Daniel Tan

Jealousy did not arrive in Saiful like thunder.

It would have been simpler if it had.

A clean storm, obvious in its violence, was at least something a man could point to and name without shame. This, instead, came in the more humiliating form of small disturbances. A sentence that stayed longer than it should. A face remembered at the wrong time. A harmless detail turning sharp at the edges only after he had gone home and the day had emptied enough for certain truths to stop hiding behind noise.

It began, though he only recognized the beginning afterward, on a Tuesday afternoon under the bright, punishing lights of the faculty lab.

The room was long and cool with overworked air-conditioning, lined with rows of monitors and whiteboards that still carried the faded ghosts of equations half-erased by previous classes. Students filled the space in tired clusters, chairs scraping over the floor, bags dropped under tables, chargers and adapters already breeding in messy tangles. Outside the narrow windows, the late-day sky had turned silver with the threat of rain.

Saiful was there early because he always was. A Year Three project briefing was about to start in the adjacent seminar room, and he had come to print a reference sheet before the queue at the department printer became a moral test of character. He was halfway through checking whether the printer had jammed again when he heard Xinyue’s laugh from somewhere behind him.

He turned before thinking.

She was standing three rows back near the lab entrance, notebook in one hand, laptop against her hip, her face tilted toward Daniel Tan.

Daniel was saying something with his usual easy confidence, one hand braced against the back of a chair as if every room belonged to him at least provisionally. He was not loud. That was part of why people liked him. Some boys mistook volume for charm and ended up sounding like advertisements for themselves. Daniel knew how to appear relaxed without seeming lazy, warm without pressing too hard. He had a face that settled easily into friendliness and a manner that made people feel, within minutes, that conversation with him required no defense.

He was, Saiful had to admit, the sort of boy parents liked instinctively and lecturers remembered with reluctant approval.

And Xinyue was laughing.

Not the sharp, amused laugh she gave Mei Qi when the world offended her dramatically. Not the brighter, more deliberate one she sometimes used on Saiful when she wanted to see whether she could unsettle him into speech. This one was easier. Loose around the edges. Unselfconscious in a way that made something tight and unreasonable move under Saiful’s ribs.

Daniel looked up first and saw him across the room.

“Senior,” he called lightly, lifting one hand. “Can ask you something later?”

Saiful nodded because not nodding would have been absurd.

Xinyue followed Daniel’s gaze and saw him too.

The quick brightness that crossed her face at the sight of him should have helped.

It did not.

Because Daniel was still standing beside her.

Because something in Saiful had already reacted before her eyes found his.

Because he now had the deeply unpleasant task of feeling his own response in full and pretending, for the next several seconds, that nothing at all had happened.

He turned back to the printer.

The paper emerged with its usual delay and soft mechanical complaint. He collected it, stacked the sheets, and told himself with clinical precision that he was being ridiculous.

Daniel was in her year. Same modules. Same timetable pressures. Same stage of first-semester confusion. It was natural for them to talk. More than natural. Expected. Healthy, even. University was built, in part, on exactly those easy proximities–boys and girls from the same cohort becoming friends, study companions, lunch companions, whatever else youth and shared inconvenience turned them into.

If there was something particularly irritating about Daniel being the one person who could offer her uncomplicated company, that was Saiful’s problem.

Which, he reminded himself grimly, it should not have been.

Still, the feeling remained.

Not large.

Not noble.

Only there.

He carried it into the seminar room with him, into the project briefing, through twenty minutes of discussion about research methods and role allocation that he ordinarily would have handled with clean attention. Instead he found himself having to drag his concentration back by force from a mind that kept insisting on replaying small, unnecessary details.

How close Daniel had been standing.

The angle of Xinyue’s face when she listened.

The ease of it.

He disliked the thought so much that by the time Haziq slipped into the seat beside him ten minutes late and completely unrepentant, Saiful’s expression must already have been off by some fraction, because Haziq took one look and murmured, “Who died?”

“No one.”

“That is not the face of no one.”

Saiful kept his eyes on the slide at the front of the room. “You’re late.”

“I know. Answer my question.”

“There was no question.”

“There was a spiritual one.” Haziq lowered himself into the chair with the air of a man entering theatre mid-performance and still expecting full entertainment. “Why do you look like you just bit into bad news?”

Saiful said nothing.

Haziq leaned slightly closer. “Did she do something?”

The phrasing itself made Saiful’s jaw tighten. Not because it was inaccurate. Because it implied Xinyue’s power too clearly.

“No,” he said.

“Did someone else?”

Saiful looked at him then.

Only once.

That was enough.

Haziq’s eyebrows went up slowly. Then, to Saiful’s immediate horror, comprehension dawned with the full warm glow of a man who had just discovered a fresh source of emotional leverage.

“Ah,” he whispered.

“Don’t.”

“Was it Daniel?”

Saiful turned back to the front.

“Ya Allah,” Haziq breathed, reverent with delight. “It is Daniel.”

“If you keep talking,” Saiful said quietly, “I will remove you from this project on religious grounds.”

“That is not how religion works.”

“Today it is.”

Haziq spent the rest of the briefing smiling into his notes like a man protecting a private treasure.

Saiful considered ending the friendship.

He did not, mostly because the project required manpower and partly because he knew Haziq would only treat any attempt at distance as additional confirmation.

After the meeting, he took the long way back through the faculty corridors to clear his head before maghrib. The rain had arrived while they were inside, sudden and tropical, washing the walkways in silver and pulling a cooler breath through the buildings. Students crowded under sheltered paths, waiting out the worst of it, their conversations lifted and blurred by the downpour.

He should have gone straight to the prayer room.

Instead he passed the open study area beside the lab and saw, through the glass partition, Xinyue sitting with Daniel and two other Year Ones around a table littered with module handouts and open laptops.

Daniel was pointing at a worksheet. Xinyue was leaning over to look. Mei Qi sat on the opposite side with her chin in her hand and the expression of a woman enduring everyone she loved by sheer discipline.

It was, in every observable way, harmless.

A study group.

A normal arrangement.

Yet Saiful felt the same sharp little wrongness move through him again, cleaner this time because he had already been warned by the earlier glimpse.

He kept walking.

At the prayer room, he stood shoulder to shoulder with other men in the quiet order of evening prayer and tried, while listening to the recitation, not to feel vaguely ashamed of the fact that his mind had developed this new and undignified talent for circling one girl’s orbit and resenting any other body caught inside it.

Jealousy, he thought afterward while sitting on the low ledge outside the room to put his shoes back on, was perhaps the least impressive way to discover one had crossed into attachment.

It did not flatter a man.

It only told the truth too plainly.

Over the next week, Daniel became impossible to dismiss as background.

Not because he demanded attention, but because he kept appearing at the exact angle of Xinyue’s life that made him difficult for Saiful to ignore.

Daniel sat beside her in one of the Friday lectures because Mei Qi had gone to claim seats elsewhere and the room had filled faster than expected.

Daniel offered to share notes after a tutorial when the professor moved through a section of calculus like a man fleeing the scene of his own teaching.

Daniel was there outside the canteen on Wednesday holding two cups of sugarcane juice while Xinyue argued with Mei Qi about whether fried noodles should count as a nutritional emergency.

None of these things were crimes.

That, again, was what made them maddening.

If Daniel had been arrogant, Saiful could have disliked him cleanly.

If he had been careless with her attention, that too would have been easier to condemn.

But Daniel was decent. Helpful. Easy to talk to. He did not overstep in ways that gave moral permission for resentment. He simply existed exactly where a simpler life might have expected him to.

Near her.

Age-appropriate in the ordinary social sense.

Uncomplicated.

The easier option.

That phrase came to Saiful one evening while waiting at the zebra crossing near the campus shuttle stop, watching from a distance as Xinyue and Daniel walked ahead with the rest of their cohort. Daniel said something. Xinyue laughed and nudged his shoulder lightly with the back of her hand. It was casual. Friendly.

And perhaps that was precisely why it lodged so hard.

There was no weight in it.

No caution.

No invisible accounting underneath.

Just two people from the same year, on the same side of difficulty, moving through university with the freedom of not having every exchange shadowed by questions of responsibility and seriousness and what liking someone should mean if it were allowed to continue.

The easier option.

Saiful stood at the crossing until the green man flashed and the cluster moved on ahead. Haziq, beside him with a file under one arm, followed the line of his gaze with terrible ease.

Then he sighed.

Not theatrically this time.

Almost kindly.

“My brother,” he said, “this is getting sad.”

Saiful did not answer.

“It’s just Daniel.”

“That’s not the point.”

Haziq looked at him with sudden sharpness. “Then what is?”

Saiful kept his eyes on the crowd thinning toward the station entrance. On Xinyue’s ponytail disappearing into it. On the space Daniel occupied beside her without seeming to know he was standing inside another man’s problem.

Finally he said, too flatly, “He belongs there more easily than I do.”

Haziq was quiet for a beat.

When he spoke again, his voice had shed almost all its teasing. “That’s not necessarily true.”

“It is logistically true.”

“Everything with you becomes logistics.”

“Because logistics matter.”

“Yes,” Haziq said. “But not in the way you use them when you’re afraid.”

Saiful looked at him.

Haziq met the look without flinching. “You think if something can be framed as practical enough, then you don’t have to call it what it is.”

“And what is it?”

The question came out sharper than intended.

Haziq answered it anyway.

“You like her.”

The words were simple.

Unadorned.

More difficult, somehow, than any joke.

Saiful felt something in him go still–not shocked, not because the truth was new, but because hearing it spoken by someone else made denial feel suddenly performative.

He could still refuse it.

Could still retreat into technicalities.

Could still say none of this had become a matter for naming.

But he did not.

Instead he looked down at the wet pavement glistening under the station lights and said, after too long, “I know.”

Haziq let out a breath through his nose.

“Well,” he said. “That’s progress.”

“It doesn’t help.”

“No,” Haziq admitted. “But at least now you’re suffering honestly.”

If the admission had settled anything, it would have been easier.

It did not.

If anything, honesty made Saiful more careful in the days that followed.

Not less.

That was his instinct in all things. Not to rush toward the place where truth had become visible, but to become wary around it, to examine where every step might lead before letting his own weight shift.

So when Xinyue messaged him on Thursday afternoon asking whether he had notes from the morning lecture because the lecturer had changed slides too quickly and her brain had left her body halfway through the derivation, he sent the PDF and added only a short explanation.

When she replied with a grateful voice message that began, “You are actually saving my semester, do you know that?” he listened once, then once more, then put the phone away and told himself that replying immediately would set the wrong tone.

When she asked if he would be at the library on Saturday because she and Mei Qi were planning to review the lab assignment and might need “a real adult,” he answered three hours later.

I may be there.

Her reply arrived almost at once.

That sounds fake, Senior. You live there.

He did not answer that one.

The restraint, however, had consequences he did not entirely anticipate.

Xinyue noticed.

Of course she did.

She noticed everything that mattered to her and several things that did not. It was one of the reasons she exhausted him so effectively. One could not hide behind vague shifts of tone with a girl who paid attention like it was a language she had taught herself young.

He saw the first sign of it on Friday after the late lecture, when the class spilled into the corridor and the crowd began breaking apart in twos and threes toward lifts, stairs, toilets, vending machines, the afternoon prayer break, whatever the hour demanded.

Xinyue came up beside him near the notice board where students always stopped for no good reason and created a blockage that should have counted as civil offense.

“Senior.”

He looked at her.

She had her notes against her chest and her bag slung crosswise, the strap pulling one shoulder of her blouse slightly out of line. She looked warm, faintly tired, and thoughtful in a way he had come to associate with questions already formed.

“Are you avoiding me?” she asked.

There was no accusation in it.

That made the question harder.

“No.”

She held his gaze for a second longer than most people could. “That answer came too fast.”

“It’s still the answer.”

“Mm.” She adjusted the strap on her bag. “Then maybe you’re just being strange.”

He should have found that amusing.

Instead he felt the small, precise discomfort of being correctly read while wishing, for once, that he were not so legible to her.

“We’re in the middle of semester,” he said. “Everyone is busy.”

“Daniel is also busy,” she said lightly. “He still replies in under thirty minutes.”

The sentence entered him like a thin blade.

He said, before caution could intercept, “Then ask Daniel.”

The silence afterward was immediate.

Around them, the corridor remained full–students walking past, the buzz of fluorescent lights, someone laughing too loudly near the stairwell, the distant slam of a seminar-room door. But inside the small space between his sentence and her face, the air changed.

Xinyue’s expression did not collapse.

It only stilled.

“You want me to?” she asked.

The question was soft.

That softness made it catastrophic.

Saiful looked at her and realized he had, in one sharp reflex of pettiness, said the one thing that revealed far too much.

Not because the words themselves were a confession.

But because they could only have come from somewhere uglier than indifference.

He could still repair it.

Say he only meant Daniel was also good at coursework. Say she had misunderstood. Say anything ordinary enough to put the walls back up before the moment recognized itself.

Instead what came out was, “That isn’t what I meant.”

She watched him.

“Then what did you mean?”

There it was again.

The question she kept placing in front of him like a mirror he was not brave enough to stand still before for long.

He looked away first, toward the windows at the end of the corridor where the late afternoon sun struck the glass so hard the panes turned white.

“I meant,” he said, each word chosen too carefully, “you have other people you can rely on.”

Xinyue was quiet.

When she spoke again, her voice had lost almost all its play.

“That’s true.”

He turned back.

She was looking at him not angrily, not even with hurt in the obvious sense, but with an attention so calm it made him feel clumsy by comparison.

“But I’m still talking to you,” she said.

The truth of it sat between them like something alive.

Not because he did not know.

Because he did.

Because that was the problem.

A few students squeezed past behind her, muttering apologies. The corridor flow shifted around them and kept going.

Xinyue lowered her gaze briefly to the notes in her arms, then back to him. “You know what’s a little cruel, Senior?”

He said nothing.

“When you act like I don’t know what I’m choosing.”

The line was delivered without heat.

No raised voice. No drama. No freshman demand to be flattered or reassured.

Only the quiet dignity of a girl refusing to have her own seriousness mistaken for confusion.

Saiful felt his throat tighten with the exact kind of helplessness he hated in himself.

“Xinyue,” he said.

“I’m not angry.”

That, somehow, made it worse.

“I just think you should be careful with that,” she said. “Telling me to go to someone else when you know I came to you on purpose.”

He had no defense against the accuracy of it.

The worst part was not that she had read him.

It was that she had read him kindly.

He looked at her, and for a moment the corridor, the students, the noise of late-afternoon campus life all receded beneath the uncomfortable clarity of what had just happened.

He had been jealous.

Pettily, instantly, involuntarily jealous.

And the evidence of it had slipped into his voice before he could guard it.

Xinyue seemed to see the understanding arrive in him.

Her expression softened, only slightly.

“See?” she said quietly. “Now you know what I heard.”

He exhaled once, slowly.

“Yes.”

The admission cost him more than volume suggested.

For a second she just held his gaze.

Then, to his surprise, the corner of her mouth moved.

Not in triumph.

Something gentler.

“I’m not asking you to explain it,” she said.

He might have been grateful if gratitude had not been threaded through with shame.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

That made her blink.

Perhaps because apologies were not the currency she expected from him.

“For what?”

“For saying it like that.”

Xinyue looked at him for another long second. Then she nodded once.

“Okay.”

No demand for more.

No punishment.

Only okay.

He should have felt relieved.

Instead the restraint of it landed with the same dangerous weight all her seriousness always carried.

She shifted her notes against her chest. “I still need the tutorial answer later,” she said, with the faintest return of lightness. “But I’ll wait an hour so your pride can recover.”

Before he could answer, she stepped around him and moved with the crowd toward the stairs.

He stood where she left him until Haziq appeared three minutes later and asked why he looked as though someone had audited his soul.

Saiful did not answer that either.

That night, however, the feeling did not leave.

If anything, it sharpened.

Not the jealousy itself–he had already named that, and named things usually lost some power in the process.

No, what stayed was the look on Xinyue’s face when she said, You act like I don’t know what I’m choosing.

He sat at his desk long after isyak, notes open before him, and thought about Daniel with a clarity he would not have chosen.

Daniel was not the true problem.

He was only the shape the problem had taken.

The visible proof that Xinyue’s world contained people who could stand beside her without the burden of all Saiful’s caution. Boys who could make her laugh without feeling every light exchange tugged backward by future consequence. Boys who did not have to ask themselves whether liking someone ought to be examined like a contract before it was allowed to deepen.

The easier option.

And yet Xinyue kept choosing him.

That was the part he still did not know what to do with.

Not because he doubted her.

Because he increasingly did not.

He doubted himself.

His ability to meet seriousness with seriousness and not wound it in the process.

His ability to feel what he felt without immediately trying to punish it into discipline.

His ability to stand in front of a simpler alternative and not, in some mean private corner of his mind, resent the existence of ease.

When his phone finally vibrated near midnight, the message was exactly what he had been expecting and not ready for.

Senior.

A pause.

Then:

For the record, I only asked Daniel because we were already there together. I asked you because it mattered to me what you thought. Those are not the same thing.

Saiful stared at the words long enough for the screen to dim slightly in his hand.

Then another message appeared.

And no, I’m still not angry. Just very aware that you’re human after all. Good night.

It was the kindest possible interpretation of his failure.

That, somehow, undid him more than accusation would have.

He typed, deleted, typed again.

In the end he sent only:

Good night. And yes. They’re not the same.

She did not reply.

He placed the phone beside his notes and leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling as the fan turned overhead in slow, indifferent circles.

This, he realized, was the point beyond which no part of the situation could still be called harmless.

Not because jealousy meant love. He was not childish enough to confuse those things.

But because jealousy meant investment had already taken root somewhere deeper than preference.

He did not dislike Daniel.

That was almost more inconvenient than if he had.

He simply hated, with a humiliation so private it barely qualified as anger, how sharply his own chest responded to the sight of Xinyue moving easily beside someone else.

That was not a passing discomfort.

That was evidence.

Of attachment.

Of wanting.

Of the first selfish edge beginning to appear in a man who had always imagined, if he ever cared for someone, he would do it cleanly and nobly and with none of the smaller uglinesses that made other men look so ungoverned.

Instead here he was.

Learning that liking someone did not arrive dressed in virtue.

Sometimes it arrived embarrassed.

Sometimes petty.

Sometimes with a decent boy named Daniel doing nothing wrong at all.

Saiful closed his eyes for a moment and let the dark settle against the back of them.

He could no longer tell himself that Xinyue was merely a bright spot in his routine, or that care had not already become part of the architecture of his day. He could no longer claim that her choices did not matter to him in ways that exceeded simple fondness. And he definitely could not pretend, after this week, that losing the place he had quietly begun occupying in her life would feel like a minor inconvenience.

No.

That would hurt.

And because it would hurt, he was forced at last into the one admission he had been circling without granting full entry.

Whatever this had become, it was no longer harmless.

He opened his eyes, reached for the unfinished notes on his desk, and tried to read.

Half a page later, he gave up.

Outside, a late motorcycle passed under the block. Somewhere in the flat, Aisyah laughed softly at something on her phone. The city went on behaving like itself.

Inside him, however, something quieter and far more inconvenient had settled into certainty.

A freshman girl with too much courage and a habit of choosing him on purpose had reached the point where seeing her with another boy could sour an otherwise ordinary evening.

That was absurd.

That was immature.

That was deeply annoying.

And it was, unfortunately, the truth.

Saiful shut the notebook, switched off the lamp, and lay down in the dark with the uneasy awareness that tomorrow would not be easier simply because he had finally named the problem properly.

If anything, naming it only meant he would now have to carry it honestly.

Jealousy was not noble.

But it was clarifying.

And what it clarified, in the long quiet after midnight, was this:

Daniel Tan was not the real threat.

The real threat was that Saiful Rahman, who had spent years living as though his inner life could be managed by discipline alone, had begun wanting something enough to suffer stupidly over it.

That, more than Daniel himself, was what made the future feel suddenly dangerous.