20. Office Hours
Office Hours
Confetti had migrated under the radiator like it intended to outlive the scandal.
The classroom door stood open a few inches, the old brass closer hissing softly each time winter air moved through the corridor.
Outside, North Lake had gone almost eerily quiet with break underway.
No tide of undergrads dragging boots over tile.
No backpacks hitting chair backs. No frantic half-whispered bargaining about extensions.
Just the hum of old heat, the distant clank of some custodial cart on another floor, and the thin gray light of a Minnesota afternoon laying itself over campus like fatigue.
Noah paused in the doorway with the dented brownie tin in one hand.
Talia stood at the front table in a cream sweater and dark trousers, sleeves pushed to her forearms, sorting a stack of marked papers into brutal little piles.
Red comments climbed every page in narrow, exact handwriting.
Her hair was down today, not loose exactly, but caught low at the nape in the kind of knot that said she’d done it quickly and forgotten about it.
A few pieces had already escaped around her face.
There was confetti at the baseboard by the wall and one bright silver strip caught under the leg of a desk, absurdly cheerful in the middle of all that winter stillness.
She glanced up.
Her gaze moved first to his face, then to the tin, then back to his face.
“You look,” she said, “like either a man about to apologize or a man about to commit carbohydrate-related bribery.”
Noah leaned against the door frame, careful with his leg. “Can’t it be both?”
Her mouth twitched.
God, he liked earning that now. Not the easy smile he could get out of half a room by reflex. This one. Specific. Chosen.
He stepped inside and nudged the door mostly shut behind him. “I knocked.”
“You did not.”
“I thought about knocking.”
“That is not the same action.”
“Feels spiritually adjacent.”
Talia set down the papers in her hand. “Mercer.”
There it was. The tone that used to make him brace for a takedown and now mostly made his pulse kick in a way that had nothing to do with hockey.
He held up the tin. “Peace offering.”
She folded her arms. “I’m listening.”
“They’re less burnt this time.”
“An inspiring slogan.”
He laughed softly and crossed to the nearest student desk, setting the brownie tin down among blue books, a mug gone cold, and a stack of ethics journals with fluorescent tabs bleeding from the edges.
The room smelled like dust, old coffee, paper, dry-erase marker, and faintly—because he’d carried the damn thing across half of campus—dark chocolate and sugar.
Not burnt sugar this time. Close, rich, warm.
He’d baked them that morning in his apartment while the campus slept and the team group chat refused to.
Owen had sent a video at 7:03 a.m. of someone using the conference trophy as a cereal bowl.
Reed had responded with a threat. Jace had added three wolf emojis and one message that had just read, in all caps, DRINK WATER OR DIE. Family, loud and frayed and honest.
His body still felt like a game had happened in it.
Bruise-deep soreness in his thighs. The drag in his hip every time he turned too quickly.
His left thumb taped under the cuff of his sweater because the skin still felt naked without the familiar spiral, even though the swelling had finally started to ease.
Last night’s rink chill seemed lodged in his lungs, phantom-cold and metallic, mixed with the remembered roar of a crowd that had wanted them to fail beautifully on national television.
And here she was in a nearly empty classroom, sorting papers as if that noise belonged to another planet.
Private vulnerability behind the public image, he thought, except this time it wasn’t just his.
“You’re still working,” he said.
“It may shock you to learn the university did not suspend grading because the men’s hockey team became temporarily capable of moral clarity.”
He grinned. “Temporary?”
“I’m preserving my options.”
Talia moved around the table, collecting another stack. “I’m trying to finish these before I go see my parents tomorrow. If I leave them until January, I’ll hate myself and all my students equally.”
He watched her slide the pages into a canvas tote. “You’re going home-home?”
“For three days.” She gave him a look. “Some of us have families who require strategic planning in manageable doses.”
“Mine just texts me recipes and asks if I’m sleeping enough.”
“That sounds invasive in a different register.”
“It is.”
He said it lightly, but her eyes flicked to him, reading the underlayer the way she always did.
Noah reached for the tin, opened it, and peeled back the sheet of wax paper. The smell deepened immediately, warm chocolate and browned butter, a little salt. Domestic in a way that still felt almost embarrassingly intimate on him.
Talia came still.
“Noah.”
He looked up. “Yeah?”
That was all. Just his name, and his answer to it, and somehow the room tightened.
She set the tote down. “I heard from the board chair this morning. The release caused chaos for exactly four hours, then everyone discovered there wasn’t actually enough blood in it to sustain a national feeding frenzy.”
He lifted a shoulder. “That must’ve disappointed several producers.”
“Profoundly.” Her expression turned wry. “The policy recommendations are what they should have been all along. Specific. Boring. Structural. Which means they’ll save more students than any dramatic purge would.”
He nodded once. “Good.”
“It is good.” She looked at him for a beat. “You’re allowed to say more than one syllable.”
“I know.” He rested his hip against a desk. “I’m just trying not to ruin this by making it about me.”
Talia’s brows rose. “That is either growth or fatigue.”
“Can’t it be both?”
Now she did smile.
He loved that she never gave it away cheaply. Loved, too, that he knew that word now and didn’t need to perform indifference around it.
Outside the broad classroom windows, snow drifted in fine diagonal lines past the brick of the opposite academic building.
The campus quad was mostly empty except for one bundled facilities worker pushing a shovel along a path that had already started disappearing again.
Inside, fluorescent light hummed over rows of desks scarred with initials and half-sanded gum marks.
Someone had left “SEE ME” on the corner of the whiteboard in blue marker beneath a list of final paper prompts Talia hadn’t erased yet.
Noah looked at that, then at her.
“You okay?” he asked.
That got her full attention. “That is a loaded question.”
“It’s meant sincerely.”
“I know.” She tipped her head. “Which is what makes it dangerous.”
He absorbed that and nodded. Fair.
Talia exhaled and leaned back against the front table, palms braced on the edge behind her. “I’m relieved,” she said. “I’m angry at half the institution. I’m proud of some of the outcomes. I’m tired enough to become violent if one more administrator uses the phrase lessons learned in my vicinity.”
That drew a real laugh from him.
She continued, quieter, “And I am… recalibrating.”
He felt his own posture shift. “Because it’s over.”
“Because that part is over,” she corrected. “Investigations end. Effects don’t.”
Noah looked down at his taped thumb where it rested against the desk edge.
He understood effects. Under the tape, the joint was still swollen, still stiff if he bent it too far. A thing technically on its way to healed that still answered every careless movement with pain.
“The room’s weird without the fight in it,” he said.
Talia watched him closely. “Your room or this one?”
He glanced around. “Both.”
From the doorway came the faint scrape-hiss of the closer settling again. Heat pushed unevenly through the radiator under the windows. Somewhere in the hall, a copier woke up and began making its dry mechanical throat-clearing noises. The whole building felt suspended between uses.
Noah took a brownie from the tin and tore it in half more out of nerves than hunger. Steam no longer rose off it, but the middle was still soft. He held one half toward her.
She eyed it with caution. “You’re eating the first one?”
“I’m not making you a test subject again.”
“An encouraging benchmark.”
When she stepped closer to take it, their fingers brushed. Tiny contact. Stupidly electric.
He swallowed and made himself stay where he was.
This was the thing now. Not charging at wanting because wanting finally had room. Not turning care into pressure. Not taking a softened moment and using it as cover to grab more than was offered.
Take care of your people first.
The code was still his. It had not become wrong just because he’d used it badly before. The difference was that now he knew care had to include the truth of what the other person wanted, not just what he could provide.
Talia bit into the brownie. Closed her eyes for one brief second.
“Well?” he asked.
She chewed, considering him with insulting seriousness. “Annoyingly good.”
Relief moved through him so fast it was almost comical. “That was a long pause for annoyingly good.”
“I wanted to make sure I wasn’t being manipulated by texture.”
He barked a laugh. “You are impossible.”
“And yet you brought baked goods to my office.”
“Classroom.”
She glanced around. “Semantics.”
He set his untouched half down on the desk. “Talia.”
This time his voice changed enough that she stilled.
The room got very quiet in that old way he remembered from their first real conversations—the dense quiet before someone finally admitted the truth.
Noah pushed off the desk and stood straight despite what his leg thought about it. “I didn’t come here to do a speech.”
“Thank God.”
“Rude.”
“Accurate.”
He breathed in through his nose, catching chalk dust, coffee gone cold, and chocolate. “I came because all week, all month, maybe all season, I kept trying to make myself useful enough that whatever else was true about me would matter less.”
Her face didn’t soften. It steadied.