12. Amiyah
Chapter twelve
Amiyah
Monday morning hits different when you walk into a lecture hall and find a pink rose sitting on your seat like it owns the place.
I stop in the doorway. Students push past me on both sides, backpacks swinging, sneakers squeaking against the tile. I let them. My eyes are fixed on the flower.
A single pink rose. Placed in the center of my chair with a precision that suggests intention rather than accident.
I pick it up, hold it at arm’s length the way you might hold a venomous snake—with respect, curiosity, and a healthy dose of suspicion.
The stem has been trimmed at a precise angle, the cut clean and deliberate. No thorns remain. Each petal is perfectly formed, the color a deep blush that fades to almost white at the edges.
My gaze sweeps the lecture hall in a practiced arc—door to window, front row to back row, seat by seat, face by face.
Professional habit.
I clock Jae’s face almost instantly.
He’s sitting in the very back row. Last seat on the far left, tucked against the wall like he’s trying to become part of the architecture.
This is better, actually.
He's back there, I'm up here, there's twenty feet of breathing room between us and that is objectively an improvement. I hope he stays there. I hope he loves it back there. I hope he makes a little home in the last row and never moves again.
I sit down, and set the rose on the desk. Opening my binder, I align it with the edge of the surface, and place my pen case to the right with the focus of a woman who is completely, totally, one hundred percent unbothered.
The rose sits there.
Pink.
Fragrant.
Smug.
Professor Chen walks in at 8:02 and greets the class. There is a collective mumble of “good morning” from the class before he begins.
The lecture starts and he begins flipping through slides.
I write it all down. Pink for key concepts, yellow for case citations, blue for Chen's asides. My notes build neatly on the page. United States v. Roberts, 848 F.2d 906. Chain of custody protocols. Documentation requirements. The dry bureaucratic architecture of making sure evidence stays evidence.
The rose sits at the edge of my desk and smells faintly expensive.
I do not look at it because I am taking notes.
I am a serious law student with a 4.0 GPA and a color-coded organizational system and absolutely no feelings about flowers left anonymously on chairs by men who have relocated themselves to the back row, pretending they’re invisible when they are, in fact, the single most visible person in the room.
By the time Chen gets to the last slide, I have two and a half pages of notes and zero thoughts about roses.
Well, almost zero.
Class dismisses, and I close my binder with a soft, final sound and sit for exactly three seconds while the room empties around me. Then I pick up the rose, stand, and walk to the back row.
This asshole has another thing coming if he thinks he can just drop a flower on my seat and retreat to the goddamn cheap seats like nothing happened.
Jae looks up when I’m about four feet away. His expression does that thing where it rearranges itself too slowly, like he was expecting me but is performing surprise anyway.
“Hey there, hotshot,” he says, pleasantly.
I wish he would stop with the stupid name already.
“What the hell is this?” I hold the rose out between us.
He considers it. “Looks like a rose to me.”
God, he is fucking infuriating.
“It was on my seat.”
“Interesting,” he replies, in the tone of a man who does not find it interesting at all and is simply toying with me.
I look at the flower, glaring up at him and then I set it down on the desk directly in front of him, stem pointing toward him, petals facing me, a clean transfer of property.
“Keep it,” I say. “I don’t want it.”
His mouth shifts.
“You don’t want it.” he repeats.
“I don’t want it.”
“Okay,” he says, and does not touch it.
I cross my arms. “Why are you sitting back here?”
He tilts his head toward the front of the room. “You said I was sitting too close.”
“I said you were in my personal space.”
“And now I am not in your personal space.” He spreads his hands in a gesture of peaceful compliance. “I solved the problem.”
“Solved the problem? By what? Moving to the back of the classroom like a punished child?”
“I was being considerate.”
“You were being dramatic.”
He laughs then, a short, genuine sound that he doesn’t seem to have planned on making.
“There is no making you happy,” he says, and he sounds genuinely delighted by this, like it’s a puzzle he’s decided to enjoy rather than solve.
“One week I am too close. The next week I am too far. What is the correct distance, Amiyah? Should I measure it? Bring a ruler?”
My jaw tightens, the muscles in my cheeks working overtime to keep my expression neutral when every instinct I have is screaming at me to wipe that smirk off his face with my bare hands.
“There is no correct distance when you’re actively trying to annoy me, smart ass,” I snap, my voice tight.
His smile doesn’t waver. If anything, it turns into a wider, and more infuriating smile that makes my blood pressure spike.
“Am I annoying you?” he asks, his eyes crinkling at the corners, “Because from where I’m sitting, it seems like you’re the one who came all the way to the back row to talk to me. And to me, that seems like an awful lot of effort to expend on someone who annoys you.”
I open my mouth. Close it.
He watches me with that dark gaze of his. He’s enjoying this.
Fucker.
“I came back here to return your flower,” I say.
“You don’t know it’s mine.”
“I know it’s yours.”
“Do you?”
“Who else would leave a pink rose on my chair?”
He leans back, completely at ease in his back-row kingdom, and folds his arms behind his head. “Maybe it was a secret admirer.”
“Ughhhh! You are impossible.” I groan.
“I’m impossible,” he agrees, with a smile that makes heat pool in my lower stomach, “But you’re the one standing here.”
He’s right.
I’m trained better than this. I am a fucking assassin with a perfect kill record and a carefully constructed life, and somehow I’m letting this man with his stupid accent and his stupid smile and his stupid rose dismantle my composure like it’s made of wet tissue paper.
I stand there, staring at him, and for one terrible second I can’t think of a single thing to say.
My brain—the same brain that can recite case law from memory, that can calculate trajectory and wind speed in under three seconds, that can lie to federal agents with a smile—has completely short-circuited.
“You know what,” I grind out, “Keep the flower and whatever little game you’re playing. I have class.”
I turn on my heel and walk back down the aisle, toward the door.
His voice stops me.
“See you Thursday, hotshot.” he calls out.
I flip him off without turning around. The gesture is crude, juvenile, and deeply beneath me, but I commit to it with the full force of my irritation, my middle finger extended skyward as I push through the double doors into the hallway.
In my opinion, I just won this debate.