Undecided

Undecided. I sat crisscrossed in my worn jeans and oversized Catfish and the Bottlemen tee out on the quad, staring at the electronic version of my schedule from my first semester of freshman year on my phone. As my tired, nervous fingers slid across the screen, I realized how much time had passed me by. Classes were taken, exams were passed, and friends came and went. Only one thing remained the same: I was still undecided. When I thought about it—really thought about it—long and hard, I was still fucking undecided. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. Not even an inkling. Not even a sliver of a thought of an idea. I had finished every general requirement there was, and I knew that this semester was crucial. I needed to decide. What do you do when you can’t decide?

“Bitch, what are you even thinking about so pensively over there?” Jase asked.

“Just how undecided I really am,” I said.

“Maybe you should do business or something like that. Mary’s getting a business degree, and she seems really happy.”

“Business?” I sighed. “Maybe you should mind your own fucking business.” I was teasing him, of course, and we tossed ourselves back in the grass and looked up at the bright, late-summer sun.

“Mentioning of business, did you end up signing up for that class we talked about?” he pressed eagerly, a mischievous little smirk on his face.

“The sex one?”

“It’s called Seduction in Literature, ya silly bitch,” he laughed.

“Yeah, same thing,” I shrugged. “And yes, I signed up for it. You pretty much threatened me, so I did.”

“Well then, we’ve got to go. We don’t want to be late on the first day of class.”

Jason, or Jase, as I called him, and Mary were just about the only friends I’d met since I started at Swanson University who had decided to stick with me semester after semester. A lot of times, people came and went. That was to be expected. You’d have a class with someone, and maybe you’d be study buddies, or maybe you’d do a group assignment with them, but when all was said and done, people went their separate ways at the end of each semester. Jason and Mary were in it for the full term. Jase was a Criminal Justice sweetheart. He was incredibly bright, abundantly hilarious, and never missed an opportunity to make me smile. Mary was a Business Management hopeful. She was always studying hard, and when she wasn’t, she was reading her bible or curling up on the quad with a good book. They were my friends, and I was theirs.

Jase and I knew our way around this campus after the two years we had under our metaphorical belts, and we quickly found the basement of the Dawson Building where our class was to be held. When we walked into room AC 10 and found seats, students were still filing in, and the professor was nowhere to be found.

“Have you heard of Noah Kingsley?” Sally Gunderson asked the girl sitting next to her in the row in front of us. Jase and I purposefully chose to sit in the back, hoping that we would go mostly unnoticed.

“No, I don’t think so. Who is he?” her friend questioned curiously.

“Oh my gosh. He’s so fucking hot. It’s unreal,” Sally answered, placing her head in her palms as she dazed into the abyss of the seminar room dreamily.

“I’ve heard that he’s incredibly hot,” Jase said quietly, addressing me directly.

“Who? Noah Kingsley?”

“What? No, I mean Dr. Cardiff. Everyone says that he dresses really well, too,” he chuckled.

“Really? I haven’t heard that. Where did you hear—”

I stopped myself abruptly when he walked into the room. In fact, I swore every single student in the class stopped talking, putting down their phones and shutting their laptops to give him their complete attention. Maybe it was my imagination, though. I blinked repeatedly, taking him in. I couldn’t give two fucks about what he was wearing, despite the information that Jase had just given me. I only studied him: dark eyes accented with black, round-framed glasses, perfectly shaped jaw covered in neatly trimmed facial hair, and a sharp-looking haircut for his dark, curly hair. I cleared my throat nervously and peered over at Jase, but I didn’t want to say anything out loud. Instead, I leaned over and wrote on a blank page in his notebook: What the fuck, dude? He laughed quietly, and we straightened in our seats when everyone else did at the first sound of his voice.

“Good afternoon, everyone. I’m Dr. Cardiff, and I’m assuming you’re all here because you like sex.” The room burst into laughter at this casual yet brazen introduction. I was intrigued, too, of course. “There’s going to be plenty of it. I’ve assigned some readings and films for this course, so be sure to have those in your hands by the end of the week. Class discussions will revolve around that material, and you’re encouraged to participate. I don’t do graded assignments, other than an introductory paper, a midterm, and a final. The purpose of an introductory paper is to get to know each of you and your writing voice,” he explained.

I watched as Jase scribbled in my notebook: Was I right? I shook my head adamantly, pretending that he wasn’t. But he was. He was so fucking right.

“There often isn’t much to do on the first day, so let’s talk about why you’re all here. Does anyone want to volunteer?” he encouraged. Sally’s hand shot up in the air eagerly. “In the back,” he announced, calling on her.

“I’m here because it said online that we have to read Fifty Shades of Grey,” she confessed.

“And you’re here because you’d like to read it?” he asked, not even trying to hide the clever smile that came to his lips upon responding to her.

“I’ve already read it,” she said, sounding a little feisty.

“Well, then you must be an expert. Why don’t you come down here?” he teased. I bit my lip, a breathy laugh escaping nervously as I shook my head. I was obviously amused by him, just like everyone else was, but I was trying so hard not to be. That was the reaction he wanted; it wasn’t the reaction I wanted to give him. “Back row,” he said, speaking up and nodding his head in my direction. Before I could open my mouth to speak, Jase piped up.

“We’re here for Robert Greene. The Art of Seduction,” he said, and I knew he had prepared a joke before it even came out of his mouth, “and we want to know which archetype describes you.”

“In due time,” Cardiff said. “What about your friend?” I shook my head at Jase as if I had to answer to him and not to the professor. It was a desperate plea, really. I was internally asking him to tell the professor that I couldn’t talk. Maybe he could say that I had laryngitis. That sounded rational.

“She’s also here for—”

“—The classics,” I interrupted. “Casanova, especially.”

“Interesting. I would assume that most of your classmates wouldn’t agree with you. English major?” he asked curiously.

“Undecided,” I said, my voice loud enough that he could hear me but quiet enough that I hoped he wouldn’t.

“We’d be happy to have you,” he said, shining a bright smile at me before turning his attention back to the rest of the group. “Anyone else?” A girl in the front row muttered something inaudibly, and he tapped on the table in front of her, encouraging her to share.

“We’re here to see your outfits. We overheard last semester that you dress like a GQ model,” she said nervously, her face becoming flushed and perfectly pink.

“I do like to get dressed every morning. I’d encourage each of you to let me know if I ever forget.”

He wanted us to let him know if he ever forgot to get dressed. What? Did I hear that correctly? I knew I wasn’t the only one in this classroom who would refrain from saying something if he did happen to forget. For the rest of class, he explained the introductory paper, which sounded simple enough to me. Everyone else seemed to be dreading having to write a paper so soon, but I loved writing. I was eager to do it. In fact, you could even say that I was eager to write something just to have him lay his eyes on it. Maybe he would lay his eyes on it while he was sitting in his grand, leather chair at home later this week. Maybe he would cross one leg over the other and lean back, taking a sip of some expensive liquor out of his lowball glass as he read it. Or maybe he would lay it across his lap when he curled up in bed for the night, peering at my words under the light of his bedside reading lamp and the moonlit sky coming through the window. Or maybe he would just peruse it in the bath, wearing nothing but that shaggy, sexy hair, his round-framed glasses, and a smile. Fuck. Good God, did I want to write that paper—and right away, too.