Noah found Room 2E19 on the third try, which was either an indictment of Brookfield’s signage or a testament to the chemistry building’s commitment to being a personality trait.

  The East Wing hallways narrowed and turned in ways that suggested the architect had once been wronged by a student and decided revenge could be structural. Every door looked identical. Every room number felt like it had been assigned by someone rolling dice.

  By the time he reached the seminar room, his fingers had gone numb at the tips.

  He knocked once anyway, because politeness was what you did when your life was falling apart: you held the door for it on the way down.

  “Come in,” Rachel’s voice called—steady, clipped, all-business.

  Noah opened the door.

  The seminar room was small and bland, the kind of space designed to host meetings that no one wanted to attend. Fluorescent lighting, a long table, a few chairs arranged with the optimism of order. A whiteboard with ghosts of old equations.

  Rachel stood by the window with her arms folded, looking out at nothing in particular. Her posture was impeccable. Her face was composed.

  The problem, Noah realized immediately, was that he knew what she looked like when she was composed because she was afraid.

  He closed the door behind him gently.

  Rachel turned.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hey,” Noah answered, and watched his own voice come out as if this were normal. Like he hadn’t spent the last hour taking notes while the universe rearranged itself in his skull.

  Rachel gestured at the chair nearest the table. “You found it.”

  Noah sat down because the alternative was standing forever. “Eventually,” he said. “Your directions were clear. The building is… interpretive.”

  A fraction of something crossed her face—almost amusement, but it didn’t have the strength to become real.

  “That’s accurate,” Rachel said. She sat too, across from him, placing her clipboard down with careful precision, as if controlling the object might control the moment.

  They looked at each other over the table while the lights buzzed overhead.

  Noah felt his brain reaching for procedure: be polite, be calm, make it easy for the other person.

  Rachel got there first.

  “Well,” she said, briskly, “I’m glad we… caught this early.”

  Noah nodded, because that was a sentence that existed. “Yes.”

  Rachel continued, like she was reading from a mental list. “And it’s… good we didn’t—” She stopped, mouth tightening, and corrected herself without looking at him. “Good that things didn't go farther than they could've.”

  Noah’s chest tightened in a way that was almost funny, if you were the sort of person who laughed at your own misfortune.

  He said, instead, “Right.”

  Rachel’s fingers slid along the edge of her clipboard. Tap. Still. Tap. The silence stretched.

  Noah waited. He didn’t interrupt. Rachel needed the space—she always did, he realized, when the anxiety got loud.

  Eventually, Rachel lifted her eyes to his face. Her voice was quieter when she asked, “How old are you?”

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  Noah blinked once. The question shouldn’t have had weight. It did. It was a guillotine disguised as a number. He answered anyway, because he didn’t believe in lying to the woman who’d just discovered she’d kissed a student.

  “I'll be nineteen in October,” Noah said, because the word eighteen felt like something that ought not to be said aloud.

  Rachel’s eyes closed for a second. Not dramatically. Not like she was performing despair. Like she’d simply needed a blink to stop her brain from spilling out. When she opened them again, her expression was controlled, but the color had drained from her face.

  Noah’s mouth moved before his common sense caught up.

  “You know,” he said, lightly, because if he didn’t make it light it would crush them both. “Half-plus-seven says this is… technically fine.” Then, quieter: “In a month.”

  Rachel stared at him.

  Noah immediately regretted having a sense of humor.

  Then Rachel’s lips parted and, for the first time since she’d walked into that lab, she looked like herself rather than a job title. A sound escaped her—half laugh, half disbelief—and it was over almost as soon as it appeared.

  Noah felt his chest loosen a fraction, seeing that she was still in there.

  “Don’t,” Rachel said, and her voice was strained but not angry.

  Noah nodded once. “Sorry.”

  Rachel looked down at the table, as if the wood grain might offer guidance. When she spoke again, her voice was steadier, the way it got when she’d made a decision and was forcing herself to live with it.

  “I need time,” she said. Time to think. Time to panic. Time to decide what kind of person she wanted to be when she looked back at this. Time to put distance between herself and the fact that last night, she’d been on her toes to kiss his cheek.

  Noah nodded, because nodding was what you did when you didn’t want to beg.

  “Okay,” he said.

  Rachel lifted her gaze, waiting for him to make it harder. Waiting for the messy, emotional pushback that usually came when you told someone no.

  Noah didn’t give it to her. He looked at the table, then at her hands, and felt the familiar, automatic urge to make the discomfort go away. To fix the problem, even if the problem was that he was the inconvenience.

  “It makes sense,” he said quietly. “You have a career. I'm not going to ask you to risk setting it on fire for me.”

  He looked up, expecting to see relief. Expecting her to exhale.

  He didn’t.

  Rachel went very still.

  Her grip tightened on the clipboard until the plastic creaked. She looked at him with a strange, sharp intensity, as if he’d just insulted her instead of agreeing with her.

  “Don’t,” she whispered.

  Noah blinked, confused. “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t be reasonable,” she said, and her voice sounded tight. “Don’t sit there and… de-escalate this.”

  “I’m not de-escalating,” Noah said. He was just doing the math. “I’m being pragmatic. You have a lot to lose. I don't want to be the reason you lose it.”

  Rachel stared at him for a long beat, her expression unreadable—somewhere between frustration and a terrible sort of softness that looked painful to hold.

  “Noah,” she said, and stopped. She shook her head slightly, as if she couldn’t explain why that answer was both right and wrong.

  She didn’t finish the thought. She just breathed out—a sharp, frustrated exhale—and looked away.

  They sat in the silence of that misfire. It wasn’t a shared understanding; it was a stalemate. Noah kept his hands folded in front of him, the picture of harmlessness, because he didn’t know what else to do with his body to make this easier for her.

  Rachel’s eyes flicked to him—quick, searching, almost pained—and then away again, like looking too long might crack her resolve.

  She stood first.

  Noah stood too, because gravity still existed.

  Rachel picked up her clipboard like it was armour.

  “I’ll—” She stopped, adjusted, tried again. “I’ll talk to you later. Not… today.”

  Noah nodded, and he made his voice gentle because he didn’t want to be another pressure in her life. “Okay.”

  Rachel hesitated, hand on the edge of the table. Her expression softened by a fraction, the smallest concession to the fact that Noah was not just a student problem she had to manage. He was a person she’d laughed with. A person she’d let into her apartment. A person whose nickname for her still echoed in her head at inconvenient times.

  “I’m sorry,” she said—not an apology that fixed anything, just the only honest thing she could offer.

  Noah’s throat tightened. He kept his face steady.

  “Me too,” he said. “For the mess. Not… the rest.”

  Rachel’s lips pressed together hard. She nodded once, decisive now, and walked to the door. She paused with her hand on the handle, and Noah felt the air hold its breath with her. She didn’t look back.

  The door opened. Light and hallway noise spilled in. Then it closed behind her with a soft, final click.

  Noah stood there, stupidly still, staring at the door she’d gone through. He’d gone into that lab thinking his biggest problem was whether Josh would wake up on time.

  Now his biggest problem was that the person he’d started to want—quietly, stupidly, sincerely—had just asked him for time like it was a bandage she could wrap around a wound.

  And Noah, who had always been good at waiting for other people to decide what they needed from him, realized, with an unpleasant sort of certainty, that he didn’t want to be good at it this time.

  He picked up his bag and left the seminar room anyway, because wanting didn’t change the rules.

  It just made them hurt.