He shakes his head, though he doesn’t quite meet her eyes. “No, it’s okay. Friends share their personal lives, right?” Then he goes quiet for a few moments before speaking again. “She had an emotional affair with a colleague. She said it hadn’t gotten physical yet, but she was in love with someone else.”
“Fuck,” Ramona says, fighting every urge to reach out and touch him. And then she stops fighting, because she doesn’t know how else to express her sympathy. Her hand lands on his knee, rubbing back and forth a few times through his jeans. “I’m sorry.”
When he stiffens at her touch, she drops her hand. Right. He said he didn’t want her pity. “We were together so long and knew each other so well. Maybe we took each other for granted, I don’t know. I’ve spent the whole year trying to figure out what I could have done to drive her away. What I did wrong that made her want someone else. Was I working too much, or was I unavailable when she needed me?”
What if you didn’t do anything wrong at all?Ramona wants to ask.
“She’s not a bad person,” Nick rushes to say, and her heart breaks a little, hearing him defend his ex-wife like this. “Really. And it wasn’t an ugly divorce. After all this…I still want her to be happy.”
If he put that on his dating profile, he’d have to beat women away with a stick.
Ramona swallows hard. “Very mature of you.”
“It comes with age,” he says, mouth tilting into a smile, and she gets the feeling the joke is signaling that he’d like to move on.
So she holds up her own phone. “Let’s try another one. Natural smile this time—yes, much better.” Then she holds out her arm for a selfie of the two of them.
“I realize that I’m new to the whole dating thing, but I think it might send the wrong message if I have a picture with Ramona Wilder on my profile.”
“Ha,” she says, right before the whistle blows to start the third quarter. “No, this one is just for me.”
The Clippers lose, 123–91, but everyone agrees they made a tremendous effort. Surely, they’ll get ’em next time.
As they’re leaving the arena, Nick motions for her to follow him into one of the merch shops. She’s almost a little devastated that the game is over. For just a moment, she tries bargaining with the universe, wishing they could go home together instead of back to their separate cars. Even if all they’d do is talk. Even if he doesn’t touch her for the rest of the day.
Ramona has to swallow back a stab of jealousy, imagining women swiping right on him. Back in his office, she’d wanted him in a purely physical way. Now she’s not sure what she wants—only that she can’t have any of it.
“To commemorate your first outing as a normal person,” Nick says, swapping the baseball cap on her head for one with the team’s updated logo. His gaze locks to hers while her heart races, and she wonders why nothing about this feels normal at all. “I’d say it was a rousing success.”
16
Ramona’s hand shoots up beforeNick has even finished asking his question.
“According to the Cannon-Bard theory,” she says when he nods to her, “emotions result from an external stimulus, along with a physiological reaction. So, if your teacher announces a pop quiz and you haven’t studied, not that that’s somethingIhave ever personally experienced”—this draws some scattered laughs—“then you might feel anxiety and start to sweat, but neither of those is caused by the other.”
Nick tries his best to keep the smile from taking over his whole face. She’s clearly done the reading.
Another hand goes up, a sophomore named Matt. “But if you look at Darwin, it’s clear emotions evolved to help us survive.”
Ramona twists in her seat. “Yes, but I think that’s too rudimentary a way of thinking about it for the modern era. Our lives are more complex. There are too many emotions we experience these days that Darwin couldn’t have accounted for—no offense.”
“On his behalf, none taken,” Nick says. “I hope.”
Debates like this are his favorite part of teaching. They’ve just introduced six different theories of emotion, and it’s only natural for students to gravitate toward one of them. In fact, he doesn’t always fall in the same place, either.
Ever since the basketball game last week—since that afternoon in the library, actually—Ramona has been different in class. More engaged. A couple days ago, he mentioned over text that he had a trunk full of things to take to Goodwill, and she asked if she could join.It sounds VERY normal, she messaged, and he chewed the inside of his cheek and told her to meet him at the donation center on North Brand in Glendale.
After they dropped off his boxes, they browsed the aisles until Ramona started worrying a group of teens was watching her, so they grabbed iced coffees at a nearby café, then sat outside talking until all the ice had melted.
She was wearing her new Clippers hat, and the way he felt about that rivals the swell of teacherly pride he feels when she concludes the debate with another insightful remark.
“I think that’s a good place to stop for today,” Nick says. “Happy Halloween. Try not to think about what Freud would say about your costume choices.”
He busies himself organizing papers while his students pack up, though it doesn’t escape his notice that Ramona lingers, as though fighting with the zipper on her bag.
He did in fact consult the UCLA faculty handbook after their conversation in the library, and what he found was this: romantic or sexual relationships with students are unacceptable forms of conduct.
Getting coffee with a student? Not expressly prohibited. Going to a basketball game together? Also murky.
