The evening air still held the clean, electric smell of rain as Haruki walked back from the library, his notebook tucked under his arm and Noa's folded note secure in his pocket. The campus looked different after the storm—washed and gleaming under the streetlights, puddles reflecting the warm glow from dormitory windows like scattered coins.
He was thinking about her words, turning them over in his mind like smooth stones, when he noticed someone approaching from the opposite direction along the tree-lined path that led to the east dormitories.
Even in the dim light, he recognized her silhouette—the oversized cardigan, the purposeful stride, the way she carried her bag like it contained everything she needed to survive in the world. Noa was walking directly toward him, though she seemed lost in thought, her gaze fixed on something in the distance.
They were maybe twenty feet apart when she looked up and saw him.
"Haruki?" She slowed her pace, surprise evident in her voice. "What are you doing here?"
"Walking back to my dorm," he said, gesturing toward the cluster of buildings ahead. "Sakura Hall. You?"
"Same." Noa stopped walking entirely now, studying him with that sharp attention he was beginning to recognize. "Which floor?"
"Third. Room 314."
Something shifted in her expression—surprise giving way to what might have been amusement, or possibly dismay. "You're kidding."
"Why would I be kidding about my room number?"
"Because," Noa said, shouldering her bag and resuming her walk, "I'm in 315. Right next door."
Haruki felt the world tilt slightly, like stepping off a curb he hadn't seen coming. "Next door?"
"Thin walls, shared bathroom, the whole charming dormitory experience." She glanced at him sideways as they fell into step together. "How long have you been living there?"
"Since I transferred. A week and a half." He tried to process this information. "How did we not run into each other before?"
"Different schedules, probably. I'm usually in the lab until late, and you..." She paused, considering. "Actually, I have no idea what your schedule is like. You're surprisingly mysterious for someone who just told me his entire romantic history in the library."
They'd reached Sakura Hall, a modest brick building that managed to look both institutional and somehow cozy, with ivy climbing its walls and warm light spilling from most of the windows. Students moved through the lobby and up the stairs, their voices creating a comfortable background hum of ordinary life.
"This is weird," Haruki said as they climbed to the third floor.
"Which part? That we're neighbors, or that we didn't know we were neighbors?"
"Both. All of it." He paused on the landing, looking down the hallway toward their rooms. "Do you think it's a coincidence?"
"What, that we ended up living next to each other?" Noa pulled her keys from her bag, metal jingling softly in the quiet corridor. "Probably. The housing office isn't known for its matchmaking skills."
But something in her tone suggested she found the coincidence as unsettling as he did.
They walked down the hallway in silence, past doors decorated with dry-erase boards covered in messages and inside jokes, past the communal bathroom they apparently shared, past the small kitchen where someone was making instant ramen and humming off-key.
Room 314. Room 315. Side by side, identical doors with identical locks and identical potential for awkwardness.
"Well," Noa said, stopping in front of her door. "This explains a few things."
"Like what?"
"Like why I've been hearing someone typing at weird hours. And playing music just quietly enough that I can't quite make out what it is, but loud enough that I know someone's awake." She turned to face him fully. "That's you, isn't it? The mysterious night owl next door?"
Haruki felt heat creep up his neck. "I didn't know the walls were that thin. I can use headphones—"
"Don't." The word came out sharper than she seemed to intend, and Noa softened it with something that almost looked like a smile. "I mean, it's fine. It's actually kind of... comforting. Knowing someone else is awake when the rest of the world is sleeping."
They stood there in the hallway, keys in hand, neither quite ready to disappear behind their respective doors. The fluorescent lighting was harsh and unflattering, but it couldn't diminish the strange intimacy of the moment—two people discovering they'd been living parallel lives separated by nothing more than drywall and circumstance.
"Can I ask you something?" Haruki said.
"You seem to be making a habit of that."
"Do you ever feel like..." He searched for the right words. "Like the universe is trying to tell you something, but you're not sure if you want to hear it?"
Noa considered this, her head tilted slightly in that way he was beginning to recognize as her thinking pose. "You mean like how we accidentally ended up in the same philosophy class, and then accidentally ended up sharing a library table, and now it turns out we've been accidentally living next door to each other this whole time?"
"Exactly like that."
"Honestly?" She leaned against her door, keys still dangling from her fingers. "I think the universe is terrible at subtlety. If it wants to tell us something, it should just come out and say it instead of arranging all these elaborate coincidences."
"Maybe it's trying to," Haruki said quietly. "Maybe we're just not listening."
---
The hallway fell silent except for the distant sound of someone's television and the hum of the building's heating system. Noa was looking at him with an expression he couldn't quite read—surprise, maybe, or recognition, or something more complicated than either.
"You know," she said finally, "when I left you that note in the library, I didn't expect to be having this conversation twenty minutes later outside our apparently adjacent bedrooms."
"What did you expect?"
"I don't know. Maybe that you'd think about it for a few days, maybe bring it up in Professor Akizuki's class on Thursday. Not that we'd end up..." She gestured vaguely at the space between their doors. "This."
"Is this bad?"
"I don't know yet." Noa finally unlocked her door, pushing it open to reveal a glimpse of organized chaos—textbooks stacked on every surface, a small plant on the windowsill, fairy lights strung around the room that cast everything in warm, golden light. "But it's definitely not what I planned."
"What did you plan?"
"To keep my distance. To observe from a safe space. To maybe help you figure out your attachment issues without getting tangled up in them myself." She laughed, but it sounded more rueful than amused. "Turns out the universe has other ideas."
Haruki unlocked his own door, revealing a room that was neat to the point of sterility—books arranged by author, clothes folded and put away, nothing on the walls except a small calendar marked with class schedules and assignment due dates. It looked like a room where someone was prepared to leave at any moment.
"Your room looks exactly like I thought it would," Noa said, peering past him.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Careful. Controlled. Like you're afraid to leave evidence that you actually live here." She stepped back into her own doorway. "Mine probably looks like chaos to you."
"It looks lived-in," Haruki said, and meant it as a compliment.
They stood there for another moment, each framed in their respective doorways, the hallway stretching between them like a bridge they weren't quite ready to cross.
"So," Noa said eventually. "What happens now?"
"I don't know. What usually happens when you discover your mysterious neighbor is someone you've been accidentally getting to know?"
"I have no idea. This is uncharted territory for me."
A door opened somewhere down the hall, followed by footsteps and laughter as other students went about their evening routines. Normal sounds. Ordinary life continuing around them while they stood suspended in this moment of strange recognition.
"Haruki?"
"Yeah?"
"That thing you wrote in your notebook today—about being afraid to say you're lonely?" Noa's voice was quieter now, more careful. "For what it's worth, I don't think you have to be afraid of that anymore."
Before he could ask what she meant, she'd stepped into her room and closed the door with a soft click, leaving him standing alone in the hallway with the echo of her words and the sudden awareness that everything had changed again.
---
Haruki went through his evening routine mechanically—shower in the bathroom he now knew he shared with Noa, though he didn't see her there; instant curry heated in the communal kitchen; an hour of reading for tomorrow's classes. But his attention kept drifting to the wall that separated his room from hers, to the soft sounds of movement that suggested she was going through her own evening routine just a few feet away.
Around eleven, he heard the faint sound of music starting up next door—something soft and melancholic that he couldn't quite identify. Without really thinking about it, he put on his own music, keeping the volume low but audible, a quiet response to her quiet invitation.
They didn't speak through the wall. They didn't knock or text or make any direct acknowledgment of each other's presence. But somehow, the knowledge that they were both awake, both listening, both existing in the same small space felt like the beginning of a conversation they weren't quite ready to have out loud.
Haruki pulled out his notebook and turned to a fresh page.
*Today I learned that coincidences might not be coincidences,* he wrote. *That the girl who's been challenging me to be honest has been living three feet away from me this whole time. That maybe the universe isn't subtle, but it's persistent.*
*I'm still afraid to say I'm lonely. But maybe I'm more afraid of not being lonely anymore.*
*What happens when the person you're learning to trust turns out to be the person you can't escape from?*
He paused, pen hovering over the page, listening to the soft music filtering through the wall. Then he added:
*What happens when you don't want to escape?*
Next door, Noa's music shifted to something slightly more hopeful, and Haruki found himself smiling as he closed his notebook and settled in for sleep.
Tomorrow was Thursday. Professor Akizuki's class. The space between what they said and what they meant.
Tonight, for the first time since transferring, he wasn't sleeping alone in an empty room. He was sleeping next door to someone who saw him clearly and hadn't run away, someone who left notes about honesty and timing, someone who played music like an invitation to stay awake a little longer.
The walls were thin, but maybe that wasn't such a bad thing after all.
---
*End of Chapter 3*