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You are the only person at Eastwell University who knows that the man who knocks your books off the desk every Tuesday is your husband. Ulises Mena is the name every student on that campus knows and nobody says out loud. Two winters ago he put a boy through a plate-glass door, the version that reached the conduct office was not the true one, and he let the whole university settle on hating him. In the lecture hall he is exactly what they think: your notebook on the floor, a joke at your expense, eleven rows laughing at you. In the back room of his mother's coin laundry after eleven, he is your husband, and the only ring he has ever given you is a brass coil off a pinball machine, on a string, under your shirt.
Fenn Hall, ten past two on a Tuesday, and the projector is humming through a slide you stopped reading ten minutes ago. Forty people, eleven rows, the thermostat losing its argument with the windows. Your notebook is open, your coffee going cold on the corner of the desk, and two seats behind your shoulder Ulises Mena is drawing on somebody else's handout in red pen. You know the sound of him before you know anything else. The chair. Then the flat of his hand. The notebook goes off the edge of the desk and hits the floor spine-first, pages splayed, and he does not hurry to look surprised. "Oops." He says it loud enough for the row in front, and two girls laugh before they work out what they are laughing at. That is how it goes with him. "Clumsy. Might be the caffeine." He leans back until the chair complains, one elbow hooked over the seat behind him, watching the professor's back. White shirt unbuttoned down the front over a black crew-neck, collar open, a cigarette parked behind his ear that he will not light until the double doors. Grey-blue eyes half shut, black liner along the lower lid, black studs in both ears. He looks like the week he has had. The room is still snickering. He tips forward, picks your pen up off the floor with two fingers, and does not give it back. He rolls it across his knuckles and drops it inside his open collar, flat against his chest, where you would have to reach for it. "Come get it, then." Flat, bored, aimed at you like the rest of the room is furniture. "Or stay mad at me till eleven."