Chapter 5
832 Words
The second week settled into something that almost resembled a rhythm.
Almost.
Classes in the morning, the dining hall after, the library in the long quiet stretch of the afternoon when Lia was in her own lectures and the dorm room was too small and too still to sit in alone. I found a table on the third floor with a window that looked out onto the east courtyard.
I liked it up there.
The quiet had a different quality than the quiet in the dorm. Less personal. Less like a silence that was waiting for something.
I did my reading. I took my notes. I moved through the days the way I had learned to move through difficult stretches of time…one thing and then the next thing, no looking too far ahead, no looking too far back.
It almost worked.
~0~
Nolan found me in the dining hall in the evening.
I was at a corner table with my political theory reading open in front of me and a coffee going cold beside it and he dropped his tray down across from mine.
He unwrapped his sandwich and looked at me with an expression that was curious without being pushy. "What are you reading?"
I turned the cover toward him.
He looked at it. Looked back at me. "By choice?"
"It's for my political theory seminar."
"Right but—" he gestured at the book "—by choice in the sense that you chose the seminar."
A smile tugged at my lips. "I did choose the seminar."
"Respect," he said, and took a large bite of his sandwich.
I looked back at my book.
I didn't read any of it.
After a while Lia appeared from nowhere the way Lia always seemed to appear from nowhere.
Tray in one hand, phone in the other, already mid-sentence about something that had apparently happened in her Introduction to Psychology lecture involving a debate about Freud that had gone badly off the rails.
"—and I said that's not actually what the theory argues and he looked at me like I'd personally insulted him, which, fine, but also don't cite things incorrectly in front of twenty people and then act wounded when someone notices—"
She set her tray down beside mine without pausing. "Hi. Who are you?"
Nolan looked up at her and quickly introduced himself.
"Lia." She sat. "Do you have Freud feelings?" she asked him.
He blinked. "I have some thoughts."
"Good enough." She stole one of my fries, pointed it at him. "Go."
I watched Nolan navigate being immediately interrogated by Lia with an ease most people couldn’t muster.
I was impressed.
~0~
From then on, the three of us fell into a loose kind of company after that.
Nolan was studying pre-law as well.
He was in two of my classes, History of the Roman Empire and of course, Intro to Constitutional Law. He made things lighter without making them less real, which was another thing I was kind of surprised by.
Lia adopted him immediately and completely, the way she adopted everything she decided she liked. And within a week she was arguing with him every day at our table.
It was good.
I was present in it.
I was also somewhere else entirely.
~0~
Tuesday came.
I got there early the way I always did and opened my notebook and told myself I was going to pay attention to the lecture and not anything else.
I still hadn’t figured out exactly what he’d meant. And I was too embarrassed to even attempt to go back to his office hours without knowing what I was supposed to have asked.
Nolan dropped into the seat beside me five minutes before the hour.
"Hey, Sienna," he said, a lopsided grin on his face.
"Hey, Nolan," I greeted with a small smile in return.
He had a coffee and held it out in offering. I shook my head. He shrugged and kept drinking, the class filling out slowly until it was full.
Then the room changed.
That shift. That drop in the air that had nothing to do with sound and everything to do with him. I felt it before I looked up.
He walked to the front. Briefcase down. Cuffs rolled, one then the other, the same unhurried precision as every time before. The hall went still around him once more.
I held my breath as his gaze moved across the hall.
Back row. Middle row. Front row.
When his gaze reached me, he stopped.
Not for long.
But long enough that something in me fluttered…shifted.
Then he spoke. Class began.
I stared at my notebook.
My pen was pressed to the page hard enough that it was leaving an indent and I made myself breathe and made myself write.
He called on people throughout once again.
Not me.
I wrote three words that had nothing to do with what he was saying.
And crossed them out.
- Writer
