Office Hours

Chapter 3: Office Hours

Kairo started showing up to office hours in week three, which would have been unremarkable except that he never actually had questions about the coursework.

"I don't need help with the reading," he admitted on the fourth visit, dropping into the chair across from her desk like it was his by now. Which, at this point, it basically was. "I just think you explain things better than the professor, and also this office has the only decent chair in the building."

"That's a very specific compliment."

"I contain multitudes." He glanced at the stack of quizzes on her desk. "You want help grading? I'm very fair. Ruthlessly fair, actually."

"Absolutely not. That's an integrity violation and also none of your business."

"Worth a shot." He didn't leave, though, just settled further into the chair, and Temi found herself, against every piece of professional judgment she owned, not asking him to. There was something about the ease of him that made the small windowless office feel less like a place she disappeared her lunch hour and more like somewhere she wanted to be.

"Can I ask you something," he said, after a stretch of comfortable quiet where she'd actually gotten through two whole quizzes without looking up. "Serious question."

"Depends how serious."

"Do you ever feel like you're performing your own life? Like there's a version of you doing all the correct next things, dating the correct person, saying the correct things at family dinner, and then there's whoever's actually inside doing the performing, and nobody's checked in with her in a while?"

Temi set her pen down slowly. It was, unfairly, the most precisely he had ever described a feeling she'd never said out loud to anyone except a stranger's radio dial at midnight. "That's a strange thing to ask your TA."

"You didn't say no."

"I'm processing whether to be alarmed at how specific that was."

Kairo laughed, and it changed his whole face, took the practiced ease out of it and left something more real underneath. "Sorry. My family's got a lot of opinions about who I'm supposed to be. Business, then law, then a nice long career being exactly as unremarkable and successful as my father. I transferred here partly to get some distance from all of it. Been feeling a little raw about it lately, I guess. You get an unfiltered version of me on Tuesdays."

"Lucky me."

"You are, actually," he said, easy again, but with something steadier underneath it now. "Most people don't get the unfiltered version. I don't usually let them."

The office felt smaller than it had five minutes ago. Temi was aware, in a way she didn't love, of the exact distance between his knee and the edge of her desk, of the low afternoon light through the one high window, of the fact that this was, professionally, exactly the kind of conversation she was supposed to redirect before it went anywhere close to where it was drifting.

"I should get back to grading," she said, gently, and meant it as the redirect it needed to be.

Kairo caught the shift immediately, the way he seemed to catch everything, and stood without protest, no hurt feelings visible, just a small nod like he'd registered the boundary and respected it. "Right. Sorry. Tuesday's a good day for me to overshare, apparently."

"It's fine," Temi said, and was surprised to find she meant that too. "You can overshare. Just, maybe not about how good I am at explaining media theory. It's making me suspicious of your motives."

"My motives are extremely suspicious," Kairo said, already at the door, grinning back at her in a way that made the whole redirect feel considerably less successful than she'd intended it to be. "See you Thursday, Professor."

"TA. I'm not a professor."

"You will be. I have a good feeling about you." And then he was gone, footsteps fading down the hall, leaving her alone with two ungraded quizzes and a distinctly unprofessional amount of quiet giddiness she had absolutely no intention of examining further.

She examined it further that night, alone in her apartment, staring at the ceiling instead of sleeping.

It wasn't attraction alone, though there was plenty of that, uncomfortable and inconvenient as it was. It was that Kairo had, in four sentences, described something about her own life more accurately than Dele had managed in three years, and more accurately than she'd let herself describe it even to Aro, who came closer than anyone. There was a version of Temi doing all the correct next things. There was a version of her who only came out at midnight on a low frequency signal, saying true things to strangers because it was the one place true things felt safe.

She thought about the boy in the quad who'd said everybody has secrets, I look forward to finding out yours, and the boy in her office today who'd described exactly the shape of the secret without knowing its name, and she thought, with a discomfort that sat heavy in her chest, that this was precisely the kind of coincidence her mother would call fate and Kairo would refuse to believe in before ten in the morning.

She thought about Dele's arm around her on the porch swing, warm and familiar and entirely, comfortably known.

She did not think, because she wasn't ready to, about which version of known she actually wanted.

Sleep, when it finally came, offered no answers either. Just the sound of Kairo's voice in her head, unhurried, patient, telling her he looked forward to finding out.