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Then we look at each other. He takes off his glasses, puts them on the lectern, stares at them for a moment.
Then he walks around the table at the front of the room and leans against it, facing me, arms folded over his chest, sleeves rolled up to his elbow.
There’s the tattoo. The sextant. His forearms are even nicer in the daylight, thick and muscled —
“I didn’t realize you were a student,” he says.
I swallow, my mouth dry as the desert, and shift the messenger bag I’ve got slung over one shoulder.
“I didn’t realize you were a professor,” I say.
“That makes what happened last night wildly inappropriate,” he goes on, voice low.
We lock eyes.
“Not if we didn’t know,” I murmur, quietly, so anyone in the hall outside can’t possibly hear.
“Even so,” he says, his voice matching mine. “Ethically, last night is murky at best. And going forward —”
“Is black and white?” I ask, before he can say it, tumbling over the words in my need to get them out first.
I don’t want to hear him say it. It feels easier if it’s me.
“Yes,” he agrees, then pauses. Looks at me, and for one single millisecond I think of holding hands in the botanical garden, following Vivian down the lit path.
“I unequivocally cannot date a student,” he says, his voice low, soft, gentle. Secret. “University policy is crystal clear on that point.”
It hurts.
I knew it was coming from the first second I stepped into this classroom and saw him, but it still hurts.
“Of course,” I agree, holding my body upright, rigid. “It would be wildly inappropriate.”
“It would,” he says.
And then, so quietly I barely hear him: “I’m sorry.”
“I am, too,” I whisper, and then I wait.
I don’t know what I’m waiting for. Something else, some grain of hope. Call me when you graduate, maybe.
But he doesn’t. Right now, he’s probably wishing that he could go back in time and delete yesterday, delete me as anything but one of eighteen students in a calculus class.
So I nod once, gather my wits, and leave the classroom.* * *I swear to god they’re mocking me.
The moment I open my bedroom door, there they are: brightly colored and vibrant in the late afternoon sunlight. Each one tall, proud, and thick, and a reminder I don’t fucking want right now.
“Margaret!” I shout, practically throwing my bag to the floor. “Your dicks are on my desk! Again!”
“Sorry!” she calls, her voice echoing across the small apartment. “Don’t worry, they’re the social media dicks.”
“Yeah, they’d goddamn better be!” I shout back, and now I hear the creak of a desk chair, some rustling.
“Sorry,” she says again, and two seconds later she comes through my bedroom door. “Your room has the best lighting at magic hour and I was doing some stuff for the store’s Instagram —”
“Could you please not leave a bunch of dildos on my desk?” I snap. “It doesn’t feel like a lot to ask. No giant blue dicks on my desk. Too much?”
“Okay, okay,” she says, scooping all four into her arms in one swoop, holding three against her body and the biggest one, which is purple and quite frankly alarming, in her right hand. “I swear, they’re brand new.”
“I don’t care if they’re brand new or a dick you found excavating King Tut,” I say. “I don’t want them on my desk. I don’t need them in my room.”
I grab my messenger bag off the floor, dump it on my twin bed, wrest my laptop out of it and put it on the scarred wooden desk. Margaret’s still standing there, holding a bunch of dildos, watching me.
“What?” I ask, the word coming out about five times bitchier than I mean it to.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
I pull my desk chair out and sit, staring at my unopened laptop.
It’s been a shitty afternoon, but getting unceremoniously dumped by your calculus professor will do that to you, I guess. I’m angry and hurt and upset, and I don’t even have anyone to be angry at.
At Caleb? What else was he supposed to do? At myself, for not screening him properly last night?
No, I’m just angry / hurt / upset / everything at the universe in general, and it’s really unsatisfying.
“Thalia,” she says again. “What’s wrong?”
For a moment, I don’t even know if I should tell her the truth. Can we get in trouble for accidentally going on a date?
Fuck it, I think.
“You know the guy from last night?”
She tosses the dildos onto my bed and sits beside them, facing me, cross-legged, eyes narrowed.
“Did something already happen?” she asks, astonished.
Last night, when they got home from the bars at one in the morning, I was still awake and may have waxed rhapsodic about my date. I may have waxed a lot.
“Yeah,” I say, resting my forehead on one hand. “He’s my calculus professor.”
