The One's Who Burn

Chapter Two : The Wrong Seat

I told myself it meant nothing. I told myself that on Sunday, when I was doing laundry. I told myself on Monday morning, while I was making coffee I didn't really want. By Tuesday, I had stopped telling myself anything and just accepted that some things get under your skin without asking permission, the way a song does — you don't choose it, you just find yourself humming it in the shower three days later and hating yourself a little for it.

Eli Voss was a song I did not choose.

I had Professor Aldeen's Literature and Society class at nine on Tuesday mornings, which was early enough that half the room showed up still holding coffee cups and wearing the specific expression of people who had made poor decisions the night before. I was usually one of the first ones in. Not because I was eager, but because the walk from my dorm took eleven minutes and I

needed to know I had time to pick my seat before anyone else arrived. Corner row. Third from the back. Close enough to the door that leaving quickly was an option. Far enough from the front that nobody looked at me unless I raised my hand, which I never did.

I had sat in that seat every Tuesday and Thursday for six weeks. It was mine in the way things become yours when nobody challenges them long enough.

He was sitting in it.

Not beside it. Not near it. In it. Eli Voss, whom I had last seen walking back into a party he hated three nights ago, was in my seat with his long legs stretched under the desk in front of him and a notebook open on the surface that looked like it had never once been used for notes. He was reading something — a paperback, spine cracked, cover face down so I couldn't see what it was — and he didn't look up when I walked in.

I stood in the aisle for a moment that lasted too long. The room was still mostly empty. I could sit anywhere. That was the rational thing — pick a different seat, sit down, open my laptop, pretend I hadn't noticed. I was good at pretending I hadn't noticed things.

I sat down next to him instead. I still don't fully understand why.

He looked up when my bag hit the floor. Not startled — just aware, the way you become aware of weather changing. His eyes moved to me, registered something, and then went back to his book without a word.

"That's my seat," I said.

He turned a page. "There's no assigned seating."

"I know. I've been sitting there for six weeks."

"Six weeks isn't a deed." He said it without looking up. Not rude — just factual, the way someone states something they consider obvious. "It's a habit."

I stared at the side of his face for a second. He had the kind of jaw that looked like it had been set against something for so long it had forgotten how to relax. A small scar cut through his left eyebrow, thin and old, the kind that stops being a story and just becomes a feature.

"Fine," I said.

"Fine," he said.

I opened my laptop. He turned another page. The room filled slowly around us, and Professor Aldeen arrived four minutes late with the particular energy of a man who considered punctuality a suggestion, and class started, and I spent the first twenty minutes genuinely trying to pay attention and failing because Eli Voss was approximately fourteen inches to my left and he

smelled like cedar and something colder underneath it, like air before rain, and I had not been close enough to another person to notice what they smelled like in a very long time.



* * *

After class, he didn't move immediately. Most people packed up fast — laptops snapped shut, chairs scraping, everyone suddenly remembering somewhere else they needed to be. He stayed seated, finishing a paragraph, doing it slowly, like the room wasn't emptying around him and time wasn't a thing that applied to him the same way it did to everyone else.

I was almost at the door when he spoke.

"Aldeen is wrong about the Fitzgerald reading."

I stopped. Turned halfway. "What?"

"He said the green light is purely about Gatsby's longing for Daisy." He finally closed the book and looked up at me directly. In the emptied classroom, his eyes were darker than I remembered. "It's not. It's about the part of yourself you can see clearly and never reach. Daisy is just the shape he gave it."

I didn't say anything for a moment. Not because I disagreed. Because he was right and I hadn't thought about it that way, and something about hearing it said out loud in that empty room made my chest go tight in a way I wasn't prepared for.

"That's a very specific thing to care about," I said finally.

Something moved across his face. Not quite a smile — more like the memory of one. "Yeah," he said. "It is."

He picked up his bag. Stood. He was taller than I'd registered in the hallway — or maybe rooms just make people larger when there's no crowd to absorb them. He walked past me toward the

door and paused just briefly, close enough that I could have reached out and touched his sleeve if I had been the kind of person who did things like that.

I wasn't. I hadn't been in a long time.

"Same time Thursday," he said. Not a question. Not quite an invitation. Somewhere in between, in that careful neutral space where things can be denied later if needed.

He left before I could answer.

I stood in the empty classroom for a moment with my bag on my shoulder and the ghost of cedar and cold air still in the room, turning his words over the way I'd turned the ring over three nights ago.

The part of yourself you can see clearly and never reach. I had a name for that feeling. I had been living inside it for eleven months. What I didn't have — what I hadn't expected — was someone else who recognized it on sight.