2. Extra Credit #3
He sobered first. “You know this won’t stay in this building.”
“No.”
“The media already smells blood. If this gets attached to my name, it gets attached to the program.”
She believed him. She also believed that fact had been cushioning too much for too long. “Then give them nothing worse than the truth.”
He looked at her like she had asked him to skate bare-handed across broken glass. “You think truth lands clean.”
“No,” she said. “I think lies land later.”
That one sat between them.
Down the hall, somebody laughed. A door slammed. The heat kicked on with a shudder through old pipes. Talia reached for her coffee and remembered too late that it had gone fully cold. She took a sip anyway and made a face.
Noah noticed. “That replacement coffee offer still open?”
She set the cup down. “Still no.”
“Because it’s a bribe?”
“Because I like my professional boundaries intact.”
His gaze sharpened at that, as if he heard the subtext she had not intended to give him. “And me buying coffee would ruin them?”
“It would encourage you.”
A beat.
Then, softly, “Would that be so terrible?”
There it was. Not heavy-handed. Not smug. Just warm enough to test the edge. A different version of his game than the one he’d played with reporters or freshmen. Controlled. Curious. Intimate by increments.
Talia felt the danger of it all the way down her spine.
She smiled without softness. “For you? Probably not. For me? Administrative malpractice.”
His mouth twitched despite the tension. “You dismantle all your compliments this fast?”
“I don’t believe I’ve offered one.”
“You implied I was encouraging.”
“I implied you were persistent.”
“That’s not the same thing?”
“Not in your favor.”
He braced one hand on the back of the empty chair between them. His left thumb remained carefully free of pressure. Injury, then. Not severe enough to sit him out. Present enough to shape movement. She filed it away before she could stop herself and resented the instinct.
“Talia.”
The use of her first name should not have changed the air. It did.
“Don’t make me the example for a system I didn’t build,” he said.
For the first time all afternoon, his voice had no rhetorical edge on it. No room-management, no public polish. Just plain strain. The private thing again, exposed for one second through a split seam.
Everyone wants him; only one person sees him, some reckless corner of her mind translated, and she shut that thought down so hard it was almost physical.
She straightened the legal pad under her hand. “Then stop acting like its shield.”
His eyes locked on hers.
That one hurt him. She knew it because he went utterly still.
When he spoke, each word was precise. “You think that’s what I am.”
“I think,” she said, because she owed him accuracy too, “you have confused carrying people with respecting their ability to stand in the truth.”
His throat worked once.
Noah looked away first, toward the narrow window in the door where late afternoon light had turned the hall beyond it watery gold. Students moved past in flashes—scarves, lanyards, a red sweatshirt from some other department entirely. Normal life moving around the edge of this.
Finally he nodded once. “Monday. Two-thirty.”
“And Thursday.”
He looked back at her. “Can’t wait.”
“That makes one of us.”
He gave a soft huff that might have been another laugh if the room had belonged to a different day. Then he folded the schedule sheet in half and tucked it into the front pocket of his hoodie.
At the door, his hand closed around the push bar, then paused.
Without turning, he said, “For what it’s worth, Cole’s a good kid.”
Talia stared at the line of his shoulders. “Good kids still deserve honest adults.”
His head dipped slightly. Acceptance or frustration; she couldn’t tell.
Then he looked back over his shoulder, and the public Noah was there again, but thinner now, stretched over something she had already seen too clearly to forget. “You always have an answer.”
“It saves time.”
“Maybe.” His gaze dropped once, quick and impossible to misread, to her mouth before coming back to her eyes. “Maybe not.”
Before she could decide whether to cut that down or ignore it, the hallway erupted with the muffled roar of a men’s voice and hurried footsteps. Talia moved to the door on instinct at the same moment Noah did. They reached it together, shoulders nearly brushing.
Out in the corridor, Lauren from hockey media stood ten feet away with her phone in her hand and fury on her face. A local reporter with a too-tight tie was arguing with the front desk admin while two first-year players hovered at the far wall, trapped and wide-eyed.
“—not speaking to students mid-review,” the admin was saying.
The reporter spotted Noah over Lauren’s shoulder and lit up like he’d found blood in the snow.
“Mercer,” he called. “Can you confirm men’s hockey is under formal academic investigation?”
The whole hall seemed to inhale.
Beside Talia, Noah went hard and still as a rink before first skate.
And then, very quietly, without looking at her, he said, “Tell me again this doesn’t leave this building.”