COLLATERAL

LEXI

The afternoon sun cuts low across Thornwick University, catching the glass facade of the Meridian Building and throwing long rectangles of light across the concrete route. I pull my messenger bag close and walk through the crowd. A group of young men drifts into my path, paying no attention to their surrounding. I quickly move around them and keep walking.

The sliding doors of the Meridian Building open as I approach. The ground floor opens up around me: polished concrete, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the campus garden, the café in the corner doing its usual business. The air smells like coffee, but there’s also something faintly chemical. The particular smell of buildings that are still too new to have absorbed anything of the people inside them. It’s a place that photographs well on prospectuses, but feels slightly soulless in person. I don’t mind. I like that it doesn’t try to be charming. It is what it is — a building full of information I want and people I’d like to ignore.

I find the right hallway on the second floor, following the room numbers until the corridor opens into a wider atrium. A handful of students mill around the entrance, checking their phones. I don’t make eye contact with any of them. I push through the double doors and let the cool air-conditioned quiet settle around me.

The lecture theatre is already about a third full when I push through the door, and the first thing I register is the light. The far wall is almost entirely glass, looking out over the edge of the campus where the buildings give way to the first glimpse of the Thornwick skyline, and beyond that, barely visible, the flat grey line of the sea.

I take a seat in the back row. Most of the students are all clustered in the middle, the sociable mass of twenty-odd postgraduates who’ve sorted themselves into friend groups and study partners.

I unzip my bag , pull out my laptop, and flip it open while the room fills around me. Professor Callahan’s slides are loaded on the screen at the front — Network Security Architecture: Principles and Practice — and I open my notes from last week, skimming back through them while people find their seats. The MSc Cyber Security cohort is small. It must be about forty people, maybe a few more. Mostly in their mod-twenties. Some look older, career-changers probably, people who’ve come back to education after realising what they really want. The two effortlessly beautiful women who take the front row are turned toward each other, laughing about something.

I’m annotating a diagram of a three-tier security model when the door opens again.

I look up from my laptop and see him.

He comes in unhurried and entirely unbothered by the fact that the lecture is starting in four minutes and every other person in this room arrived ten minutes ago. He’s tall, broad through the shoulders, wearing a leather jacket that fits like it was made for him over a black t-shirt. There’s ink on both forearms and I can see the edges of it from here, the suggestion of larger pieces disappearing under his sleeves. His sunglasses are still on, which should look ridiculous inside a university lecture theatre and somehow doesn’t. His hair is black, a messy undercut that’s slightly longer at the front, and he moves with the particular ease of someone who has never once in his adult life been uncertain about where to put his body. The women in the front row clock him instantly. One of them straightens. The other smiles in a way she probably doesn’t realise she’s doing.

He doesn’t acknowledge them directly. He scans the room in a way that’s almost casual and his sunglasses make it impossible to know exactly where his gaze lands. Then he’s moving again, up the central aisle, and I realise with a certainty I don’t fully understand that he is going to walk all the way to the back row.

Well, shit. He does.

He takes the empty seat beside me. Not the one two down from me, or the other one across the aisle. This one, immediately to my right, despite the fact that there are no fewer than ten other vacant seats between us and the front of the room.

I look back at my screen.

From the corner of my eye I can see him settling in, slouching back in the seat, obviously finding it genuinely comfortable. He pulls off his sunglasses and folds them into the pocket of his jacket. I keep my eyes on my notes.

“You’re staring at that screen like it said something offensive.”

I glance over and he’s looking at me with the kind of idle curiosity that suggests he has all the time in the world and expects people to find this charming. Up close, his eyes are dark, the kind of brown that looks close to black in low light. There’s something watchful underneath the easy expression.

“I’m working,” I say.

“Before the lecture’s started?”

“Believe it or not, there’s a concept called preparation.”

He looks at my screen, then back at me, and the corner of his mouth lifts.

“What’s your name?” He asks.

I hesitate.

Just tell him your name. It’s not like it’s private information. There’s no reason to pause over it.

And yet for half a second I almost refuse to answer, some part of me wanting to keep even that small thing to myself in this conversation. I let it go.

“Lexi,” I say.

“Lexi.” He repeats it like he’s deciding whether it suits me. “Damon.”

He doesn’t extend a hand and neither do I. We look at each other for a moment with the particular evaluative neutrality of two people figuring out what category to put each other in.

Professor Callahan steps up to the lectern at the front of the room and the remaining conversations drop away. I turn back to my laptop. Beside me, Damon pulls out his phone, and I’m expecting him to scroll through it for the entire lecture. Instead, he opens what appears to be a legitimate note-taking application and actually starts to type.

The lecture is interesting, which I knew it would be. Callahan covers distributed systems architecture with the kind of specific, lateral-thinking energy that I came back to education for. I type quickly, building on last week’s framework, occasionally cross-referencing the reading I did this morning. I’m aware of Damon beside me at all times. He’s quieter than I expected him to be and he doesn’t fidget.

Forty minutes in, Callahan moves to a new slide and I’m copying down a framework diagram, leaning slightly closer to the screen to read the smaller labels, when Damon speaks again. Low, so only I can hear it.

“You’ve got good shorthand.”

“Thank you,” I whisper, without looking at him.

“Different from everyone else’s.”

“I developed my own system in undergrad.”

A pause. “Cyber security undergrad too?”

“Computer science,” I say. “You?”

“Information systems.” He waits. “With a minor in making lecturers nervous.”

I press my lips together to stop the smile. “That sounds pretty self-awarded.”

“All the best qualifications are.”

I glance at him sideways. He’s looking at the screen but there’s a quality to his stillness that suggests he’s more interested in this conversation than he’s performing. I look back at my notes.

When the lecture ends I start packing up immediately. I close my laptop, tuck it in, and zip the bag before most people fully stood up. Damon is still in his seat with his jacket on, watching me again.

“Nice tattoos,” I say, and I don’t entirely know why I said that. It’s just true. What I could see of them from here is great work, dark line work with what looks like detail that would reward closer looking. It comes out more casually than I intend, like an observation rather than compliment.

He looks at his forearm, then back at me.

“I’ve got more,” he says and leans in, not enough to crowd, just enough that when he speaks his voice is low and close. His breath is warm against the side of my face. “I could show you the rest of them. Somewhere quieter and more private than this.” He pauses, breathing in through his nose. “Show you exactly how far down some of them go.”

I go still. The goosebumps move up the back of my neck before I’ve made any conscious decision about them. Then I turn my head very slightly toward the front of the room.

The two women in the first row are turned around once more.

“I’m sure they would love to see all your tattoos,” I say pleasantly.

Damon follows my eyeline, looks at the two women, and chuckles.

“I’m not asking them.” He responds.

I stand up and pull my bag onto my shoulder. “Have a good evening.”

“Wait. Let me drive you home.”

“No, thanks.”

I’m already moving toward the aisle. I can feel his attention on my back all the way to the door and do not turn around.

Outside the building, the afternoon has cooled. The sun is lower now, and the campus green quieter than it was when I arrived. I walk to the bus stop near the gates of the university with my bag strap in both hands and breathe the salty sea air that finds its way inland in Thornwick at this hour.

My phone buzzes.

Carlie: Hey hhoooo! How was the first proper week lecture? Anything interesting or was it just Callahan being Callahan again?

I smile at the screen.

Me: callahan was good actually. And there was a guy

Her response is almost instantaneous.

Carlie: WHAT GUY?? DETAILS! ALL OF THEM! NOOWWW!!!

Me: lad sat next to me in the back row even though basically the whole room was free

Carlie: hm, bold. Cute?

I think about how to answer that and decide that cute is definitely not the word.

Me: nah, not exactly. More like…do you know who James Dean is? He kinda gives off that vibe.

Me: his name is Damon btw. he offered to show me his tattoos somewhere “private”

Carlie: LEXI…

Me: I told him the girls in the front row would love to see them.

Carlie: bitch you did NOT

Me: I did.

Carlie: what did he say?

Me: said he wasn’t asking them

There’s a pause that I imagine is Carlie screaming at her phone.

Carlie: Lexi, I’m telling you this as your best friend: this guy is sssoooo into you

Me: he’s into whoever’s in front of him.

Carlie: you don’t know that

Me: I have a feeling

Carlie: that’s why u still single at 22

Me: Carlie… he looks like trouble

Carlie: “looks like trouble” is literally your type, so…

The number 19 bus pulls in thirty seconds after I reach the stop. I put my phone in my pocket, tap my card on the reader, murmur a ‘thanks’ to the driver who doesn’t acknowledge it, and make my way down the aisle in the back. I take a seat by the window. The city scrolls past as the bus pulls away from the university and joins the main road that curves down toward the harbour district.

I watch Thornwick change, the after-school clusters on pavements, the cafés and restaurants with their doors propped open, the golden light of a late afternoon on old stone buildings and modern glass ones standing side by side. I’ve lived here my whole life and know this city by the sound it makes at different hours. There’s something in me that settles, always, when the sea becomes visible.

The bus slows at a red light near the junction by the harbour road.

I’m looking out the window at nothing in particular when the car pulls up alongside us in the next lane.

It’s black, expensive, and probably costs more than Mom and Dad’s annual salaries combined.

The driver turns his head.

Oh, hell no.

Damon looks directly at me through two panes of window. He shouldn’t be able to find me that easily. But he looks straight at me like I’m exactly where he expected to find me.

He winks and smiles before he puts his sunglasses back on.

The lights change and his car moves forward. The bus lumbers after it and within thirty seconds, he’s gone, signalling left toward the harbour, disappearing into the grid of roads I’ve never had any reason to walk.

I face forward in my seat and look down at my hands. I tell myself this is nothing — a first week of term, a stranger in a back row, a wink through a car window, all of it adding up to nothing of consequence.

He looks like trouble, I told Carlie.

Understatement of the fucking year.