Love & Disobey

Chapter Four: Distance Protocol

The protocol had four rules.

Rule one: at school, be invisible. Find the back row, keep the head down, do not engage with anything that wasn't directly academic. Rule two: at home, be polite. Say good morning. Say goodnight. Answer questions with appropriate brevity and ask nothing in return. Rule three: under no circumstances give Jade enough material to work with, because Jade with material was a force of nature that Aria was not equipped to manage. And rule four — the foundational rule, the one all the others were built on — do not, under any circumstances, attract Damien Stone's attention.

She was good at rules. She had always been good at rules. And for exactly four days, the protocol held beautifully.

She mapped the campus on day two — every building, every shortcut, every study space ranked by noise level and natural light and the likelihood of running into anyone who would want to have a conversation. She found a reading room in the back of the humanities building that had six armchairs, excellent wifi, and an atmosphere of such committed quiet that even Jade, when Aria brought her there on day three, spoke in a whisper and seemed vaguely awed by herself for doing it. She located the best coffee, the fastest lunch queue, the lecture halls where the back row was genuinely at the back and not just aspirationally so.

She attended one party. Jade had presented it as non-negotiable, which was technically inaccurate but practically true, and Aria had gone with the intention of surviving it gracefully. She stayed forty minutes, spoke to seven people, laughed genuinely twice, and left before anything complicated could happen. Jade had texted her seventeen times between midnight and two in the morning describing what she had missed. Aria had read them all with her tea and felt, on balance, that she had made the correct call.

At home, she and Damien had arrived, without discussion, at a system.

It had not been negotiated. It had simply emerged, the way certain necessary arrangements did, from the accumulated logic of two people who were both too self-aware to pretend the situation was uncomplicated and too private to address it directly. If he was in the kitchen when she came down, she went back upstairs and returned in twenty minutes. If she was in the common room when he came through, he took the back stairs. They passed each other in the hallway with the precise, considerate choreography of people who had agreed, wordlessly and completely, that proximity required management.

It was civilised. It was sustainable.

Her mother found it slightly puzzling — "You don't have to avoid each other, you know" — and Aria had smiled and said they weren't avoiding each other, they just had different schedules, which was true enough to be delivered without guilt.

Marcus said nothing about it. Marcus, she was coming to understand, said very little and noticed everything, which made him considerably more complex than she'd initially assessed.

---

On day four she was early to her ten o'clock lecture and took a seat near the back, which had become a reflex by now. The two girls who settled in the row in front of her were deep in a conversation they showed no signs of moderating for a public space, and Aria, who had been trained by years of quiet observation to be very good at appearing not to listen, listened.

The subject was Damien Stone.

Specifically, whether he was currently seeing anyone, who the last person had been, and whether a particular girl in their friend group had a realistic chance or was — and this was a direct quote — "wasting her entire personality on a man who doesn't notice personalities."

Aria kept her eyes on her notebook.

The assessment of his previous relationships was detailed, and it confirmed what Jade had told her — he dated, it ended, nobody hated him. But the tone of the girls discussing it was illuminating in a different way. There was reverence in it, but there was also a kind of territorial fury at the abstract, directed not at him but at the idea of whoever might currently have his attention. It was the specific venom of people who had decided that proximity to a certain person was a finite resource, and that other people's proximity reduced their own.

Aria noted this carefully and redoubled her efforts.

Whatever the wordless kitchen choreography was at home, at school it needed to be more. Not avoidance — avoidance was noticeable. Just the natural, unremarkable distance of two people who happened to share an address and nothing else.

She had this under complete control.

Then Professor Hale assigned the study groups.

---

There were twelve students in the literature seminar. Professor Hale — who was, exactly as Damien had said, brutal and correct about everything — divided them into pairs with the brisk efficiency of someone who had stopped caring about social dynamics approximately fifteen years ago and found the decision liberating.

"Wells and Stone," she said, without looking up from her list.

Aria wrote it in her notebook calmly and without any outward response and spent the next fifty minutes constructing a completely rational perspective on the situation. It was a study group. They were both adults. She was a person who managed complicated things, and this was not even a complicated thing, it was a literature assignment, and she was going to be completely fine.

---

The library at four o'clock was quiet enough that she could hear the particular quality of silence that meant someone had arrived and was trying to determine how to begin.

She looked up from her notes.

Damien Stone was, infuriatingly, prepared. He had the primary texts, both of them annotated — she could see the tabs from across the table. He had a notebook that looked like it had been used regularly rather than opened this morning in a gesture of performance. He sat down across from her without ceremony and opened to a page he'd clearly already been thinking about.

"I've been working on the third chapter argument," he said. "If you've done the second, we can build from there."

She had done the second. She had done the second and the fourth and had thoughts about the fifth that she'd been saving because she hadn't expected to have anyone worth sharing them with.

"I've done the second," she said.

"Good." He turned the notebook to face her. His handwriting was unexpectedly deliberate — not neat in a performative sense but careful, like someone who wrote slowly enough to mean it. "Tell me what you got."

She told him. He listened in the way she'd come to associate with people who actually processed what was said to them rather than waiting for a gap to speak into. He asked one question that was better than the question she'd expected him to ask. She answered it and then asked one back, and they were twenty minutes into a genuine argument about narrative structure before she noticed that he was different here.

Not different like a different person. Different like the same person with the performance removed.

At school he was frictionless — charming, easy, the version of himself that rooms organised around. Here, across a library table with the books between them and no audience to arrange himself for, he was quieter. He chose his words with more care. He disagreed with her on the question of the author's intent and held his position without aggression when she pushed back, which she did, and he adjusted only when she made a point he couldn't counter, which she eventually did, and when that happened he said "okay, fair" and wrote it in his notebook.

She caught him looking at her twice when she was reading.

She caught herself looking at him once when he was.

Neither of them said anything about it.

---

They left the library at six and it was only when they were outside, in the early dark of an autumn evening, that she registered they were walking the same direction. Of course they were. They lived in the same place. Ten minutes of pavement between the campus gate and the estate, and there was only one logical route.

He fell into step beside her without asking, which she noted but found she couldn't object to without making the act of objection more significant than the thing itself.

For the first two minutes they didn't speak and she thought perhaps they'd do the whole walk in silence, which would be sustainable, which would be fine. Then he said, not looking at her, "Where were you before here?" and she told him, and he asked something about it that was actually specific rather than politely generic, which meant he'd retained something she'd said at dinner that first night, which she filed away without examining.

She told him about the city she'd grown up in. He asked about the university she'd transferred from, and whether she'd liked it, and she said she'd liked it well enough but not enough to stay, which was more honest than she'd intended to be. He asked what enough would look like. She thought about it and said she didn't know yet, she was still figuring that out. He said he understood that, and something in the way he said it suggested he meant it rather than saying it to maintain conversation.

They talked about books — which authors they'd read, which ones she thought were overrated, which ones he disagreed with her about. He had opinions. Actual, considered, non-performative opinions, which she found considerably more disarming than she'd budgeted for. She talked about what she wanted to do after college, the vague shape of it, and he didn't try to make it more concrete or tell her what he thought she should want, just listened and asked a question at the end that sat with her.

The estate gate appeared ahead of them and she looked up and genuinely did not know where the last twenty minutes had gone.

He held the gate. She went through. They crossed the drive toward the house and she was aware, with the specific and inconvenient awareness that had been plaguing her since she arrived, of the distance between them — close enough that she could have reached out, far enough that it was entirely deniable.

"See you at dinner," he said at the door. Easy. Unremarkable.

"Yes," she said.

She went upstairs. She sat on her bed. She put her bag down and looked at the bookshelves and sat with what had happened for a moment, which was that nothing had happened, which was technically true and entirely misleading.

Distance, she thought, had been a much more functional strategy before he turned out to be someone she could talk to.

Before he became, without her permission and against all reasonable expectation, interesting.