He could. A re-cross of the legs, a shift of the weight, the micro-adjustment every man makes every ten minutes while sitting at a desk. He doesn’t. He holds the contact as if moving would admit there was a contact to move away from. The stillness is the answer. The stillness is an answer I wasn’t sure I was going to get.
I breathe. Don’t let it show.
My heart’s going hard enough that I can feel the pulse in the side of my neck. I want to check if he can see it. I don’t check. If he’s looking, I’ve won. If he isn’t, I don’t need to know I lost.
‘I’ve been working through the problem sets,’ I say. The voice I use for him: clean, measured. The version of me that sounds like it belongs in this building. ‘But I’m stuck on something.’
I put the pages on the desk. He picks them up, his fingers on the paper, same grip, edges only, like he’s handling something that could detonate.
He reads. Scans. He creases his brow at the errors, and I track it like watching a lock pick turning: that moment when the mechanism gives.
‘Line four,’ he says. ‘You’ve assumed continuity where it hasn’t been established.’
I wrote that error at 11 pm in my halls room with the lights off and the taste of his name still in my mouth.
‘Right,’ I say. ‘Can you show me?’
He leans forward. Writes. The pen moves, and his sleeve rides up, and there it is, the hair catching the overhead light. He doesn’t even know he’s doing it.
Throat. Dry.
I lean in too. To look at the page. Obviously. Close enough for the second time, and I feel him register it, a tightening in his posture so subtle nobody else would catch it.
I notice.
He traces the substitution path with his pen. Patient, thorough. Then stops.
‘You’ve made the same error in a different form on line eleven.’ The glasses push up on his nose. His eyes find mine directly, and the kindness evaporates. ‘Both errors assume the same false premise. But the rest of your work doesn’t make that mistake. Not once.’
Silence.
‘Almost like you know the premise is false,’ he says. ‘And wrote it that way on purpose.’
Skin. Heat. Flush creeping down my spine.
I wasn’t ready for that. The plan was cologne and knee contact and the long game of erosion, and instead this man has picked apart my forgeries in five minutes with the same hands I came here to be touched by, and now he’s watching me, and I have no response.
I shrug. ‘Maybe I had an off night.’
He holds the look for another beat. Then returns to the page as if nothing happened.
‘The substitution here,’ he says, pointing, and his voice shifts: gentler, the register opening when he forgets to be careful. ‘Once you establish the bounds, the rest follows.’
His pen drops.
His, not mine. It rolls off the desk, settling between us, closer to my side. I could let him get it. The smart move is letting him get it.
I bend. Slow. My hand closes around the pen. I come back up.
Slower than I bent down. Slow enough that the jumper rides up at the back and the chain shifts on my collarbone. The line of my throat is available for inspection for approximately two and a half seconds longer than a retrieval from under a desk should reasonably take.
His gaze is.
Somewhere else.
I’ve watched men look at me. I know the catalogue of looks: the chart-it-out, the stolen, the guilty, the greedy. What I clock on his face in the one frame I catch before he adjusts is the interested one, which is the one I had half-guessed at and half-hoped for and in either case had not earned at this decibel.
It snaps up, too late—a fraction of a second where that focus was lower.
