We end up face to face, close enough that I can smell him without meaning to, woodsmoke and something sharper underneath, something animal and warm. That pulling sensation detonates in my chest so hard and fast I actually take a step back before I've decided to move.
He's looking at me with that expression he's been wearing every time our paths cross, confusion and anger and somethingunder both of those that he hasn't named yet, and I can see the tension across his jaw, the way his hands have closed at his sides.
"You need to stop," he says. His voice is low and comes out like something dragged over gravel.
"Stop what?"
"Whatever this is. This." He gestures between us and the frustration in it is almost convincing, the gesture of a person furious at something they can't fight. "Make it stop."
"I don't know how."
"Figure it out." He steps around me and walks away. I stand there in the middle of the corridor with my heart pounding, that ache under my sternum so sharp it's almost a cramp. I press my hand flat against the wall and breathe through it before I can make myself move.
The worst part is that I understand his anger. Whatever is pulling at me is pulling at him too. He didn't ask for it any more than I did, his life is complicated in ways I'm only beginning to understand, and I still feel like I've been punched.
I keep walking. My legs know where they're going even when the rest of me doesn't.
At lunch Lily has her tablet out, telling me about a third-year who apparently shifted during a practical exam and got hiccups for two hours afterward. Someone started a betting pool. She's laughing as she explains it and I'm trying to follow the story but keep losing the thread.
The pull has been sitting in my chest since the corridor and it won't settle. My food is in front of me and I've eaten maybe a third of it because eating takes attention I don't have right now. My eyes want to find Caspian's table regardless of what I tellthem. I can feel where he is in the room the way you feel weather moving in, something barometric and involuntary.
"You're not listening," Lily says.
"Sorry."
"What's going on?"
"Nothing."
"Nova." She sets down the tablet. "I'm your friend. You can actually talk to me."
I look at her and for a moment I genuinely want to. I want to explain about the pulling sensation, about what Rivera said in class, about Caspian in the corridor telling me to make it stop. I want to say: something is happening to my body and I don't understand it and I'm terrified. Instead I hear myself say:
"I'm just tired."
She doesn't believe me. I can see it in the set of her mouth, the small careful pause before she lets it go, and I feel the distance between what I said and what's true like something I'll have to account for later.
The tutoring session with Professor Harmon is at four. I walk across campus in the late afternoon cold, the sky going grey at the edges, and by the time I get to his office my eyes are burning from lack of sleep and my concentration is somewhere on the corridor floor where I left it after running into Caspian.
He notices immediately. He notices everything immediately, which is either reassuring or unsettling depending on the day.
We're fifteen minutes into my argument on territorial consolidation when he cuts me off.
"That's not your argument."
"Sir?"
"You're giving me the textbook position. I asked you to think." He leans back in his chair and watches me with that unhurried attention, and I look at the page in front of me like the answer to why my brain isn't working is written there. "What's affecting your concentration?"
"I'm tired."
"That's the second explanation you've given today that explains everything and nothing."
I go still. "Sir?"
"You've been present in this room consistently and I can count on one hand the times you've been genuinely distracted." His voice is careful, the same tone he uses for complicated historical questions. "Something has changed."
I could lie. I could give him tiredness or stress or any number of things that are technically true and he might accept them. I hear myself say instead: "Do you know anything about mate bonds, sir?"
