Wrong Name

I dropped the lanyard like it had burned me.

"Looking for something?"

His voice came from the doorway, low and amused, and I spun around so fast I nearly took the chair down with me. He was standing there with two coffee cups, one in each hand, wearing yesterday's slacks and nothing else, hair still damp from a shower I hadn't heard him take.

"I, uh." My brain produced absolutely nothing useful. "I couldn't find my shirt."

"It's on the floor by your foot."

It was. I grabbed it and yanked it over my head so fast I nearly suffocated myself in the process, which at least gave me a few seconds where I didn't have to look at him.

"Coffee?" he asked, holding out a cup like the last ten seconds hadn't happened.

"I have an early class."

"It's nine in the morning."

"My class is at ten."

"So you have time for coffee."

I took the cup because my hands needed something to do that wasn't reaching for that lanyard again. He watched me over the rim of his own mug, and there was something unreadable in his face, something that made my skin feel too tight.

"You left pretty fast," he said.

"You weren't here when I woke up."

"I had to take a call." He said it simply, no apology in it, like that was just a fact of his life and not something he owed me an explanation for. "I came back."

"Right." I drank the coffee too fast and burned my tongue. "Well. This was."

"Don't," he said, and there was an edge in it now, something almost like warning. "Don't do the thing where you pretend it was nothing."

"I wasn't going to say nothing."

"What were you going to say?"

I didn't know. I genuinely didn't know, and the way he was looking at me, steady, unblinking, like he had all the time in the world and I was the only interesting thing in it, made it very hard to think in full sentences.

"I have to go," I said instead, which was a coward's answer and we both knew it.

He didn't stop me. He just watched me gather my bag, my shoes, the scattered pieces of myself from the night before, and when I got to the door he said my name, just my name, nothing else, and something about the way he said it made my stomach drop in a way that had nothing to do with anxiety.

"Yeah?"

"Good luck with your early class."

I left without looking back at the jacket on the chair.

The walk back to my apartment took twenty minutes and I spent every single one of them telling myself it didn't matter. I didn't know his name. He didn't fully know mine, not really, not enough to find me, and in a city this size that meant the math worked out in my favor. One night. One mistake. Filed under things that happened and then stopped happening.

Dani was already awake when I let myself in, sitting cross legged on the couch with cereal and an expression that told me she'd been waiting.

"So," she said.

"Don't."

"I'm not doing anything. I'm just sitting here. Existing. Eating breakfast like a normal person who did not watch her best friend leave a club with a literal stranger."

"He wasn't a stranger by the end of the night."

"That's worse, Mia, that's so much worse." She shoveled in a spoonful of cereal, chewing while she studied my face. "Okay. Spill. Was it good?"

I felt my face heat up, which was answer enough, and she shrieked and threw a pillow at me.

"I don't even know his name," I admitted, sitting down hard on the arm of the couch. "I never got it. He kept dodging the question and I let him."

"That's so hot and so stupid."

"It's fine. It's done. I'll never see him again." I said it like a fact, like something solid I could stand on, and for the rest of that day I almost believed it. I went to class. I sat through a lecture on cellular respiration that I absorbed maybe forty percent of. I studied that night with my biology textbook open and my mind drifting somewhere it had no business drifting, to a low voice saying my name like it meant something, to hands that knew exactly what they were doing.

By the time I went to bed, I'd almost convinced myself the whole thing belonged in the past.

I should have known better. Nothing that good ever stays in the past where it belongs.

Monday morning came too fast, the way Mondays always do when you've spent the weekend pretending your life isn't on fire. I had exactly one elective standing between me and the CGPA bump I needed, a survey course on contemporary literature and ethics that I'd registered for because it fit my schedule and because the course description had made it sound easy. Easy was exactly what I needed this semester. Easy was the entire point.

I got to the lecture hall early, found a seat near the middle, pulled out my notebook, and scrolled through my phone while the room filled up around me. Dani texted me a string of laughing emojis about Saturday night that I didn't bother answering. The room buzzed with the low chatter of a hundred students who didn't know each other yet, that particular nervous energy of a first class.

At exactly ten o'clock, the door at the front of the room opened.

I didn't look up right away. I was busy writing the date at the top of a fresh page, half listening for the sound of someone clearing their throat, the usual nervous shuffle of a new professor finding their footing at the podium.

"Good morning," a voice said, low and even and horribly, impossibly familiar. "I'm Professor Calder. Welcome to Contemporary Literature and Ethics."

My pen stopped moving.

I looked up slowly, every cell in my body screaming at me not to, and there he was, standing at the front of the room in a gray button down with his sleeves rolled up exactly the way they'd been rolled up two nights ago, setting a leather folio down on the podium like this was just another Monday.

He hadn't seen me yet. He was looking down at his notes, flipping to the first page of whatever opening lecture he had prepared, and for one suspended, breathless second I thought maybe, maybe, I could just slide down in my seat and disappear and he would never even know I was here.

Then he lifted his head to address the room, his eyes moving across the rows of faces with the practiced sweep of someone counting heads.

And stopped on mine.