She shifts her cup and walks. “Good luck, O’Connor.”
“Hey,” I call. “You didn’t even let me make my case.”
“I don’t need to.” She doesn’t look back. “You talk too loud. It turns the air orange.”
I freeze on that.
Orange?
Before I can ask what the hell she means, she disappears through the library doors. I catch my reflection in the café window, smiling like an idiot, once again left circling the space she vacated.
And for once, I don’t care who sees.
5
SIGNAL TO NOISE (WREN)
The library’s fourth floor is my safe space. Quiet carrels, old heating vents humming, that familiar cocktail of worn textbooks and academic despair that peaks during midterms. No one performs up here. No one notices anyone else.
That’s the point.
I’ve claimed the corner desk by the window, pencil clicking against the margin while I work through problem sets that should take thirty minutes but keep stretching to fifty because my brain refuses to behave.
I stare at the same thermodynamics equation for the third time. The numbers blur. Behind them—disruptive, insistent—is the memory of steel blue settling into the seat beside me in Feldman’s class.
Kieran O’Connor’s knee angled into my space without touching.
The split on his lower lip I clocked before I could stop myself.
The smell of cold air and cedar layered with a faint peppered edge that made my pulse trip over itself.
I shouldnotbe thinking about him.
I click my pencil four times to reset my brain. Entropy. Heat transfer. Systems in equilibrium.
Mine is anything but.
The pencil clicks again. I freeze, annoyed at myself.
He texted me. Used my publicly posted tutoring number and signed off with a casualK, pretending we’re already friends.
I’ve opened the message six times. Read it. Closed it.
No reply is still a reply. He’s smart enough to get that.
And I’m smart enough to know silence will only wind him up. He’ll decide it’s a chase and make it my problem.
My phone lies face down on the desk. I flip it over before I can stop myself.
UNKNOWN
Partners should probably exchange contact info
Stats tutoring flyer on the bulletin board had your number
Hope that’s not weird —K
Itisweird. It’s weird that he went looking. It’s weird that he bothered. It’s weird that the message is still stuck in my chest three hours later, humming its own frequency.
