Page 10 of Bound to the Dorm Elf
I tear the pack open for him. “You have to cook it. Or at least soak it. Trust me, dry ramen’s not the move.”
He watches as I fill my electric kettle and set it to boil, his gaze tracking the water’s steam like it’s some small miracle. When I pour it over the noodles in my battered ceramic bowl, the scent of artificial chicken flavor blooms into the air, salty and warm. I slide it across my desk toward him.
“Careful, it’s hot.”
He doesn’t move right away, and I wonder if I’ve just broken some unspoken cross-dimensional etiquette. Then he picks up the bowl, cradling it in both hands like it’s precious, and lowershis face toward the steam. His eyes close for half a second, and the muscles in his jaw shift, but if it’s appreciation or revulsion, I can’t tell.
When he takes the first bite, the change is subtle—a loosening in his shoulders, the faintest sigh through his nose. It’s almost… human.
I lean back against my bedframe, tucking my knees up. “So. I’m guessing you have a name?”
His gaze cuts to me over the rim of the bowl, sharp enough to make me feel like I’ve overstepped. For a beat, I think he’s going to ignore me. Then he sets the food down with deliberate care, straightens his spine, and speaks.
The sound is… low. Rich. The kind of voice that seems to vibrate in your bones, rolling through the air like distant thunder. I don’t understand the words, but the shape of them feels heavy, ancient.
“Rovax.”
I swallow, my throat suddenly dry. “Rovax.” The syllables feel strange in my mouth, too big, too sharp in places. I probably butcher it.
His eyes narrow slightly—not in anger, exactly, but like he’s appraising whether I’m worth correcting.
“Okay,” I murmur, dragging my gaze away. The name sits in my head like a weight. Solid. Dangerous.
The room feels smaller now. The clutter—my books stacked on the radiator, laundry shoved half under my bed—presses in on me, and the air seems thick, like the heat from the ramen has seeped into the walls. He moves with the kind of precision that says he’s aware of every inch between us. Every tilt of his head, every slow, measured reach for the bowl is calculated, controlled.
I wonder if that’s just him, or if it’s because he’s still deciding whether he trusts me.
He finishes the noodles, sets the bowl aside, and leans back in my desk chair with a deliberate stillness that makes me hyper-aware of the way my own body fidgets—how my fingers twist the hem of my hoodie, how I keep tucking my hair behind my ear just to have something to do.
I want to ask a hundred questions. Where are you from? What are you? How did you heal like that? But the words knot in my throat. Because every time his gaze meets mine, it’s like he’s already answering—just not in a language I understand.
The quiet stretches, taut as wire, until I can hear my own pulse in my ears.
Somewhere down the hall, someone laughs, the sound muffled by cinderblock walls. It’s a reminder that life’s still going on out there, in the normal world. But in here, in this cramped little dorm room, I’m sitting across from something—or someone—who doesn’t fit any category I know.
And maybe it’s exhaustion, maybe it’s adrenaline still ebbing in my veins, but I’m starting to think I don’t want him to leave. Not yet.
The room feels too small for both of us.
I keep telling myself to sit, to stop pacing, but every time I make it halfway to my bed, my feet change their mind. My sneakers thump softly against the worn rug as I circle the same few feet of space, my eyes snagging on him every time I pass.
Rovax—God, even thinking the name feels like rolling a stone across my tongue—has claimed my desk chair like a throne. He sits with one ankle propped on his knee, hands resting lightly on the armrests, the empty ramen bowl abandoned at his feet. The way he holds himself is… deliberate. Not stiff, but aware. Like he’s prepared to spring into action at the smallest provocation.
It’s not just that he’s big—though he is, every inch of him a study in how much space one person can take up without trying. It’s that the air around him feels different. Charged. Likestanding too close to a live wire. When he moves, it brushes over my skin in invisible sparks, raising goosebumps on my arms.
I tell myself it’s adrenaline. That I’m still coming down from the near-death, hit-a-guy-with-my-car adrenaline spike, and my body’s just misinterpreting every stimulus as danger. But there’s something in the way his gaze follows me—not just tracking my movements, but measuring them—that makes me think danger isn’t the wrong word.
Not danger like some creep lurking in an alley. More like standing in front of an apex predator who isn’t hungry… yet.
“Okay,” I mutter under my breath, rubbing the back of my neck. “He’s fine. You got him in here, he’s fed, he’s—” I glance at him again and nearly trip over my own backpack. “—intense.”
His eyes meet mine for half a second, unreadable, and then slide away like I’m not worth the trouble.
I stop pacing long enough to dig my phone out of my hoodie pocket. No service bars. Not unusual for this building, but it feels symbolic tonight. No quick Google searches for “giant mysterious man who glows when you touch him.” No casual texts to Syndee along the lines ofplease don’t freak out but I brought home an alien. Not that she’d freak. She’d probably try to sleep with him.
I shove the phone away and lean back against the cinderblock wall. “So here’s the deal,” I say, more for my benefit than his. “You can crash here tonight. Tomorrow morning, you… I don’t know, figure out wherever it is you’re going.”
He looks at me again, head tilting slightly. It’s not confusion—it’s that same weighing, assessing stare he’s had since the woods.
