Chapter Text
It had never been easy for her to make friends. She was the kind of person who became deeply uncomfortable at the mere thought of figuring out how to start a conversation. This, of course, became even worse when it involved a conference at a faculty entirely unrelated to her field, discussing a topic completely disconnected from her dissertation. After all, the only thing more terrifying than talking to strangers was telling her thesis supervisor no.
When she had started university, she had never seriously considered pursuing a PhD. Spending even more hours at university sounded like a peculiar form of torture that no one should ever inflict upon themselves. And yet, here she was, a small Art History graduate sitting among a crowd of pompous predoctoral medical students, a young deer drinking from a river infested with crocodiles. In her defense, she had arrived first and the others had simply sat around her as if they could smell her fear.
Well. Not all of them.
One of them had chosen a seat on the opposite side of the room. He hadn't even looked at her at first, far too busy unloading pamphlets and finding any possible excuse not to sit with his colleagues. He was very tall, with dark circles beneath his eyes so pronounced they practically reached the floor. His vitiligo made him stand out in a lecture hall full of people dressed almost exactly alike. She had never seen anyone look so exhausted, it seemed as though not even an entire weekend of uninterrupted sleep would be enough to reset the counter in his race against Somnus.
She had stopped paying any real attention to the presentation on epistemology quite some time ago. Instead, she kept drafting and deleting an email to her office mate, describing increasingly creative methods of bringing this conference to an immediate end. Her supervisor had deceived her, she had promised there would be a lecture on medicine in the Early Modern period and that they would probably use paintings that might be useful for her research on the proximity of the sordid in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century art. That lecture had already happened, and not a single image had been shown. Now she was trapped until half past eight in the evening at a conference where she knew no one and where, if she were being entirely honest with herself, she had little interest in changing that situation. She had overheard enough conversations during the breaks to conclude that the pigeons gathered by the entrance, waiting for some absent-minded researcher to drop a crumb from their sandwich, would probably make for more intellectually stimulating company than a good portion of the attendees.
Well, perhaps not more than him.
The thought appeared so spontaneously that it almost annoyed her. She was no longer fourteen, nor was she a first-year undergraduate; she was a graduate, a funded doctoral researcher, and, if everything went reasonably well, a future doctor. She should have been above the tendency to get distracted by an attractive stranger sitting on the other side of the room.
The fact that he was handsome was irrelevant. The fact that he looked as though he hadn't slept more than three consecutive hours in several years should have been irrelevant too. The fact that he stared at his laptop with an almost pathological intensity, as though no one else in the room existed, also deserved no further consideration.
And yet.
Was he looking at her?
The question burst into her mind with such force that, for a moment, she even forgot the tedium of the lecture. Was he looking at her? The absurdly attractive medical PhD student who had spent the entire afternoon orbiting the event with the quiet authority of someone who had probably organized half the panels and edited the other half? At her? Specifically at her, who had spent at least ten minutes alternating between an expression of existential suffering and one of absolute disinterest?
She was probably imagining it.
She had never been one of those people capable of attracting attention without trying, much less the kind of woman to whom things happened according to the peculiar logic of novels. She had had relationships, the occasional romance, and a respectable number of questionable decisions made at university parties, but that was a far cry from becoming the protagonist of a memorable encounter. He was probably looking at her because he was trying to identify her.
He looked like the sort of person for whom order was not a preference but a necessity, someone incapable of tolerating the presence of an unknown variable in a space they considered perfectly catalogued. And if he was one of the conference organizers, as she suspected, he had probably spent the entire afternoon wondering who the doctoral student infiltrated among the medical attendees was. Or perhaps he had simply noticed the expression on her face. After all, she had been watching the presentation with the enthusiasm of a condemned prisoner attending her own public execution for so long that it was surprising nobody had yet asked whether she required medical assistance.
She immediately looked away and pretended to take a sudden interest in her notes. Or rather, in the disaster she had scribbled in the margin of the conference program.
"If this man says 'paradigm' one more time, I'm throwing myself out the window."
A perfectly valid academic observation.
The speaker continued talking with a confidence she envied profoundly. How could anyone be so convinced that what they had to say was interesting? She needed half an hour of psychological preparation just to buy a loaf of bread. She shifted in her seat. The hands of the clock seemed barely to have moved. When someone's phone rang in the back row, she felt such genuine joy that she almost applauded. The interruption lasted only a few seconds. A true tragedy.
She looked up again without meaning to, or perhaps she did mean to, because he was by far the most interesting thing that had happened all day. The young man was still there, yet he was no longer looking at her. He was typing on his laptop at a speed that seemed physically impossible, his expression exactly the same as it had been all afternoon: terminal exhaustion mixed with a concentration so intense it bordered on aggression.
It was strange. The longer she watched him, the less he seemed to fit with everyone else, he spoke to no one, he did not join the conversations during breaks, he seemed entirely uninterested in impressing anybody... In fact, he looked as though he would rather be anywhere else.
And for some reason, she found that comforting. At least there was another hostage in the room.
The next half hour passed with criminal slowness. She took notes on things she did not understand, answered emails from students in the interactive classes she had been assigned to teach and who, for reasons she could not begin to understand, believed she would know the answers to their questions about the final assessment. She looked out the window. Counted the ceiling lamps. Briefly considered faking a medical emergency, although that was probably a poor strategy in front of fifty medical students.
Eventually, the final break arrived. A collective murmur spread through the room as people began getting to their feet. Finally.
She stood, stretched her back, and gathered her things. Her handbag had become tangled around the leg of her chair because, of course, her handbag had to become tangled around the leg of her chair. She pulled once. Nothing. She pulled again. Nothing. Perfect, the bloody Sword in the Stone, reenacted in Lecture Hall 7 of the Faculty of Medicine. She crouched down to free the strap.
"Do you need some help?"
The voice appeared so close that she nearly smashed her head against the desk. She straightened up abruptly, which turned out to be a terrible idea because she immediately collided with the edge of the table.
"Fuck!"
Pain shot through her forehead. Fantastic. Wonderful! Exactly the impression she wanted to make. When she looked up, he was standing right in front of her, much closer than she had imagined.
Tall, ridiculously tall.
The dark circles were still there, just as impressive as before, and his gray eyes watched her with a strange mixture of concern and exhaustion.
For a moment neither of them spoke. She didn't because she had just suffered an irreversible social death and was clinging desperately to the hope that if she remained perfectly still, he would return to his office and they could both pretend none of this had ever happened. He didn't because he seemed to be evaluating whether she had sustained a concussion.
"Are you okay?" he finally asked.
And there it was.
The young man who had spent the entire afternoon avoiding conversation with every human being in the building had just crossed half the lecture hall to speak to her.