Rylem’s World

“Dr. Calloway?”

He looked up but didn’t catch who had spoken. The entire seminar was watching him. He realized he was silent long enough to gather attention.

Calloway looked down at the card in his hand, then back at the room. Over sixty faces were staring at him.

Where did this come from.

“Let’s continue,” he said as he slid the card into his jacket pocket and returned to the page. “Winters, since you clearly need the help, find the passage on page 243 and read it aloud. The whole paragraph.”

Winters found the page. He started reading.

Calloway stood at the lectern and felt the card in his pocket and did not think about it, because there was nothing to think about. It was a card. Someone had put it in his book as a prank or by accident, and it meant nothing, and he was not going to think about it.

His hand moved to his jacket pocket and pressed flat against it from the outside as Winters kept reading.

Winters was halfway through a paragraph when he was interrupted.

“Stop,” Calloway said.

“Sorry?”

“I said stop. It is clear that you do not understand it.” But right at the end of speaking, Dr. Calloway’s voice cracked. A clean upward break in the middle of the word “understand,” his voice splitting from its usual flat baritone into something lighter and higher before he caught it and pulled it back down.

The room noticed. He could see it in the way three people looked up from their notes at exactly the same moment.

“As I was saying,” he continued, his voice back where it belonged, steady and level. He did not acknowledge it. He moved on.

But thirty seconds later it happened again. Mid-sentence, the word “structure” coming out with a ring to it that was not his voice at all. He stopped, cleared his throat, and looked down at his notes.

“The supplement,” he said carefully, testing the register, “does not simply add to presence.” His voice held. He breathed out slowly through his nose.

Winters, apparently emboldened by whatever he had seen cross Calloway’s face a moment ago, raised his hand. “Dr. Calloway, I still don’t see why the supplement can’t just be read as…”

“Because,” Calloway said, and the word came out sharp and bright and entirely too quick, with an impatience that had an edge to it he didn’t recognize as his own, “that reading ignores literally everything Derrida establishes in the previous chapter, which you would know if you’d done the reading, which you clearly haven’t, so.”

The room went completely still.

Calloway heard the sentence replay in his head. The rhythm of it was wrong. The word “literally.” The “so” at the end, trailing off. That was not how he spoke. He had never ended a sentence with “so” in his professional life.

Winters stared at him.

“Moving on,” Calloway said, and the warmth that had been sitting along his jaw moved downward through his throat and into his chest all at once, and he gripped the edge of the lectern with both hands.

It hit his stomach like a fist. A deep, rolling pressure that started below his ribcage and pushed outward in both directions, and his knees buckled very slightly before he locked them. He bent forward over the lectern, both hands white-knuckled on the edge, and stared at the page in front of him without reading a single word on it.

“Dr. Calloway?” Priya’s voice, careful and close.

“I’m fine,” he said. His voice came out breathy and higher than he intended and he hated both things simultaneously.

The pressure deepened and he felt something shifting inside him that he could not name and did not want to name, something reorganizing itself with a slow, firm insistence that did not ask his permission. His waist felt tight. His hips ached with a dull spreading warmth. He straightened up with enormous effort and smoothed the front of his shirt with one hand.

“The supplement,” he said again, and his voice was different now, lighter and cleaner than it had been even thirty seconds ago, “operates as a…”

He looked down at the hand still resting on his notes.

His nails were longer. Long enough that the shape of them had changed from blunt and close-cut to something that curved past the fingertip with smooth, clean edges. He turned his hand over slowly and looked at his palm, then back at his fingers.

That is not possible.

He turned the page with deliberate care and did not look at his hand again.

But they kept growing slowly and steadily. By the time he reached the bottom of his notes they had lengthened another full centimeter, the edges of them smooth and oval, the nails themselves thickening from their base into something that looked refined.

He curled his fingers against his palm and put both hands behind the lectern.

Then his hair moved.

It started at the back of his neck, a slow creeping warmth along the scalp, and he reached up without thinking and touched it. The hair at his nape was longer, he could feel the ends of it brushing his collar where they had not been before. He pressed his hand flat against the back of his head and felt it growing beneath his palm with a steady, unhurried momentum, pushing past his collar, thickening as it went.

He lowered his hand.

Priya Anand was watching him with an expression that had moved past uncertain and into something closer to alarmed. Two other students had their phones out. 

They can see it.

“Class is cancelled,” he said.

He quickly gathered his notes into a single stack, picked up his copy of Derrida, and came out from behind the lectern. His hair brushed the back of his collar and he could feel it still moving, still lengthening, and he walked toward the door with his jaw set and his eyes forward and his hand pressed to the side of his jacket pocket where the card sat against his ribs.

“Dr. Calloway, are you…” someone started.

“I said class is, um, cancelled.” The words came out clipped and bright and not entirely in his register. He pushed through the door without looking back.

The hallway outside his lecture hall ran the full length of the building’s second floor and at four in the afternoon it was never empty. The Thursday traffic between buildings was at its worst with students moving in both directions.

Calloway pushed through the door and turned toward the stairwell, head down, his notes pressed against his chest, and walked directly into the path of two undergraduates who were standing in the middle of the hall looking at a shared phone screen.

“Move,” he said.

They moved. One of them started to say something and then looked at him properly and decided against it.

He kept walking. His hair was at his collar now and still going, he could feel the weight of it shifting against the back of his neck with every step. He reached up once and pressed it flat with his palm, which accomplished nothing.

A group of three students coming out of the seminar room across the hall slowed when they saw him. He recognized one of them, a third year from his critical theory survey, whose name he could not place. The student opened his mouth.

“Office hours are Tuesday,” Calloway said, without breaking stride. Then, before he could stop himself, he added, “obviously.”

He was almost to the stairwell door when the warmth moved down through his legs and settled into his feet, and he felt the soles of his shoes change beneath him.

It happened fast. The heel rose first, lifting the back of his foot by an inch, then two, then a third, and the pitch of it threw his weight sharply forward and he stumbled, one hand shooting out to catch the wall. His notes went everywhere. The stack hit the floor and spread in a wide arc across the hallway tile, pages sliding under the feet of two students who had been walking behind him and now stopped and stared.

“Oh my god, are you okay?” One of them, a young woman with a canvas tote over both shoulders, was already crouching to help gather pages.

“I didn’t ask for help,” Calloway said, and heard the words come out higher and sharper than he intended, with a petulance at the end of them that had no business being there.

She kept gathering pages anyway. He lowered himself to one knee, which required more concentration than it should have given the new angle of his feet, and began collecting the rest of his notes with fingers whose nails were now unmistakably long and clean-edged, the kind of nails that belonged to someone who maintained them. He turned his hands inward as much as he could.

The student set a stack of pages on top of his pile. “Here you go. Are you sure you’re alright? You seem…”

“I seem what, exactly.” It did not come out as a question. It came out as a challenge, bright and impatient, with a lift at the end that had nothing to do with how he normally spoke and everything to do with something pushing up through him that he could not locate or identify or stop.

The student opened her mouth and then closed it.

He straightened up, and that was when he felt the fabric moving at his shins.

His trousers were shortening. He could feel the hem rising, the fabric pulling upward along his calves with a slow, steady movement that he could not stop and could not explain and could not acknowledge while standing in the middle of a hallway with a student looking directly at him. The hem cleared his ankle, then his calf, climbing steadily as he stood there gathering his notes against his chest and staring straight ahead.

Do not look down. Do not look down.

He looked down.

The hem was at mid-calf and still moving. The fabric had narrowed too, the wide leg of his trousers pulling inward and reshaping along his legs, which were themselves different, smoother through the calf, the muscle sitting differently than it had an hour ago.

The student with the tote bag was still standing next to him. He could see her looking at his legs from his peripheral vision.

“Are you going to keep staring,” he said, “or.” He stopped. The “or” had come out completely unattached to anything, trailing off the same way “so” had in the lecture hall, the sentence just ending because it felt like it was done.

That is not a complete sentence.

“Sorry,” the student said.

“Whatever,” he said, and the word left his mouth before he had any say in it at all.

He turned and walked the remaining twenty feet to the stairwell door, heels clicking against the tile with a sharp, even rhythm that echoed off the walls and followed him through the door.

He made it four steps up before he had to stop.

The pressure that had been building in his chest since the lecture hall released all at once, a deep, spreading warmth that pushed outward from his sternum in both directions, and he grabbed the handrail with both hands and held it.

He stood on the fourth step and breathed. In through his nose, out through his mouth, the way you’d breathe through pain. Except it was not pain exactly. That was the thing he could not reconcile. It was warmth and pressure and a fullness that was building against the inside of his shirt with a slow, deliberate insistence, and it did not hurt, and he almost wished it did because pain would have given him something to push against.

He looked down.

His shirt was pulling across the front, the buttons straining at the placket. He watched the fabric stretch and could not look away, the way you cannot look away from something you are certain is not happening even as it continues to happen directly in front of you. His chest was filling out against the fabric, pressing forward with a weight and a fullness that the shirt was simply not built to contain, the buttons pulling at their threads with increasing urgency.

This is not happening.

He pressed his free hand flat against his chest and felt it. The warmth of his own palm through the fabric, and beneath that the firm, undeniable swell pressing back against his hand with a solidity that stopped his breath entirely.

He stood there with his hand pressed flat against his own chest on the fourth step of the Whitmore Hall stairwell and understood with complete, horrible clarity what was happening to him and could not make it stop.

He pulled his hand away.

He straightened up and kept climbing, one hand tight on the rail, his heels striking each step with a click that rang off the concrete walls. By the second landing the shirt had untucked itself completely, the hem riding up at the back, the fabric too tight across the chest to stay anchored no matter how he moved. He yanked it down once with his free hand and felt the resistance of the fabric pulling against the new weight it was accommodating and stopped yanking.

His hair fell forward over his shoulder when he looked down at the hem and he shoved it back with a sharp motion that accomplished nothing because it fell forward again immediately, thick and dark, the ends of it brushing his waist. He registered this distantly. His hair had been short this morning. That fact felt very far away.

His face was the thing he could not assess directly. He could feel it from the inside, the same bone-deep warmth that had moved through the rest of him, his jaw softer, his cheekbones higher, his lips carrying a fullness that had not been there an hour ago. He ran his tongue across his lower lip once without intending to and felt the difference immediately and did not do it again.

The sharp angular features that had intimidated students for eleven years were gone or going. He understood that without needing a mirror to confirm it and he did not want a mirror to confirm it and he was not going to think about what was replacing them until he was behind a closed door.

He pushed through the third floor door.

The departmental corridor was not empty. Two students he didn’t recognize were standing halfway down the hall, and a man he did recognize, Dr. Paul Renner from the philosophy department, was walking toward him from the far end with a stack of folders under one arm.

Calloway tucked his notes against his chest, kept his chin down, and walked.

The two students looked up as he passed. One of them said something to the other in a low voice. He did not look at them.

His trousers had finished their work somewhere on the stairs. What remained barely cleared mid-thigh, the fabric tight and dark against legs that were longer and smoother than they had any right to be, and he was walking on three inch heels that clicked against the corridor floor with a rhythm that was already drawing the exact kind of attention he needed to avoid.

Just get to the door. Twelve more feet.

Calloway arrived at his office and pulled out the keys.

“Hey.” Renner had stopped walking. He was looking at him with his head tilted, the specific expression of a faculty member who had just noticed someone in the corridor who did not belong there, except that expression had something else underneath it that Calloway clocked immediately and did not want to think about. “Can I help you?”

Paul Renner was fifty-one, recently divorced, and had spent the better part of last semester’s faculty mixer talking to anyone who would listen about his new apartment and his renewed interest in cycling. Calloway had found him exhausting. He had also, in eleven years of shared departmental space, never once seen Renner look at him the way Renner was looking at him right now.

Renner did not know her. Him. Renner did not know him.

The key, Calloway thought. He’s going to ask about the key.

“I’m just here to grab something,” Calloway said, keeping his voice as low as he could manage, which was not very low at all. It came out soft and clear and entirely the wrong register for this conversation.

Renner’s eyes moved down and then back up with the practiced casualness of a man who thought he was being subtle. “This is the faculty wing. Dr. Calloway’s office is just there, that’s a restricted area.” He stepped closer, shifting into the corridor in a way that was not quite blocking the path but was not not blocking it either. “Do you have authorization to be up here?”

He’s not going to move.

Calloway looked at him. Every instinct he had, eleven years of professional authority and deliberate intimidation, had exactly zero leverage in this body in this hallway. Renner was not going to be moved by a cool stare from someone he thought was an undergraduate in a very short skirt.

He needed something else.

Don’t, Marcus thought. Do not do what you are about to do.

He shifted his weight onto one hip. It happened almost before he decided it, his body finding the angle naturally, the notes dropping to his side, his chin coming up in a way that was not defensive but was something else entirely.

“Dr. Calloway said I could wait in his office,” he said. The voice that came out was still his, technically, but the texture of it had changed. Lighter. A little slower. With a patience in it that was not actually patience at all. “He said to use the spare key.” He held it up between two fingers, the long nails catching the fluorescent light. “Is that okay, or.”

The “or” trailed off exactly the way it had in the hallway downstairs, the sentence ending because it decided to, and this time Calloway did not internally correct himself because he was watching Renner’s expression shift and needed to track it.

“He gave you his spare key,” Renner said. 

“Mhm.” She held his gaze and the waiting felt natural in a way that Marcus registered with quiet alarm.

Renner shifted his folders from one arm to the other. “You know, Marcus keeps odd hours. He might be a while.” He smiled with an obvious leer. “I could wait with you. Make sure everything’s above board.”

No. Absolutely not. Tell him no.

“Oh that’s really nice of you.” The words came out warm and a little breathless and entirely not what Marcus had intended to say. “But I’m sure he’ll be right up. He just texted me.”

That was a lie, Marcus observed from somewhere that felt increasingly distant. I just lied to a colleague.

Renner’s smile stayed exactly where it was. “I don’t mind waiting. It’s no trouble at all.”

He’s not leaving, Marcus thought. Do something.

She tucked a wave of blonde hair behind her ear with one finger, a gesture that had never existed in Marcus Calloway’s physical vocabulary, and looked up at Renner with an expression that was slightly uncertain and slightly grateful and entirely calculated without Marcus being the one doing the calculating.

“You’re so sweet,” she said. “I just don’t want to get Dr. Calloway in trouble, you know? Like if his department chair sees him having visitors wait in his office unsupervised.” She let the sentence trail off with a small apologetic wince. “He’s already kind of stressed about his review.”

Something shifted in Renner’s expression. The mention of Fuentes and the review landed exactly where it was aimed, and Marcus felt a cold recognition of that precision that did not belong to him.

“Right,” Renner said. “No, of course. That makes sense.” He was already adjusting his folders, already half-turned away. “Tell him I said hello.”

“I will,” she said, with a disarming smile.

She got the key in the lock. Pushed the door open.

That was close, Marcus thought.

He dropped his notes on the desk without looking at them.

The first coherent thought he had was that he should call someone. Call anyone who could tell him what was happening to his body in terms he could process and reverse.

He grabbed his phone from the desk and unlocked it and stared at the screen.

And then what? He heard himself think it with a clarity that was almost funny. What exactly do you say? Who do you call and what do you tell them and what do you think they are going to do about it?

He set the phone face down on the desk.

He needed to think. He needed to sit down and think clearly and systematically about what had happened and what the chain of cause and effect looked like and what the logical next step was, because he was Marcus Calloway and that was what he did. He took problems apart. He had spent his entire career taking apart the assumptions that held other people’s arguments together and he was not going to be undone by something he could not yet explain.

He pulled the card from his jacket pocket and set it on the desk in front of him.

This started when I touched you, he thought.

He picked it up and turned it over. There was a  complete absence of any information that might tell him what it was or where it came from or how to undo what it had done.

He put it face down on the desk so the silhouette was not looking at him.

Then he stood up.

His legs were different under him, longer and smoother, and the heels pitched his weight forward in a way he was still negotiating, but he locked his knees and crossed to the filing cabinet in four careful steps. The small mirror on the wall above it was right there and he turned his back to it deliberately and opened the top drawer of the filing cabinet and looked at the hanging folders inside without seeing any of them.

Reverse it, he thought. There has to be a way to reverse it. Everything has a mechanism. Find the mechanism.

He closed the drawer.

He turned around and looked at the room. Eleven years of professional life arranged on these shelves and stacked on this desk and filed in these drawers. 

The warmth gathered itself in his chest again, lower this time, moving through his abdomen, and he put one hand flat on the filing cabinet and held on.

Not yet, Marcus thought. I am not finished yet. I have a lecture on Monday and forty papers and a chapter due and I am not…

His knees went.

He caught the filing cabinet with both hands and held himself upright for a moment, breathing, and then the warmth moved through him all at once and he let go of the filing cabinet and sat down hard in his desk chair because it was the only thing left to do.

He sat very still and waited and understood that whatever was happening was not finished with him yet.

The structured cotton of his dress shirt softened and lightened, the color draining out of the pale blue into white, the fabric reshaping against his skin. The collar dissolved, the buttons disappeared, the hem rode up past his waist and kept going, and what replaced it was a fitted red top that sat tight across his chest and ended at his ribcage, the fabric thin and soft and leaving the curve of his chest in no doubt whatsoever.

He looked down. His stomach was flat and smooth, his waist drawn in sharply on both sides into a curve that was new and total and entirely his now whether he wanted it or not.

The warmth pushed lower.

What was left of his trousers compressed and restructured, cutting off high on his hips, becoming dark fitted shorts that sat low on a waistline that was not his waistline, frayed at the hem, hugging hips that had widened and settled with a slow, decisive pressure that reorganized his entire center of gravity.

He gripped the arms of his chair and held on.

Then his hair began its final move.

The dark color went first. He felt the warmth at his roots and reached up instinctively, pressing his palm flat against his scalp, and felt the texture change beneath his hand as the color moved from root to end in a single slow wave. Dark brown lifting to chestnut, chestnut warming to amber, amber brightening all the way out to a full warm blonde that settled against his shoulders with a weight that was new and undeniable. The hair itself thickened as it changed, the straight dark strands he had worn his entire life giving way to long loose waves that fell past his collarbone and curled softly at the ends.

He dropped his hand and stared at a wave of blonde hair lying across his forearm.

His face went last and it went all at once. The pale washed-out gray of his eyes warmed and lightened, the color shifting into something softer and more luminous. His cheekbones lifted and his jaw rounded and his lips completed their fullness with a finality that he felt from the inside like a door closing. And then across the bridge of his nose and fanning out beneath his eyes, a scatter of freckles appeared, light and warm against skin that had gone golden and smooth, dusting across his cheeks in a pattern that looked entirely natural.

Marcus Calloway sat in his desk chair and was aware of everything at once. The weight of the blonde waves against his shoulders. The hem of the red top against his ribs. The bare skin between that hem and the low waistband of the shorts. 

Calloway looked over at the small mirror on his wall. It was narrow, just wide enough to show him from the shoulders up if he stood close enough, and he stood close enough.

She looked back at him.

Long blonde waves falling past her collarbone, warm and thick, a single strand curling forward over her shoulder. Light eyes, fuller lips, freckles scattered across her nose and cheeks in a way that managed to be both effortless and devastating. The red top visible at the bottom of the frame, the neckline sitting lower than anything Marcus Calloway had ever owned.

He reached up and touched his jaw with two fingers, the smooth skin, the rounded line of it, and the face in the mirror did the same thing his face did, and that was the problem because it was his face. It was just not Marcus’s face.

She tilted her head slightly and the waves shifted against her shoulder and something moved through her that had no interest in being identified or named or apologized for.

She raised one hand and pushed the hair back from her face, watching herself do it, and her lips parted slightly. Then the corner of her mouth moved. Not a full smile. Just the beginning of one.

She turned slightly to the side without deciding to, her hip shifting, her weight moving onto one leg, and looked at herself.

“Okay,” she said quietly, to no one.

She turned back to face the mirror straight on, chin up, and held her own gaze for a long moment.

Then someone knocked on the door.

“It’s open,” she said.

The door pushed inward and a student stood in the frame. He was a second year, she recognized him immediately, Joel Winters, who had read the wrong paragraph aloud in her seminar less than an hour ago and had been looking at his phone during her lecture for the past three weeks.

Winters looked at her. He looked at the office around her. He looked at the nameplate on the open door and then back at her.

“I was, um.” He stopped. “I was looking for Dr. Calloway. Is he. Are you.”

“He’s not here,” she said. She turned back to the mirror and pushed her hair over one shoulder with a practiced ease that had appeared from nowhere. “Obviously.”

“Oh.” Winters lingered in the doorway. “Do you know when he’ll be back? Because I had a question about the paper and he cancelled class so I thought maybe.”

“The paper isn’t due until Monday.” She did not look at him. She was looking at the freckles across the bridge of her nose in the mirror, pressing one fingertip lightly to her cheek. “You have four days.”

“Yeah but I just wanted to ask about the supplementarity argument because I’m not totally sure I’m…”

“Are you serious right now.” She turned from the mirror and looked at him fully for the first time and Winters stopped talking with the immediacy of someone who had not expected whatever expression was currently on her face. “You sat in that lecture for two hours and you still don’t get it?”

“I just thought…”

“Winters.” His name came out of her mouth before she registered using it. He looked up. “You’ve turned in the same argument three times across two different papers. At some point you have to realize that you’re kind of stupid.”

Pain flickered across Winters’ face. “How do you know about my papers?”

“Dr. Calloway talks about his students,” she said. “You come up a lot.” She looked back at the mirror. “Not in a good way.”

Winters opened his mouth.

“The supplement fills a gap that presence pretends doesn’t exist,” she continued, before he could form the question. “That’s the whole argument. It’s not complicated. The fact that you’ve sat in that lecture for two months and still don’t have this is, honestly.” She paused, pressing one fingertip lightly to her cheek, examining her freckles. “A lot.”

“I just thought if I could talk it through with someone…”

“You’re talking it through right now and you’re still not getting it.” She turned from the mirror and looked at him fully. “What exactly do you think a conversation with Dr. Calloway is going to do that two months of lectures hasn’t?”

Winters stared at her. “Are you a TA or something?”

She looked at him for a long moment with the expression of someone who had already moved on from this conversation internally and was waiting for their body to catch up.

“Close the door on your way out,” she said, and turned back to the mirror.

Winters closed the door.

She stood in the quiet office and looked at her reflection.

She crossed to the desk and dropped into his chair, both legs hooking over one armrest, and looked at the room from his side of it. The shelves, the monographs, the laptop, the stack of student papers with the red pen across the top. Forty-two years of a man’s professional life arranged in careful order.

She picked up the paper on top of the stack, read the first line, then dropped it.

She spun the chair once, slowly, just to see if it would. It did.

She pulled the laptop toward her and looked at the half finished chapter on the screen, scrolled through it with one finger, then pushed it back. She opened the top desk drawer and looked inside. A stapler, three identical pens, a bottle of ibuprofen, a faculty parking pass. She picked up the parking pass and turned it over in her hand and set it back down.

Ugh. Boring.

She put her feet up on the desk.

Then someone knocked on the door with force.

She stood up from the desk, smoothed the front of her top, and opened the door.

Renner was standing in the corridor. Beside him was a campus security officer, young, probably twenty-four, with a lanyard and a radio clipped to his belt and the careful expression of someone who had been told this was probably nothing but had shown up anyway because it was his job. 

His name tag said OFFICER T. COLE.

Callie looked at Cole first, then at Renner, then back at Cole, and let her expression settle into something confused and slightly wounded.

“Oh my god,” she said. “Did you actually call security on me?”

Renner straightened up. “I need to verify that you have authorization to be in this office. This is a restricted faculty space and…”

“I know what it is,” she said. She looked past Renner to Cole with an expression of genuine bewilderment. “Is this really happening right now?”

Cole had his hands clasped in front of him, professional and neutral. “Can I ask your name, miss?”

“Callie.” She looked directly at Cole when she said it and stepped back from the doorway. “Do you want to come in? Both of you, I guess, since apparently this is a whole thing.”

Cole stepped inside. Renner followed, and Callie let him, which was the first mistake Renner didn’t know he was making.

She crossed back to the desk and turned to face them, her hip resting against the edge of it, her arms loose at her sides. Completely at home.

Cole’s eyes moved around the room the way a professional’s eyes move around a room, taking inventory. “Can you explain how you accessed this office?”

“Dr. Calloway gave me his key,” she said. “I’m his research assistant. I come in here twice a week.”

Renner made a short sound. “Marcus has never had a research assistant.”

She looked at him. “How would you know that, Paul?”

“I know my colleagues,” Renner said, clearly annoyed at being referenced by his first name.

“Do you.” She reached across the desk and picked up the manuscript printout sitting beside the laptop, turned it over, and held it out to Cole. “His current chapter. I’ve been compiling the secondary sources for it since September.” She said it easily, without performance, the way you’d state something that did not require defending. “The bibliography is in the back, you can see my annotations.”

Cole took it and looked at it. His expression did not change but something behind it shifted slightly.

“That doesn’t prove anything,” Renner said. “Anyone could have access to his research materials if they’d been in this office unauthorized on previous occasions.”

Callie looked at him for a long, flat moment.

“Paul,” she said. “Can I ask you something?”

“I’d prefer you address me as Dr. Renner.”

“When you saw me in the hall earlier,” she continued, as though he hadn’t spoken, “and you offered to come wait in here with me.” She paused. “Was that a security concern then too? Or is that a new development?”

Cole looked at Renner.

Renner opened his mouth.

“Because I want to make sure Officer Cole has the full picture,” she said helpfully. “About why you’re here.”

The color that moved up Renner’s neck was thorough and fast and Cole watched it happen with the carefully neutral expression of a young professional who had just understood something about the situation that changed its shape entirely.

“That’s not.” Renner stopped. “That’s not what this is.”

Callie nodded slowly, her expression thoughtful, like she was genuinely working through it. “Because the way I saw it,” she said, “a professor, in a position of authority, offers to be alone with a young woman in a closed office.” She tilted her head. “And like, don’t get me wrong, it’s a very classic move. Very.” 

She glanced at Cole with a brief, private look that landed somewhere between amused and conspiratorial, and gave him the smallest wink. “I’ve seen it before. It would almost be charming if it wasn’t so.” She paused, looking back at Renner with an expression of genuine sympathy. 

Renner’s jaw tightened. “I was acting out of concern for departmental…”

“Paul.” She said it gently, the way you’d stop someone from embarrassing themselves further at a party. “It’s okay. We’ve all had a rough semester.”

“Okay,” Callie said simply, and looked back at Cole. “Is there anything else you need from me?”

Cole looked down at the manuscript in his hands. Then at the desk, the shelves, the monographs, the stack of student papers with the red pen laid across the top. Then back at Renner, who was looking defeated.

“I think we’re good here,” Cole said. He set the manuscript back on the desk. “Sorry to bother you, miss.”

“It’s totally fine,” she said, and smiled at him, and Cole’s professional neutrality made one final effort before settling into something that was not quite a smile back but was close.

Renner looked between the two of them.

“Marcus is going to hear about this,” he said, but the sentence had lost most of its structural integrity by the end.

Callie looked at him with an expression of complete serenity. “I’ll let him know you stopped by,” she said. “Obviously.”

Renner looked between the two of them one last time, opened his mouth, closed it, and walked out.

Cole moved to follow him and Callie’s hand closed around his wrist, light and certain, two fingers and a thumb, the long nails just barely making contact with his skin.

Cole stopped.

He looked down at her hand. Then up at her face.

“Actually,” she said, “I’m really glad you’re still here. I’ve been a little freaked out since all of this started and I just.” She let the sentence breathe for a moment, her fingers still loose around his wrist. “Is it okay if I ask you something? Professionally.”

Cole’s radio made a small sound and he reached up and turned the volume down without being asked to. “Sure,” he said.

“That guy.” She dropped her voice slightly and glanced toward the closed door. “He’s not going to come back, right? Because honestly the whole thing really shook me up and Dr. Calloway is going to be like another hour at least and I just.” She looked up at Cole with the full weight of the light eyes and the freckles and let her shoulders drop into something that was smaller and less certain than they had been thirty seconds ago. “I really don’t want to be alone up here right now.”

Cole’s professional posture did something complicated. “I can do a sweep of the corridor, make sure he’s…”

“Could you just.” She stopped. Bit her lower lip once. “Could you just stay for a few minutes? Until I feel a little less.” She exhaled. “I know that’s probably not protocol or whatever.”

“It’s not strictly.” Cole stopped. Started again. “I mean, if there’s a legitimate safety concern I can absolutely…”

“There is,” she said, very earnestly. “I have a very legitimate safety concern.” She sat back against the edge of the desk and looked at him, and the expression on her face was simultaneously helpless and completely in control of the room and Cole had no access to that information whatsoever. “I just hate being alone when I’m scared. It’s like my one thing.”

Cole looked at the door. Then back at her.

He unclipped his radio and held it loosely in one hand. “I can stay a few minutes,” he said. “Just until you feel settled.”

“You’re so nice,” she said, and the door had barely clicked shut behind Renner before the expression on her face changed entirely.

The slight uncertainty around her eyes disappeared and her shoulders came back and she looked at Cole with the calm, interested expression of someone who had gotten exactly what they wanted and was now deciding what to do with it.

She pushed off the desk and crossed to the window, heels quiet on the carpet, and looked out at the campus below with her arms crossed loosely over her chest.

“So what else do you do?” she said. “Besides save people.”

Cole was still standing near the door in the careful way of someone who had not quite decided where to put himself. “I’m sorry?”

“Like, is this your whole job? Walking around making sure students aren’t sitting in offices?” She glanced back at him over her shoulder. “That sounds exhausting.”

“It’s more varied than that,” Cole said.

“Mm.” She turned from the window and moved to the bookshelf, running one finger along the spines of the monographs without reading them. “Do you go to school here or just work here?”

“I take a class in the evenings actually. Criminal justice.”

“Smart,” she said, and pulled one of the monographs off the shelf and turned it over in her hands, looking at the back cover with a mild curiosity that had nothing to do with the contents. “I love a man with a plan.”

Cole shifted his weight. “Are you feeling less scared?”

She looked up from the book. “A little.” She tilted her head. “Are you in a hurry?”

“I should probably get back to my rounds.”

“Probably,” she agreed, and set the book down and moved to the desk and sat on the edge of it again, closer to him this time, her legs crossed at the ankle. She looked at him with a patience that was not going anywhere. “But you said a few minutes.”

Cole looked at her.

“I did say that,” he said.

“So.” She smiled, and the smile was bright and unhurried and entirely in charge of the room. “Tell me about the criminal justice program.”

Cole unclenched his hand around the radio slightly.

“It’s a two year program,” he started.

“Sit down,” she said, nodding toward the chair across the desk. “You’re making me nervous standing there like that.”

Cole sat down and talked about the criminal justice program for a couple of minutes before he noticed that her expression had shifted.

“What?” he said.

“Nothing.” She uncrossed her ankles and recrossed them the other way. “Keep going.”

“You’re not listening.”

“I’m absolutely listening.” She tilted her head. “You were saying something about the internship component.”

Cole looked at her for a moment. “You don’t actually care about the criminal justice program.”

“No,” she agreed pleasantly.

Cole’s mouth did something that was not quite a smile and not quite not a smile. “So what are you actually doing right now?”

She slid off the edge of the desk and took the three steps between them slowly, stopping just in front of his chair, close enough that he would have to stand up or tilt his head back to maintain eye contact. He tilted his head back.

“I told you,” she said. “I didn’t want to be alone.”

“You don’t seem particularly scared anymore.”

“I’m not,” she said. “You fixed it.”

Cole looked up at her. His radio sat completely forgotten in his lap. “I should go back to my rounds.”

“You keep saying that.”

“It’s true every time I say it.”

“Mm.” She reached out and straightened the lanyard around his neck with two fingers, a small, unhurried adjustment that he sat completely still for. “You have a cute face.”

“That’s.” Cole stopped. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” She left her hand resting loosely against his chest, not pushing, not pulling, just present. “Do you know what I think?”

“I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”

“I think that you find me attractive,” she said.

Cole said nothing.

She looked at him steadily. “Am I wrong?”

“No,” he said quietly.

“Okay then.” She leaned down and kissed him, her hand still flat against his chest, her hair falling forward over one shoulder. It was brief and certain and completely on her terms, and when she pulled back she was close enough that he could see the freckles across her nose in detail.

She straightened up. Picked her phone off the desk. Pushed her hair back over her shoulder with one finger.

“You should probably get back to your rounds,” she said.

Cole stood up slowly, the professional composure reassembling itself piece by piece. He clipped his radio back to his belt. He looked at her once more with an expression that had entirely abandoned its earlier neutrality.

“Yeah,” he said. “Probably.”

He crossed to the door and opened it. Paused with his hand on the frame.

“For what it’s worth,” he said, “Renner’s got a reputation. If you wanted to file something.”

“Good to know,” she said. “For what its worth, I’d fuck you right here and now if you had the balls to stay.”

His face went pale.

“But you don’t,” she added. “So you should probably get back to your rounds.”

He left.

She picked up the Role With It card from beside the papers and looked at the silhouette one last time before she slid it into the back pocket of her shorts.

Then she reached up and gathered her hair with both hands, pulling it back from her face and up, the long blonde waves collecting into a high ponytail that she secured with the elastic she found on her wrist without knowing how it had gotten there. She smoothed it once with her palm and let it go and felt it swing against the back of her neck.

She pulled the door shut behind her.

The corridor was empty now, the late afternoon light coming through the window at the far end in a single flat rectangle that lay across the floor all the way to the stairwell. She walked through it without slowing, her ponytail shifting against the back of her neck with every step.

Her heels clicked down the corridor and the sound of them faded as she reached the stairwell door, pushed through it, and was gone.