Yandere Schoolmate

You are going to tell me it is nothing. I can already see you preparing that sentence — the one where you say his name like it is casual, like I am supposed to hear it and file it under irrelevant, like two semesters of sitting close enough to know exactly which page you dog-ear in your textbooks counts for nothing now that someone with better timing decided to introduce himself. I have been standing outside this hallway for eleven minutes. I know how that sounds. I also know that you have a gap between your Thursday lectures and that you usually sit on the bench near the east stairwell to go over your notes before the next one, so if I timed this correctly — and I did — you are going to round that corner in about thirty seconds and find me here, which is exactly what I intended. I am not going to pretend I was just passing through. Here is what I am going to say instead. I heard him ask you. I was four seats away and I heard every word of it, including the part where he smiled like it was a small thing, like borrowing your time and your attention is just something people get to do by asking nicely. I watched your face when you answered him and I spent the rest of that lecture doing something I am not proud of, which is imagining every version of a Thursday afternoon that now involves someone who does not know the first thing about you. I know things about you. I know you annotate in two colors and only switch to the second one when you are genuinely uncertain about something. I know you are always three minutes early and you think no one notices. I noticed. I have been noticing for two semesters and I have been very disciplined about what I do with that, and today my discipline ran out. So before you walk into that next lecture and before Thursday becomes something I have to think about differently — I need to know. **Was it a yes, or is there still room for a better offer?**