The laugh rips out of me before I have a chance to stop it. Real, loud, the kind I don't let happen in public. Two people in the front row turn around.
He grins. "Iconic, right?"
I shake my head, still pressing my lips together to keep the rest of it from spilling out. My cheeks hurt. I can't remember the last time my cheeks hurt from smiling.
He turns back to his notebook, still grinning, clicking the penis pen like a man who has zero shame and even less self-awareness. Except he's completely self-aware. He did this on purpose.
He brought a bachelorette party pen to a statistics lecture to make me laugh on a morning when laughing felt impossible, and he has no idea why it mattered as much as it did.
Dr. Petrov starts the lecture.
I type, and he writes.
When class ends, I close my laptop and sit for a second too long. Long enough for him to notice.
He's packing up his notebook, but his hands slow when he looks at me. "You good?"
The question is casual. The way he asks it isn't. His eyes hold on my face with a steadiness I haven't earned and don't know what to do with.
"I quit my job." It comes out flat. Factual. Like I'm reporting the weather.
He stops packing. "When?"
"Last night."
His pen hovers over the notebook, forgotten. "What happened?"
I give him the short version. A customer grabbed me. My boss told me to deal with it. I walked out.
His jaw tightens. Not a flinch, not a dramatic reaction. A single muscle flexing along the bone, a compression I can't name but can feel from a seat away.
He doesn't tell me I overreacted. Doesn't ask what the customer did exactly, doesn't probe for details the way people do when they want the story to be less bad than it sounds.
Five seconds of silence. Then he clicks the pink pen closed and looks at me directly.
"I know a place. They're reopening soon, hiring staff. The woman who owns it is good people." He taps the pen against his notebook once. "She wouldn't let anyone put a hand on you."
"Where?"
"Backroads Bar and Grill. Out past the compound, off the main road."
"Compound?" The word snags on its way past me. Compounds are for military bases and survivalists, not college kids who sit next to you in statistics.
"Clubhouse, basically. Where the MC is set up. I live there." He says it like it explains itself.
It doesn't. But the way he's looking at me says he's not being evasive. He's being normal. This is his normal.
"My aunt runs Backroads. Not blood aunt—club family. But she's solid. She wouldn't let what happened to you at Pint House happen under her roof."
Club family. MC. Compound.
I'm adding these to the list of things about this man I don't have enough information to understand yet.
"You'd vouch for me?" I don't know why I ask it. I don't know this person's name.
He holds my eyes. "Yeah. I would."
No hesitation. No conditions.