The space between us

What people Assume

The video found her at six forty seven in the morning.Priya dropped the phone on the mattress beside her, screen already playing, and stood over her with her dark hair loose and an expression that said she had been awake long enough to form conclusions.

"Tell me that's not you," Priya said.

Tasha looked at the screen.It was her. The corner library table, her green jacket, her color coded outline. Across from her sat Desmond Cole in his grey hoodie, reading the document she had made him. The caption read: *D. Cole's new tutor?*

She scrolled the comments, skimmed them, and handed the phone back.

"It's nothing," she said.

"Tasha. That's Desmond Cole."

"We're project partners. That is the whole story."

Priya gave her the look she kept specifically for moments of deliberate denseness. "Two hundred replies and it's not even seven."

"That's their problem." Tasha grabbed her towel. "Not mine."

She showered, dressed, packed her bag, and walked to her eight o'clock with her head down and earbuds in.The attention started before she reached the humanities buildin.Two girls near the fountain slowed as she passed, and she felt that particular shift, the kind that happens when people have quietly decided you are worth watching, and she pressed the volume button and walked faster.

She was almost at the door when someone stepped into her path.Tall, light-skinned, box braids pulled over one shoulder, a smile that arrived before anything else on her face. A Crestwood Athletics hoodie, the kind never sold in any campus store, only given.

"You're Tasha, right?" the girl said. Warm. Easy. The kind of warm that had something else sitting underneath it.

Tasha pulled one earbud out. "Yes."

"I saw the video. You and Desmond. Are you guys a thing?"

Tasha looked at the smile, at the eyes doing something completely different from the mouth, and understood the shape of the whole conversation without needing to turn it over. This was not curiosity. This was a question with an answer already decided, delivered with enough sweetness to make her feel like the rude one if she named it.

"We're project partners," she said. "That's it."

"Right, right." The girl nodded slowly. "It's just the video looked cozy."

"We were in a library. Working."

"Sure." The smile widened with disbelief plain underneath. "Tell him Simone says hi."

She walked past and Tasha stood at the door with her jaw tight and her earbud still in her hand. One second. Then she pushed through and went to class.The second library session was at four.She arrived first. Same table, same chair, same two pens sitting parallel at the edge. She opened the updated outline and told herself to concentrate. The section headers were sharp, the source list was current, and she had restructured the third argument the night before so it landed harder. There was nothing left to fix. She read it anyway.

Desmond arrived on the dot in a navy hoodie. He dropped into the chair across from her, opened his notebook, and said nothing.

"I need to say something," Tasha said, keeping her voice low and even.

"Okay," Desmond said.

"The video. I need this project quiet. No attention, no commentary, no speculation. I need the grade. That's all."

He was listening, the kind of listening where a person's whole face goes to the same place.

"I didn't post it," he said. "I told them to take it down last night, right after I saw it. One message and it came down. I don't want the attention either. I'm here for the credit. That's it."

She looked at him and ran his words against the version of him she had been building since yesterday, assembled from video comments and Simone's smile and everything people attached to his name. None of it fit.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay," he said.

They worked for two hours. He asked good questions, not the kind people asked to seem engaged but the kind that meant he had actually read what she sent and come back with the part that didn't fully hold. When they packed up he stood and said, "Same time Thursday?"

"Yes," she said.

He left. She stayed ten more minutes going back through their shared notes and found that every structural correction she had sent after their first session had been incorporated into his section. Not copied. Rebuilt around them, tighter and sharper than what she had originally written. She sat with that longer than she planned before she closed the laptop and left.The athletics building sat directly on her route home. The court lights were on inside, bright through the glass front wall, and she was not going to look.

She looked.

Desmond was alone on the court, running drills. Not the easy kind. The grinding kind, low and relentless, cutting hard left, pulling up, resetting, doing it again. Everything loose and unbothered she had watched him carry all day was completely gone.

He didn't look up.

She made herself move before he could, walked the rest of the way home without slowing, sat at her desk, opened the shared document, and stared at it without reading a single word.

Because the man she had just seen through that glass was not the version of Desmond Cole that anyone talked about.

And she had no idea what to do with that.