(Max’s POV)
The seminar room was already half full when I got there, chairs dragged into a loose circle for the group discussion, and I found an open seat between a girl scrolling her phone and an empty chair someone had clearly left their bag on to save.
"That one’s taken," the girl said, not looking up. "Sorry."
"No worries." I moved one seat over, dropping my bag beside a guy in a faded university hoodie who glanced up and gave me a quick nod.
"You’re the transfer, right? Trade policy?"
"Max."
"Diego." He stuck a hand out, easy. "You survive the midterm review last week? Half the room looked like they wanted to riot."
"I wasn’t here for that one yet."
"Lucky." He grinned. "Professor Whitlock cold-called three people and none of them knew the answer. It was a bloodbath."
The professor called the room to order a minute later, splitting us into groups of four for a case study on tariff disputes, and I ended up with Diego, the phone girl whose name turned out to be Priya — and a quiet guy named Felix who didn’t say much beyond a mumbled hello.
"Okay, so." Priya pulled her chair closer, tapping her pen against the printed case study. "Country A slaps tariffs on steel imports from Country B. B retaliates with agricultural tariffs. Who actually wins this?"
"Neither, usually," I said. "Depends who has more elastic demand. If B’s got other buyers for the steel, A just hurt its own manufacturers for nothing."
Diego pointed his pen at me. "See, that’s the answer. I had a whole paragraph about political optics and this guy just — boom. Elasticity."
"Political optics matter too," I said. "Governments don’t always play the economically smart move. Sometimes the tariff’s about looking tough for voters, not actually winning the trade war."
"Okay, wow, you actually did the reading." Priya was already scribbling notes. "What page was the elasticity stuff on? I skimmed."
"Chapter four. Might’ve been Chapter five."
"Skimmed and now cheating off you, got it." She didn’t even look up, grinning slightly as she wrote.
Felix finally spoke up, quiet but steady. "What if B doesn’t have other buyers, though? Like, what if the steel’s specialized enough that A’s basically the only real market for it?"
"Then B’s stuck," I said. "That’s the whole leverage problem. Elasticity only helps you if you’ve actually got somewhere else to go."
"Huh." Felix nodded slowly, jotting something down. "That’s actually a good point."
We worked through the rest of the case study with the kind of easy back-and-forth that made the hour go faster than I expected, Diego cracking jokes between arguments, Priya challenging every claim just to see if it held up, Felix quietly asking the questions nobody else thought to ask.
Nobody hissed. Nobody called me anything under their breath. It was, strangely, the most normal hour I’d had since I moved here.
"You should come to the study group Thursdays," Diego said as we packed up, the professor already dismissing the room. "We meet at the library, second floor. It’s mostly just complaining about Whitlock’s grading curve, but occasionally we do actual studying."
"Yeah, I’m in."
"Bring the elasticity brain. We need it."
Priya waved a quick goodbye, already scrolling her phone again, and Felix gave me another one of his small, quiet nods on the way out.
I gathered my things slower than the rest of them, replaying the hour with something warm and unfamiliar sitting in my chest not gratitude exactly, just the simple, strange relief of being liked for something as ordinary as knowing what Chapter the reading was in.
I pushed through the doors expecting an empty hallway and an empty walk home.
Lucian was leaning against the wall outside.
I actually stopped walking. "I thought you left."
"I did." He pushed off the wall, bag already over one shoulder, expression giving away exactly as much as it always did, which was nothing. "Came back."
"Why?"
He didn’t answer that directly. He just started walking, and after a beat, I fell into step beside him, still waiting for an explanation that clearly wasn’t coming.
"You didn’t have to."
"I know."
"So why—"
"Let’s go home." He said it flat, final, the same three words he’d used in the locker room, except this time they weren’t a dismissal. This time they were an actual offer, and it took me a second to catch up to that.
"Okay," I said, because it was easier than pushing for more, and because some part of me didn’t actually want to risk him changing his mind.
We walked toward the lot in a silence that felt different from the ones before, not empty, not hostile, just quiet in a way that didn’t need filling.
He didn’t ask about the seminar. I didn’t ask why he’d come back instead of driving home the second I told him I had class.
We just walked, the cold air sharp against my face, my shoulder still faintly aching under my jacket, and for the first time since I’d moved into that house, the silence between us didn’t feel like something I had to survive.
At the car, he unlocked the doors with a flat click of the fob and paused, hand on the driver’s side, looking at me over the roof for a second longer than necessary.
"You did good today," he said. "On the ice."
It wasn’t much. Four words, said fast, already turning away before I could react to them.
"Thanks," I said, to his back, because he was already getting in, already done with whatever that had cost him to say.
I got in on my side, and for the whole drive home, I couldn’t stop turning those four words over, trying to figure out exactly how someone could say so little and still leave me with so much to think about.