For 30+ Advance/Early chapters :p
atreon.com/ScoldeyJod
Two nights later, they met at the same table in the library's quietest corner. This time, there was less nervous energy, replaced by a thrum of quiet anticipation. Peter had arrived early, a habit born from a life of needing to be one step ahead. He had his biophysics textbook open, but his eyes kept flicking towards the entrance.
When Diana arrived, exactly on time, he felt that same stupid lurch in his chest. She moved through the silent aisles with a grace that felt almost supernatural, a silent ripple in the stagnant air of the library. She wore a simple dark blue sweater, and her long hair was tied back in a loose braid. It made her look softer, more approachable, yet somehow no less regal.
"Ready to tackle the chaos?" she asked, her voice a low murmur as she took the seat opposite him.
"Born ready," he lied with a grin, trying to project a confidence he in no way felt. "Or, you know, ready enough to probably fail my first midterm."
She didn't return his self-deprecating joke. Instead, she looked at him with a serious, unnerving intensity. "You won't fail. You have a brilliant mind, Peter. It's just… noisy."
He blinked, caught off guard. "Noisy?"
"Your thoughts," she explained, gesturing vaguely at his head. "They seem to move very fast. Sometimes they collide."
It was the most accurate description of his inner monologue anyone had ever given, and she'd known him for all of a day. He felt a blush creep up his neck. "Yeah, well, traffic's bad in there. C'mon, let's just get to work before my brain causes a pile-up."
For the next hour, they worked in a surprisingly comfortable silence. The only sounds were the rustle of turning pages, the soft scratch of Diana's pen on paper, and the frantic-but-silent tapping of Peter's fingers on his laptop. He found himself stealing glances at her over the screen. He noticed the way she bit her lower lip when she was concentrating, the elegant curve of her wrist as she wrote, the stray strands of dark hair that had escaped her braid to curl near her temple.
He was so absorbed in one of these observations that he didn't realize she had stopped writing and was now watching him, an amused glint in her impossibly blue eyes.
"Is something wrong with my research?" she asked, her voice laced with a subtle tease.
Peter's entire body went hot. Busted. "No! Sorry. I was just—I zoned out. This chapter on protein synthesis is a real killer."
"Let me see," she said, and before he could object, she leaned forward, reaching across the table to look at his textbook.
Her proximity was a physical force. A faint, clean scent, like fresh rain and something vaguely floral he couldn't name, washed over him. Her braid fell over her shoulder, the end of it brushing against his hand. Every one of his heightened senses went into overdrive. The world narrowed to the space of their small table, to the few inches that separated them. He could hear the soft, steady rhythm of her breathing. He could feel the warmth radiating from her skin.
His own breath hitched in his throat.
"This part," he said, his voice an octave lower than usual, forcing himself to point at a complex diagram. "The ribosome's A, P, and E sites. It's the sequence. I'm just not getting it."
Diana looked at the diagram, her brow furrowed for a moment. "It's a translation, isn't it? A language. The codons are the words, the amino acids are the letters. The ribosome is simply the scribe, reading one language and writing it into another."
He stared at her. She'd taken a dense, mechanical concept and turned it into poetry. And suddenly, it clicked. It wasn't just a diagram anymore. It was a story.
"The scribe," he repeated softly, a slow grin spreading across his face. "Huh. I never thought of it like that. That actually… helps. A lot."
"Sometimes a different perspective is all you need," she said, leaning back into her chair. The spell was broken, but the echo of it remained, shimmering in the air between them.
They packed up their things near closing time, the library now almost deserted. The silence was different now. It wasn't just the absence of sound; it was full, charged with unspoken questions.
As they walked out into the cool night air, under the dim glow of the campus lampposts, Peter knew he couldn't let the evening end.
"Hey," he started, his voice sounding louder in the quiet. "I know it's late, but there's a 24-hour diner a few blocks from here. They make coffee that's strong enough to dissolve steel and pancakes that are… well, they're pancakes. My treat. As a thank you for being a better teacher than my thousand-dollar textbook."
He held his breath, fully expecting her to politely decline.
Diana stopped walking and turned to face him. The lamplight caught the sharp line of her jaw and the deep blue of her eyes. She looked at him for a long moment, and he felt like she was seeing right through the clumsy, nerdy exterior to the vibrating, anxious core of him.
"I don't know what a 'pancake' is," she said, her tone perfectly serious. "But I would like to find out."
A wide, genuine smile broke across Peter's face. The night was cold, but for the first time, he felt a warmth spreading through his chest that had nothing to do with the spider-bite and everything to do with the woman walking beside him.