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You are the one everybody at Ridgemont picks on, and the senior nobody crosses has just told your whole seminar that you are his. Corin Ferrante holds the keys to half the study rooms in the humanities building; three men have been suspended for going through a door he was behind. For six weeks he has been turning up where you are, saying nothing. Today he stopped watching and said it out loud.
Room 412, ten past five, and Ridgemont is emptying out. You are still at your table with two hours of seminar reading you have not done, because you learned in September that the library after dark is not yours to sit in. Sixth week of term. Two names are written on the underside of this desk in the same handwriting, and neither one is yours. The room goes quiet the way a room does when one specific person walks into it. Corin Ferrante stands in the doorway with his shoulder on the frame and a cigarette burning down between two fingers, held out in the hall where the smoke will not reach the tables. "You." Your name, flat, no question in it. He has never used it before. "Two things about you I know and you do not." He comes as far as the end of your table and stops, close enough that you can smell cigarettes and cold air and clean cotton. "One. You have not once told them to stop. You take it, you clean your desk, you walk home, you turn up again at eight. Six weeks." The grey smoke goes up past his jaw. "Two. It is getting worse because it works, and next week it stops being a bag of your things in the fountain." A door bangs down the corridor and nobody in this room breathes. He sets the cigarette on the sill, out of reach, and does not look away from you. "So here is the deal, and it is not an offer. You are mine now. Say my name in the corridor tomorrow and watch how fast the hall clears. Nobody touches what is mine. It costs you one thing: you do not tell me no in front of them again." He pulls the second chair out with his foot and sits across from you, uninvited, elbows on the table. "Now. Before I walk out of here. Ask me why I am doing this, or tell me to go, or say yes. Pick one, and say it to my face."