgotten to update themselves on the current roommate situation.

I stared at it for a few long seconds before letting out a tired laugh. The sound felt thin in the quiet kitchen.

”I’ve officially lost it.”

Shaking my head, I took the untouched plate back to the kitchen, packed the food away, and slid it into the fridge next to the three cartons of milk still lingering without a purpose.

The cold air from the open fridge washed over my face for a moment, a brief, sharp contrast to the stillness of the apartment.

”Congratulations,” I told myself. ”You’ve become domesticated.”

I closed the fridge door a little harder than necessary and walked away before I could start talking to the milk cartons too.

The rest of the evening was spent buried in textbooks: psychology notes, research articles, an unfinished project that had been glaring at me from my desktop for the better part of a week.

If I studied hard enough until my brain melted, maybe I could actually have some damn sleep.

Midnight came, then twelve-thirty. My eyes had started to do that annoying thing where the words blurred into one long smear, reading the same sentence about operant conditioning four times and not remembering a word of it.

Finally, with my eyes burning from the laptop screen, I admitted defeat. The page of notes in front of me had long since stopped making sense.

”Fine.” I stretched, my spine cracking in a way that felt both satisfying and a little worrying. ”You win.”

I climbed into bed and instantly regretted it. The mattress felt... wrong. Too much empty space....oo cold, with Damien’s side of the bed untouched and treacherously chilly.

The sheets on his side still held the faint, clean scent of his detergent, which somehow made the emptiness worse instead of better.

I rolled onto my side. Then my back, then the other side, flipped my pillow, kicked the blanket off, pulled it back on. Nothing worked.

”...Fucking unbelievable.”

I had actually gotten used to sleeping next to Damien. Somewhere along the line, his stupid body heat had become essential to my survival...a fact I fully intended to never admit to him.

The thought alone was enough to make me scowl at the ceiling in the dark.

Just as I thought about getting up for tea, my phone buzzed on the nightstand.

My heart jumped before common sense reminded me to chill. It was just a text. Still, the sudden vibration cut through the quiet like a small, hopeful spark.

Still... I snatched it up, my thumb unlocking the screen faster than should have been possible for someone who’d claimed, only hours ago, to be totally fine. The soft light of the phone illuminated a small circle of the bed around me.

Damien😈: Just got off the plane.

A smile broke out on my face before I could stop it. Something warm and stupid unfurled in my chest at those two simple words.

Me: You alive?