think of a dozen ways to tell him why I didn’t return to his office. None of them seems adequate. The only real option is never going back to his office at all, but even that poses problems. He will stop me the next time I try to leave his class, I know he will. He might stop me before. Discuss it loudly and clearly in front of everyone, until I collapse under the weight of my own mortification.
Explain now why you spent seventeen hours in the toilets, I imagine him saying.
I can even see that little flourish he often does with his hand. The one that looks like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, only the rabbit is your dignity and the hat is him slowly strangling it to death in front of you. Certainly it feels as if some part of me is being suffocated, when I next see him.
Though that might be because I don’t expect it. I’m still struggling to come up with a good excuse. I think I have time to get around the fact that I masturbated in the ladies while thinking of him. Time to arrange my face into an innocent shape, to lie without looking away and blushing – then I run across the quad to the old soot-streaked archway between the science labs, searching for shelter from a sudden downpour.
And there he is.
He had the same idea as me, it seems. He wanted to see if he could wait it out in the shade of those great black bricks – though he was faster to it than I was. By the time I get there my hair is plastered to my head, clothes heavy and dark with the deluge, every inch of me bedraggled. But he looks like he just stepped out of the pages of a catalogue from the 1930s. His dark hair is dry and swept neatly across that amazing brow. The cuffs of his shirt are a crisp one inch from his jacket, and his shoes are buffed to a high mahogany sheen. He even has a cigarette lit, and as I watch he kisses it to his lips with the ease and deftness of long habit, then lets the smoke curl out in slow, lazy waves.
I think it might be the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. It stops me dead about a foot from shelter, too blindsided by it to go any further. Which is unfortunate, because he thinks I have other reasons. He sees me frozen in the rain, and the hand holding the cigarette drops to his side. His expression shifts – from the usual still surface of a lake to something else. Something struggling, I want to say.
But I dare not. His words are enough on their own to make me breathless.
‘If you had no wish to continue you needed only to say. I realise my manner is off-putting to many.’
‘It wasn’t that, it wasn’t that at all, your manner is…’
‘My manner is what?’
‘Good.’
‘You’re the most awful liar.’
‘That wasn’t a lie.’
‘Of course it was. You blink about a thousand times whenever you fib, and attempt to look at almost anything except my face.’
‘Maybe I do that because your face is really fearsome.’
Or like staring at the sun too long, I think.
Then have to glance away before it burns my eyes out.
‘Maybe you do, but my point still stands.’
‘About your manner?’
‘About you lying. You were going to say another word entirely.’
‘What word would you guess, if you had to?’
‘“Cold,” perhaps. “Aloof,” almost certainly.’
‘It was neither of those.’
‘That, at least, was the truth.’
‘I told you the truth before. I just made it a less silly sounding word.’
‘Perhaps I should be the judge of what is silly.’
‘All right. I was going to say lovely.’
He whips a look at me at that, as though to catch the telltale signs of lying before I squirrel them away. It doesn’t seem to reassure him when he finds none, however. His eyebrows lift too high in the middle, giving his gaze this oddly raw look. Like I ripped a strip off him by using that word. Now he would do anything to get it back, including this big bunch of sudden bluster:
‘Yes, you were correct. It is very silly indeed – almost as silly as being out in a thunderstorm with barely a stitch on. Where is your jacket, for goodness sake? You could at least have worn a cardigan. Your arms are turning blue,’ he says, so many words spoken in so oddly tender a fashion that I lose count of them. I fall headfirst into them. The way his tone goes up on the first syllable of ‘jacket’, the steeper tilt of his eyebrows, now verging on querulous, the softness of that ‘blue’ on the end…I can hardly stand it.
Though the worst part about it is not the words, spoken too quickly and too sharply and too everything. No, the worst part is that, when he’s done with them, he traps his cigarette between his teeth, and starts taking off his jacket. Roughly, jerkily, like it hurts to do it.
God knows, it burns a hole through me.
‘Oh, no, Professor, that – no no –’
‘Please be quiet. I am in the middle of behaving decently. It so rarely happens it deserves at least some respectful silence and gracious acceptance,’ he says.
But I can’t give him even that much. My acceptance isn’t gracious. My silence isn’t respectful. Instead it seethes with a brutal awareness of every tiny thing he does, from the sparking sensation of his thumb running around the inside of the jacket collar, to the shock of the sheer size of the thing when he snaps it closed around me. You could fit two of me inside its warm confines.
Warm, I think, with his body heat.
And oh, God – heady with his scent.
Honestly, it’s a wonder I understand the language he uses when he next speaks. His hands are still almost on me when he does it. My own hands are lost inside his sleeves.
How am I meant to concentrate?
‘Are you going to tell me the real reason you neglected to return?’
‘I would really rather not, if I can get away with it.’
‘You can.’ He leans down, sudden and shocking. More so, when I realise why: to take me into his confidence. To be conspiratorial with me, as though we’re intimates. ‘But don’t tell anyone. I don’t want it getting out that Professor Halstrom is going soft in his dotage. Next thing you know I’ll have students spending years in bathrooms left, right and centre.’
‘I think “dotage” might be a little bit strong.’
‘That’s only because you haven’t seen me with my trousers down. I have an arse like a dying question mark,’ he says, followed by me waiting for my desire to wither away.
It should wither, after that. It should make it easy to sneer.
But it doesn’t. I have to fight with my last breath to get the next words out.
‘I take back what I
