by TJ Klune
Her smile faded as she glanced back at me. “Are you all right? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I shook my head. “It’s—ah. Nothing. I just—I must have misheard you. I thought you said I’m meeting with—”
The door opened.
A man stood in the doorway, green eyes sparkling behind thick gray frames. His black beard was full—fuller than it’d been when I’d seen him last through the stacks at the library. He wore jeans and a tight white button-down shirt that pulled against his shoulders and chest in ways that should have been illegal.
His eyes widened. His jaw dropped.
Jeremy Olsen said, “Corey? What are you doing here?”
My hot former professor was now my hot current boss.
God fucking dammit.
Chapter 3: I Am So Fucking Screwed (The Non-Porn Edition)
SINCE I could barely breathe, I could barely speak. So I stood there, gaping like a fish out of water, wondering what I’d done in a past life to deserve such torment in this one. At the very least, I must have been a terrible bank robber whose reign of terror across the country ended in a hail of bullets. Either that or I’d been a cannibal.
Marina looked back and forth between us, brow furrowing. “Do you two know each other?”
Jeremy—no, Professor Olsen—recovered first. “You could say that.”
He smiled crookedly, the lines on his face deepening in a way that should not have been as attractive as it was. I mean, his dark hair was sticking up all over the place like someone had been tugging on it, and that line of thinking needed to stop immediately. And there were flecks of gray in both his hair and his beard. It was like I’d been punched in the gut.
“Corey was a student in one of my graduate courses at the U of A. A great one, at that.”
“Ohh,” Marina said, sounding excited. “This is going to make things so much easier, given that you two have a history.”
“History?” I squeaked. “There’s no history! This isn’t historic!”
They both stared at me.
I rebounded gracefully. “I mean, what. What’s going on? What’s the haps? Yo, dawg.”
Marina looked curious but shook her head. “Well, then, I’ll just leave you to it. But don’t keep him for too long, Jeremy. I plan on putting him to work right away.”
“You’re not coming in with me?” I asked her.
“Nope!” she said, oblivious to what I was sure was a look of panic on my face. “I’ve got things to do, and I want Jeremy to have some time with you before we get busy.”
That didn’t sound so good. In fact, that sounded terrible. “Maybe we could—”
“Come on in, Corey,” Professor Olsen said as he stepped back into the office.
Marina turned and began to walk back down the hall. I didn’t know her very well, but I couldn’t believe she was betraying me like this. Who the fuck did she think she was? I would have my revenge, and she wouldn’t see it coming.
I weighed my options. I could either go into the office with Professor Olsen or flee this place and move to North Dakota and change my name.
And since the very idea of living in North Dakota sounded terrible, I swallowed thickly and walked past Professor Olsen into his office.
He closed the door behind me. I was trapped.
“This is a wonderful surprise,” he said. And he sounded like he meant it. Curse him. “Marina was telling me last week how excited she was for you to be here. I don’t know why I didn’t put two and two together.” He smiled again, and my pants almost fell off. “But this is going to make this summer even better. I’m a little out of my depth here, and it’ll be good to have someone I know and trust underneath me.”
I choked on my tongue.
His brow furrowed. “Are you all right?”
No. I was pretty sure I was dying. “Yes,” I managed to say. “I’m fine.”
“Here, let me get you some water.” He stepped around me into the office, heading for a small refrigerator against the far wall. The office looked similar to when I’d been in it last for my final interview. The personal belongings for the prior director were gone, of course, but the desk was the same, and the—
Professor Olsen bent over to the fridge, his jeans pulling tight against his ass.
I made a sound that I’m not proud of, almost like a barking dog. A poodle, perhaps.
He glanced back at me over his shoulder.
I looked up at the ceiling.
“Here we are,” he said, standing back upright. He had a plastic water bottle in his hands. He started to unscrew the cap, frowned when it wouldn’t twist, and tried harder.
Since apparently my lot in life was to suffer, Professor Olsen managed to unscrew the cap, only to have some of the water slop out against his shirt. It soaked through immediately, above his right nipple, and it was then I decided that the religious right was correct and god did hate homosexuals, because surely he was torturing me at this very moment.
“Shit,” Professor Olsen muttered. “That didn’t go like I thought it would.” He laughed as he shook his head. “Guess I don’t know my own strength sometimes.”
“I do,” I breathed.
He cocked his head. “What was that?”
“Uh. Nothing. Nothing at all.” I told myself to get it together. Who the fuck was this bumbling fool whose body I seemed to inhabit? I wasn’t like this. I was cool. I was calm. I was collected. I didn’t take shit from nobody, and I kicked ass and took names. It was time to man up. “You can have my shirt if you want.”
Fuck me upside the head.
He looked confused. “But then what would you wear?”
“Oh, right,” I said hastily. “Yeah. There’s… there’s that.”
“It’s just water. It’ll dry. Besides, I don’t think your shirt would fit me. I’m a bit bigger than you, in case you couldn’t tell.”
Oh gee, I hadn’t noticed. Thank you for pointing that out to me, Professor Olsen. Now I won’t be able to stop thinking about it. Would the buttons pop off? Would the shoulders tear, the seams splitting over—
I managed to take the bottle from him without creepily caressing his fingers or dropping it. I was proud of myself. “Thank you.”
He went around the other side of the desk and sat in the chair behind it. He motioned for me to sit opposite him. I made it to the other chair without embarrassing myself further, something that had been entirely possible seeing as how my legs felt like jelly.
I took a deep breath, trying to calm myself.
It was going to be okay.
Then my brain said, Hey.
No, I snapped back.
Do you remember that porn you watched where the smaller dude got fucked over a desk just like this one by a bigger dude? You jerked off to that four times in six hours! Two of those times were dry! You got CHAFED.
I started scream-singing in my head to drown it out.
“Are you… humming?” Professor Olsen asked me.
I smiled at him, sure it was borderline crazed. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Yeah, my brain said above a terrifying rendition of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” I didn’t know why I picked that song, but it wasn’t working. Right over the desk. It was all like bam, bam, bam, oh yes, harder, harder, give it to me! Wreck my butt!
He let it go. “Well, I wasn’t kidding when I said this is a wonderful surprise.” He leaned forward, resting his strong forearms on the desk. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, and he had this vein on his right arm that was obscene. It was so… veiny. His cardiovascular health was on point. “It’s good to see a friendly face around here. Marina’s great, and the kids I’ve met so far are too, but… I’m just happy you’re here.”
“Me too,” I said, and for reasons I couldn’t explain, it sounded an octave lower. I coughed. “I mean, I didn’t—what are you doing here?”
He ducked his head, almost like he was shy. “I don’t rightly know,” he admitted. “Steph
en, the prior director, is a friend of mine. But his firm recently took on a big case and needed all hands on deck to defend a client in a trial this fall. He didn’t have the time for that and working here, so he had to let it go. I’d told him a while back that I wanted to do something different this summer, get out of the classroom for a bit, and he called me and asked if I could take his place until they found someone more permanent.” He smiled and shook his head. “I’d had a couple of glasses of wine when he called and didn’t think things through very well.” His smile softened. “Okay, maybe more than a couple.”
He agreed to do something charitable while drunk. He was a perfect human man. I hated everything about him. And since I was distracted by my hatred, I said, “You’re friends with the Super Gays?”
He blinked. “The what now?”
“The Super Gays. It’s what my friend Sandy calls them. The rich white—you know what? Never mind. Forget I even said that. I don’t know what I’m talking about. Obviously.”
Oh yeah, my brain moaned. This desk is so sturdy! Fuck me! Fuck—whaaaaat a friend we have in Jeeeeeesus!
He looked amused. “I doubt that. You’ve always been extraordinarily articulate.”
I told myself not to swoon over what was essentially me being told I talked too much. “Thank you?”
“How have you been? Haven’t seen you really since your friends’ wedding. Sorry about crashing that again, by the way.”
“It was fine,” I said. “The more the merrier.” That didn’t make sense. Like, at all. I tried again. “I’ve been… busy. You know how it is. The closer to graduation, the less time I have for anything else.”
He chuckled. “I remember those days. I don’t envy you in the slightest. Next year is your last, right?”
I almost convinced myself that he was stalking me, and it was the most romantic thing that’d ever happened to me. And since that was fucked-up, I chose to ignore it. “Yeah. Last year.”
“That’s exciting. Know what you’re going to do yet?”
I shook my head. “I’m trying not to think about it. It’s… heavy.”
He sat back in his chair again. The vein disappeared, which I was grateful for. “It is. But you’ve got a good head on your shoulders, Corey. I know that you’re going to do great things, no matter what it is you decide to do.” He nodded toward the door. “Just don’t let Marina steamroll you into staying here if that’s something you don’t want to do. She’s great, but she’s also….”
“Exuberant?”
“That’s it,” he said. “Exuberant. She’s already tried to convince me to leave the university and stay here full-time. Though now, that doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.”
My face grew hot. Thank Christ for my darker skin. “Uh… yeah.”
“Dad seems to be happy.”
That righted things a bit. “Is that so?”
He shrugged. “Think so.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “You’re not trying to get information from me about your dad’s love life, are you?”
He groaned, putting his face in his hands. “You don’t have to say it like that. I don’t want to think about my dad having any kind of love life.”
“Did he tell you how they met?” I asked gleefully. “There were prostates involved—”
He dropped his hands to glare at me. “I know. And I don’t like how happy that makes you sound. You’re evil. I don’t know why I couldn’t see that before.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Professor Olsen. I’m positively innocent.”
He snorted. “I have a hard time believing that. And it’s Jeremy, Corey.”
And once again, everything was topsy-turvy. “What?”
He looked smug. “It’s Jeremy. None of that Professor Olsen crap. We’re not in class. In fact, I’m not even your professor anymore. So call me Jeremy from here on out, okay?”
“Jeremy,” I repeated, somehow making it come out without sighing. “And if you want to know anything about your father’s sex life—”
I relished the look of horror on his face far too much.
“—you should probably ask him. I don’t know anything about it. Your dad makes Charlie happy, and I think Robert feels the same.”
“He does,” Jeremy muttered. “It’s sickening. I heard him singing the other day in the shower. He’s a terrible singer.”
That caught me off guard. “You two live together?”
“We do. I feel better knowing I can keep an eye on him, though he’ll tell you it’s only so he can keep an eye on me. We’re pretty much all each other’s got, so it works for us. We manage to keep out of each other’s way for the most part, and now that he’s… seeing Charlie, I know he’s in good hands.” He pulled a face. “I shouldn’t have said it like that.”
“Very good hands. Charlie is—”
He pointed at me. “Not another word.”
I mimed zipping my lips together.
“That’s better. So you’ll call me Jeremy, and I’ll keep on calling you….” He looked flustered for a moment. Then, “I know you’re bigender and you… you know.”
“Sometimes identify as female?”
He winced. “I’m probably not going about this the best way. I apologize if anything sounds… off. Correct me if I ever get anything wrong, okay? I want to do right by you and everyone else here. So if it’s Corey with a C, that’s fine. And Kori with a K, that’s fine too. You don’t need to feel like you can’t be whoever you need to be. It doesn’t matter to me either way. Or anyone here. All I ask is that you help us make Phoenix House an even better place for our community.”
He was fumbling, but it was sweetly endearing. I’d heard far crueler ways of going about it. Oh sure, we lived in 2016, and queers could get married like everyone else (and, in some states, fired just for existing!), but there were still many, many douchebags in the world. “Thanks. That’s good to know.”
He seemed relieved, not like he was happy that conversation was out of the way but more that I’d understood. Or at least I hoped that was the case. I didn’t think now was the right time to discuss the fact that I had a lot of his facial expressions memorized from the two semesters I had with him, sitting in the third row from the front, forcing myself to take notes instead of watching every movement he made. It seemed better that way for the both of us.
“Great. Now, I’m going to need to get a little more authoritative for a moment, if that’s all right.”
Oh God, yes, my brain moaned. Tell us what to do. Make us your bitch.
Singing church hymns in my head while my brain was tuned to the porn channel seemed like a one-way ticket to hell. There was nothing I could do about that now. “That sounds… ominous.”
He shook his head. “Nah. I just want to get a few things out of the way. I wasn’t expecting you to be… well, you. It’s a good thing,” he added quickly. “But I need to regroup for a moment here. Do some boss things.” He winced. “You’re okay with me being your boss? Well, your boss’s boss?”
“I have no problem with that whatsoever,” I told him, already sure this summer was going to see more jizz going into a towel than ever before. I’d have to go to Bed Bath & Beyond to buy more. I wondered if Nana had a coupon.
He leaned forward again, the vein making another appearance as he picked up a pen from the desk. He flipped open a folder and glanced down at it before looking back up at me. “Why are you here?”
I blinked. “Um. Because Marina told me you wanted to talk to me?
Jeremy snorted. “That’s good to know. But I meant why did you choose Phoenix House? You’re getting your master’s in social work, right?”
I nodded. “That’s the plan.”
“That’s a lot of work. And if you do go into social services, that’s a tough job. Many people wash out. It can take a lot out of a person. Most jobs, you leave for the day and go home and don’t have to worry about it until you go back the next day. With social work, I imagine that it follows
you no matter where you go.”
I frowned. “I can handle it.”
His eyes widened. “Oh, I don’t—that’s not what I meant. I wasn’t suggesting you couldn’t. I’m just curious as to… I don’t know. The why of it, I guess.” He smiled ruefully. “And you can tell me to fuck off, honestly. If I’m pushing you into something you don’t want to talk about, let me know.”
Almost. And it sucked, because there were days—hell, even stretches of weeks and months—that I didn’t think about it. But every now and then it would hit me from out of nowhere. I took a deep breath. “No, it’s okay. I mean, I’m going to have to get used to talking about it, I think. Marina knows some of it because we talked about it during the interviews. And if I go to work for Pima County or wherever after I graduate, they’re going to ask the same thing. It’s also going to be part of my practicum. My academic advisor said it’ll personalize my thesis. Give it more credibility.”
His brow furrowed. “How so?”
I shrugged awkwardly. “I—uh. I was in the system.”
He sighed. “Shit. I didn’t know that. I’m sorry.”
“For what? It wasn’t your fault.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s not—I mean, that had to have been tough.”
I rubbed the back of my neck. “I survived.”
“You did,” he agreed. “And I’m pretty sure we’re all better off for it.”
Damn him. Smooth motherfucker. “I was in foster care for a long time. I didn’t know my parents. They were… I don’t know. I was told a little bit of who they were and what… some of the stuff they did, but it’s not like I think about them a lot.”
“You don’t?”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “This isn’t a therapy session.”
“Nope. Not at all.”
I relaxed slightly. “Good. Just so we’re clear. But I know what it’s like growing up in foster care. My last fosters weren’t bad people, but I don’t think they knew how to handle me.”
“And you had caseworkers?”
I laughed, though there wasn’t much humor in it. “Six.”
He whistled lowly.
I nodded. “Part of it was turnover, part of it was a couple of them didn’t know exactly what to make of me and shuffled me off to someone else. It’s not every day you meet a gender-confused nine-year-old.”