Damage Control

"Don't post that."

The words were out of my mouth before I'd even fully processed the threat, sharp and fast, and the girl with the phone froze mid stride, her expression flickering from friendly to confused to faintly defensive.

"Post what?" she asked. "I was just taking a picture of the quad, it's pretty today."

I felt my face go hot. Professor Calder, beside me, didn't so much as blink.

"What's your question about the syllabus," he said, calm as anything, like the last ten seconds hadn't happened at all.

"Oh, right, sorry." She lowered the phone, tucking it into her bag, and I forced my shoulders down from somewhere near my ears. "The reading response for Thursday, does it need to be typed or can we hand write it?"

"Typed. Double spaced. Specifications are on the syllabus P*F."

"Got it, thanks." She glanced between the two of us, a flicker of curiosity crossing her face that I did not like one bit. "Sorry, were you guys in the middle of something?"

"Ms. Reyes had a question about the reading list as well," he said, smooth, practiced, the lie sliding out of him like he'd rehearsed it a hundred times before he ever needed it. "I'll see you both Thursday."

The girl nodded, satisfied, and jogged off toward whatever group of friends was waiting for her near the fountain. I didn't breathe again until she was fully out of earshot.

"That was close," I said.

"That was nothing. That's what close actually looks like, and we need to avoid finding out." He started walking again, faster this time, angling us toward a row of trees along the edge of the quad where the foot traffic thinned out. "We cannot be seen talking like this. Not in the open. Not where anyone can photograph it, screenshot it, post it somewhere with your name and my title in the same sentence."

"So what, we just never speak again?"

"We speak in office hours. During scheduled, documented times, about coursework, with the door open." His voice was flat, clipped, a man laying down law for himself as much as for me. "Anything else happens over email, through official channels, nothing that can't be read aloud in front of a disciplinary committee without sounding insane."

"You make it sound like we're already under investigation."

"We will be, eventually, if we're not careful. Maybe not officially. But people talk, Mia." My name, not Ms. Reyes, soft and sudden, and it knocked something loose in my chest that I immediately tried to shove back into place. "People talk, and rumors don't need evidence to ruin a career."

"Or a scholarship."

His jaw tightened. "Or a scholarship."

We stood there under the trees for a second, the campus noise muffled by distance, and I studied his face like I was trying to memorize the difference between the man who'd said my name into a pillow two nights ago and the one standing in front of me now, controlled, careful, terrified in a way he was clearly furious about being terrified.

"So that's it," I said. "Strangers in public. Polite nothing in your office. And we just pretend the rest never happened."

"I didn't say that."

"You basically said that."

"I said we keep it contained," he corrected. "Contained isn't the same as nonexistent."

I didn't have an answer for that, mostly because some traitorous part of my chest had gone warm at the distinction, at the fact that he was bothering to make it at all instead of just shutting the door entirely.

"I have a class in fifteen minutes," I said instead, because standing there any longer felt dangerous in a way that had nothing to do with getting caught.

"Mia."

"What."

"For what it's worth." He hesitated, which I hadn't seen him do yet, not once, not even when the registrar's verdict had been hanging over both our heads. "I'm not asking you to pretend nothing happened because I want it to be nothing. I'm asking because I don't see another way through this that doesn't end badly for one or both of us."

"I know," I said, and I did, even though knowing it didn't make my chest hurt any less. "I'll see you Thursday, Professor."

I made myself walk away first this time.

The rest of the day passed in a blur of half attention. I sat through my biology lecture taking notes I barely processed, something about checkpoints in the cell cycle, G1, S, G2, M, mechanisms designed to catch errors before they became permanent damage, and I remember thinking, with a kind of bitter, private humor, that I could have used a checkpoint of my own about seventy two hours ago. Something to catch the error before it replicated itself into an entire semester of disaster.

By the time I got home, Dani was already on the couch with two glasses poured and an expression that told me she'd been waiting all day to interrogate me properly.

"Okay," she said, the second I dropped my bag by the door. "Tell me everything. And I mean everything, don't you dare skip a single detail."

I told her. All of it, the registrar's office, the coffee cart, the girl with the phone, the trees, the rules he'd laid out like a man building a wall brick by brick around something he didn't fully want to keep out.

Dani sat in silence through most of it, which for Dani was basically a medical emergency.

"So let me get this straight," she said finally, setting her wine down with deliberate care. "You're locked into a semester long class with the guy you slept with. He's already talking about disciplinary committees. And he called you by your first name in the middle of laying out the rules for never speaking again."

"That's the gist of it, yes."

"Mia." She said my name the way you'd say it to someone standing too close to a cliff edge. "This isn't going to stay contained. You know that, right? Things like this don't stay contained."

"It has to. I don't have another option."

"There's always another option, it's just that none of them are good ones." She refilled her glass, which felt like a bad sign for how seriously she was taking this. "What does your gut say?"

I thought about his hand on my back the morning after, before either of us knew. I thought about the careful way he'd said for what it's worth, twice now, like an apology he wasn't quite allowed to give.

"My gut," I said slowly, "says I'm in a lot of trouble."

"Good trouble or bad trouble?"

"I genuinely don't know yet."

My phone buzzed on the coffee table between us. An email notification, university domain, sender name cutting straight through the noise of the room like a blade.

**D. Calder.**

Dani's eyebrows shot up. "That was fast."

My hands were shaking slightly as I picked up the phone, as I opened the email, half expecting some clinical, professional note about office hours or syllabus clarifications, something safe and boring and exactly what he'd promised.

The subject line read: *Regarding our conversation.*

The body of the email was a single line.

*I need to tell you something before Thursday, and it can't wait that long. Can you come by my office tonight, after hours, when the building's empty?*