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She settled her finger on the second line of the passage, ready to start talking if no one else would. But then she saw a hand rising slowly from one of the top rows. She recognized this student. Jackie DeLuca, from her second section of recitation. As she called on her, Allison’s muscles liquefied with relief.
Jackie pushed a blond curl out of her face. “‘Ful blisfully in prison maistow dure—’” She stumbled over the language, but each syllable was a symphony to Allison’s ears. “Everything seems wrong in this sentence. I thought ‘dure’ meant, like… ‘endure,’ which sounds like suffering and seems to relate to prison. But ‘ful blisfully’ sounds like a pleasant thing. It reminded me of what you were saying. Meaning stops… I don’t know… meaning anything?”
Allison beamed, blinking away a rogue tear that had smuggled its way into her lashes. “That is agreatexample. There are so many contradictions in this line, right?”
More hands blurred the air, and soon the class was analyzing lines not only from the passage Allison had introduced, but other parts of the text as well. Wendy even offered one. Allison’s heart took up too much space in her chest, and it was a battle to keep the grin off her face.Thiswas what she’d dreamed about when she’d imagined herself as a professor: students alert, active, stumbling over each other to suggest examples. Her body buzzed warm, electric.
At the first lull in the conversation, Colin raised his hand.
Allison immediately stiffened, and a sharp response rushed to her tongue.
She bit it back. Her reaction wasn’t fair. Lately, there’d been an unspoken ceasefire between them. Though there’d been no changes to the advisee situation, he’d grown more supportive, enthusiastic about understanding and developing her ideas, as if, together, they could unearth the most profound reading of any text. Even this morning, when she’d commented on his need for a translation to read Chaucer, Colin had laughed it off, recognizing the remark as the reflex that it was, competition so natural to Allison that it wasn’t always intentional.
“Yes, Colin?” She did her best to smooth the edge from her voice.
He ran his fingers over the stanzas in his text. “That’s really how you read this section?” His eyes were soft when they rose from the page to her face. Nothing about his tone suggested a challenge. Rather, he seemed curious.
Where was this going? “It is.”
“You think Chaucer’s that much of a cynic about love?”
“No, I think he’s a realist. Love can pummel you.” Colin had taught her that. Allison wished she’d learned it from Chaucer first. It would have saved her a world of hurt. “That’s pretty much what ‘The Knight’s Tale’ is about.”
His brow furrowing, Colin pulled his glasses from his face towipe the lenses. Everything about his body language looked poised to disagree, but Wendy had returned to her spot on the dais.
“These are some great points,” she said, drawing the class’s attention to her. “Let’s all thank Allison for a fantastic discussion and some excellent practice in close reading.”
With a nod, Allison gathered her materials and returned to her seat. Colin’s gaze swept over her face, but she avoided it. She’d finally had a good day of teaching, and she wanted to bask in that, not get drawn into some philosophical debate about the definition of love or Chaucer’s feminism. Thankfully, Wendy seemed to have one more thing to cover before she ended class, which meant Allison was free for a few more minutes.
Their teacher gathered a packet of papers in her arms and started handing them out to the students. When she returned to her desk, she propped a copy of a black-and-white book on the podium. Allison’s eyes zeroed in on the title.
The Mabinogion.
“My next project is going to be to look closely at Welsh Arthurian myth,” Wendy explained. “I’m really interested in exploring how some of the more modern, more recognizable legends around Arthur have come to be by considering where they started. To that end, I’ve recently gotten the permissions necessary to view, in person, the manuscript of ‘The White Book of Rhydderch,’ a part of this”—she pointed to the book—“at the National Library of Wales, and my grant funding for the trip has been approved. I have spots available for a few research assistants, and I’m hoping that some will be undergraduate students.”
Her professor’s voice grew distant and fuzzy beneath the rush of Allison’s pulse in her ears. A research trip. ToWales.She’d see a medieval manuscript in the proverbial flesh. Words scribed almost a millennium ago, sitting there right before her eyes.
Allison needed to be one of those research assistants. But she wasn’t familiar withThe Mabinogion.If Wendy asked them to contribute, she’d have nothing to say, nothing to show she deserved a spoton that trip. A more horrifying thought stole into her mind. What if Colindid?
Without her phone, which was in her bag under her chair, Allison had no way to plan for this most WCS of WCSs.
Her eyes fell on Colin’s laptop, sitting beside her elbow. A shiny chrome-and-black solution to her problem. While he watched Wendy speak, his fingers white-knuckling a pen with the same intensity Allison felt, she dragged the machine closer.
“Can I borrow this?” she whispered, already typing.
He glanced at her blankly for a second, then his brows jut together, realization settling into his features. “Actually…” The rest of his sentence was lost to his concentration as he wove his hands under and through Allison’s to reach the keyboard.
It had small, chiclet keys, the touchpad hardly the size of a sticky note. As they wrestled for control, their knuckles and thumbs and elbows bumped and brushed. Allison ignored the tiny fires bursting to life all over her skin. She cared only about finding some factoid about this text that would ingratiate her to Wendy.
Colin angled his pointy frame in front of the screen, blocking her the same way he had that first day in class. For a moment, she considered grabbing her pen and committing a second act of fashion vandalism, but chose decisive action instead. Jamming her shoulder against his to push him aside, she crammed her face before the screen, and, for good measure, threw her long hair over her shoulder to obscure his vision. With the few seconds that bought her, she took control of the search bar.
Their cheeks skimmed together as Colin pressed forward to see the browser. His long leg stretched out under her knee, and every time he shifted, his pants tickled the sensitive skin there.
Allison intensified their war for the keyboard to keep her mind from cataloging all the ways his body was currently tangled with hers. As they both tried to type at once, their thumbs prodded the trackpad, and, when Colin clicked the next search result, an ad window popped up as the website began to load.
A deep moan of satisfaction exploded from his speakers at full volume. Allison and Colin froze, their faces twin flames of embarrassment. A commercial for a porn site filled the screen with writhing limbs and close-ups of plump, parted lips and the curves of cleavage and asses. Bad music mixed with guttural screams of “yes, yes, yes” and overexaggerated groans of pleasure engulfed them.
The entire class went quiet, and, as the ad played on a loop, each iteration seemed to grow louder and louder. Performative sex in surround sound.
