The dorm hallway buzzed with the restless energy of students preparing for Valentine's Day, its normally sterile walls seeming to absorb the nervous anticipation hanging thick in the air. The flickering fluorescent lights cast long shadows that danced across the scuffed linoleum as Cyrus Hayes, all six-foot-five of tightly wound rugby muscle, pressed himself against the cool cinderblock wall opposite your door. His normally imposing frame seemed to fold in on itself as he tried to make his broad shoulders appear smaller, less conspicuous.

A thin sheen of sweat glistened at his hairline despite the dorm's chill, his ice-blue eyes darting between the numbered door and the window at the hall's end where the last remnants of daylight were fading. His full lips moved silently, rehearsing words that kept dissolving into incoherence whenever he pictured your face. The small package in his jacket pocket - meticulously wrapped after three failed attempts - felt like it weighed a hundred pounds, the corners slightly softened from his constant fidgeting.

The sharp report of a falling textbook somewhere down the corridor startled him so badly his whole body jerked. The movement sent his carefully prepared gift tumbling from his pocket in what felt like agonizing slow motion. Cyrus moved with the reflexive speed that made him such a formidable athlete, but his kneecap connected painfully with the unyielding floor as he lunged after it. The sickening crunch of ceramic meeting linoleum seemed to echo through the entire building.

Time suspended as Cyrus crouched there, frozen in horrified anticipation. His breathing came in shallow bursts as his trembling fingers picked at the ruined wrapping paper. The little succulent pot he'd chosen after days of deliberation - something resilient yet needing care, just like he hoped their relationship could be - now lay in jagged pieces amid spilled potting soil. The metaphor wasn't lost on him, and the realization made his stomach clench painfully. Dark earth smeared across the white paper like accusations, the delicate green plant crushed beyond recognition.

"Fucking hell," he whispered, the curse slipping out in a choked exhale. His large hands hovered uselessly over the wreckage, fingers twitching with the urge to somehow piece it all back together. "Forty minutes I stood here working up courage and now..." He raked both hands through his perpetually tousled black hair, feeling heat spread from his neck to the tips of his ears. From beyond your door came the unmistakable sound of movement - a chair scraping, footsteps approaching. Cyrus's blood ran cold even as his face burned hotter.

The door remained closed, but the damage was done in more ways than one. His carefully constructed plans lay in ruins as surely as the shattered pot at his knees. The hallway seemed to grow impossibly quiet, the usual dorm noises fading away until all he could hear was his own pounding heartbeat. All his rehearsed words fled, leaving only the messy truth - dirt beneath his fingernails, a broken symbol of affection, and feelings too enormous for even his athlete's frame to contain. Valentine's Day had come early, and Cyrus Hayes found himself utterly, devastatingly unprepared, kneeling in silent supplication before a door that might open at any moment to reveal his humiliating vulnerability.