I read it a fifth time.
I understand every word, yet I cannot tell you what any of them mean right now.
He looks up right when I do.
Not at the room or the door but directly at me, as if he knew the precise location of my seat before he raised his eyes. Which is entirely possible, and I am choosing not to examine it in my head right now.
I look at my textbook.
I feel his gaze for four seconds.
I count them.
Then I hear the low sound of his voice, not the words, just the timbre, that deep, unhurried frequency that moves through a room like weather. And then a pause, and the girl laughs again, softer this time.
I turn a page.
Twenty minutes later, I pack up my bag with the brisk, purposeful energy of someone who has somewhere to be and isabsolutely not leaving because Saint is getting his ego stroked, when I hear the chair.
Not hers. His.
His footsteps cross the room. He doesn’t go toward the door. He comes toward me, and I know this without looking because I have developed, against my will and better judgment, a finely calibrated awareness of where he is at any given moment.
Right now, he is closing the distance between the window and my table at a pace that suggests he is not in a hurry because he has already decided how this ends.
I pull my bag onto my shoulder.
He stops two feet away. Not close enough to crowd me but close enough that I would have to actively step around him to leave.
I look up.
My mistake. Looking up at Saint from close range is always a mistake, yet I do it anyway.
He looks at me the way he always looks at me, like I am the only fixed point in the room. Not like the girl at the table. Not the way he was sitting with her, easy and present and available.
This is different.
This is the look that has been keeping me awake at unreasonable hours for the past weeks, the one I have no clean clinical name for.
“You were watching,” he says. It isn’t an accusation.
“I was reading,” I say, staring at the hard lines of his jaw.
His mouth does the almost thing. Not quite a smile. The anterior to a smile.
“You read the same page for twenty minutes.”
“I was reading slowly.”
He looks at me. A long, unhurried look, the kind that takes inventory.
“She is in my economics lecture,” he says. “She wanted help with a problem set.”
“I don’t care, and I didn’t ask,” I say.
“No,” he agrees. “You didn’t.”
The room has gone very quiet around us. I am aware of the textbook in my bag, the table behind me, the door to my left, and that I have not moved despite having approximately three clear routes of exit available.
