He was laughing when she first saw him, standing outside the student union with two other people. A young woman with dark blonde hair and expensive sunglasses, and a heavyset young man who seemed to exist mainly to echo whatever Reese said.
The three of them were blocking the entrance. Not entirely on purpose. In the way that people block entrances when they don't think about other people needing to get through.
Mia waited, just for a second. Then she angled past them.
Reese didn't move to make room. He did glance at her. Just a flicker of assessment. The way someone looks at something to decide whether it's relevant to them.
She wasn't. She could tell.
She went inside. She thought that was the end of it.
She was wrong.
She saw him again at dinner that night. He was at the center table in the main dining hall. The one that shouldn't have been anyone's table in particular, but somehow clearly was. Six or seven people orbited him.
The blonde woman was there again, seated next to him, leaning in to say something that made him grin. The heavyset man, Burke, she would learn his name later, sat across from them, eating like it was the last meal he'd ever have.
Mia took her tray to the far end of the hall, near the windows, and sat alone.
This was not unusual. She had spent the last 7 months learning to be comfortable with her own company. Or not comfortable, exactly. More like fluent. Fluent in solitude, the way you become fluent in a language when you have no choice but to use it.
She ate her dinner and read from the textbook she'd brought and did not look at the center table again.
She was almost done when she heard the voice behind her.
"Somebody sitting there?"
She looked up.
Reese was standing about 3 ft away. He wasn't looking at her with hostility. That was the thing. He was looking at her the way you look at an object that's been placed somewhere inconvenient.
She glanced around the table. There were six empty seats.
"Someone sitting where?" she asked.
"At this table." He gestured vaguely. "This is our section."
She looked at the table again, then at him. "There's no sign."
"Yeah." He said it like she'd missed something obvious. "There doesn't need to be."
Behind him, Sloan, the blonde woman, had appeared. She was watching with mild interest. Burke was a few steps further back, hands in pockets, waiting to see what happened.
Mia looked at Reese for a moment. She took a breath. She closed her textbook. And then she picked up her tray, stood, and moved to a table closer to the window, without saying anything else.