Comfort Zone
1331 Words
The rumours did not slow down.
If anything, they adapted.
By the second week, they had stopped being just stories students repeated for entertainment. They had become something more persistent, like background noise that everyone accepted even if they didn’t fully believe it. Akira could feel it in the way conversations shifted when she entered a room, or how group discussions suddenly became too structured, too careful, as if people were avoiding saying the wrong version of her story out loud.
Morgan felt it differently.
For him, it was direct.
People asked questions. Some joking, some probing, some openly disrespectful. He learned quickly that the safest response was the least informative one. A smile here. A shrug there. A vague sentence that didn’t confirm or deny anything.
But silence always came with a cost.
That evening, the campus library was nearly empty when Morgan arrived. He had stayed behind after a group assignment, pretending he needed to “review notes,” though he had already stopped reading the same paragraph five minutes in. His mind was elsewhere—tired in a way sleep didn’t fix.
He closed the book slowly and leaned back in his chair.
That was when someone sat across from him.
Akira.
No greeting. No explanation.
Just her bag being placed on the table and her sitting down like she had every right to be there.
Morgan blinked slightly. “You usually leave before me.”
Akira didn’t look up. “I changed my schedule.”
“That sounds like a lie.”
“It’s not.”
A pause.
Then Morgan smiled faintly. “You’re avoiding your room again, aren’t you?”
Akira’s pen stopped moving.
“I’m not avoiding anything.”
“Sure.”
He didn’t push it further. Instead, he flipped the book shut completely.
The silence between them lasted longer than usual.
It wasn’t uncomfortable, but it wasn’t easy either. It was the kind of silence that had started forming more often lately—heavy with things neither of them was saying, shaped by everything people outside their room had decided for them.
Morgan eventually spoke first. “Someone asked me today if you were ‘controlling the situation.’”
Akira finally looked up.
“What does that mean?”
“I think it means they assume you’re responsible for everything weird happening around us.”
Her expression didn’t change.
“That’s stupid.”
“Yeah,” Morgan agreed.
Another pause.
Then, quieter: “They also asked if you were okay.”
Akira’s gaze sharpened slightly. “And what did you say?”
“I said yes.”
That made her stop.
For a second, she just studied him.
“You don’t know that,” she said.
Morgan shrugged. “You didn’t look like you wanted me to explain your life to strangers.”
Akira looked away.
That was true.
But not for the reason he thought.
The truth was she didn’t want anyone speaking for her at all. Not even him.
Still, something about the way he answered softened the tension she usually carried around like armor.
They left the library together later, walking through the dimly lit campus paths. The air was cooler now, the kind of evening that made everything feel slightly slower. Students passed in groups, laughing loudly enough to fill space that didn’t belong to them.
No one said anything to Akira and Morgan directly.
But they felt it anyway.
Eyes following.
Whispers starting and stopping too quickly.
By the time they reached the dorm building, Akira’s steps had slowed slightly. Not enough for Morgan to comment, but enough for him to notice.
They climbed the stairs in silence.
Room 4B waited at the end of the corridor like it always did—unchanged, ordinary, deceptively small for everything it now represented.
Akira stopped outside the door.
Morgan noticed immediately.
“You okay?” he asked.
She didn’t answer at first.
That alone was unusual.
Then she said, “It’s too loud outside.”
Morgan glanced down the hallway. “It’s pretty quiet.”
“Not that.”
A pause.
He understood then, but didn’t say it.
The rumours. The looks. The constant awareness of being observed even when no one was physically present.
Akira turned the handle and stepped inside first.
The room was dim, lit only by the small desk lamp Morgan had left on earlier. It felt safer than outside, but not entirely safe. Nothing had changed physically, but something about it felt crowded anyway.
Morgan closed the door behind them.
Akira dropped her bag on her bed and sat down immediately, not fully lying back, just sitting still with her hands resting on her knees.
Morgan watched her for a moment.
Then he spoke carefully. “You’ve been quiet for days.”
“I’m always quiet.”
“No,” he said gently. “This is different.”
Akira didn’t respond.
Morgan hesitated.
Then he sat on the floor instead of the bed, leaning back against it so he wasn’t directly across from her.
“I don’t think I like this version of things,” he admitted.
She looked at him. “What version?”
“This one where people decide who we are before we even speak.”
Akira’s expression tightened slightly.
“That’s normal.”
“It shouldn’t be.”
Silence followed.
Longer this time.
Then Akira said something unexpected.
“Today someone said I looked like I was ‘handling you.’”
Morgan raised an eyebrow. “Handling me?”
“Yes.”
“That’s… impressive, honestly.”
She didn’t smile.
Morgan noticed.
The humor faded from his voice. “That bothered you.”
It wasn’t a question.
Akira stared at the floor for a moment.
“I don’t like being misunderstood,” she said finally.
Morgan nodded slowly. “Yeah.”
Another pause.
Then Akira added, quieter than before, “And I don’t like that I’m starting to care that they misunderstand me.”
That admission hung in the room longer than anything else that day.
Morgan didn’t interrupt it.
Didn’t soften it.
Just accepted it.
“I think that’s the worst part,” he said eventually. “Not the rumours. The fact that they get inside your head even when you don’t want them to.”
Akira’s fingers tightened slightly.
She didn’t respond.
But her breathing shifted.
Subtle. Uneven.
Morgan noticed immediately.
“Hey,” he said more softly. “Look at me.”
She didn’t.
He didn’t move closer.
Just stayed where he was.
“I know you don’t like people seeing you like this,” he continued. “But you don’t have to hold it all in here too.”
Akira’s voice came out sharper than she intended. “I’m not—”
Her sentence broke halfway.
She exhaled once.
Then again.
And something in her posture changed—not dramatically, but enough to show the control she usually kept so tightly was slipping.
Morgan stayed quiet.
That silence mattered more than anything he could have said.
Minutes passed.
Then Akira spoke again, but differently this time. Smaller.
“I didn’t ask for any of this.”
“I know,” Morgan said.
Her eyes stayed down.
“I don’t know how to make it stop.”
Morgan nodded once. “We can’t really.”
That answer should have made it worse.
But it didn’t.
Because he didn’t pretend otherwise.
Akira finally looked at him properly.
And for the first time in a while, she didn’t seem guarded in the same way.
Just tired.
Morgan didn’t push anything further.
He just said, “You’re allowed to not be okay with it.”
That was when something in her expression cracked—not breaking, not collapsing, just loosening.
She turned her head slightly away.
But she didn’t leave.
And that, somehow, was enough.
Outside their room, the campus kept moving.
Inside Room 4B, for the first time in days, the silence didn’t feel like pressure.
It felt like something shared.
- Writer
