The first session was terrible.
The math was fine, easy even, the kind of problem sets I could work through with half my attention while the other half stayed carefully, painfully aware of Kai sitting across the table in Room 214, jaw tight with concentration, pencil gripped like it owed him an explanation.
It was terrible because of the silence, it was not the comfortable kind we used to have in the darkroom, the kind that didn't need filling. This silence had edges. We talked about slope-intercept form and probability distributions and nothing else, two people who used to text each other at midnight now speaking exclusively in the language of standardized test prep, careful and polite and entirely unwilling to look directly at the six feet of distance still sitting between us.
"You're
