Off Limits, Professor

Chapter Two: Office Hours

Elena told herself she wasn’t going to think about it.

She told herself that Tuesday night, lying in bed with her literature notes spread across the comforter, and again Wednesday morning over a coffee she let go cold. She told herself a third time walking to her part-time shift at the campus library, shelving returns with more force than the books deserved. It didn’t work any of the three times. Professor Cole’s voice kept surfacing in her head at inconvenient moments, low and even, asking her what a poem was afraid of.

It was just a good question, she reasoned. That was all. The kind of question a professor asked to make you feel smart on the first day so you’d come back for the second.

By Thursday, she’d almost convinced herself of that.

Then she got the email.

Ms. Reyes — I’d like to discuss your response from Tuesday in more depth. Office hours are Thursday 2-4, Humanities 219. No obligation, but I think you have more to say than you got the chance to. — A. Cole

She read it four times, standing in the library stacks with her phone in one hand and a returned copy of Wuthering Heights in the other, like the book itself might have an opinion.

No obligation. She turned the phrase over in her mind, deciding what it meant. Professors didn’t usually email students individually after one comment in a seminar. Then again, she didn’t know what professors usually did, not really. She’d spent three years at this school being careful, keeping her head down, doing the work well enough to keep her scholarship and not well enough to be noticed. Being noticed had never worked out for her.

She almost didn’t go.

She went anyway.

Room 219 turned out to be smaller than she expected, tucked at the end of a hallway that smelled like old paper and radiator heat. The door was half open. She knocked on the frame instead of walking straight in, some old instinct about not crossing thresholds without permission.

“Come in.”

He was behind a desk stacked with books that looked more read than decorative, sleeves rolled up the same way they’d been on Tuesday, a red pen resting on a pile of ungraded papers. He looked up when she stepped inside, and for a second neither of them said anything.

“Ms. Reyes.” He gestured to the chair across from him. “Sit, if you want. Or don’t. I know office hours can feel like a summons.”

“It kind of does,” she admitted, sitting anyway.

“It’s not meant to be.” He leaned back, studying her with the same stillness she’d noticed in the classroom, like he had all the time in the world and no interest in rushing through it. “I wanted to ask you something I couldn’t ask in front of twenty other people.”

Her stomach did something complicated. “Okay.”

“Where did that answer come from? The one about surviving instead of dying.” He tapped the desk once, absently. “It wasn’t a classroom answer. It was too specific. Too lived-in.”

Elena felt the question land somewhere it shouldn’t have been able to reach, given they’d known each other for exactly one class period. She considered deflecting. She was good at deflecting; she’d had years of practice turning conversations away from anything that got too close to the truth.

“I read a lot of poetry,” she said instead, which wasn’t a lie, just an incomplete answer.

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I know.” She met his eyes for the first time since sitting down. “It’s the answer I’m giving.”

Something flickered across his face, and for a second she thought she’d overstepped, that she’d just handed a professor attitude on her second real interaction with him and it was going to cost her somehow. Instead, the corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile, more like the beginning of one he’d decided not to finish.

“Fair enough,” he said. “I won’t push.”

“Why did you want to know?”

He considered the question longer than she expected. “Because most people your age haven’t learned that yet. That grief isn’t the dramatic part. Continuing is the dramatic part.” He looked down at the stack of papers in front of him, and something passed behind his eyes that she couldn’t name, gone before she could study it properly. “Some people learn it early. I was curious which one you were.”

She wanted to ask what he meant by some people learn it early. She wanted to ask if he was one of them. Instead she said, “Is that going to be the theme of this whole class? Cheerful stuff like that?”

That got an actual laugh out of him, short and surprised, like it wasn’t a sound he let out often. “It’s a literature seminar on loss and memory. I did warn you it wasn’t going to be fluffy.”

“You said unfashionable. Not devastating.”

“Give it a few weeks.”

They talked for longer than she meant to stay, longer than office hours probably warranted for a student he’d known three days. He asked what she was writing her senior thesis on, and when she told him, hesitantly, that she hadn’t fully decided, he didn’t lecture her about deadlines the way her advisor had. He asked her what she was afraid the thesis would say about her if she picked wrong, which was such a strange and specific question that she found herself actually thinking about the answer instead of giving him the easy one.

At some point she realized she’d been in his office for forty minutes and the light outside the window had shifted, gone gold and low the way it did in late afternoon in November, and she still hadn’t checked her phone once.

“I should go,” she said, standing abruptly, aware suddenly of how comfortable the chair had gotten, how easy the conversation had been. “I have a shift.”

“Of course.” He stood too, out of some old habit of manners, and for a second they were both just standing there in the small office, close enough that she noticed the ink stain on his shirt cuff, the way his desk lamp threw warm light across half his face and left the other half in shadow.

“Thank you,” she said. “For the email. I almost didn’t come.”

“I’m glad you did.” He said it simply, without any weight behind it that she could point to, and yet she felt it land somewhere it shouldn’t have.

She left before either of them could turn the moment into something neither of them was ready to name.

Walking back across the quad, the cold air felt sharper than it had on Tuesday, cutting through her jacket in a way that made her walk faster, made her want to outrun the strange, warm unsettled feeling sitting in her chest. She told herself it was nothing. He was a professor who happened to be good at his job, who happened to ask better questions than most people bothered to ask her. That was all.

She almost believed it, allthe way back to her apartment.

But that night, lying in bed again with her notes untouched beside her, she found herself replaying the forty minutes in his office instead of the poem they were supposed to have been discussing. The way he’d asked what she was afraid the thesis would say about her. The way he’d said I’m glad you did like it cost him something small and honest to say it.

She rolled over, pulled the blanket up, and made herself a new rule to go with the old one.

Don’t go back to office hours again.

She had a feeling, even as she made it, that this rule wasn’t going to last either.