What the Fuck?!

Two weeks.

It felt both longer and shorter than that depending on which part of it I was thinking about.

The funeral had been on a Thursday. The grey sky, too many flowers, a church so full that people were standing along the walls and spilling out into the car park. I had stood beside Zara the entire time with my shoulder pressed against hers and my hand in hers and said nothing because there was nothing to say that the silence wasn't already saying better. Reid had sat on her other side,with a tight jaw and his eyes dry. Dominic had come.

He had sat three rows behind his children because Reid had made it very clear before the service that he was not sitting in the front row and Dominic had not argued. He had just sat three rows back in a dark suit and looked at the coffin of the woman he had left fifteen years ago and whatever was happening on his face I had not been able to read from where I was.

After the burial the house had been full for days. Relatives, family friends, neighbors, people I had never seen before bringing food and condolences and staying longer than necessary the way people did at these things. And then slowly, the way things did, it had started to settle.

The relatives went home. The food stopped arriving. The house got quiet again. And Zara had woken up one morning, gotten dressed, and said she was going back to class because sitting in that house was making everything worse and she needed to be somewhere that felt normal even if normal was the last thing she actually felt.

That had been three days ago.

Today she was in her morning lecture and I was in an empty classroom on the second floor of the arts building with my textbook open in front of me and my notes spread across the desk and my pen actually moving across the page.

“The only way is to read your book.” Professor Marcus always said.

I was reading the book.

It was slow and painful and about thirty percent of it made sense to me on the first pass. It was not my natural habitat, this kind of quiet focused effort. I kept wanting to check my phone or find a reason to be somewhere else. But I stayed and I kept the pen moving and told myself that this was what people who wanted things did. They sat in empty classrooms, mornings like this and did the work even when the work was uncomfortable.

I was halfway through a paragraph I had read three times without fully absorbing it when the classroom door opened.

I looked up expecting a lecturer or a lost freshman.

But Reid Callum walked in.

He saw me at the same moment I saw him and stopped just inside the doorway "Brielle."

"Reid." I sat up slightly. "What are you doing here?"

"Dropping something off for Zara but I couldn't find her." He held up a small bag. "She forgot her medication at home this morning. I was passing the campus anyway so —" he glanced around the empty classroom and then back at me with that quiet amusement I was starting to recognize as distinctly his. "You studying?"

"Why do you look surprised?"

"I'm not surprised." He looked like he was though. Just slightly. "Can I…" he gestured at the chair across from me.

"Sure."

He sat down and set the bag on the table and looked at my spread of notes with genuine interest. "What's the course?"

I told him. He nodded slowly and asked a question about it that suggested he actually knew something about the subject and I answered and somehow from there the conversation just… opened up. 

We talked about Zara first. How she was really doing underneath the functioning surface she was presenting to the world. Reid said she cried at night still and was pretending she didn't and he was pretending not to hear because she needed to do it privately and he understood that about her. I said she was stronger than she knew and he looked at me and said quietly that she was lucky to have me and something about the way he said it…imply, without decoration made me look back down at my notes.

We talked about the house. About Dominic still being there which was its own complicated situation that Reid was navigating one day at a time without committing to anything resembling forgiveness but also without throwing his father out which was its own kind of progress.

"How are you doing with all of it?" I asked.

He considered the question properly rather than deflecting it which I had noticed was something he always did. "Some days are easier than others," he said. "I'm angrier than I expected to be. I thought seeing him would give me some kind of… " he paused, "resolution. But it just opened things up instead of closing them."

"That's usually how it goes."

He looked at me. "Speaking from experience?"

I held his gaze for a moment. "Something like that."

He didn't push it and I was grateful for that.

We talked for longer than either of us probably intended. The classroom stayed empty around us and the morning light shifted through the windows and at some point I stopped being aware of my open books entirely.

Eventually Reid looked at his phone and registered the time and started gathering himself to leave. He stood and picked up Zara's bag from the table and I stood too because it felt strange to stay sitting. 

"I'll walk you out," I said, which I hadn't planned to say.

We walked out into the corridor and toward the stairwell and at the top of the stairs he stopped and turned and said, "It was nice speaking with you today."

"Same here." I said honestly.

He opened his arms slightly; the universal language of I'm going to hug you now and I stepped into it and his arms came around me and I felt the warmth of it settle across my shoulders and I told myself very clearly to stay normal.

I did not stay normal.

He was warm and solid and he smelled like something clean and understated and he hugged the way people hugged when they actually meant it rather than performing it for the sake of politeness. 

Four seconds.

Five.

Six…..

I was counting and I was aware that I was counting and I was aware that being aware of counting was already a problem.

He pulled back and looked at me and said, "How about we catch up this Saturday? Maybe watch a movie at my house. Zara won't be home so we can actually catch up properly."

I blinked. "Yeah, I ..that'll be cool.”

And then he was walking down the stairs and I was standing at the top of them watching him go and he raised a hand without turning around and disappeared around the corner.

I walked back to the classroom slowly, sat down in front of my open textbook  and notebooks, picked up my pen, held it and stared at the page.

The hug. It kept replaying in my head.

I put the pen down.

That hug had lasted at least four seconds longer than a normal hug and I knew what normal hugs felt like because I had had plenty of them and they did not feel like that. They did not make you stand at the top of a staircase afterward counting seconds and replaying the exact weight of someone's arms around your shoulders.

I pressed my hand flat on the textbook.

“Stop.” I told myself

He said this Saturday which was either just a friendly thing between two people who had been circling each other for weeks or it was something else entirely and I was not going to decide which one it was while sitting in an empty classroom with my heart doing something completely unauthorized.

I picked up my pen.

Read the same paragraph for the fourth time.

Retained approximately nothing.

Forty minutes later I gathered my notes, packed my bag and headed to the submission office to drop off the assignment I had finally finished the night before. The arts building corridor was busier now with students moving between classes, a group gathered outside a lecture room and basically the general Tuesday afternoon noise of a campus back in full swing.

I dropped the assignment off and headed back down the corridor.

Professor Marcus Cole's office was on my left.

I glanced at it as I passed and noticed the door was not fully closed, just slightly ajar, a thin strip of the office visible through the gap so I slowed slightly. I had been showing up on Thursdays at his office for two weeks because he offered to help me improve in the areas I didn't get right in his course  and our interactions had been strictly professional and surprisingly functional and somewhere in that process the hostility had cooled into something approaching a working relationship.

I raised my hand to knock.

And then I heard something.

I went very still and got closer.

A sound from inside the office that was….that was not the sound of a man reviewing coursework or anything related to academics.

That was the sound of…..

I pushed the door open.

“What the fuckkk?!” I said in a high tone

Professor Marcus looked like all his blood was drained from his body the moment he saw me.