Daniel paid for breakfast like he'd promised.
He also, without asking, grabbed my bag off the chair and slung it over his own shoulder as we walked out, which I tried to object to and failed because he was already three steps ahead pretending not to hear me.
"I can carry my own bag," I said, catching up.
"I know," he said simply, not giving it back.
I gave up. Which felt like a metaphor for something I wasn't ready to examine yet.
The afternoon was bright and unhurried, campus moving around us at its usual pace, students cutting across the quad, the smell of grass and coffee and the particular warmth of a day that hadn't decided yet what it wanted to be.
"Where are we going?" I asked, because we'd walked past the library, past the arts building, past every logical destination.
"Nowhere specific."
"That's not an answer."
"Sure it is." He glanced sideways at me, that grin already in place. "It's a very honest answer."
I stole my bag back while he was distracted by a group of his teammates cutting across the path, Timi, Jordan, Caleb, still apparently locked in some ongoing argument that had survived the party, the night, and most of the morning.
"Daniel!" Timi called out. "Tell Jordan that a three pointer from half court during practice COUNTS—"
"It doesn't count," Daniel said without breaking stride.
"It COUNTS—"
"Goodbye, Timi."
Timi's protest faded behind us and Daniel shook his head, the laugh escaping before he could stop it.
"Those three are never going to agree on anything, are they?"
"They're enthusiastic."
"About everything?"
"About everything," he confirmed. "Last week Caleb had a forty minute argument about the correct way to fold a fitted sheet."
"Who won?"
"Nobody. It ended when Jordan threw the sheet out the window." He paused. "We're on the third floor."
I stopped walking to laugh properly, and he stopped with me, watching my face with that particular expression he had when he'd been aiming for exactly this reaction and wasn't going to pretend otherwise.
"Come on," he said, when I'd recovered. "I want to show you something."
The something turned out to be the rooftop of the music building.
I hadn't known the music building had a rooftop accessible to the general public, a fact I expressed while following him up a narrow staircase that smelled like old wood and sheet music.
"It's not exactly accessible to the general public," he admitted.
"Daniel."
"Caleb's in the music programme. He gave me the code." He pushed open a heavy door and the sky opened up above us, wide and blue and completely unexpected after the cramped stairwell. "Worth it?"
I stepped out after him and stopped.
The whole campus spread below us, the quad, the library pond, the oak near the arts building, the sports complex where I'd watched him all those weeks during the basketball season.
All of it small and neat and somehow beautiful from up here, like a map of everything we'd been through in the past year laid out in miniature.
"Okay," I said. "Worth it."
He sat on the low wall at the edge, far enough from the drop to be safe, close enough to the view to make the most of it, and patted the space beside him.
I sat. The sun was warm on our faces. Below us, a group of students crossed the quad in a loose cluster, laughing about something we couldn't hear.
"I used to come up here during the season," he said. "When practice got too loud in my head. Just to think."
"And now?"
"Now I wanted to show you." He said it simply, like sharing a private thing was the most natural decision in the world. "This is one of my spots. The place I go when I need to reset."
I looked at him. The wind was doing something unhelpful to his hair and he didn't seem to care, just sitting there in the sun looking out at the campus he'd spent the year learning, easy in his own skin in the way he always was when nobody was watching him be anything in particular.
"You have a lot of spots," I said.
"You've seen maybe two of them."
"How many are there?"
He considered this with more seriousness than it deserved. "Seven. Maybe eight."
"And you're sharing them with me?"
"Working through the list." He glanced at me sidelong. "At this rate I'll get through all of them before graduation."
I looked back at the campus below us. "What's number three?"
"The boathouse by the south lake. Nobody goes there on weekday afternoons." He paused. "Number four is a twenty-four hour diner forty minutes off campus that does the best pancakes you've ever had in your life."
"That's bold."
"It's accurate."
"Prove it."
He turned to look at me fully, something shifting in his expression, the easy teasing giving way to something warmer and more deliberate. "Is that a yes to coming with me?"
"It's a maybe," I said. "Depending on how good the pancakes actually are."
"They're life-changing."
"Big claim."
"I'm a confident man."
I laughed, and he watched me laugh, and for a moment the rooftop went very quiet despite the wind and the distant campus sounds and all the ordinary noise of a Tuesday afternoon happening below us.
He reached over and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear — unhurried, His hand stayed at my jaw afterward, just resting there, warm and certain.
"Hi," he said softly, like we'd just arrived somewhere.
"Hi," I said back.
He kissed me then, not the charged, breathless kind from the party, but something slower and more deliberate, the kind of kiss that takes its time because it isn't trying to prove anything.
Just warm and easy and tasting faintly of the coffee from the café, his thumb tracing my cheekbone once before he pulled back just enough to look at me.
"Pancakes," he said. "Friday night. I'll pick you up at seven."
"That's very presumptuous."
"You said maybe. Maybe means yes."
"Maybe means maybe."
"Friday at seven," he said again, standing up and offering me his hand.
I took it, because I was done pretending I wasn't going to.
Below us the campus kept its Thursday pace, entirely unbothered, entirely unaware that something up here had quietly, irreversibly tipped into something new.
"Fine," I said, as he pulled me to my feet. "But if the pancakes aren't life-changing, I'm never trusting you again."
He grinned, wide and genuine and entirely too pleased with himself.
"They're life-changing," he said. "Trust me."
And the terrible thing was, standing there on a rooftop in the middle of a Thursday afternoon with his hand in mine and the whole campus spread out below us, I did.