Alessia woke to the uncomfortable sensation of being far too warm and far too exposed at the same time.

The warmth was the first thing she registered. Not the familiar cocoon of her bed in the sorority house — with its starched sheets and carefully chosen duvet — but something lazier, heavier. The air smelled different too. No faint lavender sachet, no hint of polished wood. Instead there was paper and laundry powder and a trace of… was that coffee?

She shifted, and fabric slid over her bare shoulders.

Bare.

Her eyes flew open within an instant.

A ceiling she didn’t recognise stared back at her — plain, painted in an off-white that had probably never seen the inside of a manor. Light spilled in from a window somewhere to her right, that blue-grey sort of light you only got on autumn mornings in Friedenburg, when the city was still considering whether to wake up properly.

Alessia inhaled carefully and tried to move again.

The blanket — soft, well-used, certainly not hers — fell lower on her chest. Cool air touched skin that should not have been exposed to a stranger’s morning.

Her entire body went stiff.

She was naked.

A hot tide of mortification surged up her throat. She clutched the blanket to herself in a sudden, graceless movement, knuckles whitening in the fabric. Her mind, usually so neat and linear, refused to cooperate.

Ceiling. Light. Blanket. Naked.

Her gaze jerked around the room, catching on details in rapid succession: a modest bookcase with more astronomy texts than she’d ever see outside a faculty office; a desk with battered notebooks, portable typewriter, and a mug ring on its surface; the silhouette of a sundial miniature on the windowsill. A bin filled with crumpled papers. The faint hum of pipes in the walls.

Not her room. Not the sorority house.

This is Senior’s room.

The thought landed with a dull, resounding thud.

The other side of the bed was empty, but the sheets there were still faintly indented, still warm if she dared to reach over. She did not dare. The pillow smelled of clean shampoo and a note of something indefinably him.

He wasn’t here.

Some wild, unreasonable part of her quailed at that — not because she wanted him to see her like this, but because the absence made last night feel like a dream she’d invented. The aches in her body insisted otherwise: a faint soreness low in her thighs, a tenderness if she shifted just so.

Alessia pressed her lips together, seized the blanket tighter about herself and swung her feet down to the floor. The wooden boards were cold under her soles. That, at least, was bracing.