The space between us

Chapter one:The wrong seat

Someone was in her seat.The one place she controlled and he didn't look like someone who gave things back.Tasha Reeves stopped at the end of the aisle and stared, her notebook pressed flat against her chest, her bag strap cutting into her shoulder. She had walked into Advanced Composition at seven fifty-eight, same as always, same route, same pace, same routine, and now she was standing here staring at the back of somebody's head like the floor had shifted under her feet.

Third row,window side,her seat.

He was sprawled across it like it had been built for him specifically. Long legs stretched out and crossed at the ankle under the desk in front, one arm hanging loose over the back of the empty chair beside him, a phone held up in his other hand. He was reading something on the screen with the complete stillness of someone who had no idea, or no interest in knowing, that he had just walked into the one corner of this room that belonged to her.

She walked up to him.

"That's my seat."

Nothing. Not a flinch, not a glance. His thumb scrolled once.

Tasha's grip tightened on her notebook.

"Excuse me." Her voice came out flat and precise. "You're in my seat."

He looked up.

Not quickly. Not with any kind of urgency. He lifted his eyes from the phone the way people do when they've already decided that whatever interrupted them probably isn't worth the full turn of their attention, and he looked at her, and the look was so completely, effortlessly unbothered that something sharp and hot moved through her chest.He was tall even sitting down. Broad through the shoulders in a grey hoodie that looked like it had been washed a hundred times. A jaw that the morning light coming through the window, the same window that was the entire point of the seat he was currently occupying. He had a small scar above his left eyebrow, thin and faded, and dark eyes that moved over her face once like he was cataloguing something.

Then he looked back at his phone.

"I meant what I said," Tasha said.

"I heard you," he said. He didn't look up.

She stood there for three full seconds. Then she turned, walked one row back, dropped into the seat directly behind him with more force than necessary, and yanked her notebook open.

Fine.

The window from here was at an angle. The light hit differently. She could see the side of his face if she looked up, which she was not going to do, and the back of his head if she didn't, which was worse.She uncapped her pen and drew a line across the top of the page. Clean. Hard. The ink pressed deep.She did not know his name. She did not intend to.

Professor Hale came in at exactly eight, dropped a stack of syllabi on the front table, and looked out at the room with the expression of a man who had done this enough times that the first day no longer felt like anything special.

"New semester," he said, pushing his glasses up his nose. "New project structure. For those of you who were here last year, yes, I changed it. No, I am not taking questions about that."

He picked up his own copy and moved toward the board.

"The final project this semester is collaborative. Partner assignments. It runs the full length of the semester and it is worth forty percent of your grade."

Tasha's pen stopped.

"Pairings are already decided," he continued, pulling a folded paper from inside the syllabus. "You don't get a vote. That's intentional."

She already knew. Not from logic, not from any real information, just from the specific weight that settled into her chest in the seconds before something goes wrong. She felt it before he even unfolded the paper.

"Cole." Professor Hale didn't look up. "Desmond Cole, paired with Tasha Reeves."

The guy in her seat did not move. Did not turn around, did not shift his weight, did not do one single thing to acknowledge that his name had just been called out loud and attached to hers. He sat exactly as he had been sitting, phone in hand, arm over the chair, completely untouched by the information.

Of course,Tasha stared at the back of his head.

"Mr. Cole." Professor Hale's voice carried the specific patience of someone who had learned not to wait. "You received the registrar's email. You understand what's at stake with your eligibility."

"Yes sir," he said. Low,unhurried. Still not looking up.

Tasha raised her hand. "What does his eligibility have to do with my project grade?"

Professor Hale looked at her over his glasses. "It means your partner needs this credit to keep playing. It means if this project fails, the consequences land on both of you, in different ways." He held her gaze for a moment. "I'd take that seriously, Ms. Reeves."

He moved on to the next name.

Tasha lowered her hand slowly and looked at the back of Desmond Cole's head. At the set of his shoulders. At the way he still had not turned around, still had not reacted, like being told his entire season depended on a writing project with a girl he had never spoken to was just another Tuesday.She pressed her pen into the paper until the next line came out darker than all the others.The moment class ended, she was on her feet.

Bag on her shoulder, notebook under her arm, three steps toward the door before most people had even closed their laptops. She was already building the argument in her head, already running the math on whether the registrar's office opened before her next class, already deciding exactly which words would communicate that this particular pairing was a problem that needed to be solved before it became permanently her problem.

She made it into the hallway.

"So when do we start?"

She stopped walking.

He was beside her. Not behind her catching up, not in front of her waiting. Just there, at her shoulder, matching her pace exactly like they had walked out of that classroom together. He was looking straight ahead, hands in the front pocket of the hoodie, like the question was just something he was dropping into the air between them.Tasha turned and looked at him fully.

Up close he was taller than she had registered from behind, and broader, and there was something about the way he carried himself that took up space without trying. The scar above his eyebrow was more visible in the hallway light. He was still looking ahead.

“We haven't even spoken," she said.

"Desmond." He glanced at her sideways. Quick. Even. "You're Tasha."

"I know who I am."

"Good." He stopped at the place where the hallway split into two directions and turned to face her, and the look he gave her was direct and flat and completely unreadable. "So when do we start?"

She looked at him. At the steadiness of it, he was just standing there like the question had one answer and she was simply the last person in the building to arrive at it.

"I haven't agreed to anything," she said.

"The professor already paired us."

"I was there."

"Then you know we're starting." He tilted his head slightly to one side. "Send me your availability. I'll work around your schedule."

"I don't have your contact information."

"You will”, he said like it was already decided, he said.And then he walked away. The left side of the hall split, hands still in his pocket, not looking back. No pause. No glance over his shoulder. Just gone, like the conversation had reached its conclusion and everything after it was no longer his concern.Tasha stood at the split and watched him go.

She had things to say. She had them ready, ordered, and ready to deliver. But she pressed her notebook against her ribs and turned the other way and walked, because she was not going to stand in a hallway looking flustered over someone who hadn't even given her enough attention to be properly rude about it.

She was fine.

She was always fine.

Her dorm room was quiet. Priya was in her morning lab, the kind that ran three hours and always left her dramatic about it, and Tasha had the room to herself. She dropped her bag on the desk, opened her laptop, and started typing an email to the registrar before she had fully sat down.

She got two sentences in.

She stopped.

Read them back.

Closed the draft.

Because she knew, even as she was typing it, that the registrar was going to tell her the pairing was final, and the professor had already explained the stakes, and the only thing she would accomplish was wasting twenty minutes to end up exactly where she already was. She knew this. She was good at knowing things before she needed to.

She exhaled and opened her full inbox instead.

And she saw it.

One new message at the top. The timestamp said forty-three minutes ago. Which was before class had even started.

She looked at the sender's name.

Desmond Cole.

She sat very still for a moment. Then she clicked it open.

*I'm not as bad as you've already decided I am.*

One line. No greeting. No subject. No explanation. Just that, sitting in the middle of a white screen, sent while he was in her seat, on his phone, with his legs stretched out and his eyes somewhere else entirely.

Tasha read it once.

Read it again.

Her hand was resting on the edge of the keyboard and she was not typing anything, because her brain had snagged on something and she could not move past it. She had not said one word about what she thought of him. She had said *that's my seat* and *I know who I am* and nothing else, nothing with an opinion in it, nothing he could have turned into a conclusion.

Which meant he hadn't read her words.He had read her instead

And underneath that, quieter and more unsettling, was the thing she didn't want to look at directly. Because she had known his name by the time she reached the hallway split. She had put it together fast, the way she always put things together fast, and she had run it against everything she already knew, the things said in passing, the name that travelled certain parts of campus with a particular weight attached to it.

And not one piece of it explained the way he looked at her in that hallway.

Not one piece of it explained this email.

She was still staring at the screen when her phone buzzed. She looked down at it. Priya, asking about dinner.

She set the phone face-down on the desk.

I looked back at the email.

Her cursor was blinking in the reply box, and her fingers were close to the keyboard, and the line was sitting there waiting, and Tasha Reeves, who always knew exactly what she thought and exactly what she was going to do about it, sat in her quiet, ordered room and realized she had no idea how to respond to someone who had just seen her more clearly in one hour than most people had in two years.

She closed the laptop.

I opened it again.

The email was still there.

And her hands, steady through every hard thing she had ever had to do, were not entirely steady now.