by Noir, Roxie
“If he got hauled down there now, he’d have Charlie to reckon with,” my mom says.
“I don’t know which is worse.”
“What about your brothers?” she asks, back to the topic at hand.
“I never told them,” I remind her. “You know that. They don’t know there’s anything to forgive.”
She taps her fingertips together, still leaning over the railing, then cocks her head at me.
“And you’re really not going to tell me what this bad thing you did was?”
I consider it. For half a second, I consider it, but there’s no way.
“I’m really not,” I confirm. “You’d hate it, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to do it again.”
“That’s not like you.”
“I know.”
“Still,” she says slowly, thinking, watching the dark back yard and the forest beyond. “It’s better to do a bad thing with intention than slide into it half-assed. Own your actions and then, when the shit hits the fan, own up to them.”
I almost ask her if that’s what she wishes Dad had done, but it’s a moot point because he never got the chance. Maybe if he’d owned his actions he’d still be here, but that’s a long road with too many what if’s.
“Language,” I tease her instead, and she just sighs.
“It’s the one downside of having grandchildren,” she says, straightening, both her hands going to her lower back. “Are you spending the night or heading back?”
“Heading back,” I say, holding up my glass. “It’s iced tea.”
“I know,” she says, then nods her head for the back door. “Come on, I made pie.”
* * *
When I get home that night, I go straight for the pile of graded quizzes in a neat stack on my kitchen table. I flip through them.
I find Thalia’s and pull it from the stack.
I spent dessert holding Thomas with one hand and eating pie with the other, since I offered to hold him while Charlie ate, and he promptly fell asleep on me.
Then I spent the entire drive back thinking about what my mom said, about owning your actions. About choosing the wrong course of action with open eyes.
And I think about what I said to her, something that I hadn’t even thought about yet: I’m pretty sure I’m going to do it again.
Open eyes.
I grab a red pen and, before I can change my mind, write on Thalia’s quiz in neat block letters.
Then I put it back into the stack and go to bed.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Thalia
Sunday morning, I wake up at seven a.m. and I’m at the library by eight, leaving my apartment before any of my roommates get up and make eye contact with me.
It’s the coward’s way out, but I’m fine with it. I’ll be a coward all day long if it means I get to skip confronting what happened last night, or, more accurately, confronting the fact that my roommates know what happened last night.
If I hide out in the library, I’m free to pretend they don’t know. I can pretend that they’re never going to confront me, never going to ask me what the fuck I think I’m doing and whether I know it’s wrong and whether I shouldn’t report Caleb for being a dirty old pervert and whether he’s a terrible, terrible person for wanting me.
I don’t think he is. Maybe I’m naïve. Maybe I’m stupid for thinking that I’m special. Maybe he’s got a revolving door of young, easily duped students who he seduces for a semester and then discards.
But I doubt it.
I’m at the library all day. Every time my phone buzzes, I scramble to look at it, thinking that it’s either my friends or Caleb, but none of them texts me at all. The only person who does is Bastien, asking me if I have any idea where my high school copy of Moby Dick might have wound up.
I do not.
Meanwhile, I work on graduate school applications with the fire of a thousand suns. I ruthlessly edit my personal statement. I format my resume. I email psych departments up and down the east coast to double-check that VSU has, in fact, sent them my official transcript.
To hear my applications tell it, I was born with a passion for neuroscience. I was reading psych journals while I was still in diapers and asking my kindergarten teacher about the latest in experimental PTSD therapy.
It’s not all that far from the truth. I’m a Navy brat, and while I think my own father is one of the lucky ones who escaped that kind of psychological damage, I was surrounded by it.
And then, of course, there was Javier. I write and delete and re-write and re-delete a paragraph about him over and over again, because I don’t know what I should say and I don’t know whether I should say it in a graduate school application.
I grapple with that. I look at my planner and wonder when I’m supposed to do everything that I’m supposed to be doing. I stare at the wall in the Absolute Quiet room and my mind floats back to last night, and before I know it I’m having dirty fantasies in the library.
When I finally go home that night, Margaret and Harper are both there, and they each give me a look but thankfully, they don’t say anything.
* * *
PLEASE SEE ME AFTER CLASS.
I don’t like those words. I’ve never once read them and thought, yay! I get to talk to a teacher after class! I’m sure they have some positive news for me!
Admittedly, I don’t see them a lot. Teachers rarely ask to see straight-A students after class.
I glance over at Caleb, his back to me as he hands back the last few quizzes, and I think for at least the thousandth time about his mouth on mine in the dark, the way he groaned when I touched him.
I’m yours to plunder.
I uncross and re-cross my legs under my desk, desperately trying to quell the heat there and focus on the matter at hand.
It makes for a very, very long fifty minutes, but finally, it’s over. I took four pages of notes but to be honest, I have no idea what today’s lecture was about. For all I know he told us about his favorite Disney Princesses for an hour, though I seem to have written down lots of numbers, so it was probably math.
The other students leave. I hang back, putting my stuff into my bag as slowly as I can, trying to ensure that I’m casually the last one in line to speak with Professor Loveless as he goes over a particularly thorny problem from last week’s quiz. I half-listen, because it was the problem I lost points on, but I’m too distracted.
Then, finally, they leave and it’s my turn. I walk up to the lectern, heart kicking in my chest because I don’t know what he’s going to say and I don’t know what I’m going to say, but I’m pretty sure it’s not going to be about calculus.
Please don’t say we can’t see each other again, I think. We tried that and it didn’t work.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi,” he says, and he smiles.
Then he takes his glasses off, looks at them, folds them in one hand.
“Can you see without those?” I blurt out.
“Pretty well,” he answers, shrugging. “My eyesight actually isn’t too bad, I just think they make me look smart.”
“Right, your Dr. Loveless costume,” I say, and he laughs.
“Not a costume,” he says, putting them down on the lectern.
Then he looks at me, and I feel like his emerald eyes can see all the way to the bottom of my soul.
“I fucked up,” he says, his voice low and soft. “What happened Saturday night never should have, and I broke basically every ethical guideline pertaining to student-teacher relationships.”
I feel like a balloon, slowly deflating.
“It was wrong,” he goes on. “No two ways about it, Thalia, what we did was wrong as hell and if I had a lick of sense I’d never so much look in your direction again and pray you didn’t feel like going to the ethics committee.”
I’m not deflating any more.
“Is that why you asked to talk to me?” I ask, my voice matching his, soft and low. “To tell me how badly we fucked up and swe
ar you’ll never look at me again?”
“It’s not,” he says. “It’s to ask what you’re doing Friday and whether you’d like to come over for dinner.”
He leans forward, his elbows on the lectern, his folded glasses in one hand.
“Just the two of us,” he says. “With locked doors and a couch in the living room and a bedroom upstairs and tiramisu for dessert.”
“Yes,” I say, then swallow hard and take a deep breath. “Yes. I’d like that.”
“Good,” he says, and then studies my face, a smile tugging at his lips. “I’d kiss you now if I thought I could get away with it.”
As if on cue, a student for the next class walks into the classroom and sits at a desk.
“I’ll pretend,” I say, and then we walk out of the classroom and somehow, we manage to make normal conversation and then we part ways.
Friday can’t come fast enough.
Chapter Thirty
Caleb
I love research. I have a Ph.D. and work in academia; of course I love research. I love discovering information. I love digging deep into a topic I know nothing about. I love the way learning is its own reward. I love feeling prepared for every situation.
That said, I don’t recommend Googling first-time intercourse with a well-endowed man without Safe Search turned on. Most of what comes up isn’t educational in the least.
The last time I had sex with a virgin, I was sixteen. She was also sixteen. We were in her childhood bedroom while her parents were away for the weekend and inexplicably trusted her to stay home alone, and we did not know what we were doing. It’s probably a minor miracle that we managed to fit Tab A into Slot B at all, and an even bigger miracle that we enjoyed it.
In terms of logistics, I don’t know whether it matters that Thalia’s a virgin, but it seems like I should prepare for a range of possibilities. I go a little insane and buy seven different kinds of personal lubricant, then pay for fast shipping. I take notes from one of the few helpful articles I find — go slow, make sure she’s turned on, let her be on top so she can control speed and depth — and put them in my bedside drawer, just in case I need a handy, bullet-pointed reference sheet.
But beyond logistics, I don’t care that she’s a virgin. I see her face practically every time I close my eyes. Every time my mind wanders, it wanders to the sound she made when I slid two fingers into her, the way she arched her back. I want her beyond all reason and sanity.
Whether I’m her first lover or her fiftieth doesn’t really matter to me.
* * *
There has never been a longer week in the history of time. Pointless meetings have never dragged on more. My office hours have never gone slower, and since it’s shortly after midterms, every student who still hasn’t grasped basic integration is there, panicking right into my face.
Then, at last, it’s Thursday, and I walk home from campus while the sun is still up, for once, and then I drive to the fancy grocery store across town. That night I’m up past midnight layering tiramisu and texting an annoyed Eli for tips.
He doesn’t ask why I’m making tiramisu, and I don’t volunteer that information. It probably means that Seth has accidentally spilled his suspicions, and while that’s annoying, I can’t blame him. Keeping secrets from brothers who know you have them is basically impossible.
Friday comes. She’s in class just like always, sitting in the seat in the last row that’s become ‘her’ seat, listening attentively and taking notes, tapping her pen between her fingers the same way she always does. Leaning forward on her elbows, focusing on the blackboard, like she always does.
I, on the other hand, call an asymptote an arachnid and write the quadratic equation wrong on the board. I don’t even notice that I write it wrong. A student has to point it out. It’s not my finest classroom moment, but I survive it, even if I can barely think about calculus.
She doesn’t say anything when she leaves. I consider asking to talk to her after class, just because I want to see her up close and hear her voice, but I don’t. I don’t want to raise suspicions.
When she leaves, she catches my eye, and she nods. Almost imperceptibly, but she does and my heart growls and sputters like a twenty-year-old car, and then she’s gone and I realize that a sophomore is asking me a detailed question about the homework and I missed the first half of it.
* * *
When I get the email, I’m standing in my kitchen, a notebook in my hand, a recipe pulled up on my phone, trying to take stock of my situation. It’s six o’clock, so Thalia is due in two hours, and I admit I’m feeling a little lost.
I’m also feeling like an idiot for taking Eli’s advice about what to make, because the more I read this recipe, the more I realize that each steps has sub-steps and timing that needs to work out properly. Of course he recommended this as an easy recipe, he’s a goddamn chef. He could probably do this with his eyes closed.
I, however, cannot. I’m a perfectly adequate cook but I don’t think I’ve ever impressed anyone.
I’m reading the recipe yet again when my phone vibrates in my hand and an email slides in from the top of the screen.
The pit of my stomach goes cold before I even read the subject line. All it takes is the email address it’s from.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: I know
You’re morally bankrupt.
That’s all. Those three words. I stare at them until my phone screen dims and then goes black of its own accord, and I slowly put it back into my pocket.
Morally bankrupt?
Seriously?
Sex traffickers are morally bankrupt. People who take money meant for charity and buy themselves private jets are morally bankrupt.
I might argue that anyone who knowingly gets in the “15 items or less” line at the grocery store and knows they have twice that many is morally bankrupt, but I’d be willing to hear alternate takes on that one.
Even though it’s silly and over-the-top, the email rattles me. It’s not the charge of being morally bankrupt that does it — is dating Thalia against the rules? Yes. Morally bankrupt? No — it’s the fact that someone knows, and that someone is clearly not happy about this.
But on the other hand, that someone hasn’t reported us to VSU administration. They haven’t even told Gerald, my department chair about it. They’re just sending me emails about my qualities as a person. They’re not even making threats.
And it’s not like I thought I was making an ethically defensible choice. I’m doing the wrong thing with my eyes wide open.
Fuck it.
I pull my phone out, ignore the email, and get back to the recipe that I should have started at least thirty minutes ago.
Chapter Thirty-One
Thalia
I triple-check the address before I walk up the short path to the front door, even though I’m pretty sure I recognize the car in the driveway as Caleb’s. I mean, I didn’t memorize his license plate number or anything, but it’s a silver hatchback at the address he gave me, so I’m probably in the right place.
As I walk I take the bottle of wine out of the black plastic bag it came in and shove the bag into my purse, alongside my toothbrush, a change of clothes, and a handful of condoms. My boots click on the flagstones, the porch light on, revealing a welcome mat at the top of a few brick stairs.
I take a deep breath before I ascend, because I’m nervous. I’m nervous that someone’s seen me walking here. I’m nervous that I’ll knock on the door and Caleb will tell me he was just kidding about this.
I’m nervous that I’ll say something dumb and make him not like me any more, that he’ll realize I’m not actually that interesting, that I’ll be bad at sex.
I’ve spent twenty-two years being the good girl, who got the good grades, who joined the right sports teams, who did the after school activities and had the right friends and won the accolades and made her parents proud.
; They would not be proud of me right now. My father would be furious and my mother would strongly not approve of me losing my virginity to my math professor who I’m not even technically dating, I guess, let alone engaged or married to.
I love my mom. I think she’s an amazing woman. But she’s a hundred percent positive that all men have a why buy the cow philosophy, while I prefer to imagine that my worth as a person and potential partner doesn’t reside entirely in my hymen.
Anyway, I knock on the door, gripping the wine bottle by the neck.
There’s no response. I wait, patiently. I check the time on my phone. It’s five ’til eight, so maybe he’s in the shower, or maybe he’s still getting dressed, or doing something else that prevents his answering the door.
Or it’s not his house because you somehow got the address wrong, and this is about to get awkward.
I wait a full minute before I knock again, and this time the door opens practically under my fist and then Caleb is standing there, in gray sweatpants and a black shirt with flour all over it and a smear of something on his cheek.
“Sorry,” he says, and he smiles that smile he has, the one that’s charming and sheepish and rakish all at once, and my heart goes thadunk and I can’t help but smile back.
“It’s my fault, I’m early,” I say, and hold out the bottle of wine. “Thanks for having me.”
“I haven’t yet,” he says, lifting an eyebrow, and I laugh, my anxiety dissolving because this isn’t some high-stakes drama about a scholarship student having a torrid affair with her professor, it’s just Caleb and I being us, together.
“Take the wine and don’t be saucy,” I tell him.
“You look nice,” he says, taking the bottle from my hand. His eyes drift from my face, down my body, and he doesn’t even bother to try and hide it.