Rejected by One, Wanted by Another
Lucy sat at a small wooden desk in the very last row of the history section, in the library. She was at a hidden corner that the overhead lights barely reached her. She kept her head down, her eyes tracing the same line of a textbook for twenty minutes without processing a single word. Every time the heavy front doors creaked open in the distance, her heart jumped. She was hiding, and she knew it.
She heard the footsteps before she saw him. She didn't look up, but the air around her suddenly felt charged, a shadow stretched across her open book, and then the chair across from her was pulled back.