Page 12 of Hostile

“I don’t drink coffee,” I said.

“Tea?”

“I don’t need you to buy me anything.”

“I know you don’t.” He said it simply, without defensiveness. “I want to. There’s a difference.”

I looked at him—really looked—something I’d been avoiding since the auditorium—and noticed the same thing I saw two weeks ago, but I didn’t know how to respond. He wasn’t acting for show. He wasn’t thinking about how this could benefit him. He was just standing in a classroom at four in the afternoon, asking a girl who had just reorganized his notes if she wanted something warm to drink, and he truly meant it exactly that much, no more.

That, it turned out, was the most dangerous version of Wyatt Aldridge.

Not the heir to a dynasty. Not the boy who’d played every sport and worn every crown in Savannah while I watched from a distance. Not the person whose family name had bookended my entire childhood, a symbol of everything I could never have.

This version. The one who thought in branches and noticed how I cross-referenced my margins, and said I want to instead of let me.

“One hour,” I said. “I have a seminar at six.”

His smile was quiet and unhurried, the kind that didn’t need an audience.

“One hour,” he agreed.

The café was three blocks from campus, small enough that the ambient noise stayed low enough that conversation didn’t require effort. I ordered tea, and he ordered black coffee. We took a table near the window and spent the first ten minutes, in the circuitous, mutually cautious way of two people who know more about each other than they’ve officially acknowledged, establishing that we were going to talk about ideas rather than history.

It was, in retrospect, the most sophisticated negotiation I’d conducted in eighteen years of life, and neither of us named it directly.

He asked me what had drawn me to business law. I told him—the precision of it, the way it required you to think of language as a system of binding agreements rather than a collection of words, and the quiet satisfaction of finding the exact clause that changed everything. He listened in the focused way I was starting to recognize as native to him, not polite listening but actual tracking, following the logic of what I was saying to its next point before I arrived there.

Then I asked him the same question.

“Honestly?” He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn on the table, a small, unself-conscious gesture. “My dad sent me the textbook list in August, and contract law was the first thing I’d seen in four years of being told what I was going to study that I actually wanted to learn more about.”

“Because?”

“Because a contract is a promise with teeth.” He looked up. “I’ve spent my whole life watching people make promises without teeth. It’s refreshing to study the version that bites back.”

I sat with that for a moment. “What did you want to study? If you’d had a choice.”

“Computer engineering.” No hesitation. “The architecture of systems. How you build something that can adapt without losing its core logic.” He paused. “You?”

“Finance. I’ve always wanted to understand how money moves. Not just how to accumulate it—how it flows. Who controls its direction and why, and how you get yourself into a position where you’re one of the people at the controls.”

Something in his expression grew careful in an interesting way—the look of someone who’s heard something that goes beyond the words used to say it. “That’s not a small ambition.”

“No,” I agreed. “It isn’t.”

He looked at me for a moment. Just looked, with the kind of attention that didn’t need to be filled with words. “You’re going to be remarkable,” he said finally. “I thought that in Savannah. I think it even more now.”

The tea had gone lukewarm. Outside, Cambridge moved through its early October afternoon, unremarkable and unhurried.

“You thought about me in Savannah?” The question came out before I’d decided to ask it.

He didn’t flinch from it. “Yes.”

“We barely spoke.”

“I know.”

“Why?”