CHAPTER 6

     Her name was Lilith, and she deserved better than she had been given.

     Kai knew this before he asked her out. He knew it the way you know something when you're watching a situation from outside and the logic of cause and effect is visible in a way it never is from inside. He could see that she was nervous and genuine and trying too hard and that trying too hard was the only tool available to her in a world that had consistently undervalued every tool she brought. He could see all of this clearly. He asked her out anyway.

He asked her because she was the first person who had smiled at him — really smiled, not the performance of a smile but the involuntary one, the one that arrives before the face has a chance to edit — in longer than he could precisely remember. She sat next to him in the seminar on modern narrative, and she laughed once at something the professor said that nobody else found funny, and Kai found he had turned to look at her because the sound was unexpected and unguarded, and she caught him looking and the smile appeared, and it was not Summer's smile, it was not anyone else's smile, it was just hers, specific to her face and her moment, and he thought: Maybe this is what trying looks like.

     He had asked with almost no hope. He had framed it as coffee, which was the lowest-commitment invitation he could construct — minimum exposure, maximum deniability. She had said yes in the very particular way of someone who has been asked something they wanted to be asked and is now terrified of wanting it too visibly.

     The cafe was near the west gate — small, slightly shabby, with mismatched chairs and a chalkboard menu that was still advertising a seasonal drink from three months ago. She arrived before him, which meant she had left early for it. She had worn something careful — not formal, but considered, the outfit of someone who had looked in the mirror several times and made a decision. He noticed this and it made him feel something he wished he didn't feel, which was guilt.

They sat across from each other with ceramic cups between them and the comfortable noise of other people's conversations providing a kind of cover. She smiled. She talked a little — about her course, about a professor she found both brilliant and terrifying, about a film she'd seen the previous week that had surprised her. She was not performing. She was just being a person who was pleased to be somewhere and wanted to share that pleasure.

     Kai listened. He asked questions at appropriate intervals. He was present in the mechanical sense of the word — responding, attending, following the shape of the conversation. But there was glass between him and the experience. He could see it clearly, could understand in perfect detail what was happening, but he could not reach through the glass to actually touch it. Every time he tried to feel something real — something that matched the sincerity she was offering — he found Summer waiting on the other side. Not as a rebuke. Just as a fact.

     He looked at Lilith across the café table — her nervous hands around her cup, her genuine eyes, the careful outfit she had chosen — and he saw a person he wanted to want to be here with. And underneath that seeing was the cold, specific knowledge that wanting to want something and actually wanting it are two entirely different experiences, and no amount of effort can bridge that distance from the wanting-to-want side.

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     He excused himself to the bathroom. He stood at the sink and ran cold water over his hands and looked at his own face in the mirror with the careful assessment of someone doing a damage report.

     When he returned, something in his face had changed — had defaulted to the controlled blankness that was his resting expression in the months since Summer — and she saw it. He watched her see it. Her smile adjusted itself into something smaller and more protected. She picked up her cup. She was gracious; she didn't press. They finished their drinks and she thanked him and they parted at the gate and she walked away down the lane with her shoulders set in the particular way of someone who has already adjusted their expectations and is in the process of accepting the adjustment.

     He watched her go. He felt the guilt acutely — not the general guilt of Summer, but this specific smaller guilt, the guilt of offering someone a door you know you've already decided to keep closed.

By the next morning, the rumors had started. He heard them third-hand — someone in the corridor mentioning to someone else that Kai had been seen with her, that particular girl, you know the one, and the implication carried in the phrase that particular girl said more about the campus than it said about her. He heard that she was being talked about again, that his presence had been enrolled in the ongoing project of diminishing her.

     He sat in his room and held Summer's pendant and thought about walls. About the way walls protect the person inside them and damage everyone who tries to enter. About whether protection and damage were always the same project, just seen from different sides.

     "I can't love anyone anymore," he said to the empty room.

The room didn't argue. The room never argued. That was the problem with rooms.

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