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He glances down at his phone and his mouth quirks in a smile. Better.
He is…not hideously ugly. The opposite. His jaw is determined; his eyes are piercing. And when he smiles, all that purposeful certainty softens into something that feels like a welcome.
He smiles now, and I silently forgive him for not liking my comments on Facebook.
What happens now? I type.
He looks upward, then shrugs. Something between us never talking again and us making out in my office right now. I have a strong preference between those two.
I can’t help it; I laugh. It’s the medium. The fact that when our screens are between us, this is who we are to each other. We’ve been flirting for far too long, and it’s become too second-nature to us to stop.
Is the last one even an option? Aren’t there rules against professor-student relationships?
He exhales, and writes for a longer time. My phone buzzes again. For obvious reasons, I looked up the code of conduct to figure out where we stood. You’re a senior. You’re not in my department. I do not have, and do not reasonably expect to have, academic responsibility for you. Unless you’re planning on going to grad school here in chemistry and/or physics and you never told me?
I shake my head.
Then it’s not an issue. Also. I love your laugh.
I look over at him. I want to forget everything. I also want to enshrine it in my memory. I shake my head and write. You are such a liar.
He raises an eyebrow. I’ve done a lot of shit wrong. But that was the truth. I love your laugh.
Not about that. My gaze drops to the curve of his bicep, visible beneath his T-shirt, and then slides up. I take a deep breath. You said you were hideously ugly.
His lips twitch into a smile. Beauty standards are complete shit. Also, I wanted to lower expectations.
Fine. But get out of this one, I write. Actual Physicist? You’re in chemistry, not physics.
He snorts and shakes his head as he types. Remind me to send you an explanation of the weird division between chemistry and physics in the UK versus the States. It’s not a one-to-one mapping. He considers a moment, before typing again. Besides, I told you I had a terrible personality. It’s not my fault you didn’t believe me.
I consider this. You do have a terrible personality.
I know. I merited the fuck-off shoes.
I look down.
So does he.
I’m incredibly conscious of my shoes right now. I hadn’t been thinking of him—much—when I put them on. The glass beads sparkle in the fluorescent light of his office.
These, I write, are shoes I wear for courage. Which is why I’m messaging you from five feet away, instead of safely in my house.
I’m sorry, he writes back. I’m sorry. To say this was a fuck-up is an understatement.
I look at him. I did start some of it. Some of the time. I seem to recall sending you drinks that one time.
He suppresses a smile. Some. But not most. My ego is fine. We don’t need to pretend this started with anything but my treating you with utter disrespect.
I look forward, and then type the scariest thing I have ever typed. I keep asking myself if we can just start over and pretend none of this happened.
He exhales. No. We can’t. I knew at LBL that if I said anything, it was over.
I desperately want the alternate reality he posits. You’re such a dumbass. Why didn’t you keep quiet? I give you retroactive permission to not tell me.
He shrugs. You would have found out anyway. He pauses, frowns at his answer on the screen, and types again. It would have hurt you if I kept quiet, and I couldn’t hurt you any more than I had.
I look up. He’s watching me with an intensity that I don’t want to understand.
It’s too much. I can’t—I just can’t—take more of this. More and I’ll have to think beyond the confines of my phone, to put him in a place in my life. I’m not ready to figure out where he fits.
I stand up.
He does, too. He looks at me across his desk, and I think about him saying we could make out. This is no longer a hypothetical possibility. It’s real. I don’t know what to do with this kind of real.
I need a little more time, I write.
He looks over at me, then types one last time. I have something I’ve been holding for you. Can I give it to you?
I consider this. I like presents.
It’s not a present.
He opens a drawer on his desk and removes an envelope. The paper is almost translucent, stamped with tiny brown fibers. There’s one word on the front, handwritten in a dark black: Maria.
I remember his handwriting from those damned napkins. I swallow. He holds it out to me
I reach out carefully. So carefully. I make sure I don’t touch his fingers when I take it. I look over into his eyes.
We haven’t said a word to each other the entire time.
I don’t leave, though. We stay in place for several minutes, looking at each other. I don’t know what he sees. I can’t imagine what he’s thinking. All I know is that this is Jay, and he hurt me.
I want to not hurt. I want, not with the power of lust, but with a deep-down desire, a quiet intensity. I want us to be friends. I want him to hold me. I want to lean my head against his chest and have the scent of him wash away my memories.
I know if I ask him to do it, he’ll try.
I don’t say the words.
“Thanks,” I finally say instead. My voice feels rusty. My chest almost hurts. “I’ll see you.” Our eyes can’t seem to break away from each other. “Good-bye, Jay.”
He gives me a half smile. “See you around, Maria.”
* * *
I’m aware of the letter tucked in my bag all the way home. Text should be text; I’ve exchanged hours and hours of messages with Jay. But somehow pixels on a lit screen, notifications that flash one second, are responded to the next, and scroll off into nothingness, pushed away by the next exchange of messages, are different than a physical letter. There’s no timestamp telling me when he wrote it. For all I know, he’s had it sitting in his drawer for days.
I can’t respond immediately. He can’t tell when—or if—I read it. It won’t be backed up to any cloud service.
I wait until I’m home and can retreat to my room. I don’t even pretend that I’m going to put it off any longer.
I tear the envelope open.
Dear Maria, he has written. I am so sorry.
I feel a pang in my chest. So am I.
I fucked up. I can’t count the ways that I fucked up, but I will try.
1. I jumped to conclusions. I’m not going to excuse or explain myself; that’s not the point of this letter.
I exhale slowly. He doesn’t have to excuse or explain himself. The truth is, he already has. I put together the pieces slowly over the last week. He told me—the Maria me—that I reminded him of someone. He told me—the Em me—that he’d had a girlfriend who said something terrible to his brother. It’s not hard to see what happened.
Even the fact that he was attracted to me probably messed with him. He doesn’t trust his own judgment.
And yeah, he was still an ass. But having someone be an ass in a vacuum is a really different thing than understanding why someone was an ass.
2. You got under my skin early, and I treated you like crap because of it.
No excuses. I realized I’d come to an erroneous conclusion about you, and I hate being wrong. It was entirely obvious that I was wrong, and so I took it out on you. That was also fucked up.
In a way, I’m glad I waited to go talk to him. The day after he told me, I wouldn’t have been able to hear this.
Yes, he did provoke me. But he also tried to apologize. And while I can’t pretend that we were equally at fault, I can recognize that for the last couple of months, I’ve been the one pushing most of the hostility. He was the one making jokes about confirmation bias.
3. I don’t know how to go forward. I don’t know if there is a forward. But you are important to me.
I don’t know what to do with that. It’s the simple truth. You are important to me.
You’re important enough that even if there is no when, if there is no what, and there is no longer a me in your life, I’m going to do better.
Yours,
Jay
I’m not sure what to do with this letter. Maybe I was hoping that he’d have some magic insight, something that changed everything. Maybe I was hoping that he’d give me an excuse. Some way that I could forget what happened.
I put my head in my hands.
Maybe I want an excuse.
