Between Us

Chapter 14 — The Assessment

I told myself the library session on Sunday was purely academic.

Enzyme kinetics. Wednesday assessment. Legitimate reason to be in the same space. Nothing more.

I told myself this approximately eleven times on the walk over.

He was already there when I arrived — same table, same seat, notes already out. He looked up when I sat down and there was a moment, just a second, where neither of us said anything and the air felt slightly different from usual.

Then he pushed a set of printed notes across the table. "Michaelis-Menten equation. You're going to need this."

"Good morning to you too," I said.

"Good morning." He pointed at the notes. "Michaelis-Menten."

Normal. Academic. Fine.

Except it wasn't entirely fine because every twenty minutes or so one of us would say something that had nothing to do with enzyme kinetics and we'd end up talking for longer than we should have before one of us caught it and redirected back to the work.

Him: "Have you eaten?"

Me: "We're doing enzyme kinetics."

Him: "That's not what I asked."

Me: "I had something earlier."

Him: "That's not a yes."

He left for fifteen minutes and came back with two meat pies from the campus shop and put one in front of me without comment and went back to his notes.

I ate it.

An hour in I got something wrong — a calculation, Km value, stupid mistake — and made a sound of frustration that was slightly more feeling than I intended to show.

Zane looked up.

"Show me," he said.

I turned my notebook toward him. He leaned across the table to look at it, closer than necessary, and I watched him trace through my working with his pen, finding the exact point where I'd gone wrong, explaining it quietly and clearly without making me feel stupid about it.

He was a genuinely good teacher. Patient in a way that surprised me every time.

"Got it?" he said, looking up.

He was still leaning across the table. We were closer than the situation required.

"Got it," I said.

Neither of us moved for a second.

Then his phone buzzed and he sat back and the moment dissolved like it always did and I looked back at my notebook and rewrote the calculation correctly.

We packed up at 8pm.

Outside the air was cool and we walked in comfortable silence, the kind we'd gotten good at, the kind that didn't need filling.

Halfway back he said — quietly, to the path ahead of us — "Keira texted me today."

I kept walking. "Okay."

"She said she's moving on. That she hopes we're happy." A pause. "I think she means it."

I processed this slowly.

"That's good," I said carefully. "That's what we wanted."

"Yeah." Another pause. "It is."

We reached the point where our paths split.

I stopped. Turned to face him properly.

In the yellow campus light he looked — I don't know. Serious. Like he was trying to work something out.

"So Keira's moving on," I said.

"Looks like it."

"Which means—"

"The deal is done," he said quietly.

The words landed in the space between us.

I waited for the relief. The clean feeling of something completed, resolved, filed away.

It didn't come.

"Right," I said. "The deal is done."

He looked at me for a long moment.

"Ava—"

"We should get some sleep," I said. "Assessment Wednesday."

Something moved across his face. He nodded once. "Yeah. Assessment Wednesday."

"Goodnight Zane."

"Goodnight."

I walked back to the hostel.

I didn't put my face in my pillow this time.

I just sat on my bed in the quiet and thought about the fact that it was over — the deal, the arrangement, the whole careful constructed thing — and tried to figure out why ending it felt exactly like losing something real.