Mike watched her, his eyes dark and unblinking. He didn't interrupt; he simply let her build her intellectual fortress, brick by brick, watching how she used her mind to shield the woman he had just spent hours unraveling.
"I've been thinking about it for two years," she said, her voice gaining a momentum that felt like a defensive maneuver. "I just hadn't found the framing that made it feel worth the effort..."
"You said something about the schedule acting as cover and the terms being the actual mechanism... it's not a new idea, but the framing was right."
"So, I wrote it down."
"In your faculty meeting notebook," Mike repeated, his voice a low, knowing rumble.
He was testing the boundary, reminding her that even as she spoke of grand academic theories, she was still sitting in the wreckage of their shared bed.
"In my faculty meeting notebook," she confirmed.
