Chapter 4 

It wasn't love.

It wasn't even obsession.

Not yet.

What Saafia felt was itching the kind under the skin. The kind that only got worse the more you tried to ignore it. Something about Rinon Xiu, his restraint, his silence, the way he looked at people like they were intrusions rather than companions had caught in her throat like a swallowed needle.

She hated him for it.

And so, naturally, she made him hers.

Not openly, of course. That would've spoiled the game. Saafia had rules: no touching, no spectacle, no evidence. If you could point to the cruelty, it wasn't elegant enough.

The first time she acted, it was barely anything.

During a philosophy seminar, she volunteered to hand out copies of the reading. She paused half a second longer at Rinon's seat, watching him scratch notes in the margins of his textbook. She handed him the wrong packet completely off-topic, out of order, full of red herring arguments.

He looked at the front page. Blinked once. Didn't speak.

Later, she slipped the correct reading under his door in the dark. No note. Just enough of a delay to unsettle.

The next week, he arrived early to class. Saafia arrived earlier. She swapped the seating cards before anyone else came in and made it look like Professor Noori had reassigned the group discussion layout. Rinon, now paired with the loudest, most arrogant student in the cohort, spent the hour suppressing his instinct to snap.

Saafia sat across the room, watching.

At the end of the session, he passed by her with an unreadable look. Then, in a low voice just above breath:

"You get bored easily, don't you?"

She looked up, lashes lazily. "Only with unresponsive material."

Rinon held her gaze a second too long. Then walked away.

By the third week, he started double-checking his belongings. His pen would disappear from his desk and reappear in the wrong pocket. His class notes would glitch, one or two pages always inexplicably missing. One afternoon, the file on his USB drive contained Saafia's name in the author metadata.

She passed him on campus that day, phone in hand, pretending distraction.

"Careful," she murmured, brushing by, "You never know what people might put their name on."

He didn't look at her. Just said, "You'd sign a blank page if it meant ownership."

Her teeth clicked together behind a smile. So he was paying attention.

Once, in the library, she sat two seats away as he typed. Her foot tapped out a rhythm that didn't match the hum of the space, disjointed and irregular, like a metronome having a breakdown. Rinon paused, eyes flicking to her.

"You do that for attention," he said quietly, not looking at her.

"Everything's for attention," she replied. "Why else would you be listening?"

He went back to typing. But the backspace key clicked harder than before.

The next morning, her name appeared in a footnote on his draft:

Saafia Bin – "Irregularity as provocation." (Lecture comment, paraphrased.)

She hadn't said it aloud. But it didn't matter. He understood.

They were speaking in codes now. A private language of edits and erasures.

Her favorite moment came days later. Rinon arrived late to a seminar, sleep-deprived. She had impersonated him on a late-night maintenance call, claiming a leak in his ceiling. He spent the night in the hallway, waiting for no one.

When she passed him on the steps that morning, he didn't stop.

But as they brushed shoulders, his hand grazed hers.

"Comfortable in your role?" he asked, voice dry.

"Which one?" she asked, smiling without mirth.

"The god. Or the coward."

She said nothing. But she felt his words settle under her skin like a bruise forming.

No apology. No accusation. Just that slight pressure.

I know what you're doing, it said.

Then stop me, she thought back.

Neither did.

It was working. The slow break. The erosion of certainty. She had made herself indispensable not through kindness, but chaos.

He never smiled at her. Never glared. But his silences grew longer. More loaded. He had started listening with his whole body, like a man expecting a knife.

And wasn't that what she was?

Not the wound.

Not the healer.

The hand that hovers near both, never letting either close.

Saafia lay awake that night, staring at her ceiling, the ceiling fan humming like breath. Her chest ached in the most specific, satisfying way.

Not obsession.

Momentum.