by Rachel Ember
“Well, just so that you don’t forget.” She carefully put the letter back in the place she’d taken it from. “If you need a test audience to be sure your presentation is accessible to the poetry-obtuse, let me know. No one is more sincerely clueless than me.” She winked at him. “I’d better be off. I have a class. I was only here to give moral support in the form of snark and tea, but considering that letter, your ego didn’t need me after all.”
Emile checked his calendar and compared the conference dates to his teaching schedule. He should be able to make the whole trip while only missing one lecture. Because the class was his upper-level survey, he called the tenured professor who often taught the same class. He was fortunate to catch her at her desk, and she agreed to cover it for him.
He hadn’t expected it would be difficult to get coverage, even if he had to ask more than one of his colleagues, but he was pleased to have it taken care of so easily. Emile spent a half-hour writing the email accepting the invitation to speak at the conference, held up a little by the need to title the presentation. Then, he saved the acceptance email into his drafts, and wrote a stilted inquiry to Ben. To forestall any objections Ben might have, he outlined that he could travel fairly cheaply, miss just one class, and had already confirmed someone could sub for him while he was gone.
The message was straightforward, and still Emile labored over every word. Contacting Ben, even in writing, for the first time since their final argument, made Emile’s stomach roil. But he did it anyway, and then spent his lunch hour walking briskly around the old quad so that he couldn’t hover over his email inbox. He tried to recapture the energy of the early morning, when he’d felt such a sense of possibility, but couldn’t quite do it.
At one, Emile headed to the building where Lit 100 was scheduled. He’d had a class on the same floor the previous spring, so he walked with the detachment of habit, his head down. He was still thinking of things other than his surroundings when he reached the door for the correct room, and looked up to find that someone else was a half-step ahead of him and already reaching for the door handle.
They turned their heads toward each other at the same time, and a flashback of feeling crashed over Emile.
Jay, the too-young, too-handsome man from Laramie’s, was here. Here, in Emile’s life. It was like a dream and reality had merged. His stomach lurched at the sensation.
Their gazes locked. Jay’s wide eyes were the exact shade of cerulean Emile remembered. In the harsh light of the hallway, his skin still managed to look flawless. He had freckles on his nose that hadn’t been visible in the darkness of Laramie’s downstairs.
The moment was so vivid, striking, and confusing, Emile itched to close himself into a room or find a quiet corner somewhere and scratch out a few lines of verse. Making sense of strong, overwhelming, competing emotions the one way he knew how.
It had been so long since Emile had met someone and felt—sensed, knew—that there could be something powerful between them. He’d thought his memory had been exaggerating the instant chemistry he’d felt with Jay, but now, here they were, and the feeling was exactly how he’d recalled it.
Then the realization struck him fully. A student. A Walland student. The thought was like a bucket of cold water upturned over Emile’s excited subconscious. All poetic thoughts vanished.
“You,” Jay breathed out.
“Me,” Emile agreed.
Jay seemed to sway, and took a quick step backward for balance. “I don’t—you’re here?” Jay looked painfully young in his uncertainty. Not at all the bold creature who had grazed Emile’s neck with his teeth and ordered Emile to wait for him in a bathroom stall.
“I’m a—professor. Here.”
As Emile’s thoughts caught up with him, he was at a loss for what to say. He wanted to apologize about leaving Laramie’s without a word. He was also incapable of making direct reference to what they’d almost done—what he’d been so eager to do.
“Oh. And I go here as a student,” Jay said, like he wasn’t stating the obvious. “I have a class…” Jay nodded at the door Emile had been heading toward. “In there. I went for the door and didn’t see you.”
“It’s quite all right,” Emile said faintly. He was surprised he’d said anything intelligible, because his mind was suddenly blank. “Literature 100? I’m—that’s my class. I’m Professor Mendes.”
For a few long seconds, Jay didn’t speak; he only stared, a red flush crawling up his neck. Eventually, he managed, weakly, “Oh.” He winced. “Oh.”
Emile empathized. “I didn’t see a ‘Jay’ on the class list,” he managed weakly.
Jay shrugged, shifting the strap of his bag on his shoulder. “Well, it’s—everyone calls me Jay. But my name is actually Jason.”
Jason Miller. Emile remembered.
A student. His student. As though their respective ages hadn’t made Emile’s behavior unforgivable enough.
Maybe he deserved this, he thought grimly. The coincidence felt too blatant to be anything but karmic. Emile opened the door for Jay with a practiced, polite smile.
“Thanks, um, Professor.” Jay ducked his head as he walked past, keeping all of the careful distance between their bodies that the width of the doorway allowed. Emile still felt his warmth. And for some reason, his title sounded erotic on the kid’s tongue.
Shit. He’d been right that Lit 100 would be torture, but he hadn’t imagined his despair would be this instant sickness of the body and heart.
He remembered how Jay’s breath had felt in his hair. How Jay had held himself with unconscious grace, like a dancer. The gold hair on his strong forearms. The way he’d shuddered at the recitation of a poem.
It was the longest teaching hour of his life, including his practicum. Emile tingled with awareness of himself: his every word, his every movement, his every breath. He let the class out early and, when the room was empty, he tugged at his own hair and laughed at the horrible absurdity of it. And because he was a poet and an idiot, he laughed, too, at the beautiful absurdity of it.
But he quickly sobered. He would never act on what he felt—of course not. But even to feel it for one of his students was wrong, and complicated in a way that could harm more than just Emile himself.
He should tell a supervisor, he realized. He should request a rearrangement of the Lit 100 sections so that Jay wasn’t under his supervision.
Yet, he knew as soon as these correct and reasonable courses of action came to mind that he wouldn’t do any of them.
He closed his eyes and groaned aloud in the silence of the empty room.
Three
Jay
August
Jay’s mother waved aggressively at her camera lens from her end of the video call. “Hi, honey!”
Jay was sitting in his dorm room with his laptop on his knees. He sat on the bed by default; the tiny desk and chair that were the only other seating option were buried under a pile of books and laundry.
On the screen, his mother’s and father’s faces were crowded together, too close to the camera.
“Your chin looks really nice, Mom. Have you been moisturizing?”
Her face lowered an inch so that, in addition to her chin, Jay could see her frown. Over her shoulder, the right side of his dad’s face pulled into a snicker.
“Do you think you’re going to check out any clubs?” Again, he couldn’t tell if she was being serious. “I just think you need to make friends outside of soccer,” she went on, cajoling. “You were so set on expanding your social horizons.”
“There’s a poetry club!” his father added helpfully.
“I don’t write poetry.”
“Maybe they just talk about it. You could go to one of their meet-ups and ask.” His father winked at him, and Jay glared back.
“You’re just trying to get on Mom’s good side. You’d never go to something like that. Admit it.”
Jay’s father was one of the shyest people Jay had ever met—with strangers. With f
amily, he was just as irrepressible as Jay’s mom. Now, his dad grinned so that the dimple Jay had inherited appeared, but in his right cheek instead of his left.
“Touché. And I’m not trying to get on Mom’s good side; I’m trying to stay there.”
Jay’s mother twisted in her chair to give his dad’s cheek a smacking kiss. “Don’t worry, honey. I’d never let you be anywhere else,” she murmured.
Jay put his hand against the tiny backlit camera lens on his screen and made a vomiting sound. “Go get a room.”
“We have one!” his mother snapped back with a wink. “Your old room.”
Jay blinked, lowering his hand and peering at them, confused. “What are you doing with it? Is it going to be a sex room?”
“Yes,” his mother deadpanned. “That’s exactly it. I thought an office, or maybe a guest room. But then your dad, genius that he is, pointed out that it would make the perfect sex room. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it.”
“It’s got all that southern exposure,” his dad said, nodding sagely. “Very good for the chakras.”
“You’re both so weird and so gross. I’m going to leave you to it.”
They both burst out laughing. “Jay, no, noooo,” his mother pleaded. “It’s just going to be an office.”
“A sex office,” his father clarified.
“Just the nicest little sex office,” his mother agreed. “Don’t be mad at us.”
Jay started to close the screen. “Bye!”
“No, wait,” his mom pleaded, still laughing. “I’m sorry. We’ll be good. How’s it going with your roommate? Eric, right?” She lowered her voice. “Is he kind of… troubled?”
Jay’s parents had met Eric on moving day, if you could call it ‘meeting.’ It was hard to really meet Eric, from what Jay could tell, but they’d introduced themselves and Eric had nodded at them without speaking or making eye contact.
“Nah, he’s fine,” Jay said, though he squirmed a little.
“I think you should just be very aware of warning signs,” his mother continued, grimacing.
His dad laughed. “Is this about the khakis?” Jay’s mom reached around to mock-slug him in the arm and he held his hands up, still grinning.
“In her defense, the khakis are kind of terrifying,” Jay weighed in. Eric wore khakis every day—with carefully-pressed polo shirts that he tucked in, a leather belt, and black Doc Martens.
The video froze, his parents’ faces two fleshy blurs, but the sound was still coming through fine.
“Jay, honey. I saw on the website they have a club fair.”
“If I join a club, do I have to get a job?”
The video unfroze again so that Jay could watch his parents exchange a quick look and reach an unspoken agreement in under a second. An eerie skill of the long-married. “Yes,” his mother announced firmly. “The job is a requirement and the club is a suggestion.”
“Okay, then no, definitely no clubs.”
“Maybe he’ll make some nerdy friends in his lit class,” Jay’s dad mused. “We know poetry brings out something special in him.” He winked at Jay to show he wasn’t being completely serious.
Jay felt like he’d swallowed a rock. Hastily, he wrapped up the call and pushed his laptop onto the foot of his bed, reaching for his running shoes. His practice wasn’t for another hour, but if he left now, he could run a few extra miles beforehand.
Anything to stop himself from studying his strong reaction to his father mentioning poetry and what it ‘brought out’ in him.
On the second day of Literature 100, Jay walked into the building with a plan. He would once again sit silently through the class without saying a word. He would not stare at Emile like a stalker the whole time. Then, he would wait around after class and deliver a short, sincere apology.
He should have done it on the first day, but he’d been too panicked. Now that he’d had two days to think about it—okay, to obsess—he knew there was no avoiding it. He had to apologize, even if it would undoubtedly be awkward as hell.
Emile wasn’t in the hallway, or in the room. A few other students were five minutes early like Jay. They were taking the same seats they’d been in on the first day, some of them smiling shyly at each other. No one knew one another well enough yet to relax. Jay accidentally caught a red-haired girl’s eye, and she blushed and looked away. He rounded the back of the room, giving everyone a wide berth.
The desk he returned to was positioned on the far side of the room, in the second row to the back and uncomfortably close to the wall. He’d chosen it on the first day after bumping into Emile in the hallway. Basically, he’d fled from the realization that the person he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about for weeks was his English professor. And the corner of the room was as far away from the front podium as he could get.
He’d just sat down when Bria came in.
Tall, lean in a honed way, and deliberately dressed all in black, Bria cut her usual intimidating figure. She stalked over to sit in the desk behind Jay and kicked the back of his chair with her black ballet slipper.
“Good morning.”
“It’s one p.m.,” Jay said automatically. “What are you doing? If you’re in this class, you missed the first day.”
“I enrolled yesterday, which makes today my first day.”
Jay stared at her. “Why?”
“I need the credit, and you’re here.” She winked at him. As usual, she wore black eyeliner and no other make-up. Jay feared Bria too much to ever call her ‘pretty’ even in his head, but she always looked striking whether she put the effort in or not. “My own tutor. Just like old times.”
A slight guy with longish brown hair set his book on the desk beside Bria’s and started to sit. He happened to glance at Bria, and froze at her cool stare. He straightened up, his ass never touching the seat, and moved on to a desk at a safer distance, two aisles over.
Jay shook his head, faintly exasperated but mostly amused. Bria had always had a knack for repelling people. She’d already perfected it before they’d met. Jay would have been just as terrified of her as everyone else was if circumstances had been different. But her family lived in the house a street over from Jay’s, and shared their backyard fence. For the past six years, she’d been like Jay’s part-time big sister.
A semi-scary big sister.
Bria wasn’t nice to Jay, exactly. But he’d become immune to her dagger-stares and biting sarcasm. He knew how to look deeper for the signs that she cared. When she’d left for Walland three years ago, Jay had worried he’d never hear from her again. But instead she’d sent him almost-daily texts. When he’d gotten his scholarship to Walland and let her know, he liked to think she may have smiled.
Before Jay could ask her any more questions, Emile came in.
Jay had tried and failed to forget their encounter at Laramie’s over the weeks between then and now. He’d come to wonder if the real man could possibly be as interesting as the person haunting Jay’s memories.
He was. But he was different, too, when he was seen at a distance, rather than tangled up with Jay like he had been at Laramie’s. He was intriguingly self-possessed, with an instant, warm command of the room as he closed the door and stood at the front of the room.
“Good afternoon, everyone. It’s nice to see you again.” He scanned the class, but Jay swore his gaze rerouted to skirt around Jay. “I can see that you’re all delighted to be here, fully prepared to discuss the reading assignment, and that you got plenty of rest last night.” Several of the students laughed, and Emile returned an easy smile as he leaned back against the desk and crossed his ankles. He seemed so relaxed, and Jay felt so invisible to him in the corner of the room, that he almost wondered whether Emile remembered that night at Laramie’s at all. “I happen to know you’re not all English majors, so for many of you, this is just a box to be checked on a required courses list.” There were a few nods, and Emile—Professor Mendes—nodded back. “I don’t expect to unearth some
long-buried passion for the written word in all of you, but I will try to make this class as interesting as I can,” he said earnestly. “I consider that part of my job.” He clapped his hands together. “Now, let’s get into it.”
Emile was likely many students’ most adored professor, and not just because he was lanky and inky-haired and dark-eyed. He was sincere and funny as he taught. The only sign that he might have a hole in his armor was that, both on the first day and today, Emile never once looked at Jay directly. His eyes were always carefully elsewhere.
The miserable tension Jay felt was harder to bear today. Maybe because, unlike in the last class, Jay didn’t have shock to insulate all of his spinning thoughts.
The hour crawled by. At the end, Bria stood up at her desk and waited, pointedly expecting Jay to walk out with her.
“I, um,” Jay began, glancing quickly at Emile and back. “I have to ask the professor about something.”
She shrugged and leaned her hip against her desk. “I’ll wait.”
Jay stared at her, at a total loss for words. It turned out that he didn’t have to say anything. Apparently, she could read the panic on his face—because a tiny, dangerous smile appeared on the corner of her mouth for the briefest of moments.
Then she straightened up swiftly, picking up her messenger bag in a smooth movement. She’d always had the coordination of a cat.
“On second thought, I have somewhere to be.” She gave Jay a wink that made him want to throttle her and glided out of the room.
That left Jay and Emile together in the classroom. Alone. Jay cautiously moved toward the front of the room, where Emile was sliding his copy of the book the class was reading into a leather messenger bag.
He looked up and their gazes locked. Jay had thought it would be hard to look Emile in the eye, but now that it had happened, he couldn’t look away.
“I…” Jay stopped, his throat feeling like it had closed over. Emile just stood there and waited for Jay to continue—his beautiful eyes wide and dark, his lips parted. ‘Surprised and unsure’ was a good look on him, which was very inconvenient. How good he looked should have been the furthest thought from Jay’s mind.