Dawn makes it to her lit class on time, but can think of none of the astute questions she'd developed during her long, insomniac night. She has no trouble remembering other things she'd thought about in the dark.
She half expects to crash during her first or second class, but she rides a wave of energy that doesn't flag. After a quick yogurt in the student cafe, she heads to Starbucks to study.
She's almost afraid she'll find Ethan in the front table, but he's not there at all. There's an atypical lull in business, so she slings her coat and messenger bag on one of the fireplace chair and goes to place her order. Might be wise, she thinks, to have tea instead of an espresso drink to avoid caffeine backlash. Yet when the barista asks for her order, she orders a double shot latte.
Dawn stays until it's time to meet Valryn for Idol, but he doesn't show. So what's it going to be, another ten days, two weeks?
Valryn asks about "the old guy" during a denture glue commercial, and Dawn says, "Aren't you a riot."
"Well?"
"I saw him the other night with Prof Roberts and said hi, that's all."
"Ohhh," she says, like that tells everything, and Dawn could bite her own tongue. "I guess one girl's old guy is some other man's hot young thing."
"Oh, don't be gross," Dawn snaps.
"You're no fun," Val says without rancor. She drops the subject, so Dawn stays through the whole broadcast and hangs out after while Val texts dozens of votes for the worst singer.
Around midnight she scuffs back to her room in her slippers, but she doesn't bother trying to go to bed. She finishes her reading for tomorrow, outlines her paper, emails Buffy and Xander, then cleans her room.
Sometime around four she goes to bed, hoping for another dream about Ethan. But he's nowhere around there, either.
***
One more mostly sleepless night and she still hasn't crashed. After her early class she drops into Starbucks more from habit than expectation, but this time Ethan is there.
"Do you mind walking and drinking?" he asks as she approaches his table. "There's someplace I'd like to show you."
Relief gusts through Dawn. After the dream she had, just as real as standing here with him now, she'd never be able to sit across from him and be even remotely normal. Yet she has no desire to be away from him. Walking, with other things to focus on, will be just perfect. "That would be great. Where are we going?"
His smile, so damn entre nous, makes something flutter in her stomach. "Let's leave it a surprise for now. You needn't worry; it's completely public."
She thinks to say, "Oh, I'm not worried at all," but she doesn't want to sound like a careless idiot, so she bites it back. But it's true. He's proven he cares about her comfort level, that he's not going to push her in any way. "It's warmed up a lot since the other day," she says. "A walk would be nice."
Ethan gathers up his satchel -- considerably lighter today, she notices -- and accompanies her outside. He leaves his coat unbuttoned, his cashmere scarf loose around his neck. "So the conversation -- was it satisfactory?"
"The what? Oh. With Jin-Kyong."
"What do you discuss, in the interests of improving her English?"
"Everyday stuff, most of the time. Yesterday she told me about a misunderstanding she had at a store. Sometimes she asks questions about words or expressions." She glances at Ethan to determine if his interest is real or exaggerated, but he's plainly engaged. "One time she asked me what 'pick up' meant. So I launched into this whole discourse on the different ways those two words show up in American English. Y'know, 'pick up a quart of milk, get that room picked up right now, missy or you're grounded, I picked up this totally hot babe last night, hey, look at that pickup truck.' She didn't look any less confused, so I asked what the context was. She pulls out a tabloid headline: 'Cobain bio-pic up in smoke.'"
Ethan laughs, and the flutter deepens. "Proof of the dangers of learning English from the tabloids." He leads her onto a side street and halfway down the block, gestures her down a short flight of steps into a lower-level shop.
"What's this?"
"The most essential antiquarian bookseller in North America," Ethan says.
"Oh my god, how did I not know about this?"
He holds the door for her and bends to whisper in her ear. "Because it's a deep, dark secret."
Dawn doesn't know if it's the words themselves or his breath stirring the hair by her neck, but she gasps softly, and the flutter becomes a throb.
Ethan offers her a sly smile.
Deep.
Dark.
Secret.
Dawn wets her lips and steps inside.