Chummy had perfected the art of being alone in a crowded room.
It was a skill, really—the ability to smile at the right moments, laugh at the appropriate jokes, and say just enough to make people believe they knew him. They didn't. They knew "Chummy," the nickname that had followed him since childhood like a brand he hadn't asked for but couldn't escape. Friendly. Approachable. Easy.
The irony would have been funny if it wasn't so accurate.
He stood in his studio space at 6:47 AM, exactly two hours before he was supposed to meet anyone, surrounded by the comfortable chaos of his process. Coffee cup number three sat precariously balanced on a stack of reference books he'd meant to return four weeks ago. Sketches covered every available surface: the desk, the floor, three different chairs, taped haphazardly to the walls. His expensive Moleskine notebook, which his father had given him with the pointed comment about "taking things seriously," bore the evidence of his actual work ethic: coffee stains, bent corners, pages that refused to lie flat because he'd sketched through them too forcefully.
His father would call it disrespectful.
Chummy called it honest.
The building he was sketching now had been living in his head for three days, demanding to be released. It was the same building he'd been drawing variations of since he was sixteen: all vertical lines and impossible height, windows like prison bars, a structure that reached toward sky but offered no way in. No doors. No obvious entry point.
Beautiful.
Empty.
Alone.
"What are you working on?"
Chummy's hand didn't pause, but his jaw tightened. He knew that voice. It was Kenji, one of the few people in the program who was genuinely talented rather than just well-connected. Which made him almost tolerable.
"Nothing important," Chummy said, his tone deliberately light. He flipped the notebook closed with practiced casualness, the lie sliding out smooth as his reputation. "Just clearing my head before the Capstone madness starts."
Kenji peered at the closed notebook with the kind of curiosity that made Chummy's fingers itch to move it further away. "I saw the partnership assignments. You got paired with Uju."
"I did."
"That's going to be interesting."
"So I've been told."
Kenji waited, the kind of expectant silence that invited elaboration. Chummy didn't offer any. After a moment, Kenji shrugged and moved toward his own workspace, apparently satisfied with the non-conversation.
This was why the nickname worked. Chummy gave people just enough interaction to feel like they'd connected, while revealing absolutely nothing that mattered.
He reopened his notebook, but his hand didn't move to continue the sketch.
Uju.
The name had been sitting in his consciousness since yesterday's announcement like an architectural problem he couldn't solve. She was brilliant—he'd give her that without hesitation. Her structural calculations were flawless, her understanding of load distribution and material stress analysis better than half their professors.
She was also the most rigidly controlled person he'd ever met.
Everything about her screamed "system": the color-coded planner she carried like a holy text, the precisely timed arrival to every class, the way she organized her thoughts in numbered lists and subsections. She approached architecture like it was a mathematical proof that required absolute certainty before proceeding.
She was everything he wasn't.
Which was probably why Professor Nathan had paired them.
Chummy picked up his pencil, but instead of returning to his cage-building, he found himself sketching something else: clean structural lines, the kind of foundation system that prioritized stability over innovation. Uju's approach, distilled to its essence.
Then, almost without thinking, he added his own elements on top—the soaring glass, the impossible cantilever, the conceptual risk that made engineering professors nervous.
The combination was... interesting.
The building that emerged on the page was something neither of them would have designed alone. Her mathematics gave his vision weight. His concepts gave her calculations purpose.
"Damn," he muttered, studying the sketch with the uncomfortable realization that Professor Nathan might have known exactly what he was doing.
The studio filled gradually as morning shifted toward the official start of classes. Chummy watched the door with the kind of peripheral awareness he'd trained himself to maintain—always observing, never obviously waiting.
Sandra arrived at 8:15, shooting him a smile that he returned with practiced warmth.
Ramirez showed up at 8:23, complaining about the partnership assignments to anyone who would listen.
At 8:37, Uju walked through the door.
She didn't see him immediately, which gave Chummy an unguarded moment to observe. She moved through the space with that same calculated efficiency she brought to everything—backpack precisely positioned, path through the cluttered studio optimized to avoid obstacles. But there was something else now, a tension in her shoulders that hadn't been there before yesterday.
The partnership announcement had rattled her.
Good.
No—not good. That was the wrong word. Interesting. The partnership had made things interesting, and interesting was better than the alternative.
Better than the comfortable numbness he'd been coasting on for the past three years.
"Morning, Uju," he called out, just loud enough to carry across the studio.
She turned, and for a split second before her expression smoothed into polite neutrality, he saw the calculation happening behind her eyes. She was already building walls, preparing defenses, cataloging variables.
He recognized the impulse because it was the same one he'd perfected years ago.
"Chummy." She crossed to his workspace, her gaze flickering over the organized chaos with barely concealed judgment. "We need to discuss our meeting schedule for the Capstone."
"I said seven AM tomorrow."
"You said seven. I'll be there at 6:45."
"Why doesn't that surprise me?" He leaned back in his chair, studying her with the same attention he'd give an interesting building. "You know the project isn't due for three weeks, right? We have time to—"
"Time isn't the issue." She pulled out her phone; of course, she had a phone, probably with seventeen different productivity apps and color-coded calendar alerts. "The issue is establishing a clear workflow, dividing responsibilities, and creating a realistic timeline that accounts for your," she paused, her eyes landing on his coffee-stained notebook, "creative process."
The way she said "creative process" made it sound like a disease.
"My creative process," Chummy said, his voice still light but with an edge creeping in, "has won every major design competition this university holds."
"And my structural analysis has kept those designs from collapsing." She met his eyes directly. "We can either argue about whose approach is superior, or we can figure out how to combine them into something that actually wins the Keating Fellowship."
She was right, which annoyed him more than it should have.
"Fine." He reached for a blank page in his notebook—not the one with the cage-building, not the one with his experimental Uju-plus-Chummy sketch, but a fresh page that implied he was taking this seriously. "What's your proposed workflow?"
Her shoulders relaxed fractionally. She'd expected more resistance.
"We start with site analysis," she said, the words coming faster now, more confident. "The library's western wing was built in 1973, which means,"
"Brutalist period, likely reinforced concrete with minimal fenestration, probably dealing with outdated HVAC and electrical systems that weren't designed for modern research needs." Chummy watched her expression shift—surprise, quickly masked. "I do pay attention in history seminars, Uju."
"I didn't say you didn't."
"You thought it."
A ghost of a smile touched her mouth before disappearing. "Maybe."
The moment stretched between them—not quite friendly, not quite hostile. Something else. Something that felt dangerous in a way Chummy couldn't immediately categorize.
He didn't like things he couldn't categorize.
"Tomorrow," he said, closing his notebook before she could see any of the sketches. "6:45. I'll bring coffee."
"I don't drink coffee before nine AM. It disrupts my,"
"Your carefully calibrated caffeine schedule. Got it." He stood, suddenly needing distance from whatever this conversation was becoming. "See you tomorrow, Uju."
He walked away before she could respond, before he had to decode the look on her face or the uncomfortable sensation in his chest that felt too close to anticipation.
The rest of the day passed in the usual blur of classes and studio work, but Chummy's attention kept fragmenting. He'd sit in lecture, ostensibly taking notes, and find himself sketching variations of that combined building—her foundations, his vision. He'd work on a design for his Sustainable Systems course and catch himself wondering what Uju would say about the structural feasibility.
It was annoying. More annoying than he thought.
By evening, he'd retreated to his apartment, which was a deliberately sparse space that his father had called "depressing" and his brother had called "weird." Chummy called it "honest." No personal photos, no sentimental objects, no evidence that anyone actually lived here beyond the functional necessities.
He liked it that way.
Permanent things had a tendency to disappear.
His phone buzzed: a message from his father.
Heard about your Capstone partnership. The Uju girl is from a modest background. Make sure you're pulling your weight. The family reputation,
Chummy deleted the message without reading the rest. He knew how it ended. The family reputation was always at stake. The Abbas name meant something. Don't embarrass us.
As if he could do anything else.
He opened his laptop, intending to start preliminary research on the library building, but instead found himself looking at old photographs he'd scanned years ago and kept in a hidden folder labeled "Reference."
His mother's building.
The only structure she'd ever designed that had been built. It was a small community center in their old neighborhood, elegant and warm, with curves instead of harsh angles, windows that invited rather than excluded. She'd been so proud of it.
Then she'd left.
No explanation. No goodbye. Just gone one morning, leaving behind a father who turned to ice and two sons who learned that permanence was a lie architects told themselves.
Chummy closed the laptop.
He didn't sketch buildings like his mother's anymore. Warm, inviting structures were for people who believed in staying. His buildings were honest about what they were: beautiful cages that kept the world at a safe distance.
At 6:32 AM the next morning, Chummy stood outside Studio B with two coffee cups.
One black, no sugar—his preferred method of mainlining consciousness.
One earl grey tea with honey—because Uju had said she didn't drink coffee before nine, which meant she probably drank tea, and earl grey seemed like the kind of precise, structured choice she would make.
He told himself he'd only stopped at the campus café because it was on the way.
He told himself the tea was just basic courtesy.
He told himself the fact that he'd arrived at 6:34 instead of 6:45 had nothing to do with the uncomfortable anticipation that had kept him awake until 2 AM.
The door to Studio B opened at exactly 6:43.
Uju stopped short when she saw him, her expression cycling through surprise, suspicion, and what might have been approval before settling back into neutral.
"You're early," she said.
"You're late," he countered. "I thought you'd be here at 6:30."
"I was here at 6:30. I went to get tea."
She held up a cup from the campus café. Earl grey, if the tag hanging from the lid was any indication.
Chummy looked at the identical cup in his hand.
For a long moment, neither of them spoke.
"Great minds," Uju said finally, her tone absolutely deadpan.
"Or predictable ones," Chummy replied, but he was fighting a smile he hadn't expected.
She noticed. Her eyes narrowed slightly, recalculating something.
"Are we going to stand in the hallway analyzing our beverage synchronization," she asked, "or are we going to work on the project that determines our entire futures?"
"Both?" Chummy suggested. "I'm good at multitasking."
"No, you're good at last-minute improvisation that somehow works out despite all logic and probability."
"That almost sounded like a compliment."
"It was an observation." But the corner of her mouth twitched. "The studio?"
"The studio," he agreed.
They entered together, and Chummy felt it again. It was that uncomfortable sensation that he couldn't quite categorize. Not quite anticipation. Not quite dread.
Something else.
Something that felt like the moment before you committed to an impossible design, when you were balanced between failure and innovation, between safety and risk.
Uju set her bag down with characteristic precision, pulled out her color-coded planner, and looked at him with those analytical eyes that saw too much.
"So," she said. "Where do we start?"
Chummy opened his notebook, the coffee-stained one, the honest one, to a fresh page.
"We start," he said, his voice steadier than he felt, "by figuring out if your math can support my chaos."
"Or if your chaos can survive my math."
"That too."
They stared at each other across the table—two people who'd spent years perfecting the art of keeping the world at a controlled distance, now forced into proximity by a partnership neither had chosen.
Chummy thought about his cage-buildings.
He thought about Uju's perfect foundations.
He thought about the sketch he'd done yesterday, combining both approaches into something neither would have built alone.
"This is going to be interesting," he said quietly.
Uju picked up her pen, her expression unreadable.
"You keep saying that."
"Because I keep meaning it."
And for the first time in three years, Chummy meant something without his careful mask in place.
The realization terrified him.
But not enough to walk away.