after hours
1033 Words
Cindy sat down on her bed. "He's easier to work with than I expected. That's all. It's not complicated."
Maya stared at her.
"It's not."
"Okay."
"Can we drop it?"
"Already dropped," Maya said pleasantly, and picked up her cereal again.
Cindy opened her laptop. Three hours of reading before she could sleep, and that was fine, that was normal, that was what she was here for.
She read the same paragraph four times before it went in.
The library closed early on the second Thursday — a facilities thing, an issue with the heating, a notice emailed out at six that Cindy didn't see until she was already there, already set up, twenty minutes into the statutory cross-reference she'd been turning over since Tuesday.
She was reading the notice on her phone when William arrived.
"I know," he said, before she could speak. He'd already seen it. "Café on West?"
The Annex was a 24-hour café on West Campus — fluorescent lights, mismatched chairs, a chalkboard menu with ghost-erasures of last semester's specials still visible underneath. It smelled like burnt coffee and someone's leftover curry, and at eight on a Thursday it was half full of people who also had nowhere else to be.
They took a table in the back corner.
Something was different from the start, and she couldn't pin it to anything specific — the lighting, maybe, or the absence of the library's enforced quiet, or just the lower chairs sitting closer together with no wood paneling to hide behind. It felt less like a workspace.
It felt like a place people actually sat.
She opened her laptop. He ordered two coffees at the counter without asking her, which she was going to object to until he came back and said, "I got you the oat milk one, there's a note on the menu that the regular milk's from a bad supplier," and she found she didn't object to it after all.
They worked. The research had moved into argument construction — the part where you stop describing the law and start using it — and it took more back-and-forth than the first phase had. She asked questions. He answered. He asked questions. She answered. They disagreed on the negligence threshold, talked it through, landed somewhere between their two positions that was sharper than either had been alone.
She wrote it down and did not say: *that's the best version of this argument I've heard.*
She wrote it down. He wrote something in his own notebook. Neither of them said anything for a while.
His phone went off at nine.
The first time, he declined it without looking — smooth, practiced, like he'd done it many times in many places.
She noticed. Said nothing.
Five minutes later, it went off again. Same motion.
The third time he picked it up, looked at the screen, and something in his face went flat in a way she hadn't seen before. Not blank. Flat — like a surface pulled tight over something underneath.
He pushed back his chair. "Give me two minutes."
He walked to the far end of the café, not outside, just past the noise. She could see him but not hear him. Back to the room, one hand in his pocket, the other holding the phone to his ear. She watched his shoulders.
They didn't drop once.
Four minutes. He came back. Sat down. Picked up his pen.
"Sorry." His voice was exactly the same as before the call.
"It's fine."
She looked at her screen. He looked at his notes. The café moved around them — a chair scraped, a group laughed by the door, the barista called out an order.
"Where were we."
"Negligence threshold," she said. "Causation link."
"Right." He looked at his notebook. "I think we anchor it in the third element. Proximity of harm."
"I think so too."
They kept working. She didn't ask about the call. She'd noticed the way he'd made sure it wasn't her business — the turned back, the controlled return, the same voice. Whatever it was, he'd folded it up and put it somewhere she wasn't supposed to see.
She understood that.
She had things folded up too.
By eleven the café had thinned to a handful of insomniacs and one guy sleeping upright with an open textbook.
William closed his laptop. She was finishing a note, the last one, and could feel him not rushing her — its own kind of thing.
"Good session."
"Yeah."
"The causation argument's stronger than I thought it would be."
"It needed the Kellerman framing. Without that it was just assertion."
He nodded. She closed her laptop and started stacking her things, and the ordinary routine of it — notebooks, pens, the laptop cord — felt strange in a way she couldn't account for. Like pulling your coat on at the end of a shift you hadn't expected to stop noticing.
They walked out together. The night was cold. The Annex's sign buzzed faintly behind them, one letter darker than the rest.
He fell into step beside her without deciding to. She let it happen without deciding to.
They talked about the case first — safe, allowed — then about Whitman, because he'd said something in class that afternoon she'd found interesting and apparently so had William. Then it had been two blocks and she was almost at Caldwell and they were still talking and neither of them had managed to stop.
She stopped at the entrance.
He stopped too.
The light above the door was bright and yellow, catching the angles of his face, and she was aware, suddenly, standing still, of how close they were. Not inappropriately. Just closer than they'd been all evening — close enough to see the collar of his shirt above his jacket, the slight shadow under his jaw.
He was looking at her.
Not in any of the ways she'd expected — not competitive, not assessing, not the easy performative attention of someone who knew they were being looked at. Just looking.
His hand came up.
Slow. Not sudden. Like it moved on its own and he was watching it with the same uncertainty she was.
- Writer
