I pull out the chair beside her and sit. She watches me do it. Doesn't move away. Doesn't adjust her position or create more distance or do any of the things people do when they want someone to understand they're uncomfortable.
She watches me with those eyes and the very beginning of a smile that she's trying to flatten.
"What are you doing?" she asks.
There it is.
Notcan you move, orthat's too close, or any version of discomfort. Just curiosity. Just a girl who knows exactly what I'm doing and wants to see if I'll admit it.
Satisfaction ripples through me.
"Sitting," I say.
"There are other chairs." She looks around the room, at the open space. I could be anywhere, but instead I’m right here.
"There are," I agree.
She looks at me for a moment. Then she pulls her laptop closer.
I stand.
She doesn't watch me this time. Keeps her eyes on her notepad, but her shoulders have changed. I move behind her again, slower this time, testing.
I reach around her and fully open the laptop, tilting the screen back so I can read it properly. She goes very still. Not frightened — I know what frightened looks like on her, and this isn't it. Just — aware. Every nerve aware.
I read the paragraph she was working on when I came in. Then the one before it. Then the thesis statement at the top.
"Your argument breaks down in the third section," I say quietly close to her ear. "You're conflating compliance with consent. They're not the same."
She doesn't respond immediately. I can see the side of her face from this angle — the line of her jaw, the way she's looking at the screen without reading it.
"I know they're not the same," she says finally. Her voice is steady. Impressively steady. "That's the point. The institution relies on people not knowing the difference."
"Then say that. Explicitly. You're implying it when you should be stating it."
I straighten.
And I notice, in the half second before I do, that she smells like something warm and clean, and I am now going to have difficulty unnoticing that.
I take a step back.
She turns in her chair and looks up at me, and the smile she'd been flattening is fully visible now, small and certain and slightly devastating in a way that I find — inconvenient.
"Better?" she asks.
I look at her for a moment.
"Fix the third section," I say.
I leave and don't look back.
I'm in the elevator before I register that I stood behind her for longer than the essay required, that she knew it and smiled about it, and that I am now going to be late for therapy, thinking about the way Adela smells instead of what I'm going to say when I get there.
I stare at the elevator doors.
This is a problem.
Family therapy is at five.
