"Petra."
She stopped again. The path lights along the west walk were the kind that only pretended to illuminate, and she stood at the edge of one of the yellow pools with her shoulders set like she was daring me to add anything to a conversation she had already decided was finished.
"I’m not done."
"You are remarkably comfortable making that determination for both of us."
"Come back here."
Nine feet of concrete, and she covered it in five steps, and I noticed that she did not make me repeat myself, which told me more about the last twenty minutes than anything she’d actually said out loud.
"Friday is the meeting," I said. "Friday is not the problem. The problem is the next eight months, because you and I are stuck in the same faculty conference room once a month until spring, and I need to know that when something happens between us that you don’t like, your first move isn’t a phone call to Wolfgang."
Her chin came up. "I have already explained"
"You explained why it happened. I’m telling you it doesn’t happen again." I kept my voice at the same level it had been the whole time, conversational, the register I use to order coffee, which is the exact register that makes people lean in without noticing they’re doing it. "Not with your brother. Not with your father’s legal department. Not with a friend of the family who happens to know somebody at the regional office. If you have a problem with me, you bring it to me. In a room. With your mouth. Like a person."
"That is an extraordinary demand from someone with no leverage."
"It’s not a demand. It’s a condition."
"Of what?"
"Of us functioning." I let that sit for a second, because she needed the silence more than she needed another sentence from me. "You want to run this cohort. Genuinely, not for the credential. You want the brief in your handwriting and the schedule under your control and you want Dravid to look at 1-B in three weeks and understand that somebody in the room was paying attention. I can hand you that. Steele already listens to me for reasons neither of us have to enjoy, and Radiant knows my name, and I’m the one who ends up in front of the cameras when somebody puts a camera in front of us. You want that pointed at your work instead of at me."
Her eyes narrowed. "You’re offering to be my mouthpiece."
"I’m offering to be your amplifier." I shrugged. "Or you can keep doing the thing where you sit in the top row with your planner shut and let everyone in that room believe you think you’re above them, and by finals you’ll have six votes and a reputation. Neither of them will be the one you wanted."
Something moved behind her face.
Not anger. Anger I would have known immediately. Anger from Petra Lang comes out cold and articulate and she’d been running it on me since move-in day. This was the other one. This was the thing that had cracked for a quarter second in Room 214 when Steele smiled at her answer about saving lives. She’d looked, for exactly as long as it took to be noticed, like a person who had never once in her life been told she got something right by someone who wasn’t being paid to say it.
She had that look again now. It lasted longer this time. Long enough that I could see her trying to figure out where I’d found it and what it cost me to point at it directly.
Then it was gone. Her posture reset. Her chin came up slightly, which meant she’d found the angle she needed to turn the read into something she could work with.
But she hadn’t corrected me.
Which meant I was right.
"You have a very high opinion of your own read on people," she said.
"I have an accurate one. The high opinion is a bonus feature."
"That is the single most you sentence I have ever heard."
"Thank you."
"It was not"
"I know it wasn’t a compliment. You keep telling me things aren’t compliments and they keep being the nicest things anybody’s said to me all week, so at this point I’d say the compliments are on you." I put my hands back in my pockets. "Do we have a deal or not."
Petra looked at the path. Then at the door light. Then at me, and she did it in that order, which meant she’d already decided and was building the version of the sentence she could live with hearing herself say.
"You bring me every inquiry that lands on your file," she said. "Every one. Not a summary. The docket number and the requesting party, within twelve hours of you learning about it."
"Fine."
"You do not commit our cohort to anything in a faculty meeting without my signature on the language, regardless of how compelling you find your own improvisation in the moment."
"That’s going to be hard for me but sure."
"And you will stop." Her jaw shifted. "Whatever you did just now. With the distance and the tone and the specificity. You will stop doing that to me."
I let a beat go past. "No."
"Excuse me."
"You don’t get that one. That’s not a professional request, that’s a personal one." I watched the color come up her throat and I did not look away from it, which was probably the cruelest thing I did all night and I’d like the record to show I thought about it first. "You can ask me to keep it out of the conference room. I’ll say yes to that."
Petra breathed out through her nose. "Keep it out of the conference room."
"Done."
"Then we have a deal, Belmont."
"Great." I stuck my hand out.
She looked at it like I’d offered her a live animal.
"We’re representatives," I said. "This is what representatives do. There’s probably a form."