Brackmoor was rarely truly quiet at this hour.
Even during a lecture, muffled voices drifted through the walls from the hallway, somewhere a door clicked shut, chairs scraped across the floor, and outside on campus, life carried on between the library, the cafeteria, and the sports complex. Professor Alois Grimmer stood at the front of the lecture hall, explaining some model at the board with the enthusiasm of a man who probably considered tax forms a hobby.
Iestyn Dellinger sat three rows further back.
Normally, that wasn't information that surprised anyone.
Almost everyone on campus knew who he was. Wide receiver for the Kestrels. Full scholarship. One of those names that echoed through the stadium over the loudspeakers on game days. Tall, tattooed, damn good at his sport, and equipped with enough confidence to occasionally give the impression that Brackmoor had personally asked him to attend.
Today, nothing about him seemed unusual at first.
Black hoodie. Dark sweatpants. A notebook in front of him that actually had notes in it. His phone lay face-down next to his elbow.
Only he himself knew he hadn't absorbed a single word Grimmer had said in nearly twenty minutes.
His pen had stopped moving.
Damn.
He knew this feeling.
And he hated how well he knew it by now.
He exhaled slowly through his nose, shifted in his seat, and forced his gaze back to the board.
Focus.
Grimmer wrote a new formula.
He read it.
Once.
Twice.
By the third attempt, he realized he still had no idea what it said.
"Shit,"
he muttered so quietly the word barely left his seat.
His fingers tightened around the pen.
He could wait.
Of course he could wait.
He'd told himself that exact sentence often enough over the past few years to know how little comfort it still offered.
He glanced at the clock.
Thirty-seven minutes left.
Great.
His knee bounced once under the desk before he deliberately stopped the motion. He forced himself back to his notes, wrote two lines, and immediately crossed out the second one.
Grimmer kept talking.
Josip Ulvestad would probably have laughed at him if he were here. Sylwia Reichenbach would have made some comment about how the great Iestyn Dellinger was apparently being defeated by his own brain.
The thought pulled the corner of his mouth up for a split second.
Then the smile faded.
Thirty-five minutes left.
He closed his eyes briefly.
No.
Not today.
He had video analysis after the lecture. Then practice. A game Saturday. A paper for Grimmer also needed to get done, and the head coach had already made it clear enough yesterday what he thought of a lack of focus.
He didn't need another shitty day he ruined for himself.
So he stayed seated.
Five minutes.
Ten.
At minute twelve, he gave up.
Not dramatically. Not with some grand internal surrender.
He simply closed his notebook, slid it into his bag, and stood up as unobtrusively as a man of nearly two meters could stand up in a lecture hall.
Grimmer glanced up.
Their eyes met.
He gestured briefly toward the door.
Professor Grimmer regarded him with that mix of distrust and resignation he had presumably earned over the past semesters, but said nothing.
The hallway outside was nearly empty.
He ran both hands through his black hair and stood still for a moment.
"Get it together."
It helped about as much as expected.
He knew the building. Knew the areas that were barely used between lecture blocks because most seminars took place in the opposite wing.
That fact alone made him pause briefly.
This was stupid.
He knew it.
Did it anyway.
An empty side room lay a few doors down. He opened it, automatically checked whether anyone was inside, and stepped in.
Empty.
He pulled the door shut behind him.
Not locked.
A detail he didn't think about as much as he should have in that moment.
A few minutes.
That was all he wanted.
He ran the tap cold and put both hands under it. Twenty times. Then twenty again. Then he lost count and started over.
Then back to his life.
To video analysis. To practice. To Josip's dumb comments. To Grimmer and his paper. To everything Iestyn Dellinger normally had so damn well under control.
Only that control had been a word he used far more generously than he should for years.
—
When the door opened, everything changed within a second.
He froze.
His head snapped around.
For a tiny moment, something appeared on his face that almost no one ever got to see on the football field.
Panic.
Not for long.
He was too good at pulling himself together.
He shut the tap off, stepped back, and forced his breathing under control while his gaze moved to the open door.
Then to you.
Silence.
Somewhere outside, two students walked down the hallway laughing, with no idea that Iestyn Dellinger's shitty day had just gotten considerably shittier.
His jaw tightened.
"Fuck."
He ran a hand over his mouth.
He could have just left right then.
Acted like nothing had happened.
Hoped it wouldn't lead anywhere.
Instead, he stayed.
His dark eyes rested on you attentively while something else worked behind the initial embarrassment. Thinking. Assessing. Taking back control.
Typical him.
"Okay."
His voice sounded much more like the man Brackmoor knew again.
Calm. Confident. Almost.
He grabbed his bag, slung it over one shoulder, and walked to the door. Just before it, he stopped, with enough distance not to block the way.
His gaze swept across your face once, as if he could find an answer there that you hadn't given him yet.
He couldn't.
That didn't seem to please him.
"I could claim right now that it didn't look like what it looked like."
One eyebrow rose.
"Though that would be a pretty shitty strategy."
For a moment, that familiar, arrogant grin flickered.
Then he turned serious again.
"So let's make it simpler."
He shifted his weight and held your gaze.
"How much did you see?"