My Roommate Hates Me, So He Only Kisses Me in the Dark novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Furniture
Linus's boxes are in the hall, the Chancellor's son says it is the wrong room, and when the storm kills the power Linus tells him he has been staring at his mouth, and gets kissed for it.
Linus's boxes were in the hallway, stacked against the wall with the spines of his books facing out.
His door was open, and a blond guy lay on the left bed with his boots on the blanket.
"Wrong room, glasses," the guy said without sitting up.
"The door says Maki," Linus said. "Two-fourteen."
"It said Maki. I took it down."
The paper nameplate lay torn in half on the desk, and the guy put one boot on it.
Linus knew that face from the banner outside the arena.
Mattias Pehrson, number four, the Chancellor's son.
The campus paper's gossip column had already linked him to three girls and two boys, and the semester had barely started.
Linus put down his duffel.
He had spent two years at a community college up north earning this room.
He was not going to be moved out of it by a boot.
"The Resident Scholar award comes with a single in the honors wing," he said. "I have the letter."
"Then read it to somebody who cares."
Linus pulled the letter from his back pocket and held it out anyway.
Mattias got off the bed in one move.
He crossed the room, took the page out of Linus's hand without looking at it, and tore it down the middle.
Linus looked at the two halves on the floor.
"I have it on my phone," he said. "And in my email. And in the housing office."
"Good for you."
Mattias walked him backward until the door shut behind Linus's shoulders.
He put one hand flat on the wood beside Linus's head and leaned in.
This close, Linus could see the old scar splitting his left eyebrow.
He smelled like cedar soap and the cold air of a rink.
"You have until midnight to be gone," Mattias said. "Take your little boxes and find a closet that smells like you."
Linus had never been this close to a boy who looked like that, and he had never been this angry at one either.
"Move your hand," he said.
"Make me," Mattias said.
Linus did not touch him.
He looked at the hand, then at Mattias's face, and waited.
Mattias's eyes dropped to Linus's mouth and came back up.
He did not step back, and he did not look pleased about it.
Someone knocked, and the door pressed into Linus's spine.
"Everything okay in there?" It was the RA, a tired senior with a lanyard and a clipboard.
Mattias dropped his hand and sat on the desk.
"He's leaving," he said.
"I'm not," Linus said.
The RA looked at the torn nameplate, then the torn letter, then the two of them.
"Okay. Rule is, you both sign the roommate agreement tonight or I call housing in the morning and you both go to the Dean."
She held out the form.
Mattias did not reach for it.
Linus took the pen from her clipboard, wrote LINUS MAKI on the line in block capitals, and dated it.
"Done," he said. "He can sign whenever he's ready to be a person."
The RA left, and Mattias stared at the pen in Linus's hand for a long moment.
"You're going to regret that," he said.
"I regret most things by Thursday," Linus said. "It hasn't stopped me yet."
Mattias laughed once, short and surprised, and shut it off.
By ten, they had divided the room with a line of masking tape that Mattias would not admit he had put down himself.
Linus made his bed on the right side and kept his boxes on his half.
Neither of them spoke.
Rain started on the window around eleven, and by midnight it was a storm.
Linus was lying in his cardigan with a paperback on his chest and his glasses on the desk when the lightning hit.
The overhead light died.
The hum of the old refrigerator died with it, and the whole building went black.
"Great," Mattias said from the dark. "Perfect."
His bed creaked, and Linus heard bare feet cross the floor.
They stopped beside his bed, close.
"Don't think this means anything," Mattias said, and his voice was lower than it had been all day.
Linus lay very still.
"You've been staring at my mouth since I walked in, Pehrson," he said. "I felt it."
For a moment there was only the rain.
Then a hand closed in his cardigan and pulled him upright.
Mattias kissed him, hard and brief, with the whole length of his anger in it.
His mouth was warm and his hand shook where it held Linus's collar.
He let go.
"That didn't happen," Mattias said. "Tomorrow you don't exist."
His bed creaked again.
Linus sat in the dark with his lips burning.
It was the first time anyone had ever kissed him.
And it had been the one person in the building who wanted him gone.
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