The world outside was still gray with sleep, painted in streaks of soft gold from the early morning sun. But inside Lecture Hall 107, the atmosphere had already reached critical mass.

  Students didn’t so much leave css as they leaked out in waves. Dazed, slow, buzzing with the kind of confusion usually reserved for final exams or discovering your roommate has been secretly living as a furry for three semesters.

  Everyone tried to act normal. No one succeeded.

  A guy in a backwards cap tripped on the stairs trying to get one st look at Marisol. He caught himself on the railing, whispered “holy shit,” and kept walking backwards like he was filming his own documentary titled *I Witnessed Divinity and Lived*.

  A freshman girl stood frozen in the aisle, staring into space and muttering to herself, “They both kissed him like he invented kissing. They invented kissing. I need to speak to the patent office.”

  One T.A. (poor, sweet, overworked Priya) stood outside with her clipboard and forgot how to read. She just held the attendance sheet like it was a sacred scroll and whispered, “I need to lie down. I need to lie down forever.”

  Ayesha was packing her things in silence, though her brain was a full Category 5 tornado.

  Zara, her backpack already half-zipped, finally said what they were both thinking: “Okay. That was weird. But like… hot-weird. Not bad-weird. Right?”

  Ayesha just nodded numbly. “Uh-huh.”

  Then came the sound.

  Heels clicking on linoleum.

  Confident. Graceful. Like trouble wearing Louboutins.

  “Bharath!”

  The hallway froze.

  Heads turned so fast necks should have snapped.

  Even the vending machine paused its eternal hum, as if it too needed a moment to process.

  There she was.

  Sarah Goldstein, in her flowing peach sundress that looked like it had been personally approved by Aphrodite’s stylist. The fabric clung and floated in all the right pces. Her breasts (God forgive the witnesses) jiggled with every step like they were independently auditioning for a shampoo commercial directed by Fellini. Her hair was down and gleaming like it had its own personal lighting team. The fluorescent lights seemed to soften just for her, as if the university had secretly installed mood lighting in the corridor overnight.

  “Oh my god,” someone whispered.

  “She’s actually real! This is happening!” muttered another frantically. “She wasn’t in a fever dream.”

  A third voice, in absolute disbelief: “That’s also his girlfriend? Her AND her?!”

  Sarah didn’t walk so much as glide. Her eyes locked on Bharath like she hadn’t seen him in years, like he was both dessert and salvation and the only Wi-Fi signal in a dead zone.

  Ayesha instinctively turned, caught in the undertow like everyone else.

  Sarah reached him.

  And pounced.

  A kiss that didn’t just break rules, it abolished them. Tongue, hips, fingers in his hair. Like she was charging her soul through his mouth. Like she needed to refill her whole bloodstream with Bharath-fvored oxygen.

  Students gasped. A girl dropped her textbook with a thud that echoed like a gunshot. A guy behind Ayesha whispered, “That’s not PG-13, man. That’s NC-17 with grandparental advisory required.”

  Someone in the corner mumbled, “I’ve been kissed, but not like that.”

  A student leaned against the wall, stunned: “He must have cheat codes. He’s not pying on normal difficulty.”

  Another guy just crouched, hands on knees, chanting to himself like a broken mantra: “Why God? I studied. I did everything right. I even joined Tech when I could have joined Arizona State.”

  And Marisol?

  Marisol just stood nearby, leaning against the lockers like a queen overseeing her kingdom. She smiled—genuinely—like Sarah’s tongue down Bharath’s throat was part of a morning routine. Like this was just another Monday.

  Ayesha’s brain short-circuited.

  Then Sarah turned, lips still slightly red, eyes glinting, and reached for Marisol.

  And kissed her.

  Not a kiss of obligation. Not curiosity.

  This was deliberate. Familiar. Pyful.

  Like she’d done it before.

  Marisol kissed her back without hesitation, her hand sliding to Sarah’s waist, pulling her closer for one long, nguid second before they parted with matching smirks.

  Zara’s jaw hit the floor so hard it should have cracked the tile. “Did they just...?”

  “They did,” Ayesha whispered, voice hollow.

  Two guys walking past physically walked into a wall.

  Someone gasped, “That man is my hero.”

  Another girl grabbed her friend’s arm. “I’ve been single for two years and this man has two girlfriends who kiss each other?”

  Sarah pulled away from Marisol with a grin that could unch ships or end wars. “I needed a refill. I’ll be back for lunch.”

  Then she turned and walked down the hallway like a catwalk model on a farewell tour, leaving behind only the scent of vender, legend, and collective cardiac events.

  Silence reigned for a full ten seconds.

  Then a guy moaned, “He’s got both. He’s got both... Two! In a campus where there's a 5:1 ratio. What even am I?”

  The hallway practically trembled under the weight of shattered assumptions.

  Ayesha couldn’t breathe.

  Not because of the heat, though the air in the corridor suddenly felt thick, but because her lungs had simply forgotten how to expand.

  Across the corridor, Marisol was leaning against Bharath’s side like she was born there, casual and cozy, like he was her morning coffee and she wasn’t sharing him with a woman who looked like a literal dream.

  And Bharath?

  Bharath looked like he belonged.

  Not cocky. Not smug. Just centered. Easy. Like all of this made sense. Like he hadn’t just been kissed by a junior who looked like a literal dream and then kissed back by Marisol with no drama, no accusations, no damage control.

  The hallway buzzed around them like an aftershock.

  Whispers.

  Laughter.

  More disbelief.

  And through it all, he stood calm, kind, a little flushed maybe, but so grounded it made Ayesha want to scream.

  How?

  How had he pulled this off?

  She watched as Marisol reached up and casually fixed a stray curl that had fallen across Bharath’s forehead. Sarah had already disappeared around the corner, but the ghost of her presence lingered like perfume in a closed room.

  Ayesha finally remembered how lungs worked and sucked in a breath.

  Zara grabbed her arm. “We need to talk, girl. Like. Right now.”

  They stumbled toward the stairwell like survivors of a natural disaster.

  Behind them, a guy in a GT hoodie was still crouched against the wall, muttering, “I prayed every night. Every night. And this is what I get? A front-row seat to someone else’s harem anime?”

  Another student, clearly a film major, pulled out his camcorder and started filming the empty hallway like it was evidence in a court case. “This is going on a tape. Title: ‘When your cssmate has two girlfriends and zero survival instincts.’”

  A girl with blue hair and a nose ring leaned against the lockers and sighed dreamily. “I’ve decided I’m no longer heterosexual on Tuesdays. That was too powerful.”

  Ayesha and Zara made it to the stairwell and colpsed against the railing.

  “Okay,” Zara said, breathing hard. “Scale of one to ‘I need therapy,’ how destroyed are you right now?”

  Ayesha stared at the ceiling. “I think I just witnessed a miracle. Or a war crime. I can’t tell.”

  Zara ughed, a little hysterically. “He kissed both of them. In public. In the hallway. And they kissed each other. And no one died. No one even threw a punch. What timeline is this?”

  “I don’t know,” Ayesha whispered. “But I want to live in it.”

  They were quiet for a second.

  Then Zara said, “Do you think… he’s recruiting?”

  Ayesha snorted so hard she almost choked. “Zara.”

  “I’m just saying! If he’s collecting goddesses, maybe there’s an application form. I can write a cover letter. ‘Dear Bharath, I’m emotionally stable, I can parallel park, and I’ve never once cried during a rom-com. Please consider me for the third slot.’”

  Ayesha ughed until tears came.

  Down the hall, the vending machine finally resumed humming, like it too had needed a moment to recover.

  Somewhere in the distance, someone yelled, “I need to speak to the dean! This is unfair distribution of hotness!”

  And somewhere deeper in the building, Bharath, blissfully unaware of the campus-wide existential crisis he’d just triggered, walked toward his next css with Marisol’s hand in his, still tasting Sarah on his lips, and wondering why everyone kept staring at him like he’d personally invented gravity.