Page 34 of Lethal in Pink

I lean forward, elbows on the narrow table. The wood is cool under my forearms. I can smell her perfume and it wraps around my senses, something sweet and floral that makes my chest tighten. I read over the

“Can I say something?” I ask.

“Will it be useful?”

“Probably.”

“Then say it, I guess, if you truly must.”

I point at the screen. At two specific places in her outline where the argument framework makes a leap that the citations don’t fully support.

“Here,” I say, tapping the bullet under ‘Framework Construction.’ “You’re arguing that procedural integrity functions as a necessary constraint on prosecutorial power, which is correct, but the leap to ‘and therefore any deviation constitutes structural corruption’ doesn’t track with the Porter holding. Porter establishes that deviations can be justified if they’re transparent and subject to review. You’re treating deviation and corruption as synonyms. They’re not.”

She’s quiet. Her eyes track from my finger to the text, back to my finger, to the text again. The highlighter in her hand, twirls once between her fingers before she uncaps it and draws a single, clean line through the phrase I’ve indicated.

“Also,” I continue, scrolling down to the practical application section, “your mitigation framework assumes the existence of functional oversight mechanisms in every jurisdiction. That’s…optimistic. Some of these places, the oversight is the prosecutor’s golf buddy. You need a contingency for systems where the checks are theoretical at best.”

Another pause. Longer this time. Her jaw does that thing—the tightness, the small muscle movement along the hinge that she tries to hide and fails at. Then the highlighter moves again. One stroke. Precise. Surgical.

She doesn’t thank me. She doesn’t acknowledge that I’m right. She just…incorporates the feedback, the way a skilled editor incorporates a line edit—without ceremony, without ego, with the pure, focused efficiency of someone whose only priority is making the thing better.

It’s the most attractive thing I’ve seen all week, and I am not proud of that fact.

“Section three is where I think we actually disagree,” she says. “The framing of the central argument. You said in class that defending procedural integrity in a corrupt system is defending the architecture of injustice. I think that’s reductive.”

“Because it is.”

“Because it’s not that simple.”

“Nothing is that simple, hotshot. That’s my entire point.”

“Stop calling me that.”

“Make me.”

The words leave my mouth before my brain has fully approved the export paperwork. They hang in the air between us, warm from the lamp, charged with something that has nothing to do with ethics frameworks and everything to do with the fact that we are sitting close enough that I can see the exact point where her lip gloss catches the light.

She holds my gaze for a moment. Then she looks down at the outline.

“My point is,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper, “that you can’t just tear down the system because it’s flawed. You have to fix it from within. Otherwise, you’re just creating chaos.”

“Chaos gets results when the system is built to protect the bad guys,” I counter, leaning in half an inch.

Her gaze flickers, something dark and unreadable passing across her eyes before she locks it back down. We go back and forth—challenging precedents, tearing down assumptions, rebuilding the framework line by line—until an alarm begins to screech on her phone, signaling that our ninety-minute commitment is up.

The outline has become something neither of us could have built alone. It has her rigor and my angles. It has cases she found and observations I made. It has a structure that holds both our voices without collapsing into contradiction.

But it still needs a little more work.

“Thursday,” she says, zipping her tote. “After classes. Same place.”

“Thursday,” I agree. “I’ll bring my A-game. Or at least my B-plus game.”

She stands and the lamp light catches the curve of her cheek, the soft wave of her dark hair, the particular set of her mouth that suggests she is fighting a smile and losing, slowly.

“You do that.” she says.

I stand too. My coffee cup is empty. I should throw it away. I will, in a minute. Right now, I’m watching her gather the last of her things—a pen that rolled to the edge of the table, a hair tie she’d been wearing on her wrist, the particular way she tucks a strand of hair behind her ear that I have now seen approximately seven times and am somehow not tired of.