Page 12 of Office Hours
She smiles. “I’ll bring cookies. My roommate bakes when she’s anxious, so we have a mountain of them.”
I try to keep my face blank, but the warmth in my chest is dangerous.
“See you Saturday,” I say, and she peels off, waving over her shoulder.
I want to fuck her in the hallway, right there among the medieval poetry posters and faded fire evacuation maps.
Instead, I go home alone, drink a glass of bourbon, and grade the worst set of freshman papers I’ve seen in years.
Saturday is a heartbeat away.
4
GETTING READY
SIMONE
Saturday comes far too soon. I wake up to sunlight slicing my room into stripes and a text from Professor Thomas with his address, nothing else. No emoji. No “looking forward.” Just an apartment number and a precise time: 2:00 sharp. If my body is a crime scene, my dorm is the evidence locker. There are clothes everywhere: discarded party tops, jeans that lost their stretch, one abandoned pair of Hello Kitty pajama shorts that Andie claims “manifested” on her bed, but I know better.
My desk is a sprawl of textbooks, coffee rings, Maybelline carnage, and the suspiciously orange smear of Cheetos fingers past. I sit on the bed, cross-legged and braless, and try to will myself into academic mode. I fail. I stare at the closet instead, hung with an evolutionary history of my bad decisions—vintage thrift, half a dozen Victoria’s Secret Pink hoodies, three dresses that would get me thrown out of Mass. I need an outfit, but what’s the right vibe for “I want you to save my grade but I’m also insanely attracted to you”?
There’s a tap at the door. Andie comes in, a towel wrapped turban-tight around her hair. She’s eating cereal straight from the box and already in her comfort zone: “You going somewhere, or is this a suicide mission?”
I hurl a crop top at her, which she dodges. “Don’t you have a field hockey game?”
She makes a face. “It’s not until four. Besides, watching you stress-shop your own closet is, like, more entertaining than TV. What’s the occasion, Simone?”
“I have to go meet with Liam Thomas. The professor.”
“Office hours on a Saturday?” She slides onto her bed and fluffs a pillow behind her back, eyes bright. “Do I need to call HR?”
I toss a black skirt on the bed, then shake my head. “It’s not like that, Andie. He said I could get extra help on my paper if I wanted. I want.”
She raises her eyebrows. “Do you want, or do youwantwant?”
I glare, but it’s mostly for show. “It’s not a sex thing, it’s a GPA thing. Can you focus please?”
Andie sets down the cereal. “I’m focusing. You just stress me out when you do this. You act all chill and then two hours before, you’re hyperventilating in the stairwell.”
“I’m not hyperventilating,” I say, already out of breath from squatting to find my tights. “I just don’t want to bomb out and get sent back to West Texas because of a literature essay.”
“Yeah, but isn’t Professor Thomas, like, obsessed with you?”
I feel my face go pink. “No, Andie. He’s obsessed with Herman Melville. And maybe with failing me.”
She shrugs. “Every girl in the class says he’s a dom. Like, the way he stands at the podium? It’s a vibe.”
I roll my eyes and drop a stack of bralettes on my bed. “That’s just a rumor.”
“So is the thing about him knocking up some co-ed last year,” she says, picking at her cuticles, “but the rumor persists.”
I groan. “Andie. Please.”
She spreads her hands. “I’m just saying, if you come home pregnant, I’m not helping you pay for raising a child. Not unless it’s a girl, and not unless she’s as cute as a ladybug.”
I snort, because she’s incorrigible. “If I get pregnant from a writing tutorial, I’ll personally eat all of your secret Lucky Charms stash.”
Andie laughs, and for a second, it’s not so heavy. She flops back on the bed and sighs. “You know, you could just wear normal clothes maybe? Like, jeans? A t-shirt? And not, you know, whatever outfit you’re constructing right now.”
