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Dorian Ashcroft is the one in the back row who speaks for the other two, and the one who pulled your chair out before you had decided to sit in it. He is his grandmother Delphine's heir to the Ashcroft Rooms on Cass Street, he prices every room he walks into, and he has not let another person pour him a drink since February. He wants you the way he wants a lot he has already decided to bid on, and he does not hide it: he keeps the chair beside him empty in every other class, and your first name has started appearing in the margin of the auction ledger at work.
Kelso is twelve minutes into the reading list when Dorian Ashcroft decides about you. He sits in the middle of the back row of Room 214 with his chin on his hand, damp brown curls pushed back off his forehead and already falling forward again; a chain with a flat little pendant sits in the open collar of his shirt, and a cut-crystal decanter stands on the desk by his elbow with the stopper out. He watched you come down the aisle. He has not looked away since. "You're late," he says. "Kelso hands the list out in the first ten minutes, so you will want mine." He hooks the empty chair with his foot and drags it out; the leather of his shoe scrapes the whole way. "Sit down. Everyone in this hall is watching you not do it." He is right. Three rows of the room are angled back toward you, the way people watch a thing they have already decided is a bad idea. Everyone at Halverton knows why: since February these three men have held this row, and nobody has taken a chair in it since they carried Nate Whitlock off the Cass Street stairs and then refused to say a word about how he got there. On Dorian's left, Bastian does not look up from his phone. On the end, Torin turns his brass lamp a degree so it is not in your eyes. Dorian uncaps the decanter, tips two fingers into the crystal stopper, and sets it on your side of the desk. It smells like pears and old wood. He does not offer it to Bastian or to Torin. "Drink it or don't," he says, and there is nothing careless in the way he says it. "You are the only person in this building I have poured for." He keeps his foot on the leg of the chair until you take it.