Page 11 of Hostile

I turned around slowly. Wyatt was standing at his desk with his own notebook open, and he was looking at mine like a man who’d been trying to work something out from a distance and had finally gotten close enough to see it clearly.

“I noticed during the Brandeis case,” he continued. “You write the citation in the margin, then the principle in the main column, then draw a line to where it connects to the prior precedent. I’ve never seen anyone do it that way.”

I looked at him for a moment. “It keeps the logical sequence visible without losing the reference chain.”

He nodded slowly—the nod of someone whose suspicions had just been confirmed. “Does it work for the sciences too, or just law?”

“It originated in chemistry. I adapted it.”

Something shifted in his expression—not the polished, social version of interest he’d deployed in the Harvard auditorium hallway with his leather portfolio and easy stance. This was less performative. Something more like actual curiosity, and I was familiar enough with the difference to notice it.

“I’ve been using a linear outline since the eighth grade,” he said. “My notes look like a legal brief.” He paused. “A poorly organized one.”

I almost smiled. I caught myself before it happened. “Linear works if your recall is sequential. Most people’s recall process is linear.”

“Mine isn’t,” he said calmly, as if accepting it as a fact. “I think in branches. The outline format forces me to constantly translate, and I end up losing something.”

I looked at his notebook, which he’d turned slightly—not aggressively, just enough to see what he meant. The notes were dense and structural, organized by number and sub-number, as if someone had been told that was the correct method and had complied without considering whether it suited him. They were thorough. They were, as he’d said, somewhat rigid.

“Try using horizontal branches from each primary point instead of a vertical sub-list,” I said. “If you think in associations, your notes should reflect them. The linear format is fighting your natural process.”

He looked at the page, then back at me. “Show me?”

It was two words. Utterly straightforward. And yet something about the directness of it—the simple, unguarded way he’d said it, as though asking were the obvious next step and nothing about any of this were complicated—made me pause in a way I hadn’t expected.

I had a system for Wyatt Aldridge. I’d built it over the course of two weeks since the auditorium, and it was solid and sensible, having served me well. He was a category. He belonged to a world I’d left behind. He was someone I could acknowledge with basic civility and then efficiently ignore, as you’d acknowledge a piece of furniture in your way and then step around it.

The system did not account for his genuine interest in how I organized my notes.

I took his pen from his hand—he gave it without comment—and turned to a new page in his notebook.

“Your primary point goes here,” I wrote. “Instead of sub-listing below it, branch horizontally. Like this.” I drew the structure, moving through it as I had explained it to Christine sophomore year, when she’d asked why my notes looked different from everyone else’s. “Each branch preserves the association without breaking the visual hierarchy. When you review, your eye moves the way your brain does rather than against it.”

He watched me work with the focused attention of someone who was truly listening, which was its own distinct experience. Most people listened to the sound of information. Wyatt watched its structure.

Once I finished, he retrieved the notebook and examined the page. “That’s going to change everything,” he said softly. It wasn’t a show. Just a simple observation, delivered with the clear confidence of someone who immediately recognized its significance.

I recapped his pen and held it out. He took it, and for just a moment his fingers curled around mine on the barrel before I let go.

I stepped back and picked up my bag.

“You didn’t have to do that,” he said.

“I know.”

“But you did.”

“Don’t read too much into it. I’m constitutionally incapable of watching someone use a system that works against them.”

The corner of his mouth moved. “Constitutionally incapable.”

“It’s a character flaw.”

“I’d call it something else.” He closed his notebook and tucked it under his arm. “Can I buy you a coffee?”

And there it was. The thing I’d been half-expecting since he sat down behind me, the natural next move for a man like him—handsome, confident, accustomed to getting what he reached for. The invitation that would require me to either accept and compromise the clean, efficient distance I’d been maintaining or decline and spend the rest of the semester in Business Law and Ethics, aware that he was sitting directly behind me, having made his position known and having been turned down.

Neither option was particularly convenient.