I suppose it hid behind the lugubrious features and the excessive tweed, but it announces itself now. It accosts me, viciously. I have to glance away because I can feel the colour rising to my cheeks – and not just because I enjoyed the look of him.
Because of what I’ve done.
I didn’t just hand in a filthy story to my Professor.
I handed it in to my deeply and unnervingly attractive Professor.
And now I have to speak to him about this somehow. I have to go into that tiny office and discuss penises at length and in great and varied detail, even though I can barely answer when he asks a simple question.
‘Was it your intention to sit out here all evening?’ he asks, and I just about manage to shake my head. How I stand I have no idea, and especially when I see what he intends. He doesn’t disappear inside to let me in. He stands there and holds the door, so that I have to almost go under his arm. My hip brushes some oddly electric part of him, the contact static-y and squirm-inducing.
And the scent of him…
It gets me right in the face, rich with what must be tobacco yet is sweet and oddly familiar at the same time. Like a place I used to go to or a person I used to know, I think – until I see his office. Then I understand why it means something to me. I get it completely.
It’s the smell of ink and paper. It’s all over him, like an animal who recently rolled in books. Though how could it be otherwise, when his office looks the way it does? Every available surface is covered in paperbacks and hardbacks and leather-bound classics. They flow like papery waterfalls off straining shelves and touch the ceiling in teetering stacks. Barely any light penetrates the tiny room, because what does get through has to squeeze between the spines of several dozen novels.
It’s like stepping into a book labyrinth.
One wrong turn and I’ll be lost for ever in literature.
A fate that sounds markedly better than the one I can expect here. He asks me to sit, but doing so is impossible. The only chair in here is the creaking, broad-backed old thing he takes, beneath the window. My options are the desk that runs all along the wall beside us, or a stack of books. At a pinch I could go out and get the chair from the hall, but doing so would pose another problem.
The only available space for it is about an inch from him. Our knees would probably touch if I managed to wedge it in there. Every time he moved I would feel him, and I can’t let that happen. I’m already sweating and red-faced. My limbs are watery and nothing is working right, and it gets worse every time I notice something new about him. Like his sideburns, too thick and too heavy and all amazing. And the scars that feather up from underneath his starched collar.
As though he really did burst out of his suit-skin once.
He rampaged across some malevolent, ink-black moors.
The ones that only exist inside me.
‘Maybe I should just stand,’ I say, finally.
But he dismisses the idea with a wave of his hand.
‘Oh, I should think you will be here long enough to need one. There is a stool behind the stack of Dickens novels to your right. Draw it up, and we can begin.’
Begin what? I think, over and over, yet none of the words reach my mouth.
I just do as he suggests, primed for an exasperated noise from him every time I make a mistake. I send books sprawling to the floor and bang the leg of the narrow stool against some solid part of him, wincing all the while. It doesn’t even occur to me that he hasn’t made a sound until I sit down. Then I dare to look at him, and find no irritation or amusement.
On the contrary – his gaze is as flatly assessing as ever.
Like an anthropologist, cataloguing me for later.
‘Now, to the matter at hand. Or should I say the problem?’
‘If there is one you have to know I didn’t mean to cause it.’
‘So then you handing in this piece of work was unintentional.’
‘Completely unintentional. It was just an accident.’
‘You accidentally handed in an erotic story.’
He doesn’t so much as raise an eyebrow, but I hear the amusement in his voice. It’s dark and deep and way down at the back of his throat, but it’s definitely there.
‘I know it sounds ridiculous, Professor –’
‘Utterly absurd, but really whether you deliberately did this deed or not is rather beside the point, don’t you think?’
‘I have no idea. I don’t know what the point is. I spent all night trying to guess.’
‘And what was your very best attempt?’
I hesitate. Partly because this conversation is strangling me.
Mostly because telling the truth might make this happen:
‘That you wanted to give me a real roasting.’
‘I see. And by roasting you mean insults, that sort of thing.’
‘Pretty much, yes. In fact no, exactly that.’
‘You thought I was going to tear a strip off you.’
‘It had occurred to me that you might.’
‘Well, to be honest I have half a mind to.’
He glances away as he says it, as if I’m not worth the full weight of his contempt. I only get half-measures. Other, more important students are permitted full explanations and disappointed looks. He doesn’t make them twist in the wind as he builds up to whatever this is going to be – though maybe they would never twist in the wind anyway. They probably don’t find it hard to breathe, or make bloody semi-circles in the palms of their hands. They don’t have to brace themselves, the way I do.
By the time he finishes his thought I’m wincing away from him.
I practically flinch at the first word – but I’m a fool to do it.
‘Do you have any idea how irritating it is to spend three terms assessing your mediocre nonsense, when you were capable of producing work of this calibre? Endless interminable essays written in the most pedestrian style possible…I ought to put a piece in the newspaper. “Student Deliberately Bores Lecturer To Death. Motivation as yet undetermined.”’
I mean, did he say ‘calibre’ there? Is ‘calibre’ good?
I think so, but it’s awfully hard to tell when your mind has just slid sideways. It takes almost everything I have to respond to him, and when I do I know how I sound. Stuttery and flustered and focusing on completely the wrong thing.
‘That isn’t…I didn’t deliberately bore you to death.’
‘Ah, so that was accidental too.’
‘No.
