Whatever Cole is reading in me tonight, he keeps it behind that turned back. The faint bruise on the side of his neck has already started to darken, the shape of my mouth on his skin visible above the line of his shoulder. The mark is mine. The thoughts behind it aren't.
Cole's hands at his sides in that parking lot. The grip on my jaw tonight, his thumb on my pulse,yours, always yours, his back to me now in the blue light with my mark still on it. Across the hall, on my desk, Maya's recorder where she set it this afternoon, then where she didn't reach for it tonight. The drawer at the Chronicle. The doorway across the hall from this room. The two places her eyes refused to settle.
And under all of it, Cole's voice in my head,three years of that, you stop planning, you know, delivered to the one person who would hear exactly what it meant. Maya's hand an inch from mine with the heat crossing the distance, my finger pressing white against the oak. Cole's back toward me here, her recorder across the hall in my room, the same span of hardwood stretching to both.
I lie there in the dark, the weight of the night pressing down on my chest until I have to force air into my lungs.
Chapter 5
Cole
Constitutional Law at 8 a.m. is a fucking punishment designed by people who hate hockey players. I'm slumped in the third row, close enough that Whitfield sees my face when he scans the room but far enough that he has to lean a little to call on me, and that small distance is the only shield I've got.
My phone buzzes in my lap, the vibration cutting straight through my teeth.
Dad: Mock trial results posted. Zimmerman got the Hartley fellowship. You would have too if you'd applied. Still time for fall cycle at Georgetown.
I lock the phone, my thumb pressing too hard against the button. Unlock it. Read the words once more until they blur. Lock it again, and the click sounds too loud in my headwhile Whitfield drones on about the equal protection clause. Three texts this week. Monday the fellowship, Wednesday Georgetown, now Friday both of them again. He never just says hi.
Whitfield points toward the front row. "Ms. Patel. Bolling v. Sharpe?" She starts answering, stops halfway through the second sentence, and flips through her notes. I know the case—I read it at six this morning between protein shakes, highlighter moving down the margins while the blender was still humming. Whitfield will call on me next week with something harder. He likes to space me out. Three good answers a month and he remembers the answers, not how often.
Patel picks her answer back up, and Whitfield nods and turns back to the board.
Near the front, one seat to the left, Maya's laptop screen glows open like a fucking beacon. Her Media Ethics seminar uses the room after ConLaw, and the journalism kids usually drift in during the last few minutes, but Maya was already here when I walked in at seven-fifty. She sits perfectly still, her eyes tracking across the screen while her fingers rest on the keys without typing, and I know that stillness means she's absorbing every word. The pen behind her ear is the one she carries everywhere, chewed at the end. And she's wearing that gray Briarcliff sweatshirt with the cuff split along the seam—the one I lent her freshman year when she came over to study and got cold. The one she returned to the Elm House couch on Tuesday night. Seeing it on her now tightens my chest until I have to force my next breath. She must have grabbed it back off the arm before she left, because three days later it's on her again. She usually keeps my stuff for a week before it migrates back. Three days is fast, and the speed of it fucking gets to me.
Whitfield closes his notes. "Read Romer for Monday." Students start packing bags. "And Mr. Maddox." He waits untilI look up, his eyes holding mine. "Your brief on qualified immunity was the strongest in the section. Consider the law review submission deadline. March fifteenth."
"Thank you, Professor."
You've got the mind for this.It's what my father says when he's praising me, said the same way Addison does after a shift—short, certain, like the decision's already been made.
The lecture breaks with chairs scraping and backpacks zipping while the ConLaw crowd funnels toward the aisle and the Ethics students drift in through the opposite door. Maya looks up from her screen as the room reshuffles, and her eyes land on me with a focus that makes my pulse kick.
"Stalking me?" she says, her voice dry.
"Whitfield's ConLaw. Every Monday-Wednesday-Friday." I sling my bag over my shoulder, edge out of my row to the center aisle, and step up beside her row. "You know this. You've been sitting in this room with me for three semesters."
"I've been sitting in this room before you for three semesters. You just happen to be here when I arrive."
"Semantics."
"Precision," she says, and the word lands like a challenge.
I lean against the desk at the end of her row, turned toward her seat, while she looks up at me, chin tipped slightly back, the gray sweatshirt hanging loose on her, and my throat goes tight.
"How's the mid-season piece?" I ask.
"Filed it this week. After—" She stops, her mouth stilling for half a second before the sentence finishes. "After the interview," she says, neutral, but I hear the edge underneath.
The press room comes back at me sideways: Dante across the table with his voice low and flat sayingYou showed up in this world with a borrowed name, Maya sitting still while he said it, that tight line along her jaw, and me beside him with my knee pressed against his under the table, a line of heat I couldn'tignore. Her recorder is probably still on Dante's desk. I've been in his room twice since Tuesday and both times it was sitting beside his laptop in the same spot, neither Dante nor I touching it, a silent fucking standoff.
Borrowed name. She filed the piece anyway.
"It'll be good," I say. "Your pieces are always good."
"Don't patronize me, Cole."
"It's not patronizing if it's true."
