Marcus drew the nucleophile attacking the wrong carbon three times.
The first time I circled it.
The second time I drew a skull beside it.
The third time I put my pencil down.
“Marcus.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
He stared at the mechanism.
Then at me.
“No.”
There we go.
Normally Marcus sees reaction mechanisms before the rest of us finish reading the reagents. In lab he is the person who notices you grabbed the wrong solvent from six feet away. He can balance a separatory funnel against one hip, tell you why your yield sucks, and remember exactly which TA wrote CLEAN YOUR GLASSWARE on the board after somebody left a flask in the sink for three days.
Tonight his pencil had worn a gray divot into the same spot on the page.
Room 4B was cold enough that I had his department crewneck over my shirt. My pleated skirt was mostly hidden under the table.
Mostly.
Marcus had been pretending not to notice it since 10:12.
He was bad at that tonight too.
“How much sleep?”
“Enough.”
“Number.”
He sighed.
“Four hours.”
“Last night?”
“Across two nights.”
I stared at him.
“Midterm,” he said.
“I also have the midterm.”
“You’re not worried.”
“I’m terrified. I’m just prettier about it.”
He laughed once.
Small, but real.
Marcus was funniest when the laboratory-grade self-control cracked. He was twenty-one and sometimes acted like the chemistry department would collapse if he stopped monitoring it for ten minutes.
I tapped the bad curved arrow with my pencil.
“Study break.”
His eyes lifted immediately.
Awake now.
We’d been circling each other since lab two weeks ago, when I asked him if he needed help with functional groups while staring at his mouth. He’d made me say what I meant, and I had. We both knew what this was.
Marcus looked at the frosted-glass door. It was locked. He pushed his chair back and pulled me up, and I felt the moment he stopped thinking about whether this was smart and just took what he wanted.
I stood.
The chair legs scraped softly over the floor as I walked around the table.
Marcus looked down at the skirt now.
“You wore that on purpose.”
“For organic chemistry? Obviously.”
“Luna.”
“You like it.”
He looked at my legs again.
“Yeah.”
My stomach flipped, which was irritating because I had come over here intending to be the composed one.
I stopped between his knees and put both hands on his shoulders.
His neck was hard with tension.
“Jesus.”
“What?”
“You feel like you’ve been carrying the building.”
“Midterm.”
“Yes, Marcus. I remember the midterm. It has been mentioned.”
I dug my thumbs in once.
His eyes shut.
“Ten minutes,” I said.
His eyes opened.
“You’re setting a timer?”
“No. That’s deranged.”
“You color-code flash cards.”
“That’s scholarship.”
I kissed him before he could answer.
Marcus always started careful.
Five seconds, maybe six.
Then the hand at my waist tightened and the other came up behind my neck and I could feel him stop measuring the kiss quite so closely.
I pulled back.
I went down between his knees and he watched me settle there like he couldn’t believe this was happening.
The floor in 4B is harder than it looks. The carpet is basically decorative felt glued to concrete. I could feel it through my socks when I settled onto my knees.
Marcus’s hand came down to my hair and stopped there.
The ventilation fan hummed over us.
His laptop charger made that faint electric tick it had been making all night.
I undid his jeans and took him out.
He was already hard.
I looked up.
Marcus kept his eyes on me instead of the mechanism sheet or the clock.
Good.
I took him into my mouth slowly.
His breath caught.
The hand in my hair moved once, fingers flexing and then going still again.
I stayed slow.
Marcus spent the entire day ahead of himself: reading the next step, checking the next variable, correcting the next mistake before it existed. I wanted the reaction before the explanation.
So I watched.
His fingers moved when I found the pressure he liked.
His head tipped back when I changed the angle.
His knee shifted against my shoulder and, for once, he left it where it landed.
I drew back for air and Marcus looked down at me like I was the only thing that mattered. I went back down and his thumb brushed behind my ear, holding me there, his fingers flexing in my hair.
He made a sound and I felt him start to pull back, like he was embarrassed by how reactive he was. I didn’t let him. I kept him right where he was and kept going, and he gave up trying to be quiet about it. His fingers flexed in my hair when I found the pace he liked.
His fingers flexed in my hair without pushing. I followed the reaction.
Slow until his breathing settled into the rhythm.
A little more when his hips finally moved.
He froze the first time.
I put my palm against his thigh and kept going.
He looked down at me.
The second time his hips moved, he let them.
That was hotter than an apology would have been.
Marcus got quieter as he got closer.
His hand didn’t. Every small change came through his fingers first: tightening in my hair, loosening when I needed breath, settling against the back of my head again when I returned.
Then my name.
He said my name like a warning, his hand loosening just slightly, but I pushed into it and kept going, and he groaned and stopped fighting it.
His whole body tightened for one sharp second.
He finished in my mouth.
I swallowed.
For a few seconds Marcus did absolutely nothing.
That may have been the rarest event of the evening.
I sat back on my heels.
His head was against the chair and his eyes were closed.
The mechanism sheet was still on the table behind me, wrong arrow and all.
I reached up and tapped his knee.
“Hey.”
One eye opened.
“Water.”
He grabbed the bottle from the table and handed it down to me first.
I drank.
Then he did.
He found my mints without asking because he knew they were in the small front pocket of my bag.
He handed me one.
Took one himself.
“Why are you eating one?”
“Solidarity.”
I laughed.
Then Marcus stood.
I thought he was going to stretch.
Instead he pulled my chair out with his foot.
“Sit.”
“Excuse me?”
“Spectroscopy.”
I stared at him.
He picked up the whiteboard marker.
“You’ve been avoiding question twelve for three days.”
“How do you know that?”
“Your flash cards skip from eleven to thirteen.”
I looked at the stack.
Fuck.
Of course he had noticed.
“Sit,” he said again.
I sat.
Marcus drew the spectrum on the whiteboard, cleaner than the one in the practice packet.
“First thing you see?”
I answered.
He asked the next question.
I got that one wrong.
He made me try again.
At 12:38 I solved the spectroscopy problem I’d been pretending did not exist.
At 12:44 Marcus went back to the original mechanism.
He stared at the curved arrow.
Erased it.
Redrew it correctly on the first try.
I leaned over.
“Look at that.”
“What?”
“Science.”
“Shut up.”
He capped the marker and looked at the clock.
“That was more than ten minutes.”
“File a complaint.”
“Thursday?”
“We already study Thursday.”
He looked at me.
I waited.
“Study break Thursday?”
“Ask me Thursday.”
He tried not to smile.
Thursday at 10:15, Room 4B was already booked under his name.
I checked.
For academic reasons.
