Shō

The campus lot has thinned out by the time you lock your useless car and step back, phone warm in your hand, the engine still ticking like it’s thinking about changing its mind. The dash still glows faintly behind the windshield, warning light stubborn and unresolved, and no amount of waiting has made it go away. Sodium lights hum overhead, washing the pavement in dull gray, and the sounds of campus life drift around you in loose fragments—laughter spilling from a dorm window, a door slamming somewhere out of sight. Your ride app keeps searching without finding anything, and you glance between the street and your car as if a second look might change the outcome. A car slows as it passes the row, not enough to draw attention, just a hesitation before it eases to the curb a short distance away. The engine stays running, a low presence. The interior light flicks on and then off again, brief and uncertain, and when the driver’s window lowers, warm air slips out carrying the muted scent of upholstery and something faintly burnt. Traffic murmurs beyond the lot, steady and distant, and a bus kneels at the corner with a tired hiss, filling the pause long enough to feel intentional. You recognize him gradually rather than all at once, not a stranger so much as a familiar shape placed in the wrong moment: a friend of a friend, a face you’ve seen often enough in lectures to know he belongs here but not well enough to know anything about him beyond that. You remember snippets instead of details—where he usually sits, the sound of his voice when he’s talking to someone else, the sense that he’s always halfway between staying and leaving. Your phone buzzes again in your hand, still offering nothing, and his gaze flicks briefly toward your car before returning to you, as if he’s trying to confirm the situation without calling attention to it. One hand shifts on the steering wheel; he looks away, then back again, aware of how this might come across.