6. Panel Discussion #3
Up close, the bright stage lighting made gold at the edge of her brown irises.
Her mic pack was gone now. The top button of her blazer hung open.
She looked composed enough to pass for untouched, but he saw the fatigue at the corners of her mouth and the live alertness under her skin.
Adrenaline, maybe. Irritation. Maybe both.
“You heard that?” he asked.
“I have excellent instincts for administrative menace.”
He huffed a laugh.
For a second they stood in the thinning backstage traffic while student volunteers hauled water bottles into a crate and someone folded extra chairs with metallic snaps.
From the lobby came the low roar of post-event voices, coffee urn lids knocking, all the false-casual conversation of academia trying to process something real without admitting it had been rattled.
Talia crossed her arms. “You went off-script.”
“So did you.”
A beat.
“Yes,” she said.
He looked at her then, directly. “Did I make your life harder?”
Her brows drew in very slightly, as if the question annoyed her on principle. “That depends.”
“On?”
“On whether tonight was a moment of conscience or a performance of conscience.”
There it was. No soft landing.
Noah’s jaw flexed. “You think I did that for applause?”
“I think you know how to hold a room,” she said. “I think you’re very good at saying difficult things in a way people can admire without immediately asking what action follows.”
The hit landed because there was truth in it. Enough truth to sting.
He stepped closer before he could decide not to. Not crowding. Just enough that the space between them stopped being public-neutral and started meaning something. “And you,” he said quietly, “are very good at acting like asking the hardest question in the room doesn’t cost you anything.”
Her chin lifted. “It costs me plenty.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
They were close enough now that he could smell her shampoo under the warm institutional air, something clean with a hint of citrus.
He could also smell coffee gone cold from the lobby and dust from the stage curtains and his own skin still carrying the sterile soap from the locker room showers.
Bright lights. Public building. Too many people one turn of the head away.
Noah kept his hands at his sides.
“I know enough,” he said.
Talia’s gaze dropped once, almost involuntarily, to the cuff of his jacket where the tape beneath pulled the fabric slightly uneven. “How’s the thumb?”
The question was so quiet it changed the air.
“Fine,” he said.
She looked up. “That was lazy.”
Despite everything, his mouth edged. “You grading my lies now?”
“When they’re that unoriginal, yes.”
“It’s sore.”
“How sore?”
He shrugged one shoulder. “Manageable.”
“Another beautifully vague answer.”
He leaned in a fraction, voice dropping. “You want specifics backstage at a university event?”
Color moved high into her cheeks, quick and gone. Not from embarrassment, he thought. From impact.
“Don’t do that,” she said.
“What?”
“Use humor when you feel cornered and then pretend the corner isn’t there.”
He stared at her.
Behind them, a student volunteer wheeled a cart past and deliberately looked nowhere near either of them.
Noah lowered his voice further. “You asked me if loyalty turns into dishonesty.”
“I asked the panel.”
“You asked me.”
“Yes.” No flinch. “I did.”
He nodded once. “Then ask the whole question.”
For the first time all evening, Talia seemed to hesitate.
Not from fear. From choice.
People moved around them. A laugh burst from the lobby and faded. A door opened somewhere down the hall, letting in a slice of cold that smelled faintly of snow and wet wool before shutting again.
When she spoke, her voice was calm enough to be mistaken for cool by anybody who didn’t know better.
“All right,” she said. “How long are you going to keep believing you can protect the team by deciding what truths they can survive?”
The words went through him so cleanly his body reacted before his face did. Pulse climbing. Shoulders tightening. Every old instinct telling him to deflect, end, redirect.
Instead he said, “That’s not what I’m doing.”
Talia’s look was merciless. “No?”
“No.” He held her eyes. “Sometimes I’m trying to buy people time.”
“For what?”
He had no good answer.
For panic to settle. For boys to become men overnight. For consequences to arrive slower. For the impossible fantasy that if he stood in front of the hit long enough, nobody smaller would feel it full-force.
His silence answered enough.
Talia exhaled and some of the steel in her face shifted, not disappearing but changing shape. “That’s what I thought.”
Anger rose fast, hot not because she was wrong but because she was close enough to touch the center of it.
“You think this is simple,” he said.
Her eyes flashed. “No. I think you prefer complicated if it lets you stay indispensable.”
That one was a body blow.
Noah went still.
In the lobby, applause broke out for something harmless and administrative. A photo, probably. A thank-you. A donor finding a microphone. Here backstage, the air seemed to tighten around the two of them until even breathing felt participatory.
Talia saw the hit. Of course she did.
For one raw second he thought she might soften it.
She didn’t.
Because she respected him too much for that.
His laugh came out low and unbelieving. “You really don’t miss.”
“Not when it matters.”
He looked at her mouth and wished, with an abrupt violence that shocked him, that they were anywhere else.
No stage. No faculty traffic. No branded backdrop ten yards away. No ethics panel still humming in the walls.
Just a hallway after an away game. A parking lot in the snow. An empty classroom smelling like marker ink and cold coffee. Somewhere private enough to ask what he actually wanted to ask, and dangerous enough that the answer might ruin him.
Instead he said, “You were good up there.”
The change in subject should have felt cheap. It didn’t. It felt like survival.
Something flickered in her expression. Weariness, maybe. Surprise. “So were you.”
“Thought you weren’t sure if I meant any of it.”
“I’m not sure what you’ll do with it,” she corrected.
Again with the precision.
He nodded slowly. “Fair.”
Talia glanced toward the lobby, where another staffer was clearly working up the nerve to come retrieve her. “I need to go make nice with three departments and at least one donor who thinks the word ethics means a parking restriction.”
Noah’s mouth twitched. “Sounds grim.”
“It is.” She shifted her notes against her hip. “And you need to decide whether that answer you gave onstage was true in a way that changes anything, or just true enough to sound brave.”
There was no kindness in the sentence. There was something better.
Trusting him to bear the weight of it.
The staffer took a step toward them.
Talia saw it, straightened, and the private current between them vanished under her public composure so quickly it was almost cruel. “Good night, Mr. Mercer.”
Noah looked at her, at the bright unyielding line of her posture, at the only woman on campus who could turn his own restraint into a challenge and make him want to earn his way back toward her anyway.
“Good night, Doctor Shah.”
She walked toward the lobby without looking back.
He stood where she left him, backstage under hot lights and the smell of dust and stale coffee, with his taped thumb throbbing and his pulse refusing to settle.
Through the curtain gap he could see the branded backdrop, the waiting faculty, the donors with their cups, the communications person scanning for him with a practiced smile.
Public Noah was still needed.
Of course he was.
He adjusted his cuff over the tape and started toward the light.
Then, from the hall beyond the lobby, he caught a flash of navy jackets and heard one sentence in a low, urgent administrative voice—
“—if the board moves tomorrow morning, hockey needs to be notified before media gets it—”
Noah stopped dead.