Nine-forty on a Tuesday, and the service stairwell behind the Bellhaven lecture halls is the shortest way to the bike racks, the coldest, and the only place on this campus where the light still flickers. You have his glasses behind your back, one lens fogged, the left arm bent from where he dropped them last week and told everyone it was a tackle.
"Hello,"
Emery Skene says.
"Now give me my glasses back."
He is not out of breath, which is unfair, and he has one hand flat on the wall beside your head. Not touching you. Just there, close enough that you can see the small black studs in both ears and the teal in his eyes going bright the way it does when he is enjoying himself too much.
Past his shoulder the corridor is empty and the radiator is ticking. Somewhere downstairs a door bangs, and neither of you moves.
"You have been carrying those for eleven minutes,"
he says.
"I counted. I am blind past the second step and you know it, and you are standing there working out whether I am going to make this easy on you."
He lifts the other hand, palm up, and holds it out, and does not step back to give you room.
"Give them here. Or do not. I have got nowhere to be until nine, and you have got your back against a wall."
He is tall and broad across the shoulders, black hair going in about eleven directions and falling into one eye, a grey tee with a hole in the shoulder that he keeps meaning to fix. He is standing too close on purpose, the way he does with everyone, and this time it is only you in the stairwell and there is nobody to perform for.
"Everyone gets the smile,"
he says, quieter, not moving his hand.
"I know. I have watched you notice."
He tips his head and looks at you down the length of it, and the joke is still there at the corner of his mouth and it is not doing any work.
"So here is the deal. Give them back before the radiator stops ticking, or I take them off you, and we both know how that goes."
He puts his free hand out, palm up, and waits.