Late was not a state I handled well.
It wasn't about the minutes themselves,the exact number didn't matter. It was what lateness meant, the small familiar feeling that came with it, the one that had lived in me long enough that I'd stopped remembering when it first arrived. Disappointment, even the private, pre-emptive kind. Even when the only audience was me.
The door to the psychology classroom opened, and I walked in.
Professor Bert looked up from whatever she was writing. I got to her before she could say anything.
"I'm sorry, Professor. It won't happen again."
She held my gaze for a moment, then looked back down. "Find a seat, Miss Carver."
I looked for mine.
It was taken.
My spot by the window, the one I'd claimed in the first week of term, where the morning light came through at exactly the right angle and made every lecture marginally more bearable was occupied. A dark-haired guy sat there with his head turned toward the glass, elbow on the sill, like he'd been placed there specifically to take the one seat I actually wanted.
The chair beside him was free, except it wasn't, because his bag was on it.
Placed there deliberately, in the specific, wordless language of don't.
I was already late, which meant every remaining second standing at the front of the room was another second of people noticing I was standing at the front of the room. I walked over, moved his bag onto the desk with a quiet thud, and sat down.
He turned.
We stared at each other for a fraction of a second that stretched considerably longer.
It was him.
Dark hair, hazel eyes, I noted the hazel immediately and resented noting it. His eyebrows lifted slightly. Not dramatically. Just enough. A wordless question about my audacity — really?
I turned to face the board.
What is Person Perception?
Professor Bert was working the room for answers in her usual way, calling on people before their hands went up. Someone two rows ahead offered something about first impressions. The discussion moved.
I became aware of him the way you become aware of a change in weather gradually, then all at once. The slight shift in his position, like four walls were already too close. The way he took up the edge of my vision even when I was looking straight ahead. He smelled clean, with something faint underneath dark, a trace of tobacco and I noticed this before I could decide not to.
I was building a profile without meaning to start one.
Professor Bert turned toward our side of the room.
She looked at me first, then at him, and directed the question to both of us.
Beside me, silence. Long enough to become deliberate.
Then he answered.
Low. Unhurried. The words didn't need any help getting where they were going, he simply put them down and let them land. Quietly, I was aware that I was not the only person who'd just realized, The girls nearby had shifted. The boys had the particular tension of a room that had just rearranged its hierarchy without being asked.
"Very good, Liam." Professor Bert's tone was almost warm. She moved on quickly, but the warmth had been there. I noted it.
Professor Bert who had once made a visiting lecturer cry in front of a full auditorium going soft for someone who had walked in like rules were a mild suggestion. Interesting.
The next two hours passed without incident.
He didn't say anything to me. I didn't say anything to him. I took notes, followed the lecture which was genuinely good, Professor Bert's fearsome reputation aside and beside me he stayed quiet, like everything was still moving but not.
When class ended I moved quickly. Lunch before the library, assignment to finish. I gathered my things and stood.
His voice came low, just behind my shoulder.
"So you like peeping, huh."
Not a question. Not quite directed at me dropped sideways, like a remark to no one in particular. By the time I processed it, he was already walking out, hands in his pockets, unhurried, through the door and gone.
I stood there for a moment.
Peeping. As though I'd been the one staring across a room while kissing someone else.
The audacity was almost impressive.
I picked up my bag and walked out.
Charlie was already at our usual table in the café, waving before I'd cleared the doorway. I crossed the room, sat down, and pulled out my sandwich. The cafeteria food and I had a long-standing disagreement. Across from me, Edd had his notebook open in the way he sometimes did before abandoning it.
"How was Bert?" Charlie asked immediately.
"Fine. Good, actually."
Charlie made a face. "Edd says the Thursday section nearly revolted last week."
"The Thursday section isn't paying attention."
"Or she's impossible and you're the only one who doesn't notice."
"Maybe both." I unwrapped the sandwich.
"Okay but wait—" Charlie leaned forward. "You know who I saw this morning coming out of the east building? Edd, tell her."
Edd looked up. "Liam Lincoln."
"Liam Lincoln," Charlie repeated, like the name itself was a headline. "His father is apparently serious money, generational. And he's here, at this school, not using a single connection. Doesn't have to. Edd says the basketball team basically recruited him because he's that good, and he still acts like none of it matters—"
"Charlie." I looked up.
"What?"
"Why are we talking about this person?"
"Because he's interesting."
"He sounds like every other person who grew up with money and coasts on it."
"No, but—" She pointed her spoon at me. "He doesn't coast. That's the thing. Edd says he's genuinely good at everything and seems completely indifferent to all of it, which is somehow worse—"
"Makes what worse?" I asked.
Edd looked up from his notebook. "She means he doesn't seem to try and it doesn't matter anyway."
The café went marginally quieter.
Not loudly, not all at once the soft, collective shift of a room's attention moving somewhere without being told to. I glanced up from my sandwich.
He walked in from the entrance on the far side.
Tall, lean, broad through the shoulders without making a point of it. Moving through the room like someone aware they were being watched and had decided this was irrelevant. The group he was heading toward clustered near the windows in a loose arrangement that had that specific understated polish I recognized from home adjusted as he arrived, the way groups did when whoever was at the center finally appeared.
He sat down. Said something to the girl beside him. She laughed.
Then, as though the universe found the whole thing personally amusing, he looked up and scanned the room.
His eyes landed on me.
Held.
Third time. A new personal record in bad luck.
It lasted perhaps five seconds — ordinary enough from the outside, probably. From where I was sitting it had a gravity to it, the kind that wanted to be longer.
The girl beside him said something again. He turned toward her, and a faint curve crossed his face brief, almost reluctant and something warm and inconvenient moved through me before I redirected my full attention to the sandwich.
Eat. Leave. Library. That was the plan and I was sticking to it.
"—and apparently even the professors just let him—" Charlie was still talking.
"Mm," I said.
"Are you listening?"
"Absolutely."
She narrowed her eyes. "What did I just say?"
"Something about professors."
"Eve."
"Charlie, I have an assignment due by four."
She studied my face with the particular look she used when she suspected something was happening that I wasn't telling her about. Then she went back to her soup.
"Fine," she said. "Go do your assignment."
I gathered my things, said goodbye to them both, and walked out.
The library was twelve minutes away. For eleven of those twelve minutes, some part of my brain was still back in that café, still sitting with five seconds of eye contact I had no reasonable explanation for, turning the whole thing over quietly like something with an edge I hadn't found yet.
By the time I pushed through the library doors, I'd decided it didn't mean anything.
By the time I found a table, I'd decided it almost definitely didn't mean anything.
By the time I clicked my pen, I was mostly thinking about the assignment.
Mostly.