Chapter 5: Tuesday at Two

“The library or the campus cafe?”

I send it Tuesday morning and stare at my phone for longer than I should. It’s a practical question. It means nothing. I am asking where to meet to discuss a research project with my assigned partner. That is the entire content of this situation.

Cole replies in four minutes.

Library works. Third floor? Two o’clock?

I put the phone down.

He said third floor. He doesn’t know that’s my floor. He can’t know that. The third floor is just quieter than the others and he’s a graduate student who probably figured that out the same way I did. It means nothing.

Fine, I type back. See you then.

I get there at 1:55 and he’s already at a table near the window. Not my corner table. A different one, more central, with two chairs across from each other and enough space between them that nobody could call it intimate. He has a notebook open and a pen in his hand and he’s reading something on his laptop when I walk up.

He sees me before I say anything. Closes the laptop halfway, not all the way. Sits up a little straighter.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey.”

I sit down. I take out my notebook. I uncap my pen. The binding-glue smell is fainter over here but still present and I find that steadying in a way I don’t examine.

“I looked at the project guidelines again last night,” he says. “The case study needs a real documented event. Something with verifiable sources.”

“I know. I read them too.”

“Right.” He nods. “Do you have topics in mind?”

I have four written down. I show him the list without handing the notebook over, turning it so he can read from across the table. He leans forward slightly. He reads all four. He doesn’t reach for the notebook, doesn’t try to take it. Just reads what I’m offering and sits back.

“The third one,” he says. “The wrongful conviction study. There’s enough documented material and it fits both our research angles.”

It does. His sports management background has a behavioral psychology component. My cognitive science work covers exactly the mechanisms involved in false conviction. It’s the most academically sound choice on the list.

It’s also not the crossed-out one.

“Agreed,” I say.

I write it at the top of a clean page. We spend the next forty minutes outlining a proposal. He talks, I write, we both push back when something doesn’t fit. It’s efficient. He doesn’t try to make it anything other than what it is. When I redirect a tangent he accepts the redirect. When I miss something in the source material he flags it without making it a moment.

He is easy to work with.

I wish he wasn’t.

At twenty to three Fatima drops into a chair at the next table with her bag and her coffee and a loud exhale that means she’s been running again. She sees me and waves. She sees Cole and her eyebrows go up slightly, the way people’s do around him, and then she opens her own laptop and minds her business.

“I think that covers the proposal,” Cole says.

“It does.” I review my notes. “I’ll write the draft and send it to you before Friday.”

“You don’t have to write the whole thing.”

“I write faster alone.”

He doesn’t argue. He picks up his pen and taps it once against the table, not impatiently. Just a small movement. Something to do with his hands.

“Okay,” he says. “Let me know if you want me to take anything.”

I cap my pen. I start stacking my notes.

And then he says, quietly enough that Fatima couldn’t hear from the next table: “I saw Theo on Monday.”

My hands go still on the papers.

“He mentioned it,” I say.

“I recognized him. Same eyes.” A pause. “I wasn’t trying to make things complicated. I just wanted to say hi to him. I didn’t think that through.”

I look up at that. He’s not performing guilt, not doing the thing where someone apologizes with their whole face so you have to manage their feelings about the apology. He’s just saying what happened. Direct. Like the hallway outside Richardson Hall two years ago when he said I should have caught that and meant it.

“It’s fine,” I say.

“I won’t do it again if you’d rather I didn’t.”

“Theo is his own person. I’m not going to tell him who to talk to.”

Cole nods slowly. He looks at the table for a second, then back at me. There’s something in his face that I recognize and don’t want to engage with, something sitting just behind the surface, patient and heavy.

I stand up.

“I’ll have the draft to you by Thursday,” I say.

“Nora.”

I stop.

Not because I have to. Because he says it the same way he said it on the phone two years ago, not as a question, not as a demand. Just my name, like it means something specific in his mouth, like he’s been careful with it.

I wait.

“I’m not going to make this weird,” he says. “I know that’s not up to me to decide. But I’m not going to.” He looks at me steadily. “That’s all.”

I hold his gaze for three full seconds.

“Okay,” I say.

I pick up my bag. I walk to the stairs. I don’t look back and I keep my pace even and unhurried all the way down to the ground floor and out through the library’s heavy front door and into the cold air outside.

I stand on the library steps and breathe.

He said he’s not going to make it weird. And the thing that is eating at me, the thing I stand here in the cold turning over, is that he hasn’t. Not once since Monday has he made it weird. He has been careful and direct and easy and he has not pushed for a single thing he hasn’t been given.

Which means I have no target for this feeling.

Which means the feeling has nowhere to go except inward.

My phone buzzes.

Theo.

so I ran into that Cole guy again. he was with another hockey guy. the other one said something to him after I walked past. Cole didn’t look happy about it.

I type: What did the other guy look like?

Theo: tall, blond, kind of looks at you like he already doesn’t like you

I know exactly who that is.

I haven’t said Dex Harrow’s name out loud in two years.

I type: Stay away from that one, Theo. I mean it.