Brian saw her leave the courtyard from across the quad, folder under one arm, the same unhurried pace she always walked with when nothing was wrong.
He hadn’t thought much of it until he clocked who she was leaving from.
Garrett. Sitting alone on the bench now, gathering something into a bag, looking about as unremarkable as a person could look while apparently having just spent a considerable amount of time with Emiliana Vane.
Brian didn’t move. He just watched for a second longer than the scene strictly required.
This wasn’t the first time. He ran it back without meaning to — the courtyard, days ago, the too-fast-to-look-away that had made him ask around for a name in the first place. One coincidence was nothing. Two, in the same couple of weeks, with the same guy, was a pattern whether he wanted it to be one or not.
He didn’t walk over. There wasn’t anything to say yet, and saying something too early tended to make things stop happening the way they were supposed to.
Garrett.
He filed it, same as before, and went home.
The next morning, it had already gotten away from him.
Garrett clocked it before he understood it — two lads by the coffee stand cutting their conversation short as he passed, a girl glancing at her phone and then at him with an expression he couldn’t quite place. None of it added up to anything on its own. All of it together felt like walking into a room a beat after everyone had stopped talking about you.
"Emiliana, right?"
He hadn’t meant to overhear it. It came from a group he was walking past, one of them midsentence, not even bothering to lower their voice.
"...no, I heard they were properly together together..."
"...my flatmate saw them yesterday, said they looked pretty cosy..."
He kept walking. Whatever the rest of that sentence was, he didn’t stay for it.
Daniel caught up with him outside the lecture hall, slightly out of breath, phone already half out of his pocket.
"Mate. What did you do?"
"Nothing. What?"
"You genuinely don’t know."
"I genuinely don’t know what I’m supposed to know."
Daniel studied him for a second, like he was deciding whether Garrett was underselling it or actually, honestly clueless, and landed on the second one.
"There’s a whole thing going round about you and Emiliana."
Garrett blinked. "...What?"
"Yeah."
"There’s nothing to have a thing about."
"I know that. You know that. Half of campus, apparently, does not know that."
Daniel turned his phone round.
It wasn’t much — a photo, taken from a distance, the two of them on the bench in the courtyard, heads bent slightly toward the same page. Nothing incriminating about it on its own terms. Garrett looked at it for a second and understood, with a specific kind of dull clarity, exactly how little the photo needed to actually show for people to fill in the rest themselves.
"Where did you get this?"
"It’s been going round a group chat since this morning. Someone’s cousin’s mate saw you two and took it. It’s basically everywhere at this point."
Garrett handed the phone back.
They hadn’t done anything. He’d translated four pages of a document she’d needed for something to do with her class project, they’d talked about lecturers, she’d mentioned her father, and he’d spent the rest of the conversation quietly trying not to look like he was somewhere else entirely. That was the whole of it.
None of that was in the photo. The photo just showed two people sitting close together, and apparently that was more than enough — because she was Emiliana Vane, and whatever normal gossip would have done with two ordinary students sharing a bench, it didn’t get the option to stay that small once her name was attached to it.
"You’re not even going to deny it properly," Daniel said, delighted.
"There’s nothing to deny."
"Say that with slightly less guilt in your voice and I might believe you."
"There’s no guilt. I just don’t know what I’m meant to be defending myself against."
Daniel grinned the whole way into the lecture hall, clearly enjoying this more than the situation strictly warranted, which Garrett supposed was fair, given how rarely anything interesting happened to either of them.
It wasn’t the gap itself that sat badly with him — he already knew the shape of that, had known it since the courtyard weeks ago. Raymond’s certainty. Whatever it was that let people like that walk into a room without checking first whether it wanted them there.
What sat badly now was that the gap wasn’t private anymore. He’d gotten used to carrying it quietly, on his own terms, in a way nobody else needed to weigh in on. Now half the year apparently had an opinion on whether Garrett, specifically, belonged anywhere near Emiliana Vane, and none of them had asked him first.
He didn’t like being a subject people discussed without him in the room.
"So," Daniel said, once they’d found seats near the back, voice dropped just enough to count as discreet. "Do you actually like her?"
Garrett didn’t answer straight away.
"That’s not a no."
"It’s not a yes either."
"Garrett."
"I don’t know, Daniel. I’ve spoken to her twice properly. I’m not exactly running the numbers on it."
Daniel didn’t push further, though the look on his face suggested he was filing this away for later with roughly the same seriousness Garrett usually reserved for actual problems.
"For what it’s worth," Daniel said, as the lecturer started fiddling with the projector at the front, "apparently she knows."
Garrett went still. "Knows what."
"The rumour. Someone said she’d already heard by first period."
Garrett looked past him, out through the window at the far side of the hall, toward the part of campus he couldn’t actually see from here but found himself looking at anyway.
He didn’t say anything.