2. Extra Credit #2
A pulse jumped in his jaw. “And you do not get to pretend there’s no cost to what you’re asking.”
“There is always a cost.”
“Easy to say when it’s not your season on the line.”
The truth of that hit cleanly. She let it. “Noah, if your season depends on falsified academic support, then the season is already compromised.”
Dylan looked like he wanted to vanish into the floor.
Cole whispered, “It was one of the grad tutors.”
Talia turned to him immediately. “Name?”
He gave it in a rush.
She wrote it down.
Noah scrubbed a hand over his mouth, then dropped it. His taped thumb flashed white against his stubble-darkened jaw. He looked suddenly older than twenty-four. Not by years. By wear. The kind that accumulated in people who had spent too long being everybody’s steady option.
When he spoke again, his voice was level. Too level. “So that’s it? One scared freshman says the wrong thing and now the whole program gets branded?”
Talia capped her pen. “That is not what just happened.”
“It’s exactly what just happened.”
“No. What happened is a student admitted support may have crossed policy boundaries, and you attempted to manage the disclosure before it was complete.”
His stare pinned hers. “I was trying not to let him incriminate himself with half-formed panic.”
“And I was trying to establish facts. Do you see how those priorities conflict?”
He laughed once, without humor. “Crystal clear.”
For a moment nobody moved. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead.
Talia could smell the cold sweetness of someone’s vanilla body spray mixing badly with paper and stale coffee.
In the hall, a student in cleats jogged past, the hard taps of the soles sharp against tile.
Campus life. Eligibility disasters. Marker squeak.
People falling apart under institutionally acceptable lighting.
Dylan pushed both hands through his hair. “So what happens now?”
Talia looked at him. “Now, individual files continue to be reviewed. Any student with inconsistent records will have follow-up meetings. Anyone identified as needing additional monitoring will be assigned recurring compliance check-ins through midterm.”
Noah’s expression hardened another degree. “Assigned by who?”
“By me, in coordination with Academic Services and Student Integrity.”
“Of course.”
“You make that sound personal.”
He didn’t answer that. Which was answer enough.
Talia opened another folder. “Dylan, your records—”
“Wait.” Noah’s voice cut across hers.
She looked up.
He braced his forearms on the table again, leaning in.
It should not have felt like physical pressure in a room this small from a man who still hadn’t raised his voice, and yet.
Hockey lived in him even here. The discipline of angle and timing.
When to absorb impact. When to step into it.
“You want honesty? Fine. Here’s some. The guys are scared.
They don’t know who signed what because half this stuff happens in hallways between lifts and buses and practice.
They’re eighteen, nineteen, twenty. They trust staff to know the rules.
And now suddenly the same institution that built the system is asking them to cleanly describe where every line got crossed while acting like fear won’t scramble memory. ”
It was a good argument. Better because parts of it were true.
Talia folded her hands on the file. “And here’s mine. Systems become abusive precisely when everyone inside them insists confusion is innocent and therefore accountability is unfair. I’m not asking perfection. I’m asking accuracy now.”
His eyes searched her face, as if looking for a softer edge he could use. “There’s a difference between accuracy and bloodletting.”
“There’s also a difference between leadership and interference.”
The words landed. She watched him take them.
Cole looked like he might be sick. Dylan stared at the table.
Noah sat back and exhaled slowly through his nose. “You really don’t like me.”
It was such a clean sidestep into charm that under other circumstances she might have admired it.
Instead Talia let one brow rise. “That line probably works better when you mean it flirtatiously.”
Dylan made a strangled sound.
Noah blinked once, then almost smiled despite himself. “You assume a lot.”
“I observe patterns.”
“Right. I forgot. I’m one of your patterns.”
“At the moment? Very much so.”
He shook his head, a quiet disbelieving motion. “You know, most people on campus can manage basic conversation without making it feel like a deposition.”
“Most people on campus are not trying to steer witness testimony with their jaw clenched.”
That brought color high into his cheekbones. Anger, definitely. Maybe embarrassment. Maybe because she had seen too much and said it aloud. “I’m trying to protect a freshman from saying something stupid.”
“No,” Talia said softly. “You’re trying to protect him from consequences before we’ve established what he did.”
He looked at her as if she had struck something uncomfortably close to bone.
Dylan spoke before Noah could. “Can we just get to whatever my part of this is?”
Talia let the tension breathe for another beat before nodding.
She took Dylan through his file, then assigned next steps, then sent both younger players out with instructions not to discuss the content of the meeting in the hall.
Cole left pale and stumbling over his own backpack strap.
Dylan gave Noah a look on the way out—part apology, part plea, part what the hell—and disappeared after him.
Then the door clicked shut, and the room changed.
It always did when witnesses left.
The silence between Talia and Noah settled dense and electric. Close quarters. Too much fluorescent light. The scrape of his chair when he stood sounded louder than it should have.
He stayed on his side of the table. She appreciated that and distrusted that she noticed.
“Are we done?” he asked.
“Not quite.”
His mouth flattened. “Shocking.”
She ignored that too. “Based on today’s meeting and your existing file discrepancies, you’ll report for recurring compliance check-ins twice weekly until further notice.”
He stared at her. “You’re kidding.”
“I’m not.”
“With you.”
“Yes.”
A sharp laugh left him. “That feels unbiased.”
“It’s supervised and documented.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Talia gathered the folders into a stack to keep her own temper organized with her hands.
“You’re a high-visibility upperclassman whose records contain inconsistencies and who attempted to redirect another student’s disclosure in my presence.
You can call that bias if it helps, but administratively it’s called a pattern requiring oversight. ”
His shoulders went rigid under the gray hoodie. “I redirected because he was spiraling.”
“And because you wanted control of the room.”
He stepped closer to the table. Not into her space. Into the conversation. “You think everything about me is strategy.”
“No,” she said, more quietly than before. “I think strategy is how you survive being needed.”
That stopped him.
For a second, his face changed with no warning.
The public ease fell away so fast it was almost violent in its absence.
She saw fatigue then, and frustration, and something more private than either—something raw enough that her own breath caught before she could stop it.
The steadiness everyone leaned on had seams. Of course it did.
Nobody smiled that easily without paying for it somewhere.
Then he put the mask back on.
Not fully. Enough.
“Twice weekly,” he said flatly. “What does that involve?”
“Review of coursework support, attendance logs, independent verification of submitted writing when necessary, and disclosure updates if additional discrepancies emerge.”
“Sounds cozy.”
“It won’t be.”
He dragged a hand down the back of his neck. “I have practice. Travel. Classes.”
“You also have obligations as a student athlete under review.”
The phrase made him wince, tiny and real. Student athlete under review. Branding by bureaucracy.
Talia kept her tone professional because anything gentler would feel like pity, and she had the sense Noah Mercer would rather bleed than be pitied. “Mondays and Thursdays. Two-thirty. Here.”
He stared at the schedule sheet she slid toward him but didn’t take it. “You planned this already.”
“I prepare for likely outcomes.”
“Do you ever take a breath before assuming the worst?”
“Do you?”
That got his eyes back on her.
They held there, the room suddenly too small for neutral things.
He was close enough now that she could see the faint shadow of exhaustion beneath his eyes, the clean line where practice stubble had given up by afternoon, the damp mark at the collar of his hoodie where melt or sweat had soaked through from carrying gear earlier.
He smelled faintly of cold air and detergent and the ghost of a rink—ice and rubber and something metallic that never quite left hockey players, as if the boards themselves marked them.
She hated that she noticed that too.
He looked down at his taped thumb, flexed it once, then took the paper. “This affects the whole team if people see me coming in here twice a week.”
“Then perhaps you should consider what message it sends when a leader cooperates visibly with academic oversight.”
He gave her a look that was almost admiring and entirely annoyed. “You really can turn anything into a lecture.”
“It’s one of the few perks of a doctorate.”
That startled a real laugh out of him.
It came low and rough and too warm for this room.
Talia regretted it immediately because for one unguarded second he looked younger, easier, less like the polished campus banner version of himself. Just a tired man with a taped hand and too many people depending on him.
Dangerous, her brain supplied.