The air in the windowless box is suddenly too thin. Ava is here, in his space, her paint-splattered jeans a violent splash of color against the monochrome stacks of paper. She holds a book—his book, the one he’d referenced in lecture—and her thumb traces the spine. The live wire in his gut snaps taut. Every professional boundary evaporates in the scent of her shampoo and the dangerous quiet of her smile.
Noah’s hand, halfway to adjusting his glasses, freezes. The office door is still open behind her, a rectangle of fluorescent hallway light. He didn’t hear it open. He’s been staring at the same sentence on an essay for seven minutes. “Ava.” His voice comes out flat. A statement, not a question.
“You referenced Camus.” She takes a step in, letting the door sigh shut. The click of the latch is obscenely loud. “The Myth of Sisyphus. I wanted to see the passage.”
“The library has three copies.”
“Yours has notes in the margin.” She lifts the book slightly. Her sea-green eyes don’t leave his face. “I saw them when you held it up. Your handwriting is very… precise.”
He can feel a flush climbing his neck. The notes are in pencil, tiny and furious, arguments he had with himself two years ago in the dead of night. Private. She is holding his private brain in her hands. The heat from this morning coils low again, persistent and undeniable. He stays behind his desk. It feels like the only thing holding him up.
“Office hours are posted,” he says, the professor-voice a brittle shell. “This isn’t them.”
“I know.” She drifts closer, not to the empty chair for students, but to the side of his desk. Her hip brushes a stack of ungraded midterms. She sets the book down between them, cover up. The spine is cracked in three places. Her thumb rests on the worn edge. “I didn’t come for office hours.”
The silence stretches. He hears the hum of the overhead light, the distant slam of a locker. Her presence is a physical pressure in the small room. She smells like citrus and rain. He can see the fine, sun-bleached hairs at her temple, the silver ring on her thumb. His own breath feels shallow, insufficient.
“Why did you come?”
“You left in a hurry after class.” Her gaze drops to the book, then back to him. A direct hit. “You blotched my name on the sheet. I was curious.”
He remembers the ink spreading, a dark planet consuming the ‘A’ in Ava. A perfect, stupid metaphor. He says nothing. His knuckles are white where he grips the desk edge.
She reaches out then, not for the book, but for his pen lying beside it. Her fingers close around it. She doesn’t pick it up. She just holds it. Her fingertips are stained with faint blue and yellow—paint. The gesture is so intimate, so casually proprietary, that the breath stops in his chest. Her smile returns, softer now. Knowing. She has seen the crack in the façade, and she is leaning in to look.