His Stupid Playlist

By the third week I knew his whole playlist, because Kai did not believe in headphones. This was another thing the flatmate website did not warn me about. Kai cooked with music on. Kai cleaned with music on, on the rare and frightening occasions Kai cleaned. Kai did his engineering coursework with music on, sitting at the kitchen table at eleven at night with his laptop and about nine open energy drink cans, and the music was always the same forty songs, and after three weeks they had moved into my head and started paying rent. I want to say I hated his playlist. I had a whole speech ready about how I hated his playlist. The problem is that one night I was studying in my room with my door shut — door shut, sticky note out, the universal sign — and one of his songs came through the wall, this slow one, this one he only played late, and I realised I was waiting for it. I'd been studying for an hour and some part of my brain had been sitting there going, where's the slow one, he usually plays the slow one around now. And then he played it. And something in my chest did a thing. I'm nineteen. I'd like everyone to factor that in. I am new at all of this. I had had exactly one boyfriend, in school, for five months, and it had been like being assigned a project partner who you also occasionally held hands with. I did not know what the chest thing was. I genuinely sat on my bed and went, am I getting ill? Is this a cold? It was not a cold. The next morning Kai came into my room without knocking — obviously, why would the third week be different — except this time he had two mugs of tea again, the sunflower one for me, and he stood in the doorway and said, "You were up late. I heard your light." "You heard my light." "The strip under your door. It was on at like two." He handed me the mug. He looked sort of careful, which was not a Kai look, Kai did not usually do careful. "Are you doing okay? With uni? You've been really quiet this week." And here is the thing. Here is the thing that I think about a lot, even now. He had noticed. Behind the no-knocking and the mugs in the sink and the forty songs and the nine energy drinks, Kai Mendoza had noticed that I'd been quiet for a week, and he had made me tea in the correct mug, and he had come to ask. "I'm fine," I said. "It's just a lot. The course. Being away from home." "Yeah." He nodded. He didn't do the thing people do where they immediately tell you about themselves. He just nodded, and sat down on the end of my bed — uninvited, of course, the whole flat was uninvited to Kai — and said, "First term's the worst one. My first term I called my mum every single night and pretended it was about the laundry settings." He grinned the grin. The unfair one. "It was never about the laundry settings." I drank my tea. The slow song from last night was somehow still in my head. "Kai," I said. "Can I ask you something." "Mm." "Why don't you ever knock? Honestly. There's a note. It has a heart." He thought about it. He actually thought about it, turning his mug, and then he said, "I think — okay, this is going to sound bad. I think I don't knock because knocking is what you do at a door that might not want you. And I just sort of decided, early on, that I was going to act like this flat wanted me here." He shrugged, looking faintly embarrassed, which I had also never seen. "Moving somewhere new is scary. So I just — skipped the part where I find out if I'm wanted. Bad habit. My sister says it's a personality flaw." I didn't say anything for a second. Because the honest truth, the truth I did not tell him, the truth I'm only telling you, is that somewhere in the last three weeks the flat had, in fact, started wanting him here. The flat being me. I was the flat. "It's a personality flaw," I told him. "Noted." "But you can keep doing it," I said, really fast, looking at my tea, "to my door, I mean, it's — fine, it's fine if it's you," and Kai went quiet, and I did not look up to see what his face was doing, because I was nineteen and new at this and absolutely not ready to find out.