Chapter 5

Rinon first noticed the shift on a Thursday afternoon.

Saafia no longer left traps; she left invitations.

Once, he found a single strand of dark hair coiled around the strap of his watch.

He wound it around his finger, tight enough to cut off circulation, before letting it fall to the ground. 

A philosophy text left open on a library desk, passages underlined in ink the exact shade of her lipstick. A chessboard set up in the common room with only two pieces out of place. His favorite coffee order black, one sugar waiting at an empty café table with no note, just the ghost of her presence lingering in the steam. 

She wasn't breaking into his life. Nothing overt. Nothing he could confront. Just a rising sense that the environment around him was subtly but thoroughly being rewritten. She was curating it. 

And the worst part? He kept accepting.

It wasn't the missing pen cap or the mysteriously rearranged notes, those were expected now, part of the rhythm of his days. No, this was different.

He opened his laptop to find his desktop wallpaper changed. Not to anything vulgar or provocative, but to a black-and-white photograph of an empty theater, the seats stretching into darkness. No note. No signature. Just the faintest trace of bergamot clinging to his keyboard.

He stared at it for a full minute before changing it back.

That night, he checked his door lock twice.

The next morning, his coffee tasted wrong.

Not poisoned, that would be too crude. But the sugar had been replaced with salt. Just enough that the first sip made him gag, the second made him pause, and by the third, he was staring at the café counter where Saafia had been standing five minutes earlier, her back to him as she stirred her own drink with deliberate, unhurried motions.

When she turned and caught his eye, she didn't smirk. Just raised her cup in a mock toast and walked away.

He threw his coffee out.

By week's end, the games grew quieter, more intimate.

Saafia wasn't touching his things. She wasn't slipping notes into his bag or tampering with his coffee.

She was turning the entire campus into her instrument.

There was a shift in how people looked at him.

It wasn't overt, just a slight hesitation before someone handed him a paper, an extra beat of silence when he entered a conversation. The kind of thing most wouldn't notice. But Rinon had spent years perfecting the art of being unseen, and now that invisibility had developed cracks.

It started with Paul Kensington, the senator's son, who suddenly developed an inexplicable interest in Rinon's research topic.

"You're working on behavioral economics, right?" Paul clapped him on the shoulder in the library, too loud, too close. "Professor Claymore said your last paper was brilliant."

Rinon stiffened. Claymore had never praised anyone publicly.

When he glanced across the room, Saafia was watching from behind a book, her eyes bright with amusement.

Then came the study group invitations always through intermediaries, always with plausible deniability.

"Hey, a bunch of us are meeting at the grad lounge," said Mira from their poli-sci seminar. "You should come. Bring your notes on the Keynesian models?"

Rinon had never spoken to Mira before.

When he arrived (against his better judgment), the room fell just a little too quiet. Saafia wasn't there but her favorite scarf was draped over a chair, her half-finished latte left sweating on the table.

As if she'd just stepped out.

As if she'd known he'd come.

The worst was the music.

The music was her masterpiece.

It stayed with him. Rinon would hear it in fragments, a few bars of a waltz drifting from an open window as he passed, the same melody hummed absentmindedly by a classmate, the ringtone of a stranger's phone cutting through the cafeteria noise. Always the same haunting progression, minor key twisting into something darker.

When he finally looked up the composition ("Spiteful Waltz," Op. 3, S. Bin), the sheet music had a single handwritten note in the digital margins: For reluctant dancers.

He closed the tab too quickly.

"Spiteful Waltz," she said looking over his shoulder. "Composed it last year. Do you like it?"

"You're being obvious," he said.

She laughed, sharp and bright. "Oh, Rinon. If I were being obvious, you'd be on your knees by now."

The words should have angered him. Instead, he felt something worse, a thrill of anticipation low in his stomach.

He hated her for that most of all.

The escalation continued in whispers:

His keycard failing at random doors, forcing him to wait for assistance like some helpless first-year

Each violation should have felt like an attack. Instead, they settled under his skin like a challenge one he found himself anticipating with a shameful intensity.

He started leaving bait.

A deliberately unfinished essay on his desk. A half-empty coffee cup placed just so. Once, even his journal left open on a library table, the pages filled with his usual precise notes except for one margin where he'd written, "Predictable patterns are the first sign of a lazy mind."

When he returned, the words were underlined in red ink.

Beneath them, in handwriting that matched his own a little too well: "Then why are you so easy to read?"

Her most brazen move came during 2nd year finals.

Rinon walked into his economics exam to find his usual seat occupied by Liam Cho, who never sat anywhere but the front row.

"Professor's orders," Liam muttered without meeting his eyes.

The only open seat was directly behind Saafia. 

Saafia lifted her gaze, just for a second, and he saw it, the quiet dare in her eyes, the unspoken question: What will you do about it?

The professor had already begun distributing tests, no time to argue.

Rinon took the seat behind her without another word.

She started tapping her pencil in a familiar rhythm.

Da-dum-dum. Da-dum-dum.

The waltz.

Rinon turned just enough to catch Liam's gaze and saw the flicker of guilt there. The realization hit like ice water: He doesn't even know why he's doing this.

For ninety minutes, he stared at the nape of her neck instead of the clock. Watched the way her hair caught the light when she tilted her head. Noticed against his better judgment that she bit her lower lip when concentrating, just once, before catching herself.

When time was called, Saafia stood and dropped her pencil on his desk as she passed. Not an accident. A gift.

The pencil was his.

Or rather, it had been his, the expensive mechanical one that disappeared from his desk last week. Now it bore a single new marking: tiny teeth marks on the eraser end, faint but undeniable.

He should have been angry.

Instead, he pocketed it with a quiet thrill.

She didn't look back, but her voice drifted lazily over her shoulder as she exited:

"You write better when you're watching me."

Not stolen, then.

Borrowed.

Kept.

Returned.

The realization hit him like a punch to the gut; this wasn't just a game anymore.

It was a conversation.

And he was still playing.