Seminar

Lena -

Julian Ashford wears a gray sweater with the sleeves pushed up to his forearms, as if he gave no thought at all to how he looks this morning. I know better now. I know how deliberate he can be, how every casual detail conceals a decision. He sets his books on the desk at the front of the room, and the small thud of paper and leather shouldn’t do anything to me.

It does anyway, and I hate that it does.

“Victorian literature,” he says, turning toward the class, “is obsessed with what it refuses to say.”

I stare at my notebook, because looking at him feels dangerous, feels like standing too close to a ledge. His voice is the same one I remember from the ship, only now it’s coming from the front of a classroom, dressed in tweed and authority instead of salt air and moonlight. There are eighteen students sitting between us, and somehow that feels like nowhere near enough distance. I count the heads without meaning to, as if their bodies might form a wall thick enough to keep me safe from him.

I look around instead, anywhere but at him.

Nate Ferro leans against the wall near the door, arms crossed, a spiral notebook tucked under one elbow. He watches Julian, not like the other students, not with admiration. More like he’s waiting for Julian to make a mistake, cataloging something only he can see.

“Desire, in this period, doesn’t announce itself,” Julian continues, pacing across the front of the room, his voice steady and low. “It hides inside grammar. Inside a pause. A woman doesn’t say, I want you. She says the weather has been unseasonably warm, and everyone in the room understands what she means.”

A few people laugh, easy and unknowing.

I don’t. I press my pen against the paper until the tip nearly tears through it.

Warm.

The word leaves a dark mark through the page, bleeding into the one beneath it.

Julian picks up a thin, worn book with a cracked spine and reads a passage about longing. A woman standing at a window. A man she can’t have. The ache of watching him walk away. When he says the word ache, his voice drops slightly, and something low in my stomach answers it.

He’s not looking at me.

That’s almost worse, because he’s making a point of not looking at me, and I know exactly why. The absence of his gaze feels louder than if he’d stared straight at me for the whole ninety minutes.

I write ache in my notes. Then, without thinking, I write it again, pressing harder the second time, as though repetition might exorcise it from my chest.

Great. I’m losing my mind, one syllable at a time.

“Mr. Ferro.” Julian sets the book down.

Nate straightens slightly, notebook still tucked against his ribs.

“You look like you disagree.”

“I look like I’m taking notes, Professor.” His tone is polite. Too polite. There’s something underneath it, though, something sharp and watchful, like a blade wrapped in cloth.

Julian’s mouth twitches, the barest flicker of amusement or warning, I can’t tell which.

“Good. Write down that restraint is not the absence of desire.” He pauses, letting the silence stretch just long enough to feel deliberate. “It’s desire’s most sophisticated costume.”

My pen stops. For one second, I forget how to breathe, and the room narrows to the sound of my own pulse.

Nobody else reacts. Maybe they didn’t hear the second meaning buried under the first. Maybe I’m the only person in the room who did, the only one fluent enough in this particular language to translate it.

When class ends, chairs scrape against the floor and backpacks zip shut. Everyone starts talking at once, the room filling with the normal noise of students who have no idea that my entire life changed three weeks ago on a cruise ship, in the dark, against a railing, with salt on my lips.

I take my time packing, mostly because my hands are shaking and I don’t trust them to zip my bag without fumbling.

“Ms. Carver.”

I freeze, spine locking straight.

Julian’s voice sounds casual. Professional. Nothing like the voice that whispered against my collarbone in another life.

“Good first day.”

“Thank you, Professor.” The word feels wrong coming out of my mouth, foreign and ill-fitting, like a coat borrowed from someone else’s closet.

Professor.

I look at him for half a second, allowing myself exactly that much and no more. Then I leave. I don’t look back, and I count that as a win, a small one, but I’ll take whatever victories I can get these days.

Tyler waits outside the building, leaning against the brick with his hands in his jacket pockets. When he sees me, he smiles and pushes away from the wall, easy and familiar, the way he’s smiled at me a hundred times before. He kisses my cheek.

“How was the torture chamber?”

“It was fine.” The lie tastes strange on my tongue, not because the class was bad, but because of who taught it, because the word fine could never hold what actually happened in that room.

“You look like you saw a ghost.” Tyler reaches up and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. It’s such an ordinary gesture, and he’s touched me like that a thousand times. He probably expects to touch me like that for the next thousand, assuming the future will simply keep repeating itself without complaint.

“Come on,” he says. “I’m starving. There’s that sandwich place you like.”

We start walking, and Tyler talks the entire way, something about an argument with a professor, a grading policy, a guy in his class who apparently thinks rules don’t apply to him. His hands move while he talks. He gets animated when he’s telling a story, gesturing wide enough to nearly clip a passing stranger.

I used to love that about him. I still do, maybe. I hate that I don’t know anymore, that the certainty I once had about us has gone soft and uncertain at the edges.

At the sandwich shop, he orders for both of us. He doesn’t ask what I want; he just orders the same thing I’ve gotten a hundred times. Usually, that would feel like being known. Today, it feels like being erased, like he’s ordering for a version of me that no longer exists.

I don’t say anything. I’m too tired to turn lunch into a fight.

“You’ve been quiet.” Tyler slides my sandwich toward me.

“Long day.”

I give him a small smile. “That’s all.”

He studies me, his eyes narrowing slightly the way they do when he’s actually paying attention instead of just waiting for his turn to talk. For a second, I expect him to brush it off like he usually does. Instead, his expression softens.

“You don’t have to perform okay for me, you know.”

I look up, surprised.

“You can just be not okay. I can handle it.”

My throat tightens. Of all the things he could say, why that? It’s kind. It’s exactly what I should want to hear from him, and it makes me feel horrible, because I know I don’t deserve the tenderness in his voice right now.

“I’m okay,” I say quietly. “Promise.”

He squeezes my hand and doesn’t push. Then he starts telling me about his roommate’s disastrous attempt at making pasta from scratch, flour everywhere, a smoke alarm, a pot boiled dry. It’s actually funny. I laugh, a real laugh, surprising myself with how easily it comes.

For a moment, I’m just sitting there with Tyler, listening to a ridiculous story, and everything feels normal again. And for one second, I love him. I really do.

It hurts, because then I remember Julian saying ache in that classroom. I remember the ship. His mouth. His hands. The way he looked at me. The feeling of being noticed, truly noticed, in a way that made my whole body feel like it had been rediscovered.

My love for Tyler doesn’t disappear. That’s the problem. It just isn’t enough anymore, and I don’t know what to do with a love that stopped being sufficient without my permission.

After lunch, I tell Tyler I need to go to the library. He kisses my forehead. “See you tonight.”

“Yeah.”

I walk away. Except I don’t go to the library. I head toward the humanities building instead, my feet carrying me there before my mind fully agrees to the destination. I spend the entire walk telling myself this is about the syllabus, that there was something I didn’t understand, a reading assignment, a due date, anything. There are plenty of reasonable reasons to talk to a professor. I’m just going to ask a question. That’s all, I tell myself, and I almost believe it.

Julian’s office door stands open when I get there, like he was expecting me, like he’d left it that way on purpose. He doesn’t look up when I knock.

“Ms. Carver.” His pen moves across a paper in short, neat strokes. “Come to clarify the syllabus?”

I stop in the doorway. “How did you know that’s what I was going to say?”

“Because it’s what everyone says.” He puts the pen down, then looks at me. He seems tired. Not sleepy - something deeper, something worn into the lines around his eyes. “Close the door.”

I glance behind me. “I thought the rule was open door.”

“The rule is an open door when it matters.” He leans back in his chair. “Close it so I can tell you why it’s going to matter every day until one of us transfers departments.”

My stomach twists. “You’d transfer?”

“I’ve considered it.”

“Considered it?”

“I drafted the paperwork twice.”

My mouth goes dry. “When?”

“Tuesday.” He looks away for a second. “Then again this morning.”

“You didn’t file it.”

“No.”

“Why?”

He doesn’t answer. Instead, he looks at the door. “Close it.”

I do. The latch clicks, and the sound seems much louder than it should, echoing in the small room like a verdict. I turn back toward him.

He gestures toward the chair. “Sit.”

I sit. My knees press together. My hands fold in my lap. I feel ridiculous, like I’m waiting for a priest to hear my confession, though I couldn’t say which of us is meant to absolve the other.

“I didn’t know your last name for three weeks,” I say.

His eyes stay on mine. “I liked it that way.”

“I did too.”

“You were easier to know without it.”

I swallow. “I could have gone my whole life without knowing your last name.”

A tiny smile touches his mouth, gone almost as quickly as it appears. “I think part of me would have preferred that.”

“Why?”

“Because then you weren’t real.” The smile disappears. “And neither was I.”

Something twists in my chest, sharp and sudden. “I liked that version.”

“So did I.”

The room goes quiet, thick with everything neither of us says. I look down at my hands.

“I liked not knowing anything about you.”

His eyebrows lift slightly. “Most people want to know everything.”

“I didn’t.”

“I noticed.” His voice is quieter now, almost gentle. “You were the only person I’ve met who wanted less information about me instead of more.”

I don’t know what to say to that, so I say the thing that’s been sitting in my head since I walked through the door. “What do we do?”

Julian leans forward, elbows on the desk, and his expression changes. Professor Julian comes back - controlled, careful, a mask sliding smoothly into place.

“We do this.” He starts listing rules: office hours only, door open, no personal messages, nothing outside academic matters. If I need to change discussion sections, I can move to Nate’s.

I stare at him. “Not Nate’s section.”

His mouth twitches. “He already looks at you like he’s building a case.”

I shake my head. “I am not becoming Exhibit A.”

For the first time, Julian almost smiles. “Fine.” He nods. “No transfer.”

“Thank you.”

“But everything else stays.” His voice is firm. “Understood?”

I nod. “Okay.”

For one second, I almost believe him. Almost. I almost believe this can work, that we can sit on opposite sides of a classroom and pretend the cruise never happened, that I can call him Professor and he can call me Ms. Carver, that we can put this thing between us somewhere nobody has to see it.

“Okay,” he says. His shoulders relax slightly, like he believes it too, like the words themselves might be enough to build a wall.

Then his eyes drop, just for a second, to my mouth. He catches himself and looks back at the papers on his desk. And there it is - the truth, plain and undeniable. The rules aren’t going to fix this.

I stand and walk to the door. My hand closes around the knob. I should leave. I know I should. Instead, I look back.

Julian is still sitting behind his desk, watching me with an expression he isn’t quick enough to hide this time.

“I still remember what you taste like.”

His expression changes, barely, but I see it, the flicker of restraint cracking. I smile, just a little.

“Just so you know, the rules aren’t going to help either of us.”

I open the door and walk out. I don’t wait for him to answer. I don’t need him to. My pulse pounds in my ears as I walk down the hallway. Behind me, there’s nothing - no footsteps, no voice calling my name.

And somehow, that tells me everything. The decision has already been made. We both know it. The rules aren’t there to stop us. They’re just the space we’re going to stand in until one of us breaks them, and I suspect, deep down, that neither of us wants to be the one who holds out the longest.