Page 33 of What We Don't Say: Part Two

“No,” he says, and the quiet agreement has weight. “I imagine you didn’t.”

For a while, we eat without speaking. It isn’t awkward. That surprises me enough that I notice it several times. Dash doesn’t fill every open space, and he doesn’t make silence into a test. The faculty lounge hums around us with the refrigerator in the corner and the building vents pushing warm air through old ducts. My phone stays facedown beside my plate. The old messages remain inside it, waiting with names that used to mean home. For ten minutes, they don't get to be the loudest thing in the room.

I eat half the plate before my body remembers it is suspicious of comfort. My stomach tightens, and the bite in my shoulder gives a dull pulse that has me setting the fork down. Dash notices, because he notices too much, but he only reaches into the canvas bag and pulls out a second bottle of water.

“Medication time?” he asks, and the lack of drama in the question keeps me from flinching.

“Already took it.” I roll my shoulder carefully, hating the way his eyes track the motion and the way he looks away once he has the information. “It gets irritated when I’m tired.”

He nods. “Then we’ll wrap this up before the building gets colder.”

“You really don’t have to keep doing this,” I say again, softer this time. The words mean dinner. They mean noticing. Theymean being the person at the doorway when my hands are shaking. They mean all the things I can't let them mean yet.

Dash closes one of the containers and leaves the fruit open between us. “I know.”

This time, I don’t argue. I take one slice of apple because he put it there and because my body has remembered hunger, and because saying no to every offered thing has not made me safer. It has only made me alone in cleaner rooms.

After dinner, Dash packs the leftovers into two containers and gives me one without ceremony. “For the hotel fridge,” he says as I accept it. “Not instead of grocery shopping. Alongside it.”

“I’m going tomorrow.”

“Sure,” he says, not disbelieving me exactly, but not insulting either of us by pretending the promise is new.

“I am.” I tuck the container against my chest, feeling the warmth seep through plastic into my cardigan. “I need coffee creamer. And something green that isn’t an herb garnish.”

“That’s a workable start.”

We turn off the lounge lights, and the hallway feels different when we step into it. Empty, but not as hollow. My office door waits at the end with my borrowed name taped to it, and for once I don’t want to go back inside and keep proving I can work until I disappear. Dash walks me there so I can grab my bag, then waits while I check that the computer is asleep, the pill bottle is zipped away, and my new phone is in the side pocket where I can feel it if I need to.

At the building exit, he stops before the automatic doors and looks out toward the staff lot. “Do you want me to walk you to your car?”

The question is simple. No pressure tucked under it. No insult hidden inside the assumption that I might want company across a dark parking lot. I think of the hotel room with its white pillows and clean kitchenette, the old messages loaded into anew phone, Mara’s voice saying nice isn’t the same as yours. I think of Sloane’s bite aching under my sweater and Idris’ absence sitting somewhere behind it, sharp enough that any warmth from another Alpha feels like stepping over a line I can't see.

Then I look at Dash holding his coat over one arm, standing far enough away that my answer has room.

“Yes,” I say.

He nods and pushes the door open, letting the cold air move in first. We walk to my car under the campus lights without touching. The leftover container is warm against my chest, my hands are steadier than they were an hour ago, and for the length of the sidewalk, I let that be enough.

Calliope

By the sixth week, the humanities building has learned my habits well enough to stop pretending I’m leaving at a reasonable hour.

The motion lights in the east hall click off at seven-fifteen. The radiator under my office window starts hissing at seven-thirty, even though the room never gets warmer. The janitor with the silver braid comes through at eight and gives my open door a look that has slowly moved from curiosity to concern, and everynight I tell her I’m almost done with the same tone I use on students who promise their drafts only need one more pass.

Tonight, almost done means a stack of midterm response papers, three student emails I’ve rewritten too many times, and a housing application open on my laptop with the cursor blinking in the emergency-contact field. I should close it. I should go back to the hotel, eat the leftover soup in the mini fridge, and stop pretending I can outwork a form that only wants one name. Instead, I sit with my scarf too tight around my throat and my shoulder aching under layers of wool, trying to decide whether a blank box can accuse a person of anything.

My phone sits facedown beside the keyboard, carrying the old thread I’ve stopped opening at night. I know the words are still there without checking. Sloane’s name, the bond-removal sentence, and the silence after it lived in my pocket whether I look or not.

The hotel gave me three extensions after the university block ended. First, because the apartment I applied for needed another inspection. Then because the inspection found something in the electrical panel. Then because the landlord decided to “pause new leases for maintenance review,” which is a beautiful phrase if a person enjoys being evicted from a place she hasn’t moved into yet. The front desk manager has been kind enough to act like my recurring panic at the counter is a scheduling inconvenience rather than a slow public breakdown, but kindness doesn’t make the rate cheaper, and it doesn’t make the room feel any more like mine.

I type Mara’s name into the emergency-contact field, stare at it, then delete it. She transferred her campus email last week, and we’ve talked twice since then, both times too carefully, as if the legal silence from Briarwick can hear us through the phone. She would let me use her name. She’d probably be furious if she knew I hadn’t. That doesn’t make the decision easier. Puttingsomeone down as the person to call when my body finally gives up feels like handing them a map to the wreckage.

The ache in my shoulder sharpens enough to steal my breath. I press my palm over the bite through my sweater and hold still until the first hot pulse passes. The medication bottle is in my bag now because keeping it in the desk drawer felt too much like admitting this office has become part shelter, part sickroom. I take one dry before reaching for the water bottle beside my laptop, and the pill scrapes my throat on the way down.

A knock lands on the door frame, soft enough that my body should not react the way it does. My hands still jerk, one palm catching the edge of the laptop. The housing application shifts on-screen, and my breath goes thin before I look up.

Dash stands in the doorway with his coat over one arm and a leather folder tucked against his side. He has stopped asking whether he's interrupting. He knows I will say no even when the answer is yes, and I know he has started reading my office instead of trusting my mouth. His gaze moves over the open housing application, the pill bottle half-hidden in my bag, the untouched soup container from lunch, and the stack of papers arranged too neatly for someone who is actually working.