25. Amiyah
Chapter twenty-five
Amiyah
The Property Law elective is on the second floor of Duncan Hall, which means climbing a set of limestone stairs that smell like citrus polish and institutional anxiety before pushing through double doors carved with the names of every dean who ever ruled this building with an iron fist and a red pen.
Yesterday was a chaotic mess of orientation crowds and running into Jae on the quad, but today is Tuesday—which means my actual lecture schedule kicks off.
The room is exactly what you’d expect from something built in 1926: dark wood paneling that swallows sound and light, tall windows with original wavy glass that distort the quad outside into a green-and-blue blur, and a mahogany lectern at the front so massive it looks like a coffin.
The desks form a loose horseshoe—heavy, scarred oak with attached iron chairs that squeak if you so much as shift your weight, ensuring the whole room registers the exact second you lose focus.
I step through the doorway and freeze.
Jae Kim is sitting right in the center of the first row—dead center of the horseshoe—his chair angled toward the empty desk beside him.
His backpack is slouched on that surface, a black North Face bag with a frayed strap and a faded patch I recognize from roughly eight thousand hours of Discord streams, occupying the polished wood like a squatting tenant.
He took my spot. Front row, center—the exact coordinate I claim in every lecture I’ve taken since freshman year. And he saved the desk right next to him.
Something slips in my face.
It’s a sudden, traitorous twitch at the corner of my mouth that tries to pull upward before my brain catches it and slams the emergency brake. My expression recalibrates instantly. Cheek muscles lock. Chin sets. Eyes flatten into a cool, neutral shield.
I walk straight down the middle aisle, my sandals clicking against the floorboards while the heavy brass key ring attached to my tote bag jingles with every step.
Jae doesn’t turn around, though his shoulders shift as he types on his laptop, the soft thwack of the keys cutting through the pre-lecture hum.
I reach the empty desk in the middle of the front row. His bag sits right on the dark grain, smelling faintly of cedar, cold morning air, and something warm that belongs entirely to him—a scent that has no business feeling this familiar.
I set my tote down, pulling out my laptop, notebook, and pen. I align everything neatly on the wood—no messy overlap, no wasted space—and sit without giving him a single glance, refusing to acknowledge that the space between our chairs suddenly feels three degrees warmer than the rest of the room.
Damn him for being so effortlessly courteous.
Literally, how dare he.
The iron chair groans under my weight. Jae’s fingers go still over his keyboard.
The sudden silence is heavy, loaded with the quiet certainty of someone who knew the exact second I entered his orbit.
Then, without a word, he sweeps his backpack off the desk and drops it onto the floor.
The movement is fluid, unthinking—the kind of casual politeness that makes my throat tighten because it wasn't performed for an audience.
Now his desk is clear, my notebook has room to breathe, and my internal tailspin over a moved bag is something I’ll dissect later.
He’s staring straight ahead at the empty lectern, but the corner of his mouth is hitched up in a slow, quiet smirk. He doesn’t look over—just sits there looking like a guy who’d just pulled off a quiet heist.
“Are you fucking stalking me?” I murmur, keeping my voice low enough that it doesn't carry across the front row.
“It’s a possibility,” he grins.
I glare at the side of his head, leaning an inch closer so he can feel the sharp edge of my whisper. “You swapped your schedule. We talked about our electives two weeks ago, Jae. You were supposed to be in Bioethics on the other side of campus right now.”
Jae finally turns his head, propping his jaw on his hand. His dark eyes glitter with a lazy, deliberate innocence that makes my blood pressure spike.
“Bioethics was full,” he says softly, his tone entirely reasonable.
“And as a future practice owner, I actually need to understand commercial leases, zoning regulations, and property disputes before I sign my name on a clinic building. It’s called long-term professional planning, Amiyah. You should be proud of me.”
I stare at him, my jaw tightening as I search for a flaw in his logic and find absolutely nothing.
“You're insufferable,” I mutter, snapping my eyes back to my screen.
“You're welcome for saving your seat,” he whispers back.
“Get fucked,” I breathe, keeping my lips barely moving as I align my notebook with the edge of the desk.
The professor arrives before he can hit me with a reply.
She’s short, sharp-featured, with a gray bob so precise it looks drawn with an architect's ruler, and wire-rimmed glasses hanging from a beaded chain around her neck.
She drops a thick leather binder onto the lectern three feet in front of us, adjusts the microphone, and begins roll call.
“Anderson.”
“Here.”
“Bishop.”
“Present.”
The list drones on in the dead air, each answer dropping like a stone onto dry floorboards. Beside me, Jae settles back. His breathing slows into a steady, deep rhythm—distinct from the ambient rustle of eighty people opening highlighters.
Before she reaches the Gs, Jae leans sideways.
His shoulder presses into mine—a deliberate, warm contact through his shirt that lingers just long enough for his breath to touch my cheek.
“You must have missed me so much you dragged your feet so I'd get here first,” he murmurs.
His accent thickens when he whispers—the consonants rounding off, the vowels stretching into a cadence that turns English into something far too smooth for a nine-thirty lecture. The low vibration hits my skin before the sentence fully registers, and my pulse spikes out of control.
I keep my eyes locked on my composition book, my pen poised half an inch above the paper.
“You followed me into this class, you cuntgrunt,” I say, keeping my tone level and laced with lethal precision. “Face forward before I cite you for harassment.”
“Go ahead,” he replies softly, tilting his head just enough that his attention focuses entirely on my profile. “I'll hire you as my defense.”
From the corner of my eye, I catch the clean line of his jaw—stubble shadowing his skin, sharp enough to cut glass—and the quiet, deliberate way he tilts his head.
He’s wearing those thin, black-framed glasses today, the ones he only puts on when he’s staring at a screen for hours or trying to pretend he’s paying attention.
They sit low on his nose, making him look unfairly, outrageously hot in a way that should be illegal in a nine-thirty lecture.
His forearms are resting flat on the desk, the sleeve of his shirt pulled back just enough to show the corded muscle from months of weight training. The rest of the room is fidgeting, tapping feet, clicking pens—and Jae is just sitting there, completely relaxed, radiating heat like a furnace.
He turns his head slightly, his eyes tracking down my profile.
It’s not subtle. His gaze drags slow and heavy from my temple down to my collarbone, and every nerve ending under my skin goes up in flames.
My throat tightens. My chest aches with a sudden, suffocating panic because how is he doing this without even trying?
I hold out for forty-seven seconds.
Then I snap my eyes sideways to glare at him.
He’s already waiting. The smirk has softened into something quieter, warmer—the curve of his mouth when he’s caught me dropping my guard and has no intention of letting it slide. His dark eyes lock onto mine for less than a second, but it hits with the sudden shock of a dropped weight in my chest.
A sudden, hot sting crawls up the back of my neck.
It spreads across my throat, rushing into my cheeks until my skin stings. The warmth is immediate, total, a flush so fierce I’m convinced the professor is going to stop roll call just to point it out.
I snap my head forward. My pink pen digs into the paper, dragging a dark, jagged line down the margin as I grip the plastic barrel hard enough to turn my knuckles white.
Jae says nothing.
He doesn't offer a cocky follow-up or acknowledge the absolute trainwreck of my composure happening three inches to his left. He just settles back into his chair, leaving the silence between us heavy, warm, and entirely on his terms.
For the next fifty minutes, Professor Vance lays out Property Law 402: Land Use, Zoning, and Regulatory Takings.
Required readings. Cold-call policies. Grading curves.
The details of a course I signed up for because the timing worked and the professor had stellar reviews—and absolutely not because it shared a building with Corporate Taxation, a detail I will take to my grave.
My fingers fly across my MacBook keyboard, transcribing the syllabus verbatim while I use my pink pen to annotate key dates in the margin of my notebook.
Each keystroke is measured, my posture locked—shoulders back, spine straight, chin level—performing absolute control so convincingly my body might actually buy it if my peripheral vision wasn't betraying me.
It tracks every movement of his hands. The way his long fingers wrap around a cheap black ballpoint. The shift of his shoulder when he reaches to turn a page. The subtle expansion of his chest when he inhales.
The professor talks about easements and restrictive covenants, her voice a dry, rhythmic drone. The clock above the double doors ticks with agonizing slowness, each minute stretching out like wire.
I do not look at Jae.
I look at my screen. At the blackboard. At the wavy glass windows where the quad is a green smear.
I look anywhere except the six inches of oak desk to my right, where Jae sits with an athlete's posture, a criminal smile, and that faint shadow of a dimple, completely unbothered by the chaos he just created.
The lecture ends. The professor dismisses us with a brief nod and a reminder that our first case brief is due Friday. Chairs scrape. Backpack zippers whine. The room explodes into the noise of ninety people gathering their belongings.
My MacBook snaps shut with a sharp, metallic click.
Notebook tucked under my arm, tote bag slung over my shoulder in one fluid motion, I am on my feet before the echo of my chair finishes bouncing off the wood.
I step into the corridor without looking back, merging into the post-lecture traffic like a woman with everywhere to be and absolutely nothing on her mind.
The stairwell is quiet and cool after the airless heat of the lecture hall, though the flush on my neck refuses to fade. My sandals click a steady beat against the stone steps as I march downstairs, listing every logical reason Jae Kim sitting beside me for the next sixteen weeks is a non-issue.
It’s just an elective.
He needs it for his clinic.
It’s just six inches of oak desk.
I push open the heavy exterior doors and step out onto the quad, letting the morning breeze cool the skin beneath my collar. I adjust my tote bag, lock my shoulders back, and pretend I don't still feel the precise spot where his shoulder pressed against mine through my shirt.
I am in complete control of the situation.
And I have forty-eight hours to figure out how to survive Thursday.