Off Limits, Professor

Chapter Nine: Office Hours, Interrupted

The email arrived on a Wednesday, brief and formal in a way that felt deliberately different from the last one.

*Ms. Reyes — Could you stop by office hours this week regarding your thesis proposal timeline? Nothing urgent. — Professor Cole*

Not *Elena*. Not *AC*. The full, careful formality of it sat oddly in her chest, equal parts relief and disappointment, which she recognized as an entirely unreasonable way to feel about an email concerning academic deadlines.

She went anyway, obviously. She'd known she would from the moment she read it.

Room 219 looked the same as it always did, stacks of books that seemed to multiply weekly, the particular afternoon light that made the whole room feel amber and warm even on a grey October day. He looked up when she knocked, and something in his expression, careful, guarded, softened by degrees the second he saw it was her, before visibly reasserting itself into something more professional.

"Ms. Reyes. Thank you for coming."

"You said it was about my thesis timeline."

"It is." He gestured to the chair, and she noticed, with the particular attentiveness she'd developed over the past two months, that he waited until she was seated before he sat back down himself, an old habit of manners that she'd started finding unbearably charming despite her best efforts not to. "You haven't submitted a formal proposal yet, and the deadline's in three weeks. I wanted to check in before it becomes a problem."

"I've been thinking about it."

"Thinking, or avoiding?"

She almost smiled at that, the directness of it, so familiar after weeks of careful distance that it felt like coming up for air. "Bit of both, honestly."

"What's the holdup?"

Elena hesitated, turning her bag strap over in her hands, an old nervous habit she hadn't quite managed to break. "I keep starting proposals about safe topics. Things I know I can write a solid, competent paper about. And every time, I think about what you said, that I hold back in my conclusions, that I retreat into what I think you want instead of what I actually think." She looked up at him. "I don't know how to write an entire thesis about something that actually matters to me without it becoming too personal."

Something shifted in his expression, understanding, careful. "That's not actually a bad place to start from."

"It feels like a bad place to start from."

"Most good work starts from an uncomfortable place." He leaned back slightly, considering her with the particular focus that always made her feel like the only person in the room, in the building, possibly on the entire campus. "What would you write about, if you weren't worried about it being too personal?"

She thought about it, actually thought about it, turning over ideas she'd been too afraid to say out loud even to herself. "Grief literature. Not the performative kind, the loud, dramatic mourning you see in a lot of classic texts. The quiet kind. The kind that doesn't announce itself. Characters who keep functioning, who go to work and answer emails and make dinner, while something underneath them has fundamentally changed and nobody around them notices."

The room went very quiet.

"That's a strong thesis topic," he said finally, his voice lower than before, something in it that made her chest tighten. "Genuinely strong. You should write that."

"You think so?"

"I know so." He held her gaze a beat too long, the careful professional distance he'd maintained for two weeks cracking slightly at the edges. "I could recommend some texts. If you want them."

"I'd like that."

He reached for a legal pad, started scribbling titles in handwriting she'd learned to recognize from margin notes on her papers, occasionally pausing to explain why a particular choice mattered, why one author had understood something about loss that most writers missed entirely. She found herself leaning forward without meaning to, caught up in the specific pleasure of watching someone talk about something they genuinely loved, the same pleasure she remembered from that very first class, his voice low and unhurried over a poem about grief.

"This one," he said, tapping a title near the bottom of the list, "is going to be difficult to find. Out of print for years. But if you can get your hands on a copy, it's worth it."

"I'll check the library archive."

"If they don't have it, I might." Something flickered across his face, brief and unreadable, gone before she could name it. "I have a copy at home. I could bring it in, if you'd like to borrow it."

"I'd like that," she said again, quieter this time, aware of how much smaller the space between them had gotten without either of them moving.

For a few minutes the conversation settled into something easier, more familiar, both of them leaning slightly toward the desk between them as he explained why one particular novel handled quiet grief better than the more famous, more obvious choices, his hands gesturing as he spoke in a way she'd noticed before and told herself, unconvincingly, that she hadn't been paying attention to.

The knock on the door interrupted them both.

"Professor Cole?" A woman's voice, brisk, faintly irritated even in two words. The door was already opening before he'd fully answered, and Naomi Voss stepped inside, sharp-eyed, sharper still when she registered Elena sitting across from him.

"Naomi." Adrian's posture changed instantly, subtly, straightening in a way Elena recognized from every faculty interaction she'd witnessed, some old instinct toward careful neutrality. "I'm with a student."

"So I see." Naomi's gaze flicked briefly to Elena, assessing, unreadable, before returning to Adrian. "This will only take a moment. The department chair wants the committee assignments finalized by Friday, and you still haven't submitted your preferences."

"I'll have them to you by tomorrow."

"You said that last week." Naomi's tone was light, almost pleasant, which somehow made it worse. "I'm not trying to be difficult, Adrian. I just find it curious that you've had time to meet with students individually but not time to fill out a form."

"I've been busy."

"Everyone's busy." Naomi's eyes moved to Elena again, longer this time, something calculating behind the polite expression. "Ms. Reyes, is it? You're in the advanced seminar."

"Yes." Elena kept her voice even, though something about the woman's attention made her skin prickle uncomfortably.

"I've heard good things. Professor Cole doesn't usually single students out for extra attention." The comment landed with deliberate weight, and Elena watched Adrian's jaw tighten almost imperceptibly. "Must be quite the thesis proposal."

"It's still in progress," Elena said carefully.

"I'm sure it'll be excellent, given the guidance." Naomi's smile was thin, professional, entirely unconvincing as warmth. She turned back to Adrian. "Tomorrow, Adrian. I mean it. The chair's already asking questions about the delay, and I'd hate for anyone to start wondering why."

She left without waiting for a response, the door clicking shut behind her with more force than necessary, and the room felt smaller in her absence, the easy warmth of a few minutes ago replaced by something tighter, more careful.

"Sorry about that," Adrian said finally.

"Is everything okay?"

"Fine. Departmental politics." He said it lightly, but something in his expression didn't quite match the casual tone, a tension around his eyes that hadn't been there before Naomi walked in. "She's not wrong that I've been slow with paperwork lately. I've had other things on my mind."

"Does she not like you? She seemed... pointed."

"Naomi and I have a complicated history in this department." He chose the words carefully, deliberately vague in a way that made Elena more curious rather than less. "She's been here longer. Applied for a position I ended up getting. It's created some tension, understandably."

"That doesn't seem fair to you either. It's not like you asked her to lose out on something."

"No. But it doesn't always work that way, does it. Sometimes people need somewhere to put their disappointment, and it's easier if there's someone specific to point it at." He said this with the particular weariness of a man who'd had significant practice being that someone. "It's fine. I try not to give her more reasons than necessary."

Elena wanted to ask what things, wanted to ask why Naomi's attention had felt less like professional curiosity and more like the beginning of an investigation, wanted to ask a dozen questions she didn't have the right to ask. Instead, she gathered her bag, aware suddenly of how long she'd been in his office, how the light outside had shifted toward evening while they talked.

"I should go," she said, the familiar words between them now, worn smooth from repetition.

"You should." He stood too, the same old habit, and for a moment neither of them moved, the aftermath of Naomi's visit still hanging in the air between them, unspoken. "Elena."

"Yes?"

"Be careful. With the thesis topic, I mean. Grief is heavier to carry on paper than people expect." Something in his voice suggested he wasn't only talking about her thesis, and she wondered, not for the first time, exactly what he'd lost that had taught him that particular lesson so thoroughly.

"I will."

She left his office with the reading list folded carefully in her bag and Naomi's pointed questions turning over in her mind, one more thread added to the growing pile she still hadn't found the courage to pull, and the distinct, uneasy feeling that whatever was building around them, quietly, in faculty meetings and hallway glances and questions that weren't really about paperwork at all, was moving faster than either of them wanted to admit.