This lecture was different.
Not because he looked at me.
He didn't, not once. I still felt the pull of wanting him to, still felt the frustration of sitting directly in his sightline for fifty minutes and not being able to do anything about it.
But underneath the frustration was something else now. Something that hadn't been there before. Every time he moved through an argument, every time his voice dropped into one of those sentences that made the whole room hold their breath, I felt it settle somewhere low inside me. At some point he pushed his sleeves up slightly, just a small thing, showing more of the hard muscles of his arms, and my face heated.
I looked back down at my notes and found I'd stopped writing entirely.
And then without realizing, I’d begun smiling at my notebook.
