Theo took the news better than I expected. That made telling him worse.
We were sitting by the graduate library windows with coffee between us and snow pressing white against the glass. He had brought a roll of film to develop later and kept turning the canister between his fingers while I tried to find a sentence that did not make me sound like I had used him as a jealousy experiment. Finally I gave up on elegance.
“I don’t think Friday should be a date.”
Theo looked at me over the rim of his cup.
“Okay.”
I waited. He waited back.
“That’s it?”
“You said you don’t think it should be a date.”
“That’s it.”
“So I’m updating the dataset.”
I laughed despite the knot in my stomach.
“You’re annoyingly normal about things.”
“I work with fungi. Drama gets contaminated.”
He set the cup
