Alle Kapitel von Torn Between My Boyfriend & the Professor: Kapitel 11 – Kapitel 19

LENAThe department lounge smells like burnt coffee and old radiators, with a damp, mildewy edge I've stopped noticing most days. The carpet is the same industrial gray it's probably been since the seventies, worn thin in a path between the door and the coffee machine, as if decades of exhausted graduate students have all walked the same desperate route.I've claimed the corner table because it gets the best light for grading. It's become a small ritual. Sit here. Drink bad coffee. Work through the essays. Pretend the stack will somehow get smaller. There's a comfort in the repetition, in pretending my life fits into something this orderly.It never does.A pile of freshman papers sits beside my red pen, which has already bled through three essays about symbolism in *The Great Gatsby*. All three make essentially the same argument, as if the entire freshman class passed one thought around before submitting their papers. I used to find this funny. Now it just makes me tired.Nate Ferro

LENAThe knock comes at midnight, three soft raps that I feel in my sternum before I even register the sound.I know it's him before I look through the peephole. I open the door and he's standing there in a gray Henley, hair messed up like he's been running his hands through it for hours, and the hallway light makes him look tired in a way I haven't seen before."You shouldn't be here," I whisper, even as I'm stepping back to let him in."I know." He crosses the threshold like he's crossing a line he drew himself, months ago, back when rules still felt possible. "I couldn't stop thinking about your face today. In class. When you got that text."My stomach drops. I close the door, turn the lock, and the click of it sounds enormous in the quiet dorm. Somewhere down the hall, another door clicks too, soft and deliberate, and I go still for a second, listening. Nothing follows. Just the building settling, I tell myself, and I let it go."I got a text," I admit, because some truth is easie

I'm on campus, tote bag digging into my shoulder, thinking about nothing more complicated than whether the dining hall still has the good bagels this late in the morning. That's the last normal thought I get to have.I don't know it yet, standing at the vending machine by the quad and feeding it quarters for a Coke I don't even want, just something to do with my hands while I wait for a class I'm already dreading, but everything has already changed. It will take me three weeks to learn what happened that morning, and only because Tyler finally tells me himself, his voice so flat it could have been reading a grocery list. By then the damage will be done, the calm already hardened into something I can't undo. But this is what he describes, and what I now can't stop replaying, even though I wasn't in the room to see it.Tyler almost never comes to campus. In five years, I can count the visits on one hand, each one a small event: the time he brought flowers for my birthday, the time he he

JULIANJulian's car is the last one in the faculty lot when he finally gives up on grading and calls it a night. The motion light above the door clicks on, buzzing faintly, throwing that sick yellow glow across the pavement. He doesn't notice Tyler until he's three steps from the driver's side door.Tyler is leaning against the hood like he owns it. Arms crossed, ankles crossed, the posture of a man who has all the time in the world. His face catches the light wrong, too calm, too pleasant, the kind of expression people wear in photographs right before something terrible happens."Professor Ashworth." Tyler says it slow, like he's tasting the title. "Working late."Julian stops walking. His keys are still in his hand, teeth biting into his palm where his fingers have closed too tight around them. "Can I help you with something?""I think you know exactly what you can help me with."The parking lot is empty except for them, the kind of empty that makes sound carry too far and not far e