Chapter 10 What We Don't Say Out Loud

• Mate. The word sits in my chest for days after she says it, too big to unpack in one sitting, too strange to say out loud to anyone but her.
• We don't tell anyone. There isn't a version of this where telling anyone goes well, a professor and a student, a thousand years and twenty-one, human and whatever she actually is underneath the skin she wears to lecture halls and office hours. So we keep it quiet, and quiet turns out to be its own kind of thrilling, something charged running underneath every ordinary interaction we have to fake in public.
• In class she calls me Mr. Kim, cool and distant, and I answer like any other student, and neither of us lets our eyes hold too long. It's a performance, and we're both good at it, and I spend every one of those forty-five minutes aware of her in a way I never used to be, aware of exactly how far away she's standing and exactly how much space is between where she is and where I want to be.