The Favor

Chapter 3

Wednesday's session started the way Monday's had ended — no ceremony, just his hand finding my back like it already knew where it was going.

"Frame," he said. "Better than last time."

"You're just being nice."

"I'm not, actually. I don't do nice as a rule." He said it lightly, like a joke, except his face didn't quite do the thing a joke usually does. "I am accurate."

I didn't know what to do with that. The music started. We moved. I was getting better at not thinking about my feet, which meant I had room to think about other things instead, which was somehow worse.

"You're quiet today," he said, a few bars in.

"I'm always quiet."

"No." Just that. No explanation, no follow-up, like he'd filed the correction away and moved on before I could ask what he meant by it.

I let it go because the alternative was asking, and asking felt like it would hand him something. I didn't know what. But something.

"Where'd you learn to lead like this?" I asked instead, mostly to have something to say that wasn't silence.

"Here and there." He turned me, easy, unhurried. "I pick things up."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the true one, though." A beat. "Most people don't notice the difference."

I noticed. I filed it away without deciding to, the way you notice a c***k in a wall you're not planning to do anything about yet.

The song ended. He stepped back at exactly the right moment, no lingering, same as always.

"Monday," Prof said to the room. He pulled away quietly, and it was like the last four minutes hadn't happened at all.

Reese caught up with me at the door. "You two talk more than you used to."

"It's a partner class, Reese. Talking is part of the assignment."

"Mm." She didn't push, but she didn't drop it either — just gave me a look I recognized, the one she used when she'd decided to bring something up again later, at a worse time.

I didn't see him again until Thursday, and I wasn't looking for him.

I was cutting through the side entrance of the library, the one that came out near the parking structure, because the front doors were being repainted, and the smell was giving me a headache. Students were everywhere at that hour — the after-class crush, backpacks and bikes and someone's speaker playing something too loud from the steps.

He was near the middle of it. Not apart from the crowd this time, not on its edge watching like he had been that first Friday — just standing among people, one hand in his pocket, the other loose at his side, like he was waiting for someone who was taking too long to text him back.

Except he wasn't looking at his phone. He was looking at me.

Our eyes caught the way they got across a crowded space, except it didn't let go the way it was supposed to. He didn't wave. He didn't need to. Something happened at the corner of his mouth — not quite a smile, just the shape one leaves behind before it fully arrives — and I could have sworn, though I'd never have been able to prove it to anyone, that his lips moved. Just slightly. Enough to form the first letter of my name, no sound behind it, like he was testing how it felt in his mouth before deciding I was worth saying it out loud.

I felt it in my chest before I let myself think about what I'd actually seen.

I should have looked away. I knew that, the way you know the sensible thing to do a half-second after you've already failed to do it. Instead, I held it — his eyes, the almost-word, the stillness of him in the middle of all that motion — for one beat too long to call it an accident.

Then someone jostled past me with an apology I barely heard, my eyes breaking from his for the length of a blink, no more than that — and when I looked back, the space where he'd been standing was just people. Ordinary people, moving through an ordinary crowd, none of them him.

I actually turned, once, a full slow circle, telling myself I was checking for a gap in the crowd he might have stepped into, not that I was looking for him. There was no gap. There was no him. Just backpacks and bikes and someone's speaker still playing too loud from the steps, like the last ten seconds hadn't happened to anyone but me.

I kept walking because my feet had never actually stopped, only my attention had.

My pulse was up. I noticed that, the way you notice weather — not alarmed by it, just aware it was there, warm and quick under my skin the rest of the walk to my dorm. It wasn't the kind of fast that came from fear. I knew what that felt like; I'd had enough almost-missed buses and near-misses on stairs to know the difference. This was something else. Something closer to the feeling right before you do something you've already decided you shouldn't.

I thought about him longer than I meant to that night. Not about the bench I'd half-imagined the day before, or any of the small strange things that should have added up to something I told Reese about. I thought about the shape his mouth had made. I thought about what it would sound like, my name, if he ever actually said it instead of just letting me imagine it.

I didn't like what I wanted to know.

I told Reese none of it. Not because it felt like nothing — it felt like the opposite of nothing, which was exactly why I kept it to myself.