Chapter 2: Domestic Deception
The lecture hall smelled of old paper and lemon-scented cleaner. Riley slouched in her seat, one knee drawn up, idly sketching the professor’s gesticulating hands in the margin of her notebook. Constantin sat beside her, close enough that his thigh pressed against hers, a proprietary warmth. He’d saved her the seat, a fact he’d mentioned twice.
“So, Friday,” he murmured, his breath a tickle near her ear. “There’s this warehouse thing in the Old First Ward. My friend’s DJing. It’ll be epic.”
Riley’s pencil traced the frantic motion of the professor’s pointer finger. “Friday’s my deep-dive into the Ghent Altarpiece. Due at dawn.”
“Come after. Live a little.” His hand found her knee under the desk, his thumb making slow circles. It felt less like an invitation and more like a claim being staked.
She focused on the projection screen, a detailed scan of a Bosch triptych. The Garden of Earthly Delights. Naked figures cavorted in a surreal landscape, a chaotic symphony of flesh and folly. She thought of Jack’s textbook, the clean, labeled lines of the pelvic floor. Two different maps of the same territory—one a moralistic carnival, the other a clinical blueprint. Constantin’s thumb kept moving.
When the bell rang, she shoved her things into her bag with a sense of relief. The crowd of students funneled out into the bright, echoey hallway. Constantin hooked an arm around her shoulders. “Coffee? I know you need it. You look…”
“Like death warmed over? Thanks.” She shrugged out from under his arm, adjusting the strap of her bag. That’s when she saw him.
Jack stood twenty feet down the corridor, outside a different lecture hall. He was talking to an older woman—Professor Irvin, Riley recognized her from the biology department. Jack’s posture was rigid, his head tilted slightly down as he listened. Professor Irvin was speaking, her expression a mix of concern and professorial sternness. She placed a hand on his arm, a gesture that made Jack flinch almost imperceptibly. He nodded once, sharply, then turned and walked away, his long strides eating up the polished floor.
He didn’t see Riley. His face, usually a mask of calm concentration, was stripped bare. In the brief moment before he turned, she saw it: a raw, unraveling frustration that tightened his jaw and hollowed his eyes. It was gone in a flash, replaced by his customary detached focus, but she’d caught it. The data point didn’t fit.
“Who’s that?” Constantin followed her gaze.
“My roommate.”
“The med robot? He looks intense.”
“He is.” She watched Jack disappear around a corner, a tall, lanky figure absorbed by the stream of students. The image of his strained face lingered, superimposed over the cavorting figures of Bosch’s garden.
The apartment was quiet, filled with the pale, lazy light of late afternoon. Riley had traded the lecture hall for the lumpy sofa, a quilt pulled to her chin. She’d been trying to read about Jan van Eyck’s layering techniques, but the words had blurred into a nap. She dreamed of disjointed things: anatomical diagrams blooming into strange flowers, the creak of a floorboard, a professor’s disapproving frown.
The sound of the front door closing, harder than necessary, shocked her awake.
She blinked, disoriented. Jack was in the room. He wasn’t just in it; he occupied it with a violent, silent energy. He stood by the bookshelf, his back to her, shoulders tight. He pulled a textbook from the stack—Reproductive Endocrinology & Pathology—and with a motion that was both fluid and jarring, he flung it across the room. It hit the wall with a solid, sickening thump and slumped to the floor, pages splayed like a wounded bird.
Riley held her breath.
He didn’t move for a long moment. Then his head dropped forward, his hands braced on the shelf. She saw the white-knuckled grip, the slight tremble in his wrists.
“Jack?”
He went very still. He hadn’t known she was there. Slowly, he straightened, but didn’t turn. “You’re home.” His voice was flat, sanded down.
“Yeah.” She sat up, the quilt pooling around her waist. “Bad day?”
A short, humorless sound escaped him. He finally turned. His glasses were slightly askew, his hair ruffled where he’d pushed his hands through it. The look on his face was the one she’d glimpsed in the hallway—the polished veneer cracked. “You could say that.”
She waited. The hum of the fridge seemed to grow louder.
“I got my midterm back,” he said, as if confessing to a crime. “Reproductive course.”
“And?”
“Eighty-one.” He said the number like it was a curse.
Riley blinked. “That’s… an A-minus.”
“It’s a B-plus in that class. The curve is vicious.” He walked over, picked up the fallen textbook with a kind of disgusted tenderness, and placed it on the coffee table. He didn’t sit. “It’s the lowest grade I’ve gotten in two years. In the one subject that actually matters.”
“Matters for what?”
“For everything.” He finally looked at her, and the frustration in his eyes was a live wire. “I want to be a gynecologist. A surgeon, ideally. You don’t get to be a mediocre student in reproductive health and then go carve up people’s insides. They don’t hand out scalpels for ‘good enough’.”
The rawness of it stunned her. This wasn’t just about a grade. It was about the architecture of his future collapsing. She thought of his mother’s comment about ‘indelicate’ work, the quiet defiance in his voice when he’d spoken of it.
“So you throw the book?” she asked, her tone softer than she intended.
“It was an inefficient release of kinetic energy. I acknowledge that.” He shoved his hands into his pockets. “The ironies are not lost on me, Riley. The aspiring women’s health specialist, failing—by my standards—to adequately understand the very system he wants to treat. It’s farcical.”
“You’re not failing.”
“Semantics.” He stared at her sketchbook on the table, open to a half-finished, exaggerated study of the professor’s hands. “I can diagram every nerve cluster in the lumbar plexus. I can recite the stages of folliculogenesis. But the synthesis… the application on the tests… it’s not clicking. And it has to click.”
There was a plea buried in the declaration. She heard it.
She swung her legs off the sofa, the floor cool on her bare feet. “What’s not clicking?”
He let out a long breath, the fight seeming to drain out of him, leaving only exhausted frustration. “It’s the pathologies. Memorizing them is one thing. Differentiating the presentations, the nuances between similarly presenting disorders… it’s like a puzzle where all the pieces are shades of the same color.”
Riley nodded slowly. She looked at her own sketchbook, at the way she’d used cross-hatching to show shadow and light on the hands. “You’re looking at the pieces individually. Maybe you need to see the whole picture first. The… the composition.”
Jack tilted his head. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know.” She stood, walking to the kitchenette. She grabbed two glasses, filled them with water from the tap. The mundane action was a anchor. “When I look at a painting, I don’t start with every individual brushstroke. I see the whole scene. The mood. The story. Then I break down how it’s made.” She brought the glasses back, handed him one. “You’re starting with the brushstrokes. The isolated facts. Maybe you’re missing the story the body is telling.”
He took the glass, his fingers brushing hers. A static shock, small and sharp, passed between them. He didn’t react. “The body doesn’t tell stories. It presents data.”
“Data has a narrative.” She took a sip of water. “You told me about pelvic architecture. Balance, tension, support. That’s a story. Maybe endometriosis isn’t just ‘ectopic tissue growth.’ Maybe it’s the story of a system invaded, architecture stressed. Maybe PCOS is a story of hormonal chaos, a different kind of imbalance.” She felt herself flushing, out of her depth. “Sorry, that’s probably useless.”
Jack was staring at her, his analytical gaze fully upon her now, but it was different from the kitchen. This wasn’t observational. It was processing. “No,” he said slowly. “It’s not useless.” He took off his glasses, polished them on the hem of his shirt—a nervous habit she’d never seen. His eyes, unfocused, looked younger. “I approach it like a machine. Malfunction A leads to symptom cluster B. You’re suggesting I approach it like a… like an ecosystem.”
“Or a painting,” she said, a shy smile touching her lips. “A sometimes grotesque, always fascinating painting.”
A corner of his mouth twitched. Not a smile, but the tectonic shift before one. He put his glasses back on. The world snapped back into sharp focus for him. “You see grotesquery. I see pathophysiology.”
“Potato, po-tah-to.” She leaned against the arm of the sofa. “Look, if you need to… talk it out. To someone who doesn’t know a Fallopian tube from a bass clarinet. Sometimes saying the wrong thing out loud helps you find the right thing.” She shrugged, trying to sound casual. “I’m a good listener. And I already know you keep precise notes on my drunken hallway navigation. Your secrets are safe with me.”
He studied his water glass, turning it in his hands. The angry tension had bled away, replaced by a deep, thoughtful fatigue. “You’d do that?”
“Sure. I owe you for the coffee. And for not commenting on the hoodie.”
That finally got a real, faint smile. It changed his whole face, softening the serious lines. “The hoodie was statistically likely to appear. I calculated an eighty-two percent chance you’d dispose of it within forty-eight hours.”
She laughed. “You’re ridiculous.”
“I’m accurate.” He set his glass down next to the despised textbook. “Alright. Maybe. Talking it out. With the wrong analogy enthusiast.” He looked at her, the offer hanging between them like a truce, or a new, fragile wire connecting their separate forts of chaos in the quiet room. “It might… provide a novel cognitive pathway.”
“Great.” She picked up her sketchbook, closing the cover on the professor’s hands. “But not tonight. Tonight, you look like you need to not look at that book. And I need to not think about the Ghent Altarpiece.”
“What do you propose?” he asked, and there was no guesswork in his voice, only a genuine, open curiosity.
She grinned, an impulsive idea sparking. “I propose we order disgustingly greasy pizza and you explain to me, in layman’s terms, why the menstrual cycle is actually a hormonal symphony and not just a monthly inconvenience. I’ll provide the artistic commentary.”
Jack stared at her. Then he let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “Your premise is flawed. It can be both a symphony and an inconvenience. But the pizza variable… that has merit.”
“See?” Riley said, reaching for her phone, the strange afternoon tension already transmuting into something lighter, something uncharted. “We’re collaborating already.”