Chapter 4 #2
This is mine. This world—backpacks and syllabi laced with the anxiety of the rapidly approaching finals week—this is where I live. Where I make sense.
I stride toward the academic section without looking back at him.
It doesn’t matter.
He stays a half-step behind my left shoulder, close enough that I'm aware of his body heat even through my hoodie, close enough that when I stop to scan a shelf, he stops too. Not crowding me. Not touching me. Just there.
I pull two editions of the business journal from the shelf, comparing the tables of contents.
It could have waited, I could not. Not when, not knowing or controlling the events in my life was driving me crazy.
Plus, I wanted to pick at him. Childish, immature, stupid, but he deserves it.
How could he have left me hanging like that?
My eyes move down the page. I'm trying to focus. I can’t. I'm reading the same line for the third time because behind me he shifted his weight—barely anything, a half-inch adjustment, but my body registered it. My pulse climbs from the warmth at my back, and I'm furious with myself… With him.
I force my attention back to the index.
"Hey—sorry, are you in Dr. Okafor's section?"
I look up. The guy is maybe twenty-three, sandy-haired, wearing a worn university hoodie with the logo cracked at the edges. He's holding the same journal, open to the title page. His smile is so easy, and uncomplicated that I can’t help but return it.
"Yeah," I say. "Second edition?"
"That's what I'm trying to figure out." He tilts his head at the shelf. "The syllabus says second but the bookstore website listed the third and I've been standing here for like ten minutes."
"Second. The third changed chapter four and Okafor still uses the old format. I emailed the department."
He laughs—genuine, a little relieved. "You're a lifesaver. I'm Marcus, by the way."
"Jana."
He shifts closer to look at the edition markings on the spine I'm holding, and his shoulder nearly touches mine. It's nothing. The casual, thoughtless proximity of two people sharing a narrow aisle in a crowded store.
Behind me, the warmth moves.
It's subtle—a change in the air at my back, like the pressure has increased by a degree. Rafail hasn't touched me. He's made no sound. But every hair on the back of my neck rises responding to a storm that hasn’t arrived.
I keep my eyes on Marcus.
"Here—" He reaches past me, his arm brushing my sleeve, fingers closing on a copy from the upper shelf.
The stillness behind me deepens. It isn't tension exactly—it's the absence of movement where movement had been. I don't turn around. I don't have to.
Marcus is still talking. Something about the class schedule, about the section times. I hear the words but they've gone slightly distant because I'm caught between two presences—Marcus in front, and the wall of coiled quiet behind me that is louder than anything else in the room.
My pulse is unsteady. I should end this. Say, "Nice to meet you, good luck with finals”, and step away.
I don't.
Something petty, frustrated, and a little reckless keeps me right where I am. Marcus asks if I know whether there are separate study guides, and I answer.
You left me aching and walked away like it was nothing. The thought moves through me, quiet and vicious. Let's see how you like nothing.
Marcus touches my arm—light, brief, just a thank-you gesture as he says he'll grab the second edition—
A hand closes around my elbow from behind.
The contact hits me before I process it.
Fingers wrapping with a quiet, absolute certainty—not rough, not aggressive, just firm.
My breath catches. My body stills on pure instinct, and for one disorienting second every nerve ending in my arm is tuned entirely to the pressure of his grip, the warmth of his palm, the specific weight of those fingers.
Those hands. I know those hands. I know how they feel pressed into my hips, how they feel dragging up the inside of my thigh. My stomach drops.
"We're done here," Rafail says. His voice is even. Calm. Directed at me, not Marcus.
Marcus blinks. Steps back. Takes in Rafail with one quick, instinctive read of the situation and makes the smart choice. "Right—yeah. Thanks again, Jana."
He's gone before I can respond.
Rafail's hand drops from my elbow. The absence of it is immediate and specific—a cold patch where warmth was.
He steps around me, takes the manual, and walks toward the register. I stand there for exactly three seconds, hand pressed over my elbow.
Then I follow.
The ride back is silent. Not the comfortable kind.
The kind with edges. He drives with one hand on the wheel.
The other rests on his thigh, fingers loose, utterly relaxed—and I stare at those fingers and think about the elbow grab, the precise, unhurried authority of it, and I make myself look out the window.
The city passes. Neither of us speaks.
The silence accumulates like static charge, layer over layer, on and under my skin.
I'm aware of the distance between us—the center console, the gear shift, the eighteen inches of charged air—and I'm aware that eighteen inches is not enough.
I can smell him from here. That warm, dark note, resinous and specific, the scent I couldn't scrub out in the shower.
It sits in the confined space of the car and does not dissipate.
I watch his jaw in profile. The muscle there is tight.
Not dramatically—not the kind of tightness someone else would clock—but I've spent enough hours in close proximity to him now that I notice the difference between his neutral and his controlled.
Right now it's controlled. His thumb moves once against the wheel, a slow, deliberate stroke, and then stills.
I look back at the window.
My elbow still holds the ghost of his grip. I press my fingers over the spot and then make myself stop. The house comes into view. I exhale slowly and don't let him hear it.
We don’t speak. He follows me to my room and watches as I set the bookstore bag on the desk. The silence—the straight line of his spine, the set of his shoulders, belies the stillness of a man who is choosing every movement—and I snap.
"What was that?" I ask.
He turns. His expression is neutral. Composed. "What was what?"
"In the store." I cross my arms. "He was just asking about a textbook."
"I know what he was doing."
"Then you know it was nothing." I hold his gaze. "So what was that about?"
He doesn't answer immediately. He moves toward the window—of course—and stands with his back to the coastal landscape, facing me. The light is fading outside, and in the low interior light his gray eyes are mirrored shadows.
"Drop it," he says.
"No," I say. This is the line I shouldn’t cross, but I’m helpless to stop my momentum.
"I want to understand the rules here, because I'm not clear on them.
You bring me here. You—" I stop. Restart.
My jaw tightens. "You do what you did last night and then you walk away.
You don't want me in your bed, apparently.
Don't want me to have a conversation with another person.
So what exactly do you want from me? What is this? " I ask, waving my hand between us.
A muscle tics along his jaw and his bowstring lips have flattened into a single line.
"Because I have a theory," I continue. "I think you bought me because you could. I think this is about control and nothing else. I think you'd have done the same thing with anyone who looked at me in that store, whether you wanted me or not, because the point was never me—the point was the owning."
A storm crosses his face. Fast, controlled, gone before I can name it. But I saw it. A flicker behind the composure, a crack in the glass—brief and real and immediately sealed.
He takes a step toward me.
"I don't even know why you bought me," I press, and the words taste raw, but I don't stop. "You obviously don't want me. So I don't understand your game. I don't understand what you're doing."
"You think I don't want you?" It isn't a question. His voice has dropped a register.
"Based on last night—"
"Let me clarify."
He takes another step, and I hold my ground even though every nerve in my body is firing, screaming at me to step back, to put furniture between us, to create distance before the distance disappears entirely.
He stops close—too close, inside the margin of space I need to think clearly, close enough that the warmth radiating off his chest blankets me.
His eyes drop to my mouth. Come back up. The look lasts less than a second and I crumple inside. Become absolute mush, but I hold myself up and glare at him.
"I stopped," he says, low and even, "because I chose to. Not because I don't want you." A pause, measured and deliberate. "And in that store, watching him touch your arm—" Another pause, longer and heavier. "That told me something."
I can't breathe quite right. Can barely hear over the drumming rhythm of my own pulse, rampaging through my throat, wrists and low in my stomach.
"What did it tell you?" I ask. My voice wafting out in a whisper.
He doesn't answer.
He takes the final step—close enough now that his exhales brush against my forehead, close enough that if I moved even slightly forward we'd be touching.
My body stiffens with the effort of not moving.
My hands curl at my sides, fingers pressing into my palms, nails finding skin.
I hold very still and watch his face and wait, and my pulse is so loud I'm sure he can hear it.
His hand lifts. Slow. Deliberate.
The backs of his fingers graze my jaw—barely, the lightest possible contact, and my breath leaves in a sharp, audible exhale.
His eyes stay on mine. Dark and steady and waiting. Before he finally answers. “It tells me that I haven’t been clear. So let me clarify.”