The Drop Form

"You want to drop what?"

The woman behind the registrar's desk had the exact tone of someone who had said those words a thousand times that week alone, flat and tired and already bracing for an argument.

"Contemporary Literature and Ethics," I said, sliding the form across the counter before I could lose my nerve. "It's not working for me."

"It's day one."

"I'm very decisive."

She didn't smile. She typed something into her computer, squinting at the screen, and I stood there gripping the edge of the counter like it might keep me upright if the news was bad.

"That's an honors elective requirement for your track," she said after a long, agonizing pause. "You don't have another section open this semester, and the next time it's offered isn't until spring of next year."

"There has to be a substitute. Some other class that counts."

"Let me check." More typing. More squinting. I watched her scroll through what felt like an entire decade of bureaucracy while my pulse climbed higher with every second of silence. "There's one other course that would satisfy the requirement," she finally said, "but it's at capacity, and it has a prerequisite you haven't taken."

"What if I petition for an override?"

"You can try. Those decisions take two to three weeks to process, and by then you'd have missed enough material in either course that you'd likely have to withdraw and retake something next year anyway."

The words landed like individual blows. Next year. A whole extra year, tacked onto a degree I'd already mapped out to the semester, all because I'd made the worst decision of my life in a club with bad lighting and good bourbon.

"What happens to my CGPA if I push graduation back," I asked, even though I already knew the answer, even though some masochistic part of me needed to hear it out loud anyway.

"You'd lose the upper level credits you were counting toward your average this term. Your timeline for any scholarship deadlines tied to current enrollment status would likely be affected too." She said it gently, the way you'd tell someone their dog wasn't going to make it, and something in my chest went hollow and cold.

"So I'm stuck," I said.

"I wouldn't call it stuck. I'd call it inconvenient."

"It doesn't feel inconvenient. It feels like the universe personally hates me."

She finally looked up at that, something almost like sympathy crossing her tired face. "Look, if there's a real problem with the course, a conflict with the professor, harassment, anything like that, there's a formal complaint process that can get you an emergency transfer. But based on what you're telling me, which is nothing, I can't push anything through today."

I thought about telling her. I thought about it for one wild, reckless second, picturing the exact words I'd have to say out loud. I slept with the professor before I knew he was my professor and now I can't sit in his classroom without wanting to disappear. I imagined her face. I imagined that story traveling through the administration building like wildfire, my name attached to it forever, Calder's career detonating right alongside mine.

"No," I said instead. "No conflict. I just don't like the reading list."

"Then I'd suggest sticking with it," she said, sliding the drop form back toward me, unsigned. "It's the cleanest path to your degree on time."

I took the form, folded it twice, and walked out of that office like I was carrying a bomb instead of a piece of paper. Outside, the late morning sun felt too bright, too normal, like the entire world hadn't just rearranged itself around one impossible, immovable fact.

I was stuck in that classroom. For an entire semester. With him.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. Dani.

**how was ur first day of pretending u don't know ur professor naked**

I typed back with shaking thumbs. **worse than you can imagine. emergency. my apartment. tonight.**

**say less. wine's already cold**

I shoved my phone away and started walking, not really toward anywhere, just away, my mind spinning through every version of this disaster. Drop the class and lose a year. Stay in the class and lose my mind. There didn't seem to be a third option, not one that didn't involve some kind of academic or emotional collateral damage.

I was so deep in my own head that I almost walked straight past the coffee cart outside the humanities building, and almost didn't notice the tall figure standing at the front of the line, leather folio tucked under one arm, phone pressed to his ear.

I noticed when he laughed.

It wasn't a big laugh, just a low, surprised huff of sound, but it was unmistakably the same laugh I'd heard against my collarbone two nights ago, low and real, nothing like the careful, controlled voice he'd used in that lecture hall. My feet stopped moving entirely.

"No, I told you, I can't do dinner Thursday, I have office hours," he was saying into the phone, and something about the easy, familiar way he said it made my stomach twist with an emotion I refused to examine too closely. "Yeah. Yeah, I know. Tell mom I'll call her this weekend."

Family. He had a mother he talked to, dinners he canceled, a whole entire life happening around the edges of the version of him I'd met. It shouldn't have mattered. It absolutely should not have mattered, and yet it cracked something open in my chest that I'd been keeping very deliberately shut since this morning.

He hung up the phone and turned to grab his coffee from the cart, and that's when his eyes caught mine across the courtyard.

Neither of us moved for a second. Students streamed past between us, oblivious, and the late morning sun was doing something unfair to the line of his jaw, and I hated, hated, that my body still remembered exactly what that jaw felt like under my fingertips.

He started walking toward me.

"This is a bad idea," I said, before he'd even fully closed the distance.

"Probably," he agreed. "Did you go to the registrar."

"How did you know."

"Because I know what that office tells students in your exact situation, and I know your face well enough now to recognize when someone's just had their entire semester rearranged against their will."

"You know my face."

"I know a great deal more than your face, Ms. Reyes, which is precisely the problem we're standing here trying to solve." His voice dropped lower, even though there was no one close enough to hear, just the ordinary chaos of students cutting across the courtyard between classes. "What did they tell you."

"That I'm trapped. That dropping costs me a year and my scholarship timeline. That there's no other path through my degree that doesn't run straight through your classroom." I crossed my arms, daring him to say something comforting, something that would make this worse by being kind. "So congratulations, Professor. You're stuck with me."

Something passed behind his eyes, quick and complicated, gone before I could fully read it.

"Then we need rules," he said. "Real ones. Starting now."

"What kind of rules."

He glanced past my shoulder, at the stream of students moving around us, several of whom were beginning to slow their pace in that unmistakable way people do when they sense something interesting happening nearby.

"Not here," he said, his jaw stiffening. "Walk with me."

I shouldn't have. Every rational cell in my body knew I shouldn't have. I fell into step beside him anyway, and we'd made it maybe ten feet down the path, his shoulder a careful, deliberate six inches from mine, when a voice called out behind us, bright and far too interested.

"Professor Calder! Wait up, I have a question about the syllabus."

We both turned. A girl from my class, the same one who'd whispered so hot to her friend an hour earlier, was jogging toward us with her phone already raised, the unmistakable angle of someone taking a photo for their story.