I stared at her for a while.
Longer than was probably normal, longer than the situation called for, but she didn’t seem to mind. She just sat there behind her desk, waiting, like she had nowhere else to be and no problem with me taking my time.
Eventually I spoke.
"Fine."
Something shifted in her, small, like she’d been bracing for a different answer entirely and hadn’t quite recovered from not getting one.
"But," I said, because there was a but, "if we’re doing this — friends, whatever this is — there are terms."
"Terms." She repeated the word slowly, like she hadn’t expected me to bring an actual list.
"Terms," I confirmed. "One. In class, you treat me exactly like every other student. No calling on me first. No lingering eye contact. Nothing that gives my friends, or anyone, a reason to ask questions."
She nodded slowly, like she was actually taking notes somewhere in her head. "Understood."
"Two. No more three A.M. texts."
"It was 8:54."
"It felt like three A.M."
The corner of her mouth twitched, but she nodded again. "Fine. No more late texts."
"Three. If you’re going to keep me after class, there needs to be an actual reason. A real one. Not—" I gestured vaguely at the room, at her, at the whole situation. "Not just because."
"Noted."
I paused, half-expecting an argument on at least one of those, and got nothing but calm, easy agreement. It threw me more than resistance would have.
"That’s it?" I said. "You’re not going to push back on any of that?"
"Should I?"
"I don’t know. It’s just..."
I stopped there, because I genuinely didn’t have anywhere to go with it.
"These aren’t unreasonable," she said, and there was something disarmingly sincere in how she said it. "They’re fair. I’ll follow them."
I stared at her for a second, waiting for a catch that didn’t come.
"Is there anything else you’d like to add?" she asked, and she asked it happily. Genuinely, brightly happy, the way most people react to good news rather than a list of rules.
I hadn’t expected that either. I didn’t have anything else ready, but the fact that she’d asked if there was more, sat strangely in my chest, somewhere between flattering and unsettling.
"...No. That’s it."
"So just to be clear," she said, still smiling, "when you say ’friends’, you mean actual friends. The kind who can text, and call, and generally exist in each other’s lives. Not just... friends in name only."
I blinked. Thirty seconds of agreement, and her first sentence already flipped the whole thing inside out.
"...Yes?"
"So I’m allowed to do all of that, right? Text you. Check in on you." She tilted her head. "Worry when you don’t answer for two hours."
I opened my mouth, then closed it again, because she wasn’t wrong, and I could already feel the ground shifting somewhere underneath the deal I thought I’d just made.
"Okay, that just sounded like a loophole."
"It’s not a loophole. It’s the definition of friendship."
"It feels like a very convenient definition."
"I didn’t write the dictionary, Nathan."
I narrowed my eyes at her, fully aware I was being outmaneuvered and unable to point to exactly where it had happened.
"Fine," I said. "But the late-texts thing stands. Nothing after eight."
"Midnight."
"Eight."
"Eleven," she said, like she was already being generous.
"Eight."
She paused, considering, then, very deliberately, let her bottom lip jut out, just slightly, the exact amount calculated to be as effective as possible.
"...Eleven. Please?"
She’s pouting.
My professor. The woman who taught entropy like she’d invented it, is currently pouting at me over a curfew like this was the single most important negotiation of her academic career.
I held out for exactly as long as I could manage, which was not very long at all.
I finally pointed at her, mostly to have something to do with my hands. "Eleven. No later."
And then immediately realized I’d just pointed at my professor.
"Deal." The word came out bright, immediate, and entirely too pleased with itself.
I stared at her, and for a second she didn’t look like a professor with a PhD at all. She looked like a teenager who’d just been told she could stay out late.
My finger, still pointed at her, slowly dropped.
By the time I got home, showered, and dropped onto the couch, my phone was already buzzing with a call; Jackson, apparently not ready to let the game go just because we weren’t in the same room anymore.
"I’m still not okay," he said the second I picked up, no greeting, straight into it. "They benched their starting center in the fourth quarter. We had that game."
"We were literally just there together. You can stop relitigating it."
"I can and I will keep relitigating it until the pain goes away."
"It’s not going away, Jackson."
"Then I’ll relitigate it forever." A pause, and I could practically hear him deciding to pivot. "Anyway. So. What did you and your professor girlfriend talk about?"
"She’s not my girlfriend."
"Sure."
"Jackson."
"I heard you. Loud and clear. Not-girlfriend. Got it." He didn’t sound remotely convinced. "So what happened?"
I hesitated, mostly out of habit at this point, then figured there wasn’t much point pretending otherwise. He already knew more than half of it.
"She asked to be friends."
There was a beat of silence on the other end, followed by the particular quality of laugh Jackson reserved for moments he found personally, deeply satisfying.
"Oh, she doesn’t just want to be friends."
"You think I don’t know that?"
"I don’t know, man, you tell me. Because from where I’m sitting, you’re acting like this is some slow-burn mystery, and it’s really not."
"It’s not that I don’t know," I said. "It’s just that... she’s moving fast. Like, weirdly fast. She’s not even playing it cool, or dropping hints, or doing the normal, I don’t know, reading-between-the-lines thing. She just... says it."
"Yeah, because she’s twenty-eight, Nathan."
"...What does that have to do with anything?"
"It has everything to do with it. She’s not some teenager with a crush, tiptoeing around it because she’s scared of getting embarrassed in front of her friends. She’s a grown woman with a PhD, a career, and apparently zero patience left for games. You keep waiting for her to play hard to get, and she’s not going to, because she’s not interested in wasting either of your time. That’s not her rushing. That’s just her knowing what she wants."
I didn’t say anything to that, mostly because I didn’t have a good argument ready, which was becoming an uncomfortably familiar feeling around anything involving her.
"And what she wants," Jackson added, entirely too pleased with himself, "is you."
I opened my mouth to argue, and that’s when my phone buzzed against my ear; a second call, cutting in.
"Hold on. I’m getting a second call."
"Who is it?"
I glanced at the screen.
"...It’s her."
There was a brief, delighted silence on Jackson’s end, and then, "Say no more," followed almost immediately by the click of him hanging up gladly.
I switched over—
"Hi."
A pause. Longer than it needed to be, because for a second the only thing in my head was how fast she’d said it. "Hey. Everything okay?"
"Everything’s fine. I was just thinking... let’s have dinner together."
I glanced at the clock. Six-fifteen. Not even close to a reasonable dinner-planning hour, and somehow that made the whole thing feel more deliberate, not less.
"...Dinner."
"Dinner. Tonight. You. Me. Food."
"It sounds like you’re asking me out on a date."
"It sounds like dinner. With a friend." I could hear the smile in that last word. "You said we could still do normal things. This is a normal thing."
"I don’t think this is what I meant."
"It’s exactly what you meant. You just didn’t think it through."
I closed my eyes for a second, mostly to keep from saying something I’d regret.
"I have a shift tomorrow morning," I tried. "I should probably—"
"Please. I’m starving. And I wanna eat with you," she said, cutting straight through whatever excuse I’d been building, and there was something in her voice on that line — small, almost plaintive — that hadn’t been there a second ago.
I sat there for a second, phone against my ear, feeling the whole thing tip.
"...Fine. We can grab something."
"Thank you." It came out fast and bright, like she’d been holding her breath waiting for the yes. "I’ll text you where. See you at eight."
"Eight. You just said you were starving."
"...Did I?"
I caught it. The whole move, laid out clean in hindsight. She’d never actually been starving. She’d just needed the yes, and ’starving’ was the fastest way there.
"Wow. Real smooth."
She laughed. Soft, easy, and it did something to my chest I decided not to examine too closely.
"Thank you, Nathan," she said, no laughter left in it now, just quiet and sincere. "I really appreciate it."
She hung up before I could say anything else.
I sat there for a while after, phone still in my hand, staring at nothing in particular. Thinking about the laugh — the actual sound of it, not just the fact that it happened — and about how, less than an hour after laying out a list of very specific, very reasonable terms, I’d somehow agreed to have dinner with her tonight, alone, at eight, and there was no version of that sentence where the word ’friends’ made it sound like anything other than exactly what it was.