Chapter 38 Coffee and Cameras
Elias POV
We meet at the cafe on the east side of campus, the one that always smells like cinnamon even though I have never actually seen them put cinnamon in anything.
It is not a plan. Noah texts me at ten in the morning asking if I want coffee. I say yes. He says he will meet me there at eleven. That is the whole conversation and somehow it carries the weight of something much larger than its word count.
I get there first and take the small table near the window, the one with the slightly wobbly leg that everyone knows about but no one ever fixes. I order my usual and sit with my hands around the cup and look out at the street and do not perform anything. There is nobody to perform for. I am just a person at a table waiting for another person.
That is new, actually. Being in a public space and waiting for Noah without also hiding the fact that I am waiting for Noah.
It feels strange. Not bad strange. Just the kind of strange that comes from a thing you have imagined for a long time suddenly becoming ordinary.
He comes in at eight past eleven, which is late enough that I notice and early enough that I do not comment on it. He is not in practice gear. Jeans, a dark jacket, his hair slightly damp like he showered not long ago. He spots me immediately and something in his expression shifts, just a fraction, in a direction I have learned to read.
Relief. He is relieved to see me.
That lands somewhere soft in my chest.
"Hey," he says, pulling out the chair.
"Hey."
He orders at the counter and comes back and we sit across from each other and it is so normal it is almost strange. Just coffee. Just a table. Just two people.
He tells me about Drayden without much preamble, which I appreciate. Not the full story, not every detail, but enough. The foul. The silence afterward. The way the locker room felt in the morning.
I listen without interrupting.
"Did you talk to him after?" I ask when he is done.
"Not yet."
"Are you going to?"
He wraps both hands around his cup. "Yeah. I have to."
"How do you think it goes?"
A short silence. He looks out the window at the street. "I don't know. Drayden's not a bad person. He's just scared of things he doesn't understand, and he's never had to think about whether that's his problem or other people's."
I think about that. "That's a generous read."
"Maybe." He looks back at me. "Or maybe I just know what it looks like when someone does a stupid thing for a cowardly reason." A beat. "I've done enough of both."
I do not let myself smile at that. It is not a moment for smiling. But I register it. The honesty. The way he turns it back on himself without making a production of it.
We drink our coffee. The cafe fills up a little around us. Students with laptops, a couple at the far end sharing a pastry, someone having what sounds like a work call in a language I do not recognize.
I notice when Noah's shoulders start to come down from where they have been sitting too high. It happens slowly, over about fifteen minutes. Like proximity does something that effort alone cannot.
I notice that too.
We are there for almost an hour when I see it.
Two students near the door. One of them is already looking at us. The other one notices a second later, nudges the first, and then both of them are looking, the kind of looking that is too pointed to be casual interest.
One of them lifts their phone.
Not discreetly. Not even trying. The camera is pointed at our table with the particular boldness of someone who has decided that documenting a moment is more important than whether the people in it have agreed to be documented.
I see it before Noah does. I make myself not react, not turn fully toward them, not give them the frame they are after.
But then Noah looks up and clocks it too.
His jaw tightens. His hands go still around his cup. For a moment I watch him work through it, the same way I watch him work through hard moments on the field, that internal calibration between what he wants to do and what he is going to do.
He looks back at me.
"Ignore it," I say quietly.
"I know."
"Let them look."
"I know, Elias."
His voice is not sharp. Just tired in a specific way. The tiredness of someone who understood that this was coming and is still finding the reality of it heavier than the preparation.
I reach across the table and put my hand over his briefly. One second. Two. Then I take it back.
"This was always going to be part of it," I say.
"Yeah."
"Does that change anything?"
He looks at me for a long moment. Something moves through his expression that I do not have a word for yet.
"No," he says.
The two students near the door eventually leave. The video, wherever it ends up, is already out of our control.
We finish our coffee.
We walk out together.
His hand finds mine on the step outside the door, and he holds it for exactly long enough to make the point before we reach the corner and go our separate ways.
Not long. But real.
That is what I carry with me for the rest of the afternoon.