20. Office Hours #3
Noah looked down at their hands, then back up. “I’m not great at that yet.”
“No.” Her voice gentled. “You are not.”
He huffed a breath that almost became a laugh. “Brutal.”
“Honest.”
He stepped in again, close enough that her knee brushed his thigh. “Then maybe you can let me practice.”
Talia’s mouth curved. “That was smoother.”
“Don’t say that like you’re grading me.”
“I am always grading you a little.”
He groaned. “That’s so bleak.”
“And still, here you are.”
Here he was.
Not in a locker room with boys becoming men around a coach’s bark and the hot stink of sweat in pads. Not under stadium lights with his taped hand throbbing and his face on a screen. Not at a podium being asked to compress a moral failure into a clean quote.
In a classroom with confetti at the baseboards and snow at the windows, with a woman who had seen every polished version of him and waited—stubbornly, brilliantly—for the unvarnished one.
Noah bent and pressed his forehead to hers.
This time he didn’t need the excuse of fatigue to do it.
“Thank you,” he said.
Talia went still. “For choosing you?”
“For making it impossible to hide from myself and then not leaving when I stopped.”
Something in her breath hitched. Small, but there.
When she spoke, her voice was lower. “You did the stopping.”
“Not alone.”
“No,” she said. “Not alone.”
He kissed her once more, softer than before, and felt her smile against his mouth.
Then, because she was exactly who she was and he adored her for it, she drew back and looked pointedly at his stance.
“You are favoring that leg.”
“Am I?”
“Yes.”
He straightened with a sigh. “I hate that you notice everything.”
“That is not true. You rely on it constantly.”
He considered, then nodded. “Also true.”
Talia reached for the brownie tin, closed the lid, and held it out to him. “Take these with you.”
He blinked. “Excuse me?”
“You need to share them with your team before Owen weaponizes holiday sugar deprivation.”
Noah took the tin automatically, offended on principle. “I brought these for you.”
“And I am keeping two.” She pointed to the napkin and the half she’d abandoned. “I am also preventing your apartment from becoming a shrine to nervous baking.”
He looked at the tin, then at her. “That’s strangely intimate.”
“It is logistically sound.”
“Right. Of course. Logistics.”
She smiled, softer now. “Come by tomorrow before I leave, if you want.”
The simple offer struck him harder than anything ornate could have.
“When?” he asked.
“I have office hours from ten to noon.” A beat. “Real office hours. Not scandal-adjacent ones.”
His laugh came easy. “I know what office hours are.”
“Do you? Historically, your attendance has been highly agenda-based.”
“Unfair. I was very committed to my education.”
“In ethics?”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. “You’re enjoying this too much.”
“Immensely.”
He stepped backward toward the door, brownie tin in hand, because if he stayed he was going to kiss her until the light died completely and her students never got their final grades. At the threshold he stopped.
Talia had already turned back toward the desk, collecting papers again, but she looked up when she felt him watching.
“What?” she asked.
Noah took her in—the sweater, the ink-smudged fingers, the ruthless comments in the margins, the confetti by the radiator, the snow beyond the windows.
He had spent so much of his life trying to be what a room required. Steady son. Easy teammate. Good brother. Smiling alternate captain. Public version fit for cameras, for alumni, for the endless appetite of everyone who loved athletes most when they stayed legible.
This felt nothing like that.
This felt like being chosen after the performance ended.
“Nothing,” he said, and then because he had promised himself he would say the true thing faster: “I’m just really happy I came in.”
Her face changed, that private softness she never wasted where it didn’t belong. “So am I.”
He nodded once and opened the door.
The hallway air met him cold at first, then warming by degrees as the building’s old heat found him again. Behind him, paper rustled. Ahead, campus waited under snow and break silence and whatever came after a season in which he had finally learned the line between caretaking and honesty.
His phone buzzed before he’d gone three steps.
Owen, of course.
WHERE ARE YOU REED IS TRYING TO EAT TROPHY CEREAL AGAIN ALSO DID YOU GET THE brOWNIES OR AM I FORCED TO MUTINY
Noah looked back through the narrow window in the door.
Talia had sat on the edge of the desk now, red pen in hand, one ankle crossed over the other, reading with the kind of concentration that made the rest of the world feel underqualified. As if she sensed him there, she lifted her eyes.
She didn’t wave.
She just looked at him—clear, direct, entirely unhidden—and tipped her chin once toward the hallway, toward the rest of his life.
Go.
Noah smiled to himself and started walking, the dented tin warm in his hand, his body sore, his future unwritten, and for the first time in a very long time, not mistaking any of that uncertainty for fear.