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“What are you doing here?” His voice was cold and even. His eyes were saying a lot more than his voice, and what they were saying was I will bury you in a shallow grave. I loved that look. Well. I hated it. Same thing.

“Hi. I’m your roommate.”

“You?”

“Me.”

“That is impossible.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know how they do things around here, but things got messed up and now I’m your roommate.” I shrugged, whistled, and walked right past him into the room with my duffel bag on my shoulder. “You can go ask the other guy. He’ll tell you the same thing.”

“What are you up to?”

There it was. For the first time that day, something moved across his face. Just annoyance, sure, a small flat line between his eyebrows, but it was something, and I was so pleased I thought I might take a victory lap around the bed.

I tossed my bag on the big bed and turned around and felt a look land on me like the temperature of the room had dropped. Not a stare. A predator’s stare, an I am considering your throat stare. For one second the back of my neck went cold and I almost took a step back, like some kind of coward.

He looked like he was thinking about eating me. Or breaking me into pieces and flushing me down the toilet.

“You should learn to smile,” I said, chuckling. “Seriously. Why are you looking at me like that? You’ve got a nice face. It’s a crime not to use it.”

I pretended I couldn’t read what was going on in his head, that what are you doing, what is your plan thing. I didn’t say anything else. I wanted him to say something first.

“Keep your bag in the closet,” he said.

I nearly fell over. After all that silence, a whole sentence. Voice low and serious and totally without room for argument, and that accent again, curling around the consonants. It was a demand, no question. It did something to the base of my spine that I chose not to examine.

“What if I don’t want to?” I said. “What if I decide to leave it on the bed? What are you going to do?”

He didn’t answer.

He just looked at me. And I looked at him. And for a minute there, we stood in that room and stared each other down across four feet of hardwood floor like a couple of dogs in a parking lot, like we were fighting with our eyes, and I had the strangest feeling that if either of us blinked, something would break.

Then he started walking toward my bag.

His stride was slow and deliberate, and he was not angry, only inevitable. I realized exactly what he was going to do, which was pick up my four-hundred-dollar duffel and shove it in the closet himself, and I’d be damned if I’d let him touch my stuff.

I grabbed the bag first.

“Okay, fine,” I grumbled. “I’ll put it away. God. Control freak.”

The closet was so tidy it made my teeth hurt. Every hanger the same direction. Every black shirt lined up like a row of soldiers. Six bottles of red wine stood in a neat line on the shelf by the door, labels forward. A single paperback with a busted spine, a laptop, a razor, and a jar of something dark that turned out to be, when I sniffed it, coffee grounds. That was it. No protein bars, no Gatorade, no snacks, no candy wrappers, no mess.

Not a single normal human thing.

Clean freak, I thought. Probably counts his socks.

I unzipped my bag and arranged my clothes on the other side of the closet, which was a hilarious contrast, my side looking like a laundromat had exploded, his side looking like a hospital. Two grown men and a whole closet of opposites. The weather outside was freezing but for some reason I was suddenly boiling, like the game was still going, and I felt a strong need to be clean.

“I’m taking a shower,” I announced, and peeled off my shirt.

I was down to my boxers when I felt the gaze. That cold hand on the back of my neck again.

I turned, and Maksim was standing at the desk with his laptop open, not looking at the screen but at me. His face was calm, with no furrow in his brow and no frown on his lips. He watched me intently from my head to my toes, and I felt like a page he was reading slowly, one line at a time.

“Yo,” I said. “What are you looking at?”

He turned and sat down and started typing as if I wasn’t there.