Off Limits, Professor

Chapter Six: The Faculty Lounge

Elena got her coffee and headed toward the Humanities building, turning the exchange over the same way she’d turned over the detail about the car, another loose thread she didn’t have the energy to pull on yet. Between Maya’s theories, Brianna’s obvious resentment, and her own inability to stop thinking about a man she was absolutely not supposed to be thinking about, the walk to class felt longer than usual, crowded with things she wasn’t ready to examine and had no intention of examining, not this early in the morning, not with an entire day of pretending everything was normal still ahead of her.

Adrian Cole had exactly one weakness, and it wasn’t the one anyone would have guessed.

It was the coffee machine in the faculty lounge.

He stood in front of it now, jaw tight with the particular frustration of a man who had negotiated seven-figure contracts without breaking a sweat and could not, for the life of him, figure out how to make the machine produce a plain black coffee instead of whatever it had just given him, something with an alarming amount of foam and a suspicious cinnamon smell.

“You’re doing it wrong,” said James Bellamy, appearing in the doorway with the smug expression of a man who had clearly been watching this unfold for longer than he was letting on.

“I’m aware.”

“You’ve been standing there for four minutes. I timed it. I had time to grade two essays.”

“The buttons make no sense.” Adrian gestured at the machine like it had personally wronged him. “There’s an icon that’s either a coffee bean or possibly a small explosion, I genuinely cannot tell, and it’s the only clue I’ve got.”

“It’s a coffee bean.” James pushed past him, nudged him aside with a shoulder, and pressed two buttons in quick succession with the ease of long familiarity. The machine obediently began producing something that actually resembled coffee. “You run a department’s worth of academic terror as a professor, you can apparently negotiate whatever it is you negotiate in that other life of yours you won’t tell me about, and you can’t operate a coffee machine. It’s genuinely one of the funniest things about you.”

“There is no other life,” Adrian said, too quickly, and James raised an eyebrow in the specific way of a man who’d known someone eleven years and recognized a deflection when he heard one.

“Sure. Whatever you say.” James handed him the cup, actual coffee this time, and leaned against the counter with the easy posture of someone settling in for a conversation he had no intention of rushing. “How’s the semester treating you? Heard you’ve got a strong section this year.”

“It’s fine.”

“Just fine? Priya Anand told my wife you’re the most popular professor in the department this semester, and my wife does not lie about departmental gossip, she takes it very seriously.” James took a sip of his own coffee, watching Adrian over the rim of the cup with the kind of attention that made Adrian distinctly uncomfortable. “There’s also a rumor going around that you’ve been unusually cheerful. Which, no offense, is new. You’ve had exactly one facial expression since I’ve known you, and it’s ‘mildly disappointed in the semicolon usage of the entire English-speaking world.’”

“That’s not a real expression.”

“It’s your expression, Adrian, I’ve watched you make it during faculty meetings for a decade.” James set his cup down, and his tone shifted, just slightly, into something more careful. “You’ve seemed different lately. Better, I mean. Lighter. I wasn’t going to say anything, but since you’re here, humiliating yourself in front of a coffee machine, I figured now’s as good a time as any.”

Adrian didn’t answer immediately, which was, in itself, an answer.

“Is it a person?” James asked, mild, like he was asking about the weather.

“It’s nothing.”

“That’s the least convincing ‘nothing’ I’ve heard since my daughter told me she definitely did not eat the last of the ice cream, while holding the empty container.” James studied him for a moment longer, and something in his expression softened, dropped the teasing edge entirely. “You’ve had a rough couple of years, Adrian. I’m not going to pretend I don’t know that, or that I haven’t watched you work very hard at not talking about it. If something’s actually making you happy again, I’m glad. I just want to make sure you’re being careful. Whatever it is.”

“There’s nothing to be careful about,” Adrian said, and this time it came out sharper than he meant it to, sharp enough that James’s eyebrows rose again.

“Okay.” James held up both hands, backing off with the practiced ease of a man who knew exactly when to stop pushing. “Noted. Message received. I’ll drop it.”

They stood in silence for a moment, the machine still gurgling faintly behind them, and Adrian felt the specific discomfort of having reacted too strongly to a question that shouldn’t have mattered as much as it did.

“How’s Diane?” he asked, an obvious subject change, and James let him have it, the way old friends did.

“Loud. Wonderful. Currently furious with me because I forgot our anniversary was coming up and she found out because the florist called the house instead of my cell.” James shook his head, mostly fond. “Nineteen years married and I still manage to be an i***t about the calendar.”

“Nineteen years.”

“Nineteen years. Feels like both nineteen minutes and also several centuries, depending on the day.” James glanced at him sideways. “You’ll understand that eventually. Assuming whatever’s making you hum in the hallways works out.”

“I don’t hum.”

“You were humming this morning. In the copy room. I heard you.” James grinned, delighted at having caught him. “Something that sounded like Fleetwood Mac, actually, which is a strange choice, but I don’t judge a man’s taste in hallway humming.”

Adrian felt his face go warm in a way that had nothing to do with the coffee, and he busied himself with the cup instead of responding, which only made James’s grin widen further.

“I’ll see you at the department meeting,” Adrian said, aiming for dignity and mostly failing.

“You will. And Adrian.” James’s voice caught him at the door, gentler now, all the teasing set aside. “Whatever’s going on. I hope it’s good for you. You deserve that, after everything.”

Adrian nodded once, not trusting himself to say much else, and left the lounge with a coffee he still wasn’t entirely sure was drinkable and a knot in his chest he didn’t examine too closely, because examining it meant admitting how much of his morning, his week, his entire recent state of mind, had nothing to do with grading and everything to do with a girl in the front row who argued with him like she had nothing left to lose and looked at him sometimes like she’d already lost something once and wasn’t planning on doing it again.

He walked back toward his office, past the department boards, past students he didn’t fully register, and did not notice, until he was nearly at his door, the woman standing near the mailroom watching him with an expression that was doing a very poor job of pretending to be casual.

Naomi Voss straightened when she saw him look over, offered a smile that didn’t reach her eyes any more than it usually did, and said nothing at all, which was somehow worse than if she’d said something.

He nodded to her, the polite, careful nod of colleagues who’d never quite warmed to each other, and kept walking, telling himself it meant nothing, that she was simply checking her mail, that the way she’d been watching him wasn’t anything more than idle curiosity.

He didn’t quite believe himself. He hadn’t, if he was honest, believed a version of that sentence in weeks.