4. Office Hours #3
Noah folded his arms, a defensive move disguised as ease. “You do this with everyone?”
“Interrogate them about their emotional architecture?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“No.” A tiny pause. “Only the ones who insist on making themselves impossible not to analyze.”
His mouth nearly curved. “That sounds personal.”
“It is personal when your work follows students into consequences they may not fully understand.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know.”
The room tightened again, but differently now.
He let his gaze drop once more to the paper in front of her. “For the record, I didn’t pretend not to understand the reading.”
“You absolutely did.”
“I pretended not to care.”
“Why?”
He could have given her something slick there. A joke. A shrug. Because it annoys you. Because it’s funny. Because athletes aren’t allowed to be earnest in fluorescent lighting.
Instead he heard himself say, “Because if I care out loud, everybody decides I’m volunteering to fix it.”
Talia went still.
There it was. Private vulnerability behind the public image. Not enough to count as a confession, but enough to feel exposed.
Noah regretted it immediately and not at all.
Her voice, when she spoke, was quieter. “And are you?”
He looked at the whiteboard over her shoulder. Institutional Responsibility. Individual Accountability. Legal Liability. Three columns. Three ways to say nobody wanted the whole answer.
“Usually,” he said.
Her eyes held his. Not triumphant. Not pitying. Just attentive in a way that made him feel more naked than sympathy would have.
“That sounds exhausting,” she said.
He huffed a breath. “You saying I look tired, Doctor Shah?”
“I’m saying your left hand has been flexing for the last ten minutes and you keep shifting your weight off your right leg like your adductors are still angry from practice.”
He stared at her.
She lifted one shoulder. “Observation.”
A laugh escaped him then. Real this time, low and brief. “You’re impossible.”
“And yet,” she said.
And yet.
The words hung there with all the things neither of them was saying.
He looked at her hand resting on the papers. Long fingers. Ink stain. Paper cut. Competent hands. He had the sudden, absurd image of those fingers tracing the spiral of tape around his left thumb, not clinically, not for evidence, just to understand how tightly he held himself together.
He dragged his attention back to her face before the thought could become a problem.
Talia cleared her throat and stepped back first, reclaiming distance with unmistakable intention. Agency. Choice. The movement should have cooled him. Instead it made him respect her more, which was somehow worse.
“You should go,” she said.
He picked up his packet and slid it into his bag. “My room needs me?”
A flicker crossed her expression at the callback. “No. Study hall is over. You have no audience left to perform responsibility for.”
“That’s a little harsh.”
“That’s a little true.”
He slung the backpack on. “You know, for someone accusing me of deciding what people can handle, you do a lot of deciding what I mean.”
“I’m open to correction.”
He stepped around the table, close enough now that he could see the fine tension along her throat, the way she held herself very still when he entered her space and did not retreat. Competitive to the last inch of air, then. Good.
“Then here’s your correction,” he said quietly. “I’m not answering for everyone else because I think they’re weak.”
Her breath changed. Just slightly.
“I do it,” he said, “because somebody should make sure they don’t get chewed up for being young in a machine built by people older than they are.”
Something in her face eased and tightened at once.
“That,” she said, just as quietly, “is the first honest defense you’ve given me.”
He gave her a crooked half-smile. “You bring out the best in me.”
“Highly doubtful.”
“Still here, though.”
Her gaze dropped, briefly, treacherously, to his mouth before snapping back to his eyes.
Noah felt it like contact.
Neither of them moved.
The hallway outside had gone nearly silent.
Distantly, a door slammed on another floor.
The building had that late-evening academic emptiness to it—heat clicking through old pipes, janitorial cart wheels somewhere far off, the world narrowed to fluorescent light and the knowledge of another person standing very close.
He wanted, with a sharpness that surprised him, to know what she looked like when she stopped holding every edge in place.
He did not move toward her.
His code held even when his pulse didn’t.
Talia broke the stare first. “Good night, Mr. Mercer.”
Too formal. On purpose.
Noah nodded once. “Good night, Doctor Shah.”
He turned and started for the door.
“Mr. Mercer.”
He stopped with his hand on the frame and looked back.
She had picked up his response sheet again. Her expression was unreadable now except for the alertness still alive under it. “You argued that systems fail when decent people wait too long to tell the truth.”
He held her gaze.
“Yes.”
“Be careful,” she said. “That principle applies to favorites too.”
Noah stood very still.
There was the hook in it. The warning. Not abstract.
Not classroom-safe. Something was coming.
A ruling, a name, a consequence, maybe all three.
And she had just told him, as plainly as she could without breaking whatever line she was still honoring, that being beloved would not protect anyone from what truth did next.
His jaw tightened.
When he answered, his voice was steady enough to pass. “You say that like I needed the reminder.”
Talia’s fingers curled around the edge of his paper. “I say it because I think you already know.”
He left before he could ask the question burning in his throat.
In the hallway, the air was cooler, carrying the institutional smells of floor polish and old radiator heat.
His footsteps echoed too loud on the tile.
The building felt mostly deserted now, emptied of day students and noise.
Through the narrow wired-glass window at the end of the corridor, he could see snow starting again, hard white flecks spinning under the campus lights.
Noah stopped halfway to the stairs and flexed his left hand.
The thumb pulsed under tape.
Below him somewhere, a phone started ringing in an office and rang and rang before cutting off. He thought of Cole’s bloodless face. Dylan’s bad jokes. Coach telling him to keep the room out of rumor. Talia in the seminar room, reading his words back to him like a challenge and a mirror.
Favorites too.
He stood in the humming quiet with his bag strap biting into his shoulder and the sick sense of a wave building just out of sight.
Then, from inside the seminar room behind him, he heard the sharp, unmistakable buzz of Talia’s phone—and, after a beat, the sound of her voice changing as she answered. Not louder. Not panicked.
Worse.
Tighter.