A Love More Than Lovely
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 2
The dining hall was loud in the comfortable way, trays clattering, someone’s laugh cutting through three tables over, and neither of them had to work at filling the silence because there wasn’t much of one.
“Brad, by the way,” he said, sliding his tray across from hers. “Figured we skipped that part.”
“Soo Yi.” She said it like she was testing whether he’d stumble on it. He didn’t.
“Soo Yi.” He repeated it back clean, no hesitation, and something in her settled at that — small, but real, the way it always was when someone got it right the first time instead of asking her to repeat herself twice, or worse, asking what it meant, like her name was a puzzle for them to solve out loud.
They ate. He told her, unprompted, that he was pre-med because his father assumed he would be and he hadn’t found a good enough reason yet to argue, which surprised a laugh out of her — sharp, unguarded, gone as fast as it came, like she wasn’t used to letting one all the way out in front of someone. She told him she was pre-med because it was the only door that had ever really been open, and didn’t explain further, and he didn’t push, which she noticed and appreciated more than she let on. Most people pushed. Most people wanted the whole story, or wanted to compare it to something in their own life that wasn’t actually the same at all.
“What about outside of class,” he asked. “You do anything that isn’t studying?”
“Not much time for it.”
“That’s not an answer.”
She considered lying, then didn’t. “I like cooking. Badly. My roommate’s stopped letting me touch the rice cooker.”
“How bad is badly?”
“I once turned white rice into something structurally closer to a brick.”
He laughed, loud enough that a couple heads turned two tables over, and she felt the old instinct rise — duck, get smaller, don’t be the reason people are looking this way — before she registered that nobody was looking at her at all. They were looking at him, laughing, and she was just sitting there, incidental to it, safe inside it. That was new. She sat with that feeling for a second, turning it over.
He asked about Organic Chem, whether she’d started the second problem set yet. She had. She was three questions in and stuck on the same mechanism he was stuck on, which turned into ten minutes of them working it out together on a napkin, heads bent close, penciling out arrow-pushing until she got there first and looked entirely too pleased about it.
“Beat you,” she said.
“You had a head start.”
“I had a better brain.”
He grinned at that, easy, and she caught herself smiling back before she’d decided to, and didn’t try to stop it.
By the time trays were empty, it wasn’t awkward anymore, hadn’t been for a while — just two people who happened to be good at the same subjects, comparing notes, in no hurry to leave. He asked if she wanted to grab a table at the library that week, work through problem sets together since they were both drowning in the same three classes. She said maybe. He said Tuesday, then, unless she had something better to do.
She didn’t.
Tuesday came, and she found herself looking forward to it in a way that unsettled her a little — the anticipation of it, sitting in the back of Psych that morning half-listening to the lecture, already thinking about which table they’d take, whether he’d be on time or four minutes late again. She told herself it was just study efficiency. She was a bad enough liar that she didn’t even believe herself, and Priya, when she mentioned it in passing that afternoon, had looked up from her laptop with an expression that said she wasn’t buying it either.
“It’s studying,” Soo Yi said, before Priya could say anything.
“Didn’t say a word.”
“You were about to.”
“I was going to say have fun,” Priya said, entirely too innocent about it, and went back to her screen.
The library was quiet by eight, most of the daytime crowd cleared out, just the serious ones left scattered at the corner tables under the bad fluorescent light. Soo Yi got there first, claimed the table near the back stacks, and had her notes half-spread across it by the time Brad found her.
“You started without me.”
“You were late.”
“Four minutes.”
“Four minutes is late.”
He sat, and they worked — actual work, not the flirting-disguised-as-studying kind, both of them too competitive about their grades to let anything get in the way of an actual problem set. She was faster at the mechanisms; he caught errors she skipped past in her hurry to finish. It fit, the shape of how they worked, better than she expected two strangers three weeks into knowing each other had any right to fit.
An hour in, she got up to return a stack of reference books to the shelves two aisles over, the kind of errand that took ninety seconds under normal circumstances.
She didn’t come back in ninety seconds.
Brad noticed at the four-minute mark, the same internal clock that had clocked every one of her exits for three weeks now going off without his permission. He told himself she was just picking through the stacks, lost in something, the way she sometimes got lost in a periodical table of contents if it caught her interest. He gave it another minute anyway, then got up.
He found them before he found her — four girls, the same loose half-circle he’d been watching close in on her for weeks now, boxed into the narrow aisle between Reference and Periodicals where nobody walking past the main floor would see. One of them had Soo Yi’s arm, fingers dug in tight enough to leave marks, and another had her backed against the shelving, close enough that Soo Yi’s shoulders were pressed flat to the spines behind her, someone’s finger jabbing into her forehead with every word.
“—not that hard a question, is it? You trying to look like that, or is it an accident—”
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.