Chapter 8: Dressed for It

Lyra's POV

My alarm still had twenty minutes on it. I was already up. Washed my hair again, did my makeup slow, built for the pale gray-green of my eyes.

Today, the white shirtdress. My favorite. One look at it in the store and it was over. I talked myself out of it twice before I gritted my teeth and paid.

White satin, fine weave, a low sheen that moved when I did. Waist taken in, so the line of me was thin. Collar open two buttons. Hem falling on its own, lazy in a way that looked like I hadn't tried.

The long curls — dark brown, nearly black — loose down my back. All that volume against the smooth satin, doing something for me.

I turned once in front of the mirror. My eyes gave me away. I liked what I saw.

Two taps of citrus behind each ear, two on each wrist. Not sweet. Nothing you'd catch walking past me. Only standing next to me.

I pulled the door shut behind me and walked to class.

Campus was mostly empty. Cutting past the lot, I caught the dark custom sedan in the last space at the end. So plain it barely read as a car from that bracket. Windows tinted black. Quiet, like a tool somebody had put away.

I knew the plate.

Didn't slow. Didn't let my eyes sit on it half a second longer than they had to. Only filed it: he got here before I did.

Which tells me something. A man who shows up early to the one class he actually attends is either wired tight or has nowhere else to be. I could use either one.

Here's the arrangement, because it matters. International Finance is a closed section — twenty-one names on the roster, and I'd asked the department for that roster in person, which is how I had the room, the hour, and the line near the bottom of the page with his name on it. Damian Quinn is enrolled in five courses this term. Four of them are names on paper and nothing else; he never goes. This is the one he goes to. Professor Thorne is his uncle by marriage, which explains that, and also explains why this section has been pulling a front row of girls who never transfer out.

The seminar room door was ajar. I didn't walk in. I looked first, through the gap.

Damian in the back row by the window, head down over his phone. Two rows around him completely empty.

Layout, since it's the whole point. Door at the front left. Board center front. Window wall down the right side, gone flat gray with low cloud. Rows facing the board, aisle down the left. He had the far right corner of the back row.

The second I pushed the door open, the room changed.

A guy a few rows ahead of Damian asked, "That's Valente. What's she doing in our room?"

Damian looked up and saw it was me. Surprise crossed his face first — then those sharp brows pulled together.

I walked toward him. He opened his mouth like he was going to say something, and I didn't give him the chance.

I sat down next to the guy who'd asked the question. Small smile. Composed, nothing extra in it. My voice, though, I pitched to carry. Loud enough for the whole table.

"Professor Thorne cleared me to sit in."

Auditing across departments isn't strange here. Your professor says yes, you come. But I'd heard the rest of it. His first year, every class pulled a crowd — some there to look, some there to land him. A year of being frozen out, and nobody gets near him now.

The empty season around him is the best opening I was ever going to get.

The guy went red. "Wel — welcome," he got out, and then had nothing.

I nodded and took the smile back clean. That kind of thing is calibration. Bright and easy is the baseline, but a beautiful girl needs exactly the right amount of distance or she isn't the dream, and one step past that line it just reads cold. Damian is the cautionary tale — a year of untouchable, and now nobody takes the seat next to him. I don't have the family behind me to afford a keep-away sign. So I keep hunting the point between warm and held back.

I took the seat center-left, five rows up from him. I'd checked that number twice on the way over. Five. Any time he looks at the board, his line of sight has to cross my face and the pale stretch of thigh under the hem.

I don't need to go to him. I sit there like an open flower and let the butterfly do the flying. Notebook open, pen on the right.

A few minutes before Thorne came in, three of them walked over together. One smiled and asked for my contact.

Small frown, shake of the head. Pleasant, nothing negotiable in it. "Professor's about to start." Eyes back down on my notes.

They drifted off. A no has to be fast but not cold. Cold makes enemies. Fast just means you're busy. In a room like that, politely unavailable is safer than a straight rejection.

Thorne took apart the leverage structure of a nineties cross-border merger. Dense with terms, fast, almost no air in it.

I'd chewed through all of it in the dorm, more than once. Notes steady, hand never stopping. And I knew exactly what I had: the paper version. The people who belong in this room have family who ran those deals. They're hearing a case. I'm hearing a textbook.

That's the gap I have to close. And I can't close it from five rows away from the one person in here who was born on the other side of it.

Twice I made myself not look back.

The second time, I did it sideways.

His head was down. His phone sat on the desk in front of him, face up, screen black. Nothing in his hands.

Not typing. Not reading. Just sitting with his head down, which means the looking was happening somewhere else, and from five rows up I couldn't tell where he'd been putting it.

Or I read the glass wrong. Cheap mirror, bad angle.

The bell went. I bent like I was tying a lace and checked along the floor. The two empty rows are a runway, and the only way out of that corner is the left aisle. Both his feet were already pointed at it.

Which means he decided before the bell. Not after.

I packed my things. Don't push it.

I stood up. Don't push it.

And he was already in front of me. He had a full head on me. Looked down. No extra expression on him at all, and no patience in his voice.

"Out. Now. Keep up. I'm not saying it twice."

Two rows over, heads turned, every face asking what the hell.

He took my wrist and moved. Fast enough that I had to jog to stay with him.

Rude son of a bitch. Would it kill him to slow down? Does this make him feel like a big man?

On my face I kept the look of a girl getting shoved around. The two of us moving like that pulled every eye in the hallway.

Under the face, I was running the board.

Witnesses first: the whole section behind us, every head in the hall. That story hits the forum by tonight, and it won't be the version I'd choose. Fine. Rumor I can work with. Rumor I can't see coming, I can't.

Second: this wasn't the plan. The plan had months in it. Orbit him, be seen, stay blank, let him come the last few feet. He'd cut all of that out and taken the first move himself, and a man who moves first when nobody's chasing him is usually moving for a reason I don't have yet.