The mouth tightens, the pen stops. The hand, the left one, flattens against the desk like he’s pushing down something that’s trying to rise.
He holds my gaze for one second. Two.
Then he stands. Walks past me, close enough that I can smell the detergent on his collar and feel the static off his sleeve, and reaches behind me for the door handle.
The door closes.
The click is very small. The building holds its breath. My heart is very loud.
He walks back to his desk like he hasn’t just rewritten the entire grammar of office hours in the space of four seconds.
The blonde girl in the red hoodie: open door. Me: closed, her laugh was safe. Mine will not be.
In university misconduct panels—I will not allow myself to Google this later, I will absolutely Google this later—a closed door during student-staff contact is either a protective measure or an aggravating factor depending on who’s asking. A closed door is evidence. A closed door is the thing a lawyer points at and saysyou see. And he has closed it. Not to kiss me, not to touch me, not to do any of the things the closed door would suggest to a panel. He’s closed it because, with the door open, our knees touching is data. His reaction to that is data. And neither of us can afford either.
I sit in the chair I sat in last week. Today, my ribs don’t fit right inside my shirt.
Four seconds.
The posture, the compressed mouth, reveal it before he speaks. The shirt buttoned to the neck; it was one down, the week before two, and now it’s fully buttoned like he’s sewn armour out of Oxford cotton.
‘Mr Carrick.’ The careful surname, not the first name that had slipped out of him last week like a confession. Carrick. Surname. Firewall restored.
So that’s how it’s going to be.
‘Dr Haldrey.’
The man is rearranged. Himself, not the furniture, papers stacked. Marking pen capped, fresh coffee. He’s tidied like you’d tidy before something you’re pretending doesn’t matter, except the effort shows exactly how much it does.
‘Your problem set.’ He reaches for it. Steady. Impressive.
I unzip my bag and take out the pages. Hand them over. Our fingers don’t touch. He’s measured the distance. I let him have it.
Today I am the best student he’s ever had.
That’s the decision. I made it on the bus this morning. I’ve run the escalating-provocation pattern three weeks running, and it has bought me a closed door and a name in his mouth and a man who has started buttoning his shirt to the throat like it’s armour. The next obvious move on the escalator is a kind of move I am not ready to make, and he is not ready to receive, and the move after that, if I picked it, would go past the point where any of this could plausibly be deniable.
So. Today. The inversion.
No provocation, no leaning in. No manufactured skin. No knee drifting under the desk, no lip-biting, no turning my head to show the angle of my neck that does enough. Just the work, clean, correct, three solutions I’m proud of, and one I stayed up till 2 am perfecting because the problem’s elegance mirrored his work on the board, and I wanted him to know I’d been paying attention.
That’s all.
Listening.
Let him see the version of me that won’t get him sacked. Let him find out it’s the same person. Let him live with the fact thatthe version of me that won’t get him sacked is, somehow, the version he wants even more.
He reads. His eyes move left to right. Obviously, everyone does. But he does it with a focus that makes me want to put my face in his way.
Don’t.
I sit back. Cross my ankle over my knee. My t-shirt rides up on one side, hip bone, the elastic of my boxers, a strip of skin that the October air from the window touches and tightens.
He’s not looking. He’s reading my problem set with the dedication of a man marking his way out of purgatory.
He looks. A flick, quarter of a second. Down, across, the trajectory from page to hip to exposed skin and back to page.
I say nothing. My face says nothing.
