The question drops into the room. His expression doesn't change but something moves behind his eyes, a subtle tightening, and he says: "That's outside my area of expertise."
"But you know the basics."
"Everyone knows the basics." A pause. "Why are you asking?"
"Academic curiosity."
"Try again."
I look at him. He's looking back at me and I can see him putting pieces together, leaning forward slightly in his chair with his forearms on the desk, and he says: "Are you experiencing a pull toward someone?"
My throat closes. "I don't know. Maybe."
"Who?"
I don't answer. I don't need to. It's written all over me, in my posture and the direction I won't look and the way I've gone quiet at exactly the wrong moment.
"Caspian Jett," he says, and his voice is completely flat, and it's not a question.
"I think so." I press my thumbnail against the edge of my notebook. "But I don't understand it. Rivera said the bond can't complete if one party is human. So why would I feel anything? What does it mean?"
He's quiet for a long moment. Long enough that I look up at him.
Something is happening behind his eyes that he isn't letting reach his face. A tension in his jaw, controlled fast, and then he says: "There are rare cases where dormant shifters experience partial bond recognition before their first shift. If you have latent shifter genetics that haven't presented yet, your body might be responding to compatibility before the shift has occurred."
"But I can't shift."
"Not yet. That doesn't mean you never will." He stands and goes to his bookshelf, running his finger along the spines with his back to me, and when he turns around he's holding a thin volume. "Read this. It covers delayed presentation in shifter genetics. If what you're experiencing is what I think it might be, you need to understand it."
He crosses back to the desk and holds it out.
I take it from the edge, careful, not reaching across the space he's put between us. My fingers close around the spine before his fully release it, and for a moment we're both holding it. He lets go first. Steps back to his chair without a word, as though that inch of overlap didn't happen. As though he's practiced at pretending things don't happen.
His hands go flat on the desk and I can see the intention behind it, the conscious choice to put space between us.
"Be careful, Miss Bardot." His voice has gone careful in a different way now. "Partial bonds are painful and complicated. Especially when one party doesn't want them."
"I know, sir."
"I don't think you do." A pause. "Dismissed."
I gather my things and leave. In the corridor I press my back against the wall and hold the book against my chest and breathe.
I don't know what that was. I know I felt it, and that he did too, and that he chose to step back. I don't know what to do with any of it except walk back to the library and read until I understand enough to stop feeling like the ground is moving under me.
That evening I'm at my usual table in the library, the book Harmon gave me open in front of me and a cup of tea gone cold at my elbow. I've been reading for an hour and a half and the words are starting to blur. The chapter on delayed presentation describes cases where latent shifters feel partial mate recognition before their first shift, the pull arriving early as the body begins to wake up even before the shift itself does. I read it three times until the shape of what's happening to me starts to make a different kind of sense.
It doesn't make it easier. It just gives it a name.
I'm staring at a paragraph I've already read twice when someone sits down across from me.
Theo Carver. He's got his mathematics text and he opens it like sitting at my table is the most natural thing in the world.
"Hi," he says.
"Hi."
"You're Nova, right? First year?"
