Chapter 3 The Library - Captain Don't Look Back (BXB)

Elias POV

I am not surprised when he sits down across from me.

It is Thursday afternoon, three days after the conversation outside the humanities building, and I am in the campus library on the second floor at a table near the window, which is where I always sit on Thursday afternoons because the light comes in correctly and the radiator under the window keeps the cold out and it is just far enough from the main corridor that people do not walk past constantly.

He has been in this library before. He knows I sit here on Thursdays.

I know because I have seen him walking past the window below on Thursday afternoons for two years and occasionally glancing up, which he probably thinks I have not noticed.

Today he does not glance up. He comes in through the door at the top of the stairs, scans the room once, and walks directly to my table.

He puts his bag down on the empty chair. He sits in the one across from me. He opens his laptop.

He does not say anything.

Neither do I.

We sit like that for almost twenty minutes. Him on one side of the table with whatever he is working on. Me on the other side with my seminar reading. The library is quiet. Other students at other tables, heads down, earphones in. The radiator ticking. The particular quality of a room where people are pretending to be more absorbed than they are.

Then he says, without looking up from his screen: "You come here every Thursday."

"Yes," I say.

"Same table."

He types something. Then: "Why this one?"

"The light," I say. "And the radiator."

He glances at the radiator under the window. Then back at his screen. "Practical."

"I am a practical person."

A pause. He scrolls something on his laptop. "You don't seem it."

I look at him over the top of my book. "What do I seem?"

He meets my eyes briefly before looking away again. "Deliberate," he says. "Everything you do is deliberate."

"That's the same thing as practical."

"Not exactly," he says.

I go back to my reading. He goes back to his screen.

Five minutes pass.

"I don't usually come to this part of the library," he says.

"I know," I say. "You use the ground floor. The sports science section. Near the periodicals."

Another pause. A different kind this time. The kind that has something underneath it.

"You know a lot about my schedule," he says.

"You are not difficult to observe," I say. "You are the most visible person on this campus, Noah. People track your movements without realizing they are doing it."

"But you do it deliberately."

"I told you. I am a deliberate person."

He is quiet for a moment. I can feel him deciding something, the way you can feel weather changing before it arrives.

"Why?" he says finally. Not aggressive. Genuinely asking. The voice of someone who has been carrying a question for a long time and has finally decided to just say it out loud.

I close my book properly this time and look at him across the table.

He looks back. He does not look away first, which is new.

"Because you are interesting," I say. "And because for two years you have been looking at me like you are trying to solve a problem and have not got there yet. I find that interesting."

"I don't know what you're talking about," he says.

"Yes you do," I say.

He opens his mouth. Closes it. Looks at the table between us. Then back up at me.

"I have a girlfriend," he says.

"I know," I say. "Her name is Nadia. She has a Tuesday afternoon class in the Whitmore building and she laughs very loudly at her own jokes, which I respect."

Something in his expression shifts. Not anger. Something more uncomfortable than anger. The face of someone being seen too clearly.

"This is a strange conversation," he says.

"Yes," I agree. "Most true ones are."

He does not leave. That is the thing I notice most. He came in, he started this conversation, and now when it has become uncomfortable he stays in the chair instead of picking up his bag and finding a reason to go.

He stays.

We go back to our respective work. The library settles back into its quiet. I read the same paragraph four times and retain nothing. He types something that I suspect is not related to whatever assignment he is supposed to be working on.

After a while he says: "Your name. Elias."

"Yes."

"Where is it from?"

"My grandmother," I say. "She said it was the name of someone in her village who was impossible to forget. She thought it would suit me."

He considers this. "Did she know you when she gave it to you?"

"She named me before she met me," I say. "She said she just knew."

He is quiet for a moment. Then, very quietly, almost to himself: "That tracks."

I do not ask what he means. I do not need to.

We stay at the table until the library starts filling with the evening crowd, students arriving for night sessions, the quiet giving way to the ordinary noise of people in a shared space.

When I finally close my book and start packing my bag he closes his laptop.

"Same table?" he says. "Next Thursday."

It is not quite a question.

"Same table," I say. "Same time."

He nods once. He picks up his bag. He walks toward the stairs without looking back.

I watch him go.

Two years of watching from a distance and now he is the one who came to find me. Two years of patience and now he sat across from me in the library and asked me why and did not leave when the answer made him uncomfortable.

That is not nothing.

That is, in fact, everything.

I put on my jacket and I walk out of the library and across the campus in the November dark, and I am not smiling in a way that anyone would call triumphant.

I am smiling in the way that belongs to someone who has been patient for a very long time and has just seen the first sign that the patience was not wasted.