Page 22 of Hostile

“It’s late,” I said.

His mouth curved slightly, as if he knew exactly what I was doing and had decided not to call me on it.

“It is.”

“I have a reading list.”

“You do.”

“And you have that brief due Monday.”

“I do.”

For a moment, neither of us moved. Then he stood and reached for his jacket. “I’ll walk you back.”

I opened my mouth to tell him it wasn’t necessary. The problem was that I wanted him to.

“All right,” I said.

His smile was small. Real.

Which somehow felt like the beginning of a problem.

The rain had settled into a steady drizzle by the time we stepped outside, the kind that wasn’t worth an umbrella but still got into everything. We walked close enough that our arms brushed every few steps, neither of us pulling away from it. The campus was quiet, mostly empty, the kind of October night that smelled of wet leaves and something almost cold.

I didn’t say anything. He didn’t either. Somehow, the silence wasn’t uncomfortable. It never was with him, which was one of the things I’d noticed first and trusted least—how easy it was just to be near him.

Don’t, I reminded myself. You know exactly how this ends. You’ve seen it end before it started.

We reached my building, and I stopped at the bottom of the steps, turning to face him. He stopped too, close enough that I had to look up a little, the drizzle catching in his hair and on his jacket shoulders.

“Thank you for dinner,” I said. “Both times.” Then, because it was true and I’d decided a long time ago that honesty was the only currency I trusted, “I like talking to you, Wyatt.”

“I know you do.” His voice had grown quieter. “I like talking to you, too. I like talking to you more than I’ve ever liked talking to anyone else.”

The rain. The wet leaves. The empty campus.

Don’t.

“Good night,” I said.

“Megan.” He said my name the way he always said it—like it meant something, like it was a complete sentence all by itself. Then he reached up and tucked a strand of wet hair behind my ear, his fingers barely grazing my jaw, the lightest possible touch.

I stopped breathing.

“I’ve been patient,” he said quietly. “I’m good at being patient. But I want to kiss you, and I think you want me to, and I’m just going to say that plainly because I don’t know another way to talk to you.”

My heart was doing something completely unacceptable behind my ribs.

You know better, the smart part of my brain said. You know exactly how this goes. You’ve watched it from a parking lot. You’ve told yourself a hundred times. You left Savannah. You left all of it. You cannot afford to⁠—

“Okay,” I said.

The word surprised both of us.

His smile was slow and quiet, nothing like the charming social version. This one was real, just for me, and that made it worse somehow. There was something he wasn’t telling me. I’d known it for about two weeks, filed it under not my business for now because we weren’t at the stage where everything was my business, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be at that stage, so I hadn’t pushed.

But it was there. In the moments when he went quiet in a way that was different from his usual quiet—not the comfortable library silence but something tighter, more controlled. In the way he’d deflected twice when I asked about going home for Thanksgiving. In the way he’d looked at his phone in the café on Thursday and put it down without answering whatever he’d seen.