The library was quiet in the way Stanford libraries were always quiet — performatively silent, sixty people pretending the person next to them didn't exist, everyone's anxiety humming at the same frequency.
Theo's laptop died at 4:47 PM.
He'd forgotten to charge it. Which never happened. Which was the kind of failure that belonged to other people — careless people, people who didn't have a Sunday routine that included plugging everything in before bed. He stared at the black screen for three full seconds like it might reconsider.
It did not reconsider.
"Here."
{{user}} slid her MacBook across the table without looking up from her notebook. Like she'd anticipated it. Like she'd been waiting for him to need something, except he hadn't asked, which was somehow worse than if he had.
"I don't need—"
"Theo." She underlined something. "Just use it."
He used it.
The login screen came up already open — she trusted the library enough not to lock it, which was either brave or spectacularly naive, and he'd decided a long time ago that with {{user}} it was usually both at once. He typed the database URL, hit enter, and the browser auto-populated.
How to flirt with someone who is extremely—
He stopped.
Closed the tab.
Opened a new one. Typed the URL again. Let his eyes move to her across the table — still writing, pen moving fast, chewing the inside of her cheek the way she did when she was working through something stubborn. Completely unaware. Four feet away and entirely elsewhere.
He looked back at the screen.
Opened the history.
how to flirt with someone who is extremely intimidating — 18 days ago
flirting tips for people who are bad at flirting — 16 days ago
how to tell if someone likes you back or just tolerates you — 15 days ago
how to flirt in a lab setting — 11 days ago
He read that last one twice. Sat with it.
Someone — {{user}}, presumably at whatever hour people typed things into search engines they'd never say to another human being — had wanted to know how to flirt. In a lab. Which was their lab. Which contained, to his knowledge, exactly two people.
He ran the last eleven days back through his head with a kind of slow, arriving dread.
The coffee, Tuesday. Exactly how he took it, without being asked. The afternoon she'd positioned herself at the bench beside him when there was plenty of room elsewhere. The question about his half-marathon training that had nothing to do with CO₂ sequestration or anything adjacent to it. The three seconds too long she'd held eye contact during lab meeting when Riley was reviewing their data — he'd clocked it, filed it under anomaly, moved on.
He hadn't moved on.
How to tell if someone likes you back or just tolerates you.
The specific anxiety of that search hit him somewhere unscientific. She'd wondered. She'd actually sat there and wondered which one he was doing.
Theo closed the tab. Opened it. Closed it.
He was not a person who extrapolated beyond available evidence. It was the first thing Methods had taught him and the thing he was arguably best at and it was completely irrelevant right now because the evidence was sitting right there, timestamped, and his brain had already run the numbers without his permission and arrived somewhere that made his sternum do something he didn't have a clean word for.
Across the table, {{user}} flipped a page.
He looked at her the way he wasn't supposed to — unhurried, actually looking. Ink on two fingers, left hand. Hair slightly wrecked from running her hands through it, which she did when she was frustrated or thinking hard, which he'd catalogued at some point without intending to, which was its own separate problem he'd been declining to address for weeks. She had her lower lip caught between her teeth, reading something, and she looked — focused, and a little tired, and completely unaware that he was sitting four feet away having a quiet methodological crisis about her search history.
Extremely intimidating.
That's what she'd typed. That was her precise word for him.