Chapter 3 The Problem With Boys Who Don’t Quit

Star POV

I told Mia about the coffee cart on the walk to lunch.

I don’t know why I told her. I hadn’t planned to. It came out somewhere between the library steps and the main hall, casual, like it meant nothing, like I was reporting the weather.

She stopped walking.

“He was waiting at the cart,” she said slowly.

“Yes.”

“Your cart. The one you go to every Tuesday and Thursday after Lit.”

“It’s not my cart, Mia.”

“Star.” She grabbed my arm. “He looked up your schedule.”

I opened my mouth and then closed it because I had reached the same conclusion at the cart and chosen not to sit with it. Hearing her say it out loud made it harder to dismiss.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” I said.

“It means he asked around. It means he put in effort before he even said a word to you.” She started walking again but she was looking at me sideways. “You never tell me things like this right away. You usually sit on it for a week before you mention it’s even happening.”

“There was nothing to sit on. He showed up. I left.”

“You told me within an hour, Star.”

“I had nothing better to talk about.”

“You always have something better to talk about. You’re the most interesting boring person I know.” She bumped my shoulder, almost smiling now. “What did he say?”

“He said he wanted to know me.”

“And you said?”

“I said I was busy.”

“And he said?”

“He asked for my number.”

Mia made a sound I had never heard from her before. Something between a laugh and a scream that she swallowed before it fully escaped.

“What did you say?” she asked very carefully.

“I said goodbye and I left.”

She was quiet for four full steps.

“He’s not going to stop,” she said.

“They never think they’re going to stop.” I pushed open the door to the dining hall. “Then they stop.”

She didn’t answer that. She got her food and I got mine and we found our usual table by the window and for a while it was normal. Comfortable. The kind of lunch where nothing needed to be said.

Then Mia put down her fork.

“He looked at you like you were a problem he actually wanted to solve,” she said. “Not like the others. The others looked at you like a prize. He looked at you like a puzzle.”

“That’s worse,” I said.

“Is it?”

“A man who thinks I’m a puzzle thinks he’s eventually going to figure me out.” I picked up my water. “I’m not a puzzle. I’m just a person who knows what she wants.”

“And what do you want?”

I looked at her. “Not him.”

“Funny,” she said, “you didn’t even have to think about that one.”

“Some things don’t need thinking about.”

“Or you’ve gotten really good at deciding before you let yourself think,” she said, not unkindly. “There’s a difference, Star. One of them is confidence. The other one is armor.”

“I don’t need a metaphor with my lunch.”

“You need several. You just won’t sit still long enough for one to land.”

“There was nothing to think about.”

“There never is, with you. Until suddenly there is.” She picked her fork back up. “Okay.”

That okay again. The one that wasn’t really okay. I let it go and finished my lunch.

He was outside my afternoon class when I came out.

Not at the door. Not obviously waiting. He was sitting on the bench across the hall with his phone in his hand and his legs stretched out in front of him, relaxed, like he had all the time in the world and wasn’t particularly concerned with how he spent it.

He looked up the exact moment I walked out.

I stopped.

“You looked up my schedule,” I said.

“Good afternoon to you too.”

“That’s not a denial.”

He stood up slowly, pocketing his phone. He was wearing a simple grey shirt and he looked annoyingly, unreasonably calm. Like nothing I said was going to land the way I needed it to.

“I asked one person,” he said. “That’s not a crime.”

“It’s close.”

“It’s interested.”

“There’s a thin line.”

“Then I’m standing right on it.” He tilted his head slightly. “Walk with me.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to.”

“Or you just don’t like losing arguments?”

I looked at him for a long moment. He looked back without flinching, without smiling, without doing any of the things boys usually did when they were trying too hard. He was just steady. Present. Like he had already decided this conversation was going exactly the way he wanted.

That bothered me more than anything else. Most people folded under that kind of silence eventually, filling it with whatever they thought I wanted to hear. He just let it sit there between us like it cost him nothing at all.

“I don’t lose arguments,” I said quietly.

“Then prove it. Walk with me.”

I should have said no again. I had said no to better men with better arguments and felt absolutely nothing. I didn’t know why my feet moved. I told myself it was because standing in the hallway arguing was more attention than I wanted. I told myself it was practical.

I started walking.

He fell into step beside me without a word, no victory, no smile, nothing that said he thought he had won something. That bothered me too.

We walked out of the building into the late afternoon. The campus was busy around us, people moving in every direction, and nobody seemed to notice us or if they did I didn’t care.

“You’re not what I expected,” he said after a while.

“What did you expect?”

“Someone who was cold because they enjoyed it.”

“And?”

“You’re not cold.” He glanced at me. “You’re careful.”

Something about the word landed differently than I wanted it to. I kept my face even.

“You don’t know me,” I said.

“Not yet.”

“Not ever.”

He smiled then for the first time. Not the arrogant smile I had been waiting for, the one that would have made all of this easier. It was quieter than that. Almost private.

“You keep saying things like that,” he said.

“Because I mean them.”

“I know you do.” He stopped walking at the fork in the path that split toward the dorms. “That’s the part I find interesting.”

I stopped too and faced him fully. “Why are you doing this?”

The question came out more honest than I intended. He heard it. I could tell by the way something shifted in his expression, slight, barely there.

“Because you make me want to try,” he said.

I didn’t have an answer for that, and the fact that I didn’t bothered me far more than the question itself had any right to.

“Goodnight, Alex,” I said.

I turned and walked toward my dorm.

I made it exactly eleven steps before my phone buzzed in my pocket. An unknown number. One message.

Same time tomorrow?

I stopped walking.

My heart did something I was not going to give it permission to do.

I put my phone back in my pocket without responding and kept walking.

But I didn’t delete the number.