Page 23 of Lethal in Pink

He, for his part, looks entirely too relaxed. His notebook is open, but his pen is capped. His phone is face-down on the desk now, screen dark, but his posture hasn’t changed. He’s still sprawled. Still taking up room. Still existing.

It’s infuriating.

Professor Chen clicks through his slides. The projector hums. The air conditioning kicks on with a low rumble that vibrates through the floor and into the legs of my chair. Outside, through the high windows, the morning light cuts across the quad in sharp, golden lines, and I can see students crossing between buildings.

As class drones on, I take notes, I underline and I star important points in the margin, my attention staying exactly where it is supposed to be.

Yet, the entire time, I am still very much aware of him.

His breathing. The shift of fabric when he moves. The faint scent of something clean and cedar-adjacent that cuts through the floor wax and desperation filling the lecture hall. The way his thumb taps against the edge of the desk during a particularly dry section on regulatory frameworks.

Ten minutes into lecture, he shifts again. This time it’s his knee. It moves maybe an inch closer to mine—not enough to touch, not enough to constitute an actual invasion, but enough that my body registers it the way it registers a change in barometric pressure before a storm.

I don’t look at him. I keep my eyes on my notes. My pen keeps moving. But something in my chest tightens—a small, precise knot of irritation that has nothing to do with corporate law and everything to do with the man sitting four inches away who has, in the span of twenty minutes, established himself as the single most annoying person I have encountered this semester.

And I’ve met a lot of annoying people. I go to law school. It’s basically a breeding ground for them.

The slide changes. Professor Chen drones on about the historical development of business regulation. I write down every word. My handwriting is perfect. My margins are even. My highlighting is strategic.

I have no idea how I am going to bear this insufferable asshole for an entire semester.

The thought lands in my brain with the flat, pleasant certainty of a verdict I’ve already reached. No appeal. No reconsideration. Just the clean, clinical assessment of a situation that is, objectively, fucked.

Fourteen weeks. Three hours of lecture per week. Forty-two hours of shared oxygen with a man who grinds every one of my gears.

I cap my pen. Set it parallel to the spiral binding. Adjust my notebook by a quarter-inch.

And beside me, the new exchange student shifts one more time, his knee settling into what appears to be its permanent residence approximately three inches from my thigh, and I think, with the particular clarity that comes from genuine despair: this fucker is going to be a problem.

Chapter eight

Jae

My next class is one of my business core requirements—Business Ethics, or whatever euphemism they’re using this semester to pretend that capitalism has a conscience. The fluorescent lights above me have the warmth and personality of a hospital morgue. They hum at a frequency that lives somewhere between hearing and feeling, a low, persistent note that makes the inside of my skull feel like it’s gently vibrating.

The professor clicks through another slide. His voice has the particular cadence of someone who has delivered this exact lecture forty-seven times and is now operating on a combination of muscle memory and existential resignation. The slide is blue. The text is white. The bullet points march down the screen in perfect formation, each one more forgettable than the last.

My binder is open. My pen is in my hand. My notes, theoretically, should be happening.

They are not happening.

Somewhere around the third slide—something about market saturation and consumer behavior, I think, though I couldn’t swear to it in a court of law—my handwriting trails off mid-sentence. The letters get smaller, then crooked, then they stop entirely, and what replaces them is a doodle. A dragon, or possibly a pig, or some unholy hybrid of the two. It has scales and a snout and eyes that look vaguely judgmental, which feels appropriate given the circumstances.

My pen taps against the edge of the desk. Not a rhythm, exactly. More like the irregular pulse of a body that’s trying to stay awake through sheer percussion.

Tap. Tap-tap.

Pause.

Tap.

I keep replaying it.

The pink cashmere sweater.

Not the pink cashmere sweater itself—though it was a very nice sweater, but the girl in the sweater. Her argumentative attitude precision. The way she dismantled my argument about the seat without raising her voice above a conversational murmur. The specific way her jaw tightened when I refused to move—that tiny, involuntary betrayal of irritation she immediately tried to swallow back down, like she’d been caught doing something indecent.

It was so fucking hot.