We Should Talk

The silence between us lasted maybe two seconds. It felt like an hour.

His expression didn't crack, not exactly, but something flickered behind his eyes, something fast and controlled, like a man slamming a door shut before anyone could see what was behind it. Then he looked away, down at his notes, and continued like nothing had happened at all.

"This course will cover six major texts across the semester," he said, his voice perfectly level, perfectly professional, while my heart tried to climb directly out of my throat. "We'll be examining the ethical frameworks embedded in contemporary fiction, how authors construct moral ambiguity, and how readers are manipulated, intentionally or not, into sympathizing with characters who do terrible things."

I heard maybe one word in five. The rest of my brain was occupied with a single, looping thought.

That's him. That's actually him.

I stared down at my notebook like it held the secrets of the universe, my pen frozen above the page, my pulse hammering so hard I could feel it in my ears. Around me, other students were dutifully writing down the syllabus structure, the reading list, the office hours scrawled across the whiteboard in tight, slanted handwriting that I now recognized with a sick lurch of memory. I'd watched that same hand trail down my spine forty eight hours ago.

I did not write anything down.

"Office hours are Tuesdays and Thursdays, two to four," he continued, and I swear his eyes flicked toward my row again before sliding away, casual, deliberate, a man who had years of practice not reacting to things. "Email is the fastest way to reach me outside of that. I do not respond well to last minute extension requests, so plan accordingly."

A girl two seats down from me leaned over to her friend and whispered something that ended in the words so hot, and I had to physically stop myself from laughing in a way that would have sounded unhinged rather than amused.

The lecture went on for fifty more minutes. I have no memory of most of it. I know he talked about an author I'd have to look up later, about narrative complicity, about how easily readers forgive a monster if the prose is beautiful enough. I know that every time his gaze swept the room in that lecturing rhythm, mine, it skated past me a half second faster than it skated past anyone else, like he was avoiding a hot stove.

I spent the entire hour rehearsing exit strategies. Drop the class before the add deadline. Tell the registrar I had a scheduling conflict. Develop a sudden, debilitating allergy to contemporary literature. Fake my own academic death.

None of it mattered, because when the lecture ended and students started gathering their bags, shuffling toward the door in that post class exodus, I made the catastrophic mistake of being too slow.

"Everyone, syllabus is posted online, first reading response is due Thursday," Professor Calder said to the room at large, already turning to erase the whiteboard, and the crowd thinned fast, the way crowds do when there's a door and freedom on the other side of it.

I was three rows back. By the time I made it to the aisle, the room had nearly emptied, just a few stragglers checking their phones, zipping up bags, and me, moving like I was wading through wet concrete, praying he wouldn't say anything.

"Ms. Reyes."

My name, my actual name, in his voice, in this room, with fluorescent light instead of club lighting and a podium between us instead of a bar.

I stopped. I had to. Walking away from a professor calling your name on the first day of class wasn't something you could just do, not without it looking exactly as suspicious as it was.

"Yes?" My voice came out steadier than I expected, which felt like a small, private victory.

He waited until the last two students filed out, until the door swung shut behind them with a soft click that suddenly sounded enormous in the empty room. Then he set down the whiteboard eraser, very deliberately, like he needed a second to decide what kind of conversation this was going to be.

"I think," he said slowly, "we should talk."

"I think that's a terrible idea."

"Probably." A muscle worked in his jaw. "Doesn't make it less necessary."

I crossed my arms over my chest, partly for warmth, mostly because I needed something to do with my hands that wasn't reaching for the strap of my bag and bolting. "There's nothing to talk about. We had a misunderstanding."

"A misunderstanding."

"A coincidence. A statistically improbable, deeply unfortunate coincidence." My voice was climbing in pitch and I hated it. "I didn't know who you were. You didn't know who I was. Now we know, and we can both just."

"Pretend it didn't happen," he said, finishing my sentence with a flatness that made it sound exactly as absurd as it was.

"Yes."

"You think that's going to work."

"I don't see another option."

He came around the side of the podium then, slow, unhurried, the way he probably crossed every room in his life, like he had nowhere else to be and all the time he wanted to get there. I forced myself to hold my ground, which was harder than it should have been given that he was fully dressed in professor clothes and we were standing in a lecture hall under unforgiving fluorescent light.

"There is no other section of this course this semester," he said. "I checked the catalog this morning, after I saw your name on the roster. There's no overlapping elective that fits your degree requirements at this point in the term either, I imagine, given how registration deadlines work."

My stomach dropped straight through the floor. "How would you possibly know that."

"Because I looked. Because the second I saw your name I went and pulled every piece of information I could find that didn't violate FERPA, trying to figure out exactly how bad this was going to be." He said it without apology, like honesty was simply the only currency he dealt in. "It's bad, Ms. Reyes."

Hearing him call me that, formal, distant, after everything his mouth had done to me two nights ago, sent a hot, confusing pulse of something through my chest that I refused to name.

"I'll drop the class," I said.

"You should look into your degree audit before you say that with such confidence."

"Excuse me?"

"I'm telling you, as your professor and not as anything else, that dropping this course without an equivalent replacement is going to put a hole in your graduation timeline that I don't think you want." His eyes held mine, steady, infuriatingly calm. "I'm not saying that to threaten you. I'm saying it because it's true, and you deserve to know it before you make a decision based on panic instead of facts."

I wanted to scream. I wanted to laugh. Mostly I wanted to go back in time forty eight hours and make Dani drag me to a different bar, any different bar, on the entire opposite side of the city.

"This is insane," I said instead, mostly to myself.

"Yes."

"You're my professor."

"Yes."

"I slept with my professor."

"You slept with a stranger at a club," he corrected, quiet, careful, like he was laying out terms neither of us had agreed to yet. "The professor part is a coincidence neither of us could have predicted. I need you to understand that distinction matters to me."

I didn't know what to do with the way he said that, like it mattered to him personally and not just professionally, like there was a difference he needed me to see and hold onto. I grabbed the strap of my bag instead, anchoring myself to something solid.

"I have somewhere to be," I lied.

"Ms. Reyes."

"Please don't call me that."

"It's your name."

"Not like that." The words came out sharper than I meant them to, raw in a way that surprised both of us. "Not in that voice. Not after."

Something shifted in his face, a crack in the careful control, gone almost as fast as it appeared. "Go to your registrar's office," he said instead, his voice dropping back into something almost gentle. "Check your degree requirements before you do anything rash. That's all I'm asking."

I turned and walked toward the door, my legs moving on autopilot, my mind already racing three steps ahead to whatever disaster waited for me at the registrar's office. I had my hand on the door when his voice reached me one more time, quieter now, almost reluctant, like he hadn't planned on saying it at all.

"For what it's worth," he said, "I would have asked for your number that morning, if my phone hadn't started ringing first."

I didn't turn around. I couldn't. I just pushed through the door and walked straight into the hallway, my heart slamming against my ribs so hard it actually hurt, and it took me until I was halfway across campus to realize I was still holding my breath.