Our eyes lock.
It hits like walking into a pane of glass.
He doesn’t look surprised. He doesn’t look away. He reaches up with one hand and slides his headset down around his neck, slow and unhurried, as if he was always planning to.
We’ve had this lecture all semester. For three months, we’ve sat in the same room—him in the back corner, me in the middle—pretending the other doesn’t exist. I’ve tracked him in my peripheral vision since August. I know he’s tracked me.
We’ve spent twelve weeks actively avoiding this collision.
Dad’s warning flashes again—live wire, blast radius, space—and for a second my body tries to obey, every instinct screaming to loop around the building, take the long way, keep his orbit from touching mine.
My body doesn’t buy that. My heart takes off like it’s on the power play. A colder, steadier thought cuts through the panic—I’m allowed to choose my direction, not reroute myself around someone else’s gravity.
The old instinct surges up—duck, divert, disappear.
No.
The word comes from somewhere deeper than fear. A low, stubborn grind of refusal.
He doesn’t get to own this hallway. Rylan doesn’t. The man who locked the door behind me doesn’t.
I do.
I keep walking.
My feet stay steady even though my pulse is a mess. Each step is its own argument.
I’m not running. I’m not.
I don’t slow down when I reach him. Don’t speed up, either. I stop a few feet away, the air between us stretched thin and tight, strung with the memory of cold air and almost-kisses.
“You don’t talk much,” I say.
It’s the first thing my brain offers and it’s objectively terrible, but if I don’t say something, the quiet will swallow me whole.
His eyes skim my face, taking inventory the way he does on the ice. There’s exhaustion there, and something sharper. A tiny tug at the corner of his mouth. “Neither do you.”
A small, unexpected half-smile tugs at my lips. It feels rusty, like I’m trying out a muscle I haven’t used in a while. He mirrors it—barely, fleetingly—and then it’s gone. But I saw it.
“Lecture,” he says. Not a question.
“Stats,” I answer.
He nods like he already knew.
Then he pushes off the railing and falls into step beside me.
Not asking. Not hesitating. Just… joining.
Our strides adjust without talking about it. There’s a few inches of space between our arms, three, maybe four. It feels microscopic.
The silence that drops over us is huge but full. The same heavy quiet from the parking lot, now walking through daylight with us.
My shoulders, which usually ride around my ears by this point in the day, drop a fraction. I hate that his proximity is the thing that lets them. I hate that the crowd feels less sharp with him slicing a line through it.
My fingers rest on the pepper spray in my hoodie pocket. They don’t curl around it.
Two girls coming down the steps clock him, eyes widening. One nudges the other, whispers something I can’t hear, and they both look from him to me and back again before pretending they weren’t staring.
