Dear Roommate Please Stop Being Hot [BL]
Chapter 64: Dates Don’t Have to Be Loud

Chapter 64: Dates Don’t Have to Be Loud

The lecture hall was packed—rows of students hunched over laptops, half-listening as the professor paced in front of the projection screen, voice steady, tapping through graphs and citations.

Noel sat in the third row, his notebook open, pen held loosely in one hand.

But the page?

Blank.

He blinked at the blank page, shifting in his seat. Focus just wouldn’t stick.

"Now, as you can see here, when the market corrects itself post-inflation..."

The professor’s voice faded into background noise, swallowed by the low hum of keys tapping and chairs creaking.

Noel exhaled slowly and looked down at his notes again. Wrote three words.

Then scratched them out.

His phone sat face-down on the desk beside him, but it took everything in him not to flip it over and check it.

He’s not going to text again that soon. Stop being weird.

He shifted again. Crossed his legs. Uncrossed them. Drummed his fingers against the edge of the desk.

In his peripheral vision, someone two rows ahead was watching a muted cooking video on split screen. On the left, the lecture slides. On the right, someone kneading bread dough like their life depended on it.

Noel stared at the screen a second too long.

Luca had once tried to make bread.

It had ended with flour in his hair and a smoke alarm blaring. He said he did it just to prove he could, and when Noel called it a disaster, Luca said: "You still ate the whole loaf, hypocrite."

A breath of laughter escaped Noel’s nose before he could catch it.

The student beside him glanced over.

Noel cleared his throat and sat straighter, tapping his pen against his blank page.

Focus.

But it was hard.

His mind kept drifting back to that moment in the dining hall—Luca calling him his favorite person, their shoulders brushing with every step, that unspoken something warm and heavy between them. The way Luca watched him when he wasn’t trying to be funny.

The way it made him feel.

Like something had already started. And stopping it didn’t feel like an option anymore.

The professor’s voice pulled him back.

"Now I want you to apply this model to last year’s trend shift," the professor said, switching to a new slide with clipped precision. "And no, ChatGPT doesn’t count. If you use AI for this, you’ll be able to explain the output line by line—understood?"

A murmur of laughter moved through the lecture hall.

Noel let the corner of his mouth twitch, just a little. Then he sat straighter, pushing his phone further up the desk until it nearly touched the base of his notebook—screen down.

He clicked his pen once.

Then he wrote.

Not slow, not rushed—steady. Focused. Words formed, lines traced across the page as the professor outlined variables and dataset relationships, his laser pointer jumping across the graph on the screen.

"Notice how the spike in Q3 led to an unsustainable growth curve. Your job is to track where that collapse began."

Noel flipped the page. His handwriting was neater now.

He didn’t stop to look out the window. He didn’t check the clock. He just let himself fall back into the work—the numbers, the patterns, the familiarity of solving something, one layer at a time.

It grounded him.

Not because he wanted to escape how he felt. But because part of him needed to know he could still hold both— The chaos of Luca... and the order of this.

The professor shifted to another slide.

"You’ll work in assigned pairs," he continued. "List will be uploaded before the end of day. Don’t email me asking to switch—you know who you are."

Noel didn’t laugh this time. He was already sketching the beginning of a trend line in the margin beside the graph. A small, sharp curve—quiet but clean.

Luca would hate this assignment, he thought, and the idea made him smirk, just for a second.

But then he tucked it away.

Focused again.

Because this was also part of who he was.

The boy who wrote sweet, stupid notes in the dark— And the boy who stayed until the lecture ended, notebook full, answers half-formed, and always trying to get them right.

Outside the courtyard buzzed with the lazy afternoon hum of campus life—students sprawled on benches, laughing under trees, skateboards clacking past, music trailing faintly from someone’s speaker a few feet away.

Luca slouched on the planter’s edge, stone warm against his palms, sun turning his hair gold. Around him, campus buzzed—but none of it reached him.

Next to him, George was hunched over his laptop, headphones in, typing furiously like he was in the final stretch of writing the next great thesis. He hadn’t spoken in ten minutes.

Perfect.

Luca didn’t need conversation.

He needed to think.

His phone sat idle in his lap, untouched. And for once, he wasn’t scrolling. He was just... staring off into space, sunglasses pushed halfway up his head, hair still messily wind-swept from this morning.

In his mind?

A question that kept looping like a bad pop hook:

What the hell does a real date even look like?

Noel had said "Let’s try. Just a week. A real date."

And Luca had agreed.

Of course he did.

He would’ve agreed to anything in that moment—anything that made him feel like he hadn’t already lost him before things had even begun.

But now?

He was here. In the sun. With no clue how to pull it off.

He glanced sideways at George, still typing like a machine.

"Hey," Luca said.

George didn’t react. Headphones.

Luca leaned over and gently yanked one earbud out. "George."

George blinked, startled. "Jesus. I thought you died or something."

"If I did, you wouldn’t notice. You’re married to that laptop."

"Deadlines don’t flirt back," George muttered, but then looked at Luca properly. "What?"

Luca hesitated. Then shrugged like it didn’t matter.

"What do people do on... like, proper dates?"

George squinted at him. "You’re asking me?"

"You’ve had a boyfriend since high school."

"Which is why I haven’t dated in years."

Luca rolled his eyes. "Fine. Useless."

George tilted his head. "Wait. Is this about ....Noel?"

Luca stiffened. Just slightly.

But George didn’t catch it. He was already looking back at his screen. "If it is, just do something you don’t usually do. Something not... chaotic."

Luca gave a humorless laugh. "Define not-chaotic."

"No clubs. No drinking. Just Something normal."

Luca looked away again, letting his gaze drift across the lawn. A couple was lying on the grass under a tree, sharing one pair of earbuds. Another pair passed by holding hands and bickering about boba flavors.

He ran a hand through his hair.

He could do club dates. He could do drunk-cry-on-the-balcony dates. He could do late-night, bad-decision, ’wake up on a stranger’s couch’ dates.

But this?

Something gentle. Something that won’t scare Noel off.

He didn’t know how to do that.

Not really.

Not since Kian—and even then, it was never like this.

With Kian, their "dates" were mostly parties. Noise. Heat. Drinks. They never had to think about feelings. Never had to plan. It was always easy because it was never real.

But this?

This feels real.

And that made it terrifying.

Still—he wanted to try.

He looked down at his phone and, after a long moment, opened a blank note.

Typed three words:

"Date ideas — Noel"

Then stared at them like they might explode.

He didn’t even hear George say goodbye as he packed up his laptop and wandered off.

Because for the first time, Luca was trying to build something that might actually last.

Luca pocketed his phone and stood, brushing invisible dust from the back of his jeans.

The campus breeze ruffled his shirt as he crossed the courtyard, hands deep in his pockets, mind still chewing on the idea.

Noel isn’t flowers-and-chocolates. He isn’t candlelit rooftop dinners either.

Hell, Luca wasn’t even sure Noel would sit through a movie without dissecting the plot out loud.

But he was thoughtful. Sharp. Quiet in a way that still felt loud.

Luca made his way past the fine arts building, watching as someone lugged a half-finished sculpture across the lawn. A few students sprawled nearby, sketching or journaling.

His footsteps slowed.

A girl crouched near the garden path, camera in hand, angling it toward a cluster of early-blooming lilies. She didn’t notice him walk past.

Neither did the guy a few steps ahead, chin tucked low, sitting on the bench beside a sun-warmed brick wall with a book cracked open in his lap. Not a textbook. Something fiction. The kind with a dog-eared cover and highlighted lines.

Luca paused.

Watched as the guy underlined something, then smiled like he’d just been reminded of someone.

Something about the moment hit differently.

Quiet. Warm. Unstaged.

No drama. No performance.

Just... someone sitting still, thinking about someone else.

Luca exhaled through his nose.

Maybe it doesn’t have to be big. Maybe it just has to be intentional.

He turned away, walking again—slower this time, steps guided more by instinct than plan.

Past the language building.

Past the old fountain students always forgot existed.

Then—there it was.

The little book café tucked behind the back corner of the library. Half-hidden, the kind most people forgot unless they were desperate for espresso after 6 PM.

One half bookstore, one half small tables pressed against rain-smudged windows. Rows of string lights overhead. A few mismatched chairs. Some even had cushions.

It was quiet.

Soft jazz playing inside.

He peered through the window. A couple was sharing a slice of lemon cake and passing a journal between them. No phone in sight.

Luca stared, and something in his chest softened. No flashing lights. No loud music. Just a quiet place that felt like a beginning. He smiled—slow, almost disbelieving.

This. This is it. No pressure. No club noise. No performance.

Just him and Noel. A table between them. Something sweet to eat. A window with rain behind it, maybe. Some dumb game, or a note scribbled in secret.

Maybe even another stupid folded paper. "Dear Roommate, please stop being hot..."

Luca chuckled to himself and stepped back, pulling out his phone again.

This time, he started typing for real.

Date Ideas — Noel

☑ Book café

☐ Share something sweet

☐ Steal his notes

☐ Get him to laugh. Just once.

☐ Ask for another week

He saved it.

And for the first time that day, the tension eased from his shoulders.

This might actually work.

Because maybe a perfect date wasn’t loud or flawless.

Maybe it was just real.