The tracing paper is already sweating under my palms when the room goes quiet.
Not quiet like focus, like everyone’s in the zone. Quiet like a storm just walked in wearing expensive shoes.
I don’t look up right away. My pencil is halfway through a line that’s pretending to be a cantilevered balcony, and if I lift it too fast, the lead will skid and take the last two hours of my life with it.
The door clicks shut. Studio chatter thins into whispers.
“Holy shit,” someone near the windows breathes. “He actually came back.”
Him.
I shade in the balcony, count my breaths, and only then let my eyes stray past the edge of my desk.
There he is.
Damian Cross is taller than the rumor, which is annoying. Rumor had him as a six-foot myth with a trust fund and cheekbones sponsored by God. In person, he’s more dangerous: navy shirt rolled at the forearms, dark slacks that definitely cost more than my rent, black hair pushed back with the kind of carelessness that only happens when you’ve never had to worry about impressing anyone.
He scans the studio like he owns it. Technically, his family probably does.
The Cross Developments logo is etched on half the campus buildings. I’ve washed enough dishes in the alumni lounge to memorize it.
Professor Hartman stands by her desk, arms folded, watching the class watch him. There’s a faint, satisfied curve to her mouth that means someone is about to be sacrificed.
He gives her a nod—cool, practiced—and sets his portfolio case down with a soft thud that still manages to sound like money.
I lower my gaze back to my drawing. Ink smudges my middle finger, my wrist aching from the night shift I just crawled out of. There’s a smear of marinara sauce on the cuff of my thrift-store cardigan; I noticed it in the bathroom mirror this morning and didn’t have time to change.
We exist in parallel universes, and the only place they overlap is right here, in this fluorescent-lit battlefield of chipboard and caffeine.
“Alright, architects,” Hartman says, snapping the silence in half. “Since the panting over Mr. Cross is disrupting oxygen flow, let’s recommence consciousness. We’re starting with pin-ups.”
The groan is collective. No one is ever ready for Hartman’s pin-ups, even if they think they are.
She glances down at her roster. “We’ll go in reverse alphabetical order today. Moore, you’re up.”
My stomach drops so fast I almost hear it.
“Already?” I mutter.
“Is there another Moore hiding under your desk?” Hartman’s gaze narrows. “You want the competition, Ms. Moore. That means you want the critique.”
Right. Competition.
The elite annual design competition. The one that could hand me tuition and a lifeboat or sink me for good. The one with the panel of outside jurors and internship offers attached like shiny bait. The one where Cross Developments has “kindly” agreed to sponsor the prize.
I slide my board onto the pin-up wall, fixing it in place with bulldog clips that have lost their spring. My hands are steady out of sheer stubbornness.
The concept is raw but honest: a community arts center retrofitted into an abandoned warehouse, punched with light wells and stitched into the street with wide, welcoming steps. It’s not perfect; the perspective on my section is a little off, and I had to choose between rendering and sleep.
