Chapter 5 DR. WEST

Cora's POV

I am three minutes late and already arguing with myself.

Demi told me this morning to drop the class. Just go to the registrar, swap sections, problem solved. "You don't need the complication," she said, watching me get ready with the specific expression she wears when she already knows how something ends.

I told her I was not dropping a required course for my major because of one bad night.

She said, "Was it a bad night?"

I did not answer that. I picked up my bag and left.

Now I am jogging across the quad in the wrong shoes and telling myself this is fine. It has been three days. He is a professional. I am a professional. We are two adults who made a mistake and are now going to look each other in the eye and move past it cleanly because that is what mature people do.

I push open the classroom door.

Thirty seconds later, he walks in.

I see him before he sees me.

He comes through the door with his bag on one shoulder, jacket, no tie, moving with that same unhurried steadiness I noticed at the bar, like a man who has never once rushed for anything because he decided a long time ago that rushing was beneath him. He sets his bag on the desk. He pulls out a marker. He still has not looked up.

The girl next to me is whispering something to her friend about the syllabus. Someone's phone buzzes. Everything is completely normal.

He looks up.

The air goes out of my body as I walk into a wall.

His eyes find me in about half a second. Third row, slightly left, I watched his gaze move there directly, like he already knew. One second. One single second where everything in his face shifts, not much, just enough, just a crack in the surface, and I see it. Shock, recognition, something that might be panic if panic could be quiet.

Then it is gone.

Completely gone.

He turns to the board. His hand moves in clean, even strokes.

DR. NOLAN WEST.

The room copies his name into their notebooks. I watch my own hand write it without telling it to. My body is doing the normal things while my brain is stuck three nights ago in a dark apartment talking about Fitzgerald.

He caps the marker. He faces us.

"Literary Theory," he says. His voice is the same. Same register, same calm. "This course is going to make you uncomfortable. That is not a side effect. That is the point." He moves to the side of the desk. "We are going to spend this semester looking at the stories people tell about themselves and asking one question: Who benefits from that story being true?"

The class shifts forward slightly. He has that quality, the kind of presence that makes a room lean in without knowing it.

I know that quality. I felt it three nights ago when he asked me why I drew the line between studying something and being it.

I look down at my notebook.

His name is at the top of the page in my own handwriting.

I draw a line through it. Then I feel absurd and close the notebook entirely.

Fifty minutes. I sit through fifty minutes of a lecture I cannot absorb. I catch pieces, something about constructed identity, something about the stories we perform versus the ones we live, but every time I find the thread, his voice pulls me somewhere else, and I lose it again.

He does not look at me.

Not once. Not even accidentally. Most professors sweep the room when they talk, eyes moving across faces. He does it too, left side to right, right side to left. But every single time his gaze crosses the third row, it goes slightly above my head, like I am a fixed point he has decided to navigate around.

He knows exactly where I am.

He is working very hard not to look at me.

Somehow, that is worse than if he had stared.

When the class ends, I do not move. Students close laptops and shuffle out around me, and I sit with my hands flat on the closed notebook and stare at the board. At his name. At the two neat words that turned my required course into a disaster, with a credit count.

The room empties.

I am still there.

"Ms. Jennings."

My head snaps up. He is standing at the front of the room. Everyone else is gone. He did not leave with them. He is holding his bag and looking at me with that careful blank expression, and I understand suddenly that he waited. He let the room empty and then said my name, which means he knew my name before I walked in today.

He looked at the roster.

He knew.

"You should go," he says. Quiet. Not unkind. "You'll be late to your next class."

I stand up slowly. "Did you know?" I ask. "Before Monday. Did you know I was in this section?"

He holds my gaze for three full seconds.

"Go to class, Ms. Jennings," he says.

Not a yes. Not a no.

I pick up my bag. I walk to the door. My hand is on the frame when I stop, because something just landed in my chest, and I need to say it out loud, or it is going to sit there forever.

"You looked at the roster," I say, without turning around. "You knew my name before I walked in today. And you still didn't transfer me out."

Silence.

I turn around. He is looking at me. Really looking, for the first time since he walked in, and his expression is not blank anymore. It is something careful and complicated and honest in a way that makes my stomach drop straight to the floor.

He does not say anything.

He does not have to.

I go straight to the registrar's office after my next class.

I ask about switching sections.

The woman behind the desk types for a moment, then looks up.

"Section Four is the only section of Literary Theory this semester," she says. "Dr. West's the only faculty member teaching it."

She tilts her head. "Is there a problem?"

I think about his face when he finally looked at me. That careful, complicated, honest thing.

"No," I hear myself say. "No problem."

I walk out.

I have no idea what I just decided.

I'm not sure he does either.