*Chapter 18: Figuring It Out*
321 Words
The “rest of it” started with a problem neither of us expected: what do we tell people?
We walked out of the café and straight into the main road, where a few students from the department passed us.
One of them did a double take.
“Dr. Lena? Professor Reed?” she said, confused. “Oh—congratulations ma.”
I smiled and said thanks.
Elias just nodded, hands in his pockets, like he wasn’t sure if he should introduce me as anything else yet.
Once she was gone, he exhaled.
“Right,” he said. “That.”
We stopped under the shade of the neem tree by the gate.
“So,” I said. “Do we hide it?”
He looked at me, serious now.
“I don’t want to hide you. But I also don’t want to make it harder for you.”
I got what he meant. The defense was over, but the department was small. Gossip traveled faster than grades.
And I’d worked too hard to let people reduce it to ‘who she was dating.’
“We don’t hide,” I said. “We just don’t perform it either.”
He nodded.
“No announcements. No hiding. Just us, until it feels right to say it out loud.”
It felt like a plan we could live with.
We walked the rest of the way to my place in silence, but it wasn’t the tense silence from before. It was the kind that comes after a decision.
When we got to my gate, he didn’t reach for my hand this time.
Instead, he tucked a strand of hair behind my ear again, the same way he did outside Room 304.
“Dr. Lena,” he said quietly.
“Yeah, Elias?”
“See you tonight?”
I smiled.
“Yeah. See you tonight.”
And just like that, the figuring out started.
- Writer
