At five in the afternoon, the library had settled into the quieter rhythm that came after a full day of exams. The floor-to-ceiling windows along the far wall caught the last low light of November, leaving long bands of amber across the ascending study terraces while the lower levels were already beginning to fall into shadow.
Students occupied scattered tables with open textbooks, loose papers, and untouched drinks, most of them sitting with their shoulders rounded over their work and their eyes fixed on the same page for longer than was probably productive.
From somewhere below came the occasional scrape of a chair or the soft click of a keyboard, while one student had a news tab open on a study computer showing part of a headline about emergency sessions being called in three governments simultaneously before they closed it and returned to their notes.
Adam sat near the middle of one of the upper terraces with his physics textbook open, a notebook beside it and a calculator resting on top of several sheets of practice problems. He'd been staring at the same paragraph long enough for the words to stop looking like language, and when he read it again, the explanation somehow seemed less useful than it had thirty seconds earlier.
He knews physics. He had been told physics exists and that it had rules and that these rules were consistent. He didn't feel this.
He rubbed his forehead, lowered his hand, and looked at the equation again as if it might've changed while he wasn't watching.
It hadn't.
He picked up his pencil and wrote another line beneath the problem, then stopped halfway through it. Tomorrow's physics exam was the fourth exam in two days, and he wanted at least thirty minutes tonight where nothing unexpected happened and nobody asked him anything complicated. The library had seemed like the safest place to get them.
He turned the page.
He heard nothing.
Then he smelled her perfume.
It wasn't strong enough to announce itself across the room. It was simply there, warm and familiar, and Adam recognized it before he'd consciously decided that he'd recognized anything at all. His eyes lifted from the textbook, and Luna was already pulling out the chair across from him.
"Mind?"
Adam looked at her for half a second too long before he remembered that he was supposed to answer.
"Not at all."
It came out normally. Slightly more normally than he'd expected, actually. Minor victory.
Luna sat down, placed her books on the table, and opened them without another word.
Adam looked at his physics problem.
Then at his physics problem again.
The silence lasted almost a minute before he gave up on pretending he wasn't aware of it.
"So, uh, how was your day?"
Luna's eyes stayed on the page. "Just because we're sitting together doesn't mean we have to talk."
Adam blinked once.
"Yeah... Right... Totally."
He looked back down at his textbook.
That was fair. She hadn't sounded annoyed, just direct, and there was something strangely easy about knowing exactly where the boundary was. He returned to the problem, pencil moving across the page while Luna turned through her own material beside him, and after a few minutes the silence stopped feeling like something he had to fill.
For a while, the only thing Adam noticed was physics.
Then he noticed Luna.
He hadn't looked directly at her. He'd only caught the changes through the edge of his vision, the slowing movement of her hand and the longer pauses between pages. Her head dipped slightly, came back up, then dipped again, and her eyes stayed closed for perhaps two seconds before opening. The next page took her several seconds longer than the previous one.
Adam glanced over.
She was almost asleep.
"Long day?"
Her eyes opened properly.
"Nah the exams were fine."
She straightened in her chair and rubbed one hand briefly over her face.
"Easy, actually."
Adam nodded slowly. "That's good."
"I was in Canada last night."
His pencil stopped.
"You were what?"
"Canada."
She said it without looking particularly interested in the fact that she'd just dropped an entirely unreasonable sentence into the middle of a study session.
"Why?"
"Spying on some targets of mine."
Adam stared at her.
"It was a long night."
He lowered his pencil onto the notebook.
"You went to Canada?"
"Yeah."
"Last night?"
"Yeah."
"How?"
Luna finally looked at him.
"Just study."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the answer you're getting."
Adam leaned back slightly, his eyes narrowing.
"How did you leave? How did you get back? How did I not notice?"
"I told you. It was a long night."
She turned another page.
Adam looked at her for several seconds before returning his attention to the textbook.
She said Canada like she said Canada. Like she'd gone to the cafeteria.
Luna rested her cheek against one hand while reading.
"You need to study harder than me anyway."
Adam glanced over. "Why?"
"I'm trying for Class B for next semester," She said it as casually as if she'd decided to change seats. "The only reason I'm in C is because I haven't had a reason to push yet."
Adam stared at her. "You're serious."
"Obviously."
There was no grin, no attempt to impress him, and no hesitation in the statement. She simply believed it, and because she believed it, there was nothing for her to prove.
Then she looked at him.
"Class B would be more interesting with someone I recognize. So don't fail."
Adam's eyes dropped to his textbook.
Oh.
He looked at the equation again.
It was still terrible.
But somehow it seemed less terrible.
"I'll give it my best."
Luna nodded once and returned to her work.
Adam picked up his pencil again.
This time he actually studied.
The next hour passed without either of them saying much. Students gradually disappeared from the terraces, chairs scraping softly against the floor as people packed their bags and headed toward the exits, while the windows changed from amber to dark glass.
By the time Adam looked up again, the library lights reflected more clearly in the windows than the outside world did, and Luna was still sitting across from him with her textbook open.
She turned a page.
"Are you into Aiva?"
Adam's pencil stopped.
He looked at Luna.
"What?"
"Are you into her?"
The question had arrived so cleanly that for a moment he couldn't find anything to do with it. He looked at Luna's face, then at the book in front of her, then back at her, trying to figure out where that had come from.
"No."
She nodded.
"Okay."
And she continued reading.
Adam waited.
Nothing followed.
He looked at her for another second.
That was weird.
He'd never been into Aiva, and he'd never given Luna a reason to think otherwise, as far as he knew. Aiva was his friend. That was all there was to it.
He almost asked why she'd wanted to know.
He decided against it.
Physics was already enough of a problem. But this went way better than Aiva predicted.
Another twenty minutes passed before Adam reached a question he couldn't get through. He wrote the equation, substituted the values, calculated the result, stared at it, crossed it out, and started again from the beginning. The second attempt produced exactly the same answer.
He frowned at the page.
The question was asking for acceleration.
His answer was not acceleration.
He knew that much.
He went back to the first line and read it again.
Luna looked over.
She watched him erase the same section for the third time.
She sighed.
"What?"
"You're doing it wrong."
"No shit sherlock."
"Scoot over."
Adam moved his notebook slightly.
Luna closed her book and stood. She came around the end of the table, pulled out the space beside him, and sat down without asking again. Her shoulder was close enough that Adam became aware of the warmth coming through the fabric of his shirt, and when she leaned toward the notebook, a few strands of her white hair fell forward beside her face.
He looked at the page.
Then at her finger.
Then back at the page.
She's here. She just sat down. She is right there.
"Here," Luna said. "You're using the wrong equation."
"I thought that was the one."
"It's not."
"Why?"
"Because you're solving for the wrong thing first."
She tapped the first line with her finger.
"Start here. What do you actually know?"
Adam looked at the numbers.
"Initial velocity. Time. Distance."
"Good. So why are you using the equation with final velocity?"
Adam stared at the page.
"Because..."
Luna waited.
Adam looked down.
"Okay. I don't have a good answer for that."
"of course you don't."
She took the pencil from his fingers and wrote the first step herself.
"Use this one. Then rearrange it."
Adam watched her work.
"Like that?"
"Yeah."
He copied the equation beneath hers.
"Now substitute."
He did.
"Then solve."
The number at the bottom finally made sense.
Adam looked at it.
"That's it?"
"That's it."
He stared at the answer for another second.
"That was actually easy."
Luna gave him a flat look.
"It was easy before you made it complicated."
"That's fair."
She pointed to the next problem.
"Do that one."
Adam worked through it while she watched.
He got halfway through before stopping.
"This one?"
"Keep going."
He finished the equation.
Luna shook her head.
"No. You dropped the negative."
Adam looked down.
She was right.
"Right."
He fixed it.
"Again."
The next question took less time. Then the next one took less time than that, and soon Luna was pointing at equations, correcting his substitutions, and telling him when he'd skipped something without bothering to soften any of it. Adam stopped arguing with her after the third correction because every time he thought she was wrong, she proved that she wasn't.
At some point, he realized he'd stopped looking at the clock.
The library had grown almost completely quiet around them. Their books remained open beneath the overhead lights, Luna's shoulder still close to his, her finger moving from one line of calculation to the next while Adam followed along and finally began to understand what the textbook had been trying to tell him for the last two hours.
He glanced sideways at her.
She was tired. He could see it now in the slight heaviness around her eyes, in the way she occasionally paused before turning a page, but she was still there, still correcting his work like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.
Do not look over.
He looked over again.
He did not ask which god he needed to thank for this, but he was open to suggestions.
Adam smiled.
He turned back to the problem and kept writing.