Chapter 2 Office Hours

• The mix up with the paper follows me around for three days, which is stupid, because it wasn't even a real problem. She said fix it, I fixed it, end of story. Except it isn't the end, because I keep replaying the way her hand looked when she waved it at me, and every time I land on the same conclusion.
• I'm losing my mind over nothing.
• It's finals season energy hitting too early, that's all. Too much coffee, not enough sleep, and a brain that's decided the best use of its free time is inventing horror movie details out of fluorescent lighting and a bad angle.
• Daniel doesn't help. He's convinced I have a crush.
• "You've said her name four times since Tuesday," he says, flopping onto his bed across the room, controller already in hand. "That's not normal for a business ethics professor."
• "I have a question about the syllabus."
• "Sure you do."
• I don't dignify that with an answer, mostly because he's not entirely wrong, just wrong about the reason. I don't have a crush. I have a splinter stuck under a nail that I can't stop pressing on. Something's off and I can't name it, and not naming it is worse than whatever the answer might be.
• So I do the only thing that makes sense. I go to office hours.
• Her office is on the third floor of the business building, tucked at the end of a hallway that smells like old carpet and burnt coffee. The door's cracked open. I knock anyway.
• "Come in."
• She's at her desk, papers stacked in a way that looks organized only to her. No family photos. No mug with a joke printed on it. No plant, even, which strikes me as strange for someone who's clearly been here longer than a semester. Every other professor's office I've been in has clutter, personality, proof of a life outside the syllabus. Hers has none of that. It's clean in a way that feels less like tidiness and more like she was never planning to stay.
• "Mr. Kim." She doesn't look surprised to see me, which is its own small unsettling thing, since I didn't email ahead. "Sit."
• I sit.
• "What can I do for you."
• It's not really a question, the way she says it, flat, like she already knows I don't have a real reason to be here and she's giving me the chance to invent one.
• "I wanted to ask about the reading list," I say, which is true, technically, in the sense that I did glance at the reading list on my way over so I'd have something to point to.
• She watches me for a second longer than the question deserves. "You didn't come here about the reading list."
• My face goes hot. "I—"
• "It's fine." She leans back in her chair, and something about the way she says it, easy, unbothered, makes the heat in my face worse, not better. "Most students who show up at my office in the first two weeks don't have a real question. They're checking if I'm as intimidating up close as I am from the third row."
• "I wasn't—" I stop, because that's exactly what I was doing, if I'm honest, even if I didn't put words to it before now. "Okay. Maybe a little."
• The corner of her mouth moves. Not quite a smile. Close enough that it changes her whole face for a second, makes her look less like the woman who cut Daniel's entire class into silence with four sentences and more like someone who might, under different circumstances, actually laugh at something.
• "And the verdict?" she asks.
• "Jury's still out."
• That gets an actual sound out of her, short, low, gone almost as fast as it arrives. I decide I want to hear it again, and I hate that I decide that, because it's the kind of thought that gets people in trouble.
• "Sit down properly," she says, nodding at the chair I'm perched on the edge of like I might bolt. "If you're staying, stay."
• I settle back. The chair creaks under me, too loud in the quiet office, and she doesn't react to it at all, like she's used to silence being the only sound in this room.
• "Can I ask you something?" I say, before I can think better of it.
• "You can ask."
• "Why business ethics? You don't seem like—" I stop myself, because I don't actually know how to finish that sentence without it sounding wrong.
• "I don't seem like what."
• "I don't know. Someone who cares about spreadsheets and shareholder responsibility."
• She studies me for a moment, and there's something in her expression I can't place, something old, like she's deciding how much of an answer I've earned.
• "I care about what people do when no one's watching," she says. "Business is just the arena where it's easiest to prove."
• It's the second time she's said some version of that. Ethics isn't what you do when someone's watching. I remember it word for word from the lecture, and hearing it again, quieter, aimed only at me, does something strange to the air in the room.
• "You really believe that," I say. Not a question.
• "I've had a long time to confirm it."
• "How long?"
• The question comes out before I can stop it, casual, the kind of thing you ask a professor who looks maybe thirty-two, expecting a joke back, expecting *longer than you'd guess* or *don't ask a woman her age.*
• She doesn't joke.
• She goes very still, the kind of still that isn't restful, the kind that looks like something holding itself in place by force. The temperature in the room doesn't change but I feel colder anyway, and for one full second her eyes catch the desk lamp at an angle that makes them flash gold instead of dark brown, bright and inhuman and gone before I can be sure I saw it at all.
• "Longer than you'd guess," she says, and her voice has gone soft in a way that doesn't sound like an answer. It sounds like a warning.
• I should leave. Every normal instinct in my body is telling me to stand up, thank her for her time, walk out that door and never think about the color of her eyes again.
• Instead I stay in the chair, heart going too fast, and ask the only question that matters.
• "What are you?"
• The door behind me swings shut on its own, and the room goes dark.