MY PROFESSOR’S DIRTY SECRET

I have no idea what my professor just asked me, but I know exactly where I want to kiss him.

At the corner of his mouth, first. The place that threatens to lift when someone gives an answer he likes. I want to find out whether that almost-smile would survive being interrupted — my lips pressed there, the prickle of his stubble, he bites me just hard enough to make me gasp.

Unfortunately, I am sitting in the second row of Fiction Workshop, and he is waiting for me to say something intelligent.

“The woman at the station,” he prompts. “Why doesn’t she leave?”

Mr. Wolfe rests against the desk, his legs spread impossibly wide. In person, nothing about him stays where I can put it. His dark hair curls over his forehead. A small scar breaks his left eyebrow. His button-up shirt fits across broad shoulders, sleeves pushed back.

His eyes are startlingly blue. Worse, they stay on mine when I hesitate. He doesn’t rescue me from the silence or glance at a more promising student. He waits as if the answer is worth hearing.

I imagine meeting him somewhere without desks. My hand against his jaw, finding the roughness there. The exact moment we cross the line. I fantasize about my palm flat against his chest and feeling the heat through his shirt. His thumb traces the line of my waist; his hand slides to the back of my neck, and I step forward until there is no space between us. He tilts my chin up and kisses me — not gently. His tongue slides past my lips as if he already knows what I taste like, and when I kiss him back, my hands fisting his shirt, he makes a low sound that vibrates against my mouth.

He breaks the kiss. “Tell me to stop,” he says, and his voice is rough. I shake my head. “Don’t stop.”

He kisses me again, harder, his hands gripping my ass and pulling me against him until I can feel the hard length of his cock. He walks me backward until my back hits the wall, and then his hands are under my shirt, unfastening my bra, his thumbs brushing my nipples until they ache.

He kneels in front of me, his hands on my hips. “Can I?”

“Yes,” I breathe.

He pauses at the apex of my thighs. “You’re so wet,” he says, his breath against my clit. “Is this for me?”

“Yes.”

He slides one finger inside me, then another, and sucks my clit at the same time, and I shatter against the wall, crying out the name of my professor.

The classroom comes back the way a room does when someone switches on the light: all at once, and too bright.

I cross my legs. The pen has left a dent in my finger. I write the date at the top of the page and underline it twice, like a woman with a serious interest in the date.

Then he lifts his left hand to rub his eyebrow.

A wedding ring catches the light.

Of course.

There is probably a woman somewhere who kisses that mouth while deciding what to make for dinner. The unfairness of this thought is followed by embarrassment. He has asked me about our homework. I am behaving as though someone has stolen a future I invented thirty seconds ago.

I look at the photocopy on my desk. In its final paragraph, a woman stands beside a suitcase while the departure board changes.

“She can’t afford the ticket,” I say.

Mr. Wolfe glances at the page. “What makes you think that?”

“She counts her money twice. The author doesn’t tell us how much she has.” I loosen my grip on the pen. “And her sister doesn’t answer the phone. Maybe leaving isn’t the difficult part. Maybe it’s admitting she needs somewhere to go.”

He stands up and turns around, I try to avoid looking at his muscular ass in his tweed pants.

“Where does the story end if we take that seriously?”

He writes a question on the board: WHO CAN AFFORD TO LEAVE?

For the next ten minutes, the class argues about something I said.

I should be delighted. This is why I applied for his workshop. His first novel made ordinary people feel important without pretending their lives were secretly glamorous. I read it between café shifts, and when I reached the last page, I started again.

I wanted to learn how he did that. Apparently, I also wanted to make my life unnecessarily complicated.

My phone lights up beneath the desk.

Jess: Her stuff’s arriving Friday at ten. I’m so sorry. Any luck with the other room?

I turn the screen over. Jess’s sister needs the couch I've been sleeping on. The room I was supposed to rent has gone to someone who could pay the deposit immediately. I have eighty-three dollars, three packing boxes, and an interview at four that I cannot afford to fail.

At 20, I have become excellent at making emergencies look like scheduling problems.

When class ends, Wolfe reminds us that the first story submission is due Monday. People gather around him with books and questions. I slide my own battered copy deeper into my bag, suddenly unwilling to become another person asking for something.

“Rose Park?”

My hand stops on the zipper.

He waits until the last student leaves. The door stays open, voices passing in the corridor, but the room feels different with only two of us in it.

“Your application story,” he says. “The laundromat.”

I nod. A woman washes a shirt that doesn’t belong to her husband. Her daughter waits beside the vending machine, pretending not to understand.

He lifts a page from his folder. My final paragraph has one neat line through it.

“You don’t need this.”

I move closer to see. He smells faintly of coffee and the clean, ordinary soap that should not be memorable and now will be. Up close, there are fine lines at the corners of his eyes.

I want to lick the coffee from his mouth. I want him to push me back onto the desk and spread my legs, to tear my underwear aside and fuck me right here, with the door open and anyone walking by able to see us. I want him to grip my hips hard enough to bruise, to pound into me until I’m coming around his cock while he watches my face. I want to stand up afterward and smooth my skirt and walk out of the classroom as if nothing happened, with his come still dripping down my thigh.

I have never been this attracted to someone, let alone someone so inappropriate. I try to remember the reason this class was so important to me. This is inconvenient.

“That’s the explanation,” I say.

“I know.” He turns the page toward me. “What happens without it?”

I read the preceding sentence. Without it, the ending hits sooner and the reader can more or less assume what happens.

I spent six lines explaining an act that needed none.

“It hurts more.” I say while biting my lip slightly.

He gives me the almost-smile. This close, it is devastating.

“Try it. You can always put the paragraph back.”

I take the page. Our fingers touch, briefly and accidentally. He lets go at once. His phone vibrates on the desk. The screen shows two children wedged against his sides on a windy beach. A woman is laughing behind them, one hand holding her hair away from her face.

He turns the phone over, but the photograph has already done its work.

“Thank you, Mr. Wolfe.”

I make the title deliberate. A useful piece of furniture between us.

“See you Thursday, Rose.”

Outside, I sit on the low wall beside the library and take out my phone. The interview is for a tutoring job: school pickup and homework, three afternoons a week, twenty-five dollars an hour. Mrs. Alvarez, who supervised me at the library last summer, gave the woman my number.

There might also be a room. That is the part I have been afraid to believe.

A new message arrives from Claire Rowe.

'Still good for four? Side gate is easiest. The room above the garage is available if we’re a good fit. Adding a photo so you can find us.'

For a moment, all I see is the house. White paint, a deep porch, windows that catch the afternoon light. Behind it, above a detached garage, a little balcony sits beside an open door.

Then I notice the man carrying a child down the porch steps.

Blue eyes. Dark hair. A familiar left hand resting against a little boy’s back.

I enlarge the photograph, although I don’t need to.

At four o’clock, I am interviewing with Mr. Wolfe's wife.