For the first time tonight, I don’t have a smart reply ready.
I swallow. “I didn’t mean to make you feel unsafe.”
“You didn’t.” She closes her notebook, neat and final. “I just work better when I understand the variables.”
For a second, the air balances between us, humming with unspoken things. The smell of solder and old coffee. The distant buzz of fluorescents. The space where I should say something smart and don’t.
Then I do the thing I’m best and worst at—I push.
“You want to grab a bite?” The words scrape out of me. “There’s a Thai place on Comm Ave still open. I’m starving.” I clear my throat. “You look hungry too.”
Her fingers rest on the notebook’s edge. She closes it with quiet precision, and I track the movement like an idiot—efficient, careful, graphite still smudged across her knuckles. I want to wipe the marks from her skin, tuck her hair behind her ear, do a thousand things I haven’t earned.
What the hell is wrong with me?
Her gaze lifts to mine, steady as a scalpel. I catch the smallest hitch in her breath. Hope flares—stupid, reckless—right before she cuts it clean.
“No.”
Her favorite word. The one she drops without blinking while my pulse stumbles. It should piss me off. Instead, it lands like a bruise I keep pressing.
“General policy?” I try to joke. My voice tips sideways. “Or hockey-player specific?”
“Neither.” She slides the notebook into her bag. “I don’t want to be seen with you.”
The hit is surgical. No hesitation. No softening.
“Because people will talk?” I manage. My throat tightens.
“Because they will assume.” She pauses, jaw setting. “And because I’m into someone else.”
Everything in my chest checks hard left. My hands flatten on the workstation, knuckles whitening. Something hot and ugly coils in my gut. Not anger. Worse.
Jealousy.
I replay the frames I didn’t want to see: the party—her eyes sliding past my shoulder to find him in the crowd; lecture—the way her shoulders eased when he spoke; group work—the unconscious pencil tap, keeping time with his words.
How did I miss it?
“Theo,” I rasp before I can stop myself.
The name drops between us like a puck on fresh ice. She doesn’t blink.
“None of your business.”
I laugh, hollow even to my own ears. “Right. Totally.” The weight in my palm suddenly feels wrong. “Still, the guy with the glasses. Does he know?”
Her jaw tightens. “You’re making assumptions.”
“I’m good at reading plays,” I say, and I am. Just not this one. “He should know.”
“That’s not how this works.” She drops the freshman’s notes into the lost-and-found bin. “Not that I’d know much about it,” she adds, quick and embarrassed. “But I’ve read about it.”
The admission lands devastating.
I’ve been with girls who knew exactly what they were doing. Girls who looked at me like I was the prize. Easy. Clean. Uncomplicated.
None of them ever made me lose words.
