The library doors swung shut behind them and cut off the reading room hush like a lid snapping down on a jar.
Reggie stretched his arms over his head on the front steps like a man who’d just been thrown out of his own house for fun.
“Banned,” said Reggie.
“One day. Your first day back on campus and my best friend gets us banned from the library.”
“You got us banned,” said Wes.
“I was standing still.”
“Details.” Reggie dropped his arms, squinted across the quad, and a grin crawled over his face that made Wes nervous.
“Okay, change of subject, and I need you to stay calm.”
“Calm about what?”
“Walk with me.”
They took the path curving around the fountain, and it took maybe thirty steps before Wes noticed, because the quad was packed with students sprawled on the grass between classes and heads were turning.
Not the polite flick of eyes strangers get, actual turning, kids leaning into their friends to whisper behind cupped hands.
A girl in a tennis skirt walking the other way looked at him, did a full double take, looked back over her shoulder twice more, and walked straight into a bike rack with a CLANG.
“Was she okay?” said Wes.
“She’ll live.” Reggie stopped at the fountain edge and spread his hands like a showman.
“So. Do you know what they call you here?”
“Wes.”
“They call you the Chapel Prince, and buddy, I’ve got news, because as of yesterday your whole brand is on fire.”
“My brand,” said Wes.
“Two years, twenty rejections, over a hundred attempts, and you turned down every girl on this campus like a man under holy orders. And now the Prince has fallen. That girl from the burger joint has a big mouth, her friend has a bigger one, and this campus handles news the way this campus handles everything.”
Reggie leaned in, and his voice dropped like he was passing state secrets.
“There’s a betting pool.”
A pigeon landed on the fountain rim between them.
“I’m sorry,” said Wes.
“A what?”
“A pool.
Real money.
It started sophomore year after rejection number eight, when Priya Patel asked you out right here at this fountain and you said no so fast she thought you were making fun of her.
At first people just bet on the why; gay, sworn to God or maybe an alien.
Then last spring somebody upgraded the market, and now the whole thing is one question and one question only.
Reggie held up two fingers.
Wes stared at him while the pigeon stared at Wes.
“You’re telling me this school is running a gambling operation about what I do in bed.”
“About what you do in bed, and business is BOOMING, because the book lives in a spreadsheet run by some econ girl nobody’s ever met, and the odds have been locked at two to one on bottom for a full year, because that’s what the market believes, my guy.
Bottom is winning.
There’s over two hundred in the pot.
And last night it all went supernova, because the most chased man on this campus got picked up at a burger joint by a girl from his own department, and if the rumors about that night are even ten percent true,Reggie whistled low,
“somebody is about to lose their tuition money.”
Wes stood very still while students streamed past on both sides, some of them definitely looking, one guy giving him a nod like they were colleagues now, and the shape of it landed on him all at once.
Two years of walls, and the campus never called him a loser, they’d called him a mystery, then they’d made him a market, and the market had just had the biggest day of its life.
“I hate this school,” said Wes.
“You love this school. Also, quick math. Everyone who bet bottom is about to cry into their ramen.”
“People need to mind their own business,” said Wes, too loud, and a passing cluster of girls giggled at him and he pointed at them and they scattered like pigeons.
Then it hit him and his stomach dropped.
“The practice set. Reggie. The Hollis set is reference only, it can’t leave the building, the retake will be built off that exact thing, and we just got banned. If I fail the retake I lose the scholarship, and if I lose the scholarship it’s back to eleven dollars an hour and Walt’s rent speeches.”
Reggie looked at him for a long moment, and the grin came back slower this time, and there was something almost professional in it.
“Okay,” said Reggie.
“Watch closely, because school is about to be in session, and not the kind you pay tuition for.”
“Reggie. She’s a librarian, not a mark.”
“Every woman is a mark if the script is right. Come on. Quietly.”
The reading room was cool and dim again, and they slid past the front desk like ghosts while Winnie Osei stamped her returns with the rhythm of a metronome, and Reggie set his forearms on the wood and pitched his voice low and apologetic.
“Miss Osei. I want to apologize, sincerely, for earlier.”
Winnie stamped a book.
Didn’t look up.
“You’re right, we were disrespectful, disturbing your sanctuary like that, and I’ve been sitting outside feeling terrible about it, so I had to come back and say it to your face. So could you ever find it in your heart to forgive us?”
“Just leave okay, and don’t make a scene,” said Winnie, flat.
“A scene? Never. I just couldn’t stand leaving a bad impression on a girl as beautiful as you, and I wouldn’t want you thinking I’m some kind of creep,” said Reggie.
And he reached out and gently brushed his fingers over her hand on the desk.
Winnie flinched and pulled back like she’d touched a stove.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Forgive me, I couldn’t help myself, it’s just that your hand is so delicate and silky that it hypnotized me,” said Reggie.
From the shelf three steps away, Wes stood frozen with a copy of Macroeconomics in his hands and his mouth hanging open, because he could see the whole thing happening in real time.
A script.
Beats.
Winnie narrowed her eyes behind the thick lenses.
“Stop joking with me, because I’m not falling for some cliché novel lines, and I’m not an idiot.”
And here was the pivot, and Reggie took it like a man catching a ball he’d thrown to himself.
He recoiled, the recoil turned into a gasp, the gasp climbed his whole face, and when he spoke his voice had gone thin and hurt.
“Cliché? I finally worked up the courage to tell you how I felt, and my feelings are just a cliché to you?”
“I, no, wait,” said Winnie.
“I’m just a very sensitive man, and women have always played with my feelings,” said Reggie, and his eyes were going red at the rims, actually going red, Wes could see it from the shelf.
“So sometimes I feel like people just take advantage of me.”
A single tear rolled down his cheek.
One.
Perfect.
Centered.
Wes would think about that tear for a long time, about how a tear that precise should look fake, and how it didn’t matter at all, because it had already landed.
Winnie Osei, terror of the stacks, stood up so fast her chair rolled back and cracked against the wall, and her whole face came apart.
“No! No, I didn’t mean it like that! It’s just that I… wait, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, and I didn’t mean to hurt you!” said Winnie.
She reached across the desk and pulled him into a hug, her head barely reaching his shoulder, and Reggie buried his face against her chest and hid his smirk where only Wes could see it, his eyes flat and busy over her hair, a hunter checking the terrain.
“Shh, it’s okay, I’m so sorry, everything will be fine I promise,” said Winnie, and her hand came up and stroked his hair.
Wes stood in the shelves holding a book he didn’t remember grabbing, watching a professional hunter at work.
Because that’s what it was, and he ran it back in his head frame by frame while the hug went on.
The apology to open the door.
The touch to test the flinch.
The silk line built specifically to trigger the cliché accusation he NEEDED, because the accusation was the pivot, and the pivot was the whole play.
Then the hurt, the tear, the reframe, and two minutes.
Under two minutes from banned to held, from a screaming dragon to a grown woman promising a grown man that everything would be fine, and every single beat had been load-bearing.
The scariest part was that Reggie had clearly run this script before, and knew, KNEW, the accusation would come, because he’d written the line to bait it.
Wes filed it.
All of it.
The structure, the timing, the tear placement.
Somewhere in the back of his head a little corkboard went up, and the first pinned card read: sensitivity cracks the guarded ones, and the harder the shell, the deeper the crack.
Winnie whispered something against Reggie’s chest, hushed and hurried, and Reggie lifted his head, glanced back over her shoulder straight at Wes, and flicked two fingers toward the back of the building.
Follow me.