After Hours

"Absolutely not."

Dani had snatched the phone out of my hand before I'd even finished reading it twice, scrolling up and down like the email might rearrange itself into something less reckless if she stared hard enough.

"Give that back."

"No. You are not going to a dark, empty building at night to meet a man who already has the power to ruin your degree." She held the phone out of reach, which was pointless since I had the email memorized in about four seconds flat. "This is how horror movies start, Mia."

"It's a campus office building, not a cabin in the woods."

"Famous last words of every girl in every horror movie."

"He's not going to hurt me." I said it with more certainty than I expected to feel, and something about how easily it came out worried me more than the email itself had. "Whatever this is, it's not that."

"Then what is it?"

"I don't know. That's why I have to go."

Dani sighed, the long, theatrical sigh of someone who knew she'd already lost the argument but needed everyone in the room to know she'd fought valiantly. "Fine. But you're texting me the second you get there, and the second you leave, and if I don't hear from you in forty minutes I'm calling campus security and telling them a professor is luring students into his office after dark."

"That's slightly dramatic."

"That's the deal."

I agreed to the deal, mostly because arguing further would have eaten into the time I needed to actually get there, and twenty minutes later I was standing outside the humanities building watching the last few lit windows on the third floor go dark one by one, my heart doing something complicated and fast against my ribs.

The building was nearly empty. My footsteps echoed too loud against the tile floor of the main hallway, and every closed door I passed felt like it was watching me, judging the particular stupidity of what I was doing. I found his office at the end of the second floor corridor, light spilling out from underneath the door, and I stood there for a full ten seconds before I made myself knock.

"Come in."

His voice sounded different through a closed door, rougher somehow, less careful than the version I'd heard in the lecture hall. I pushed it open and found him sitting behind his desk, jacket off, sleeves rolled, a stack of papers shoved to one side like he'd been pacing more than working.

"You came," he said.

"You asked."

"I wasn't sure you would, after this morning." He gestured to the chair across from his desk, and I sat down carefully, my bag still clutched against my chest like a shield. "Door stays open. For the record."

"Noted."

He didn't say anything for a moment, just studied me with an expression I couldn't quite read, somewhere between dread and resolve, and the silence stretched long enough that I started to feel the panic creeping back up my throat.

"You said this couldn't wait until Thursday," I said. "So say it."

"Right." He exhaled, dragging a hand through his hair, and something about the gesture, so identical to the one I'd watched him make from across a crowded club, made my chest ache in a way I didn't have time to examine. "There's a department wide review starting this week. Grading practices, course audits, the usual bureaucratic checkup that happens every few years."

"Okay."

"It's not about us. I want to be clear about that. It's routine, it covers every elective in the department, it has nothing to do with you specifically." He met my eyes, steady, deliberate. "But it means there are going to be more eyes on my course this semester than there normally would be. Grade distributions, assignment feedback, attendance records, all of it gets pulled and reviewed."

The room felt suddenly colder. "So if anyone connects the dots between us."

"It wouldn't just be embarrassing. It would be the kind of thing that ends careers and degrees both, and they wouldn't even need to prove anything happened, they'd just need enough smoke to justify pulling the thread." He said it plainly, no drama in it, which somehow made it land harder than if he'd been panicking. "I needed you to know that going in, so you understand exactly what we're protecting and why I'm being as careful as I am."

"You could have told me that over email."

"I could have." Something flickered in his expression, quick and complicated. "I didn't want to."

"Why not?"

"Because I wanted to see your face when I said it." His voice dropped lower, rougher around the edges, the careful professor cadence slipping for just a second. "And because there's a version of this conversation where I tell you the practical risks, and you decide the smart thing to do is keep your distance from me entirely, formally request a transfer, file a complaint even if it's not true, anything that gets you out of my classroom and away from this mess with your scholarship intact."

My pulse stuttered. "Is that what you want me to do?"

"No," he said, immediate, almost rough with how fast it came out, like the honesty surprised even him. "That's the problem, Mia. That's exactly the problem."

The air in the room went thick and charged, the same way it had at the bar two nights ago, the same gravitational pull I'd felt across a crowded room before I even knew his name. I should have stood up. I should have thanked him for the warning and walked straight back out that open door and put this entire situation back into the box marked mistake, where it belonged.

Instead I said, "What's the other version of this conversation?"

He was quiet for a long moment, his eyes dark and unreadable in the lamp light, and when he finally spoke his voice had dropped to something low and careful, like he was handling something fragile.

"The other version is the one where I tell you that since Saturday night, I haven't been able to sit in a single meeting or read a single page without thinking about you, and that walking into that lecture hall this morning and seeing your name on the roster felt less like a disaster and more like the universe playing a very cruel, very specific joke on the both of us." His hands flat against the desk like he needed something to anchor them. "And that despite every single reason I just gave you for why we need distance, I have spent the entire day finding excuses to walk past the building I knew you'd be in."

My breath caught somewhere in my chest and refused to come back out.

"That's not what office hours are supposed to sound like," I managed.

"No," he agreed. "It isn't."

Neither of us moved. The door was still open behind me, the hallway beyond it dark and silent, and somewhere in the building a door slammed shut on another floor, the sound echoing down through the stairwell, close enough that we both startled, close enough to remind us exactly how much we had to lose if anyone found us sitting here like this, the air between us charged thick enough to taste.

Footsteps started up the stairwell. Slow. Unhurried. Headed in our direction.