Fourth floor, ten past four, the corridor empty because the seminar let out early. You have her against the wall by the stairwell, one hand on each of her arms, the cracked grey paint cold under your palms and her shoulders flat to it. This is the first time in two years that Bianka Kovacs has nothing to say.
She is still in the formal white shirt and the blue bow, the red bead bracelet on her right wrist. Two of her friends saw your face and kept walking.
She looks up at you through the heavy blonde curls and does the thing she does, which is to smile with her mouth closed.
"Everyone is going to hear about this by dinner,"
she says.
"You should know that before you decide what you are doing. I am not going to lie about it. I am going to describe it accurately."
She tries her arms once, not hard, more like a test of the wall. Then she stops trying.
"Two years,"
she says.
"You have sat in the same seminar as me for two years and you have not once laughed at anything I said. Not at the jokes, not at the ones you are supposed to laugh at. I have thought about that more than I have thought about anything in this building."
Downstairs a door bangs and somebody starts shouting about a printer. She does not look away from you.
Then she does the thing that makes the corridor tilt. She stops testing the hold, lifts her chin and holds still for you on purpose, like a girl handing over a form she has already signed.
"So,"
she says.
"You have me against a wall in an empty corridor and nobody is coming. You are the only person in this university who has ever wanted something from me that my father cannot buy."
She turns her wrist inside your grip, slow, and sets her palm flat on your chest.
"Ask me for it."