🏐Connect - Chapter 10 is up 🥃
The plastic cup sweats against her palms, condensation sliding cool against Rumi’s skin as she cradles it like an anchor. One finger taps restlessly against the knuckles of her other hand, betraying the nerves she’s trying to swallow.
The dorm apartment is bigger than hers — built to hold four, maybe five — but right now it feels compressed. Suffocating under the weight of too many bodies. The walls seem to inch closer with every laugh, every careless movement. Heat hangs thick in the air, heavy with sound, laughter bouncing and overlapping until it loses shape. Until it dissolves into a constant hum beneath the bass thudding from speakers wedged somewhere in the corners of the place.
It’s too warm, too full. The air clings to her skin, makes her long-sleeved shirt feel like something she’s borrowed from the wrong body. Rumi’s used to sweat earned properly — split open through hours on the court, muscles burning, hair damp at the nape of her neck from repetition and effort and control. That kind she understands.
The smell is a mess of things layered on top of one another — cheap beer, over-sprayed perfume, the sharp tang of body spray battling sweat and losing. Somewhere near the kitchen, abandoned pizza boxes bleed grease into the air, the scent half-stale, half-savoury, threaded through with alcohol and heat.
Music pulses through the room, through the floor, through her ribs. Vibrating in time with the rise and fall of voices. Voices that crest and break in waves, colliding with the beat until it all blurs together — not quite chaos, not quite rhythm, just noise pressing in from every side.
Everywhere she looks, people cluster. On the couch, knees pressed together, sharing stories that spiral into shouts of shared joy. In the kitchen, a line of red cups is being filled, spilled, traded between hands sticky with condensation. By the windowsill, two men are perched with their legs dangling out, leaning in close like they’re the only ones in the room. Even the hallway isn’t empty — pairs and trios lingering in doorways. They spill into bedrooms and weave themselves into knots of conversation.
They move easily. Fluid. People hop from one group to the next, sliding into the rhythm like it’s second nature. No hesitation, no pause. Everyone here seems to know everyone else, she imagines a net of inside jokes and easy familiarity spun between them.
Rumi stands at the edges of it, cup in her hands, watching it all ripple and shift without her. The brightness of it makes her feel dimmer by comparison. Her chest feels tight, lung stretching and yet too shallow against the air. Her ears ringing not with music but with the sheer volume of everything around her.
Her eyes flicker over the crowd, searching for something to latch onto. Someone she recognises.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/68835506/chapters/226672011#main
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