rules
1109 Words
The espresso machine hissed behind the counter. Somewhere near the window, a group of first-years were arguing about a case in the loud, certain way of people who hadn't lost an argument in front of a professor yet.
"Thursday," he said. "Seven. You still in?"
"I said I would be."
"You also said you work better independently. People who mean that don't show up."
"I'll show up."
"Good." He stood, coffee in hand, already moving like the conversation was over before she'd decided it was. At the door he stopped, just for a second, and looked back at her — not long, not soft, just enough that she felt it land somewhere she didn't appreciate.
"Bring the jurisdiction notes," he said. "I know you already started."
He was gone before she could ask how he knew that.
She looked down at the coffee he'd left her. Black, no sugar. Exactly how she took it.
The fourth floor of the library was quiet in the specific way of a place that enforced its own silence. No signs telling you to keep it down. Just high ceilings, wood paneling, and the collective understanding that this wasn't where you came to be a person. This was where you came to work.
Cindy got there first. She always got there first.
She picked a table by the far window — good light, two chairs, far enough from the stacks that nobody would drift past and interrupt — and set up her laptop, her notebook, the case file Whitman had distributed. She uncapped her pen. Recapped it.
William arrived at 7:04.
Not egregiously late. But late enough that she'd noticed.
He dropped into the chair across from her, shrugged off his jacket, and looked at the case file she'd already tabbed and annotated. Something crossed his face, quick, before he pulled out his own copy.
"You've already started."
"I did some preliminary reading. Nothing we can't discuss."
"I said seven."
"And I said preliminary." She opened her notebook. "Ground rules. You wanted to start with ground rules."
He looked at her a beat, then leaned back, arms crossed. "Fine. Go."
She had actually written them down, which she wasn't going to tell him. "We divide the research by section. We each write our own analysis. We combine at the draft stage, not before, so neither of us is dependent on the other's pace."
"Agreed."
"Library sessions Tuesdays and Thursdays. Two hours minimum. Anything comes up, forty-eight hours' notice."
"Reasonable."
"No last-minute rewrites of sections the other person wrote without flagging it first."
"Also reasonable."
She looked up. "You're agreeing very easily."
"They're reasonable rules." He tilted his head. "You want me to argue?"
"I want to know you've actually read them, not just heard them."
Something shifted in his expression — not quite a smile, more considered than that. "Divide by section, combine at draft, forty-eight hours for cancellations, no surprise rewrites." He held her gaze. "Anything else?"
"One more." She set her pen down. "This is a project. It's not personal. Whatever we think of each other outside this table doesn't come in here."
A pause. Longer than the others.
"What do we think of each other?" His voice was neutral. That was somehow worse than if it hadn't been.
"That's the rule. Do you agree to it or not?"
He looked at her one more second. "Yeah. I agree."
She opened the case file.
"Good. Section one's procedural history. I'll take it. You take the statutory framework."
---
The thing about working with someone genuinely smart was that it changed the texture of the silence.
With most people, quiet felt like nothing. With William it felt like the space between sentences — like he was processing instead of waiting, thinking instead of pausing. She noticed it by the forty-minute mark and didn't like noticing it.
He worked fast. Not sloppily — tight, organized notes, she caught a glimpse when he shifted in his seat — but efficient, without the back-and-forth second-guessing she sometimes did. He made a decision and moved.
She made decisions and moved too. She just didn't want to have anything in common with him.
At the ninety-minute mark she found a jurisdictional problem in the statutory section — the kind of thing that would undermine the whole argument if it went unaddressed — and she sat with it a moment, weighing whether to say something or just note it for her own section and let him discover it himself.
She said something.
"The Harmon precedent doesn't apply here. Different circuit. If Whitman pushes on this it'll unravel the statutory argument."
William looked up. Looked at her notes. Looked at his own. Sat back. "You're right."
No defensiveness. No qualification. Just: *you're right.*
She hadn't been expecting that.
"There's a Second Circuit case," she said, pulling up her laptop. "Kellerman v. State, 2019. It's closer."
He was already writing. "Spell Kellerman."
She spelled it. He wrote it. They went back to work.
At nine o'clock he stretched, both arms above his head, and she very carefully did not look at the strip of skin that appeared above his waistband when his sweater rode up.
She kept her eyes on her screen.
"Same time Thursday?" Already closing his notebook.
"Thursday."
He stood, shrugged his jacket back on, picked up his bag. She was gathering her own things, unhurried, expecting him to leave — he'd already started toward the stairs — when he stopped.
"The Kellerman case." Not turning around. "Good catch."
She looked up.
But he was already gone, footsteps quiet on the stairs, and she was left at a table full of the particular feeling of a conversation that had ended one beat before she was ready for it to.
---
Maya was awake when she got back, which was unusual for ten at night, but she was also FaceTiming someone and eating cereal and had apparently entered a phase of her life where sleep was optional.
"How was it?" she called, not looking up from her phone.
"Fine."
"Fine like fine, or fine like interesting but you don't want to say interesting?"
Cindy dropped her bag on her desk. "Fine like fine."
"Uh huh." Maya finally looked up. Looked at her. Looked back at her phone. "I gotta call you back," she told whoever was on the other end, and hung up. "What happened?"
"Nothing happened. We divided the research. It was professional and efficient and completely uneventful."
"Why do you look like something happened?"
"I don't look like anything."
"Cindy. I have been your roommate for three weeks. I know your normal face. That's not your normal face."
- Writer
