Page 50 of What We Don't Say: Part Two

“They were almost done three different times.” I pull the classroom door shut and test the handle. “Priya asked a question while putting on her coat, which everyone took as permission to restart the entire conversation.”

His gaze moves briefly toward the board through the narrow glass panel beside the door. The writing is gone now, but the dust has left faint shadows where the questions were. “Utilitarianism?”

“Roommate yogurt.”

Dash looks at me, and the corner of his mouth moves once before he turns toward the stairs. “That sounds like it has institutional consequences.”

“It had too many consequences for a Tuesday afternoon.” I fall into step beside him, adjusting the strap of my bag on my shoulder before he can reach for that too. “Mara thinks I need food.”

“Mara has a pattern of being right.”

“She’d like you less if she knew you said that.”

“I doubt it.” Dash opens the stairwell door and waits for me to go through first. “She seems like someone who appreciates useful agreement.”

I look down at the steps so he won’t see the smile that catches before I can stop it. The stairwell smells like wet coats and floor cleaner, the storm from earlier still clinging to everyone who has moved through the building. Dash walks beside me instead of behind me, his shoulder close enough that I can feel the heat of him whenever the stairs narrow near the landing.

By the time we reach the first floor, I’ve started telling him about Priya’s yogurt argument. I don’t mean to give him all of it, but he asks what made the theft utilitarian instead of simply rude, and that leads to the student’s theory about communal refrigerators, moral obligation, and the ethical weight of strawberries labeled with someone else’s name.

Dash listens all the way through the lobby and out into the cold. He doesn’t interrupt to make the story smaller. He only shifts the books into one arm and takes the outside edge of the sidewalk when we head toward the faculty lot, the movement so familiar that I notice it and then notice that I noticed.

There are other things like that now. He slows before the uneven section of pavement near the library because my heel caught there once. He carries ginger candies in the second drawer of his desk, though he claims they’re for faculty emergencies and not because he saw me go pale during a meeting after taking my medication too late. He knows I grade too long when I’m avoiding going back to the lockoff, and he has stopped looking at the bite in my shoulder when pain moves through it sharply enough to change my breathing.

I know things too. I know the copier on the third floor can ruin his mood faster than the dean. I know he reads student complaints himself before forwarding them anywhere because he doesn’t trust the automated summaries to catch tone. I don’t remember deciding to learn him.

We reach my car, and Dash opens the back door to set the books on the seat. The dome light comes on, throwing a pale glow across the wet pavement and the edge of his sleeve as he arranges the stack so nothing bends.

I glance toward the row of cars nearest us, then farther across the lot.

His isn’t there.

The realization arrives slowly because I’ve never looked for it before. Every evening he walks me out, waits until I’m inside, and then heads back toward campus, and I’ve let myself believe his car was somewhere nearby because that made the ritual easier to hold.

“Where did you park?” I ask, turning from the faculty row toward the darker stretch beyond the library.

Dash closes the rear door before answering. “West lot.”

I look at him. The west lot sits on the far side of the administration building, past the library and the old chapel, close to his office and nowhere near mine. “That’s across campus.”

“It’s not that far.” He slips both hands into his coat pockets, his posture easy despite the wind lifting the hair at his temple. “Seven minutes if the chapel path isn’t flooded.”

“You’ve been walking me here and then walking back to the west lot?” The question comes out quieter than I expect, and I hate that my throat tightens around something so ordinary.

“Most nights.”

I rest one hand on the roof of my car and look toward the path he takes after I leave. The lights along it are soft and yellow, spaced far enough apart that they leave stretches of dark between the old trees. “Why?”

Dash doesn’t make me wait for an answer. He doesn’t give me a reason involving late classes, weather, safety, or anything else that would let me fold this into the careful, professional concern he started with when he first found me.

“I like talking to you,” he says.

The wind moves between us. Somewhere behind him, a car door shuts and a group of students calls goodnight across the lot, their voices scattering toward the residence halls.

I look down at my keys, the metal biting gently into my palm. “You added fourteen minutes to every evening because you like talking to me.”

His eyes stay on mine. “Some evenings were longer.”

My fingers close tighter around the keys before I loosen them again. There are things I could say, easy things that would turn the moment aside and give us somewhere less exposed to stand, but none of them reach my mouth.