Teacher's Delight

Chapter Eighteen Josh

He stayed in his office a long time after she left.

He hadn't planned to. He'd meant to gather his things and go home the moment the door closed behind her, the way he did most evenings, but instead he found himself sitting very still in the dark building, the desk lamp the only light on the whole floor, replaying the conversation with the specific, unproductive thoroughness of a man who knew he was going to do this and had stopped trying to talk himself out of it.

He had told her about Marcus. Actually told her, out loud, the real version, not the sanitized faculty-meeting version he'd been giving Dale for eighteen months. He turned that fact over and found, to his mild surprise, that he didn't regret it. He'd expected to — had braced, walking into tonight's session, for the particular hollow feeling that usually followed him being more honest than he'd planned to be, the sense of having handed someone a piece of himself he couldn't get back. It hadn't come. What had come instead, sitting across the desk from her while the building emptied out around them, was something closer to relief, the specific loosening of a muscle he hadn't fully registered he'd been clenching for four months.

He made himself sit with the harder question, the one he'd been circling since Jessica's call and hadn't yet forced himself to answer directly: what he actually felt, named plainly, without the careful hedging he'd been using even in his own head.

It wasn't infatuation. He'd had infatuations before, in the ordinary way anyone does, small and passing and easily outlasted by time or distance. This had outlasted four months of deliberate cruelty, which infatuation generally didn't survive — infatuation needed to be fed, needed proximity and warmth to keep itself alive, and he had starved this one on purpose, systematically, for a full semester, and it had not gone anywhere. It had, if anything, grown more specific. He didn't just want her attention anymore, the vague, uncomplicated flattery of being liked by someone brilliant. He wanted to know what she sounded like when she wasn't performing composure for a professor. He wanted to know the actual story behind the flight-cost math she apparently did in her head, the thing Margaret had let slip once in passing that he'd filed away and thought about more than he should have. He wanted, if he let himself be entirely honest in the dark of an empty office, to be the person she called at three in the morning when a battery housing failed for the second time, not because he could fix it, but because she'd trust him enough to want him on the other end of that call.

That wasn't infatuation. That was something with roots, and roots were exactly what he'd spent four months trying to prevent from forming, and they had formed anyway, quietly, underneath the wall, the way roots did regardless of what grew visibly on the surface.

He thought about Marcus again, differently this time. Not as a cautionary tale to organize his caution around, but as an actual question he'd never let himself ask honestly: what would Marcus tell him, now, eighteen months and a banker's box later, if he called him tonight and said I think I might be in love with a student and I don't know what to do about it? Would Marcus tell him to run, to build the wall higher, to learn from a mistake Josh hadn't even made yet? Or would Marcus — quiet now, selling insurance in a town Josh had never visited, carrying a version of I don't know if it was ever real that he'd have to live with for the rest of his life — tell him that the actual mistake hadn't been the wanting at all, it had been the eighteen months of not being honest about it, with her or with himself, until the not-being-honest became its own kind of rot?

He didn't know. He'd probably never know, because he still hadn't made the call, and some nights he suspected he never would, not because he didn't want to, but because some part of him understood that Marcus's silence wasn't really about anger — it was about a man who'd built himself a smaller life specifically so he wouldn't have to keep explaining the bigger one he'd lost.

What he did know, sitting in the dark with the desk lamp throwing a small circle of light across an annotated deployment model, was that the lesson he'd built out of Marcus's story had been the wrong one. Not never want anything dangerous. Something closer to: if you're going to want something dangerous, have the courage to be honest about it, at every step, rather than let the silence do the damage instead.

He didn't know yet what honesty actually got to look like, given the rule, given the advisory relationship, given a program and a grade and a professional structure that made any version of this genuinely complicated in ways he couldn't simply reason his way around by being brave in an empty office. He wasn't going to solve that tonight. But he could stop lying to himself about the basic shape of it, and that felt, sitting alone in the dark, like the first honest thing he'd managed in four months that didn't cost someone else something to hear.

He gathered his things, finally, and turned off the lamp, and stood a moment in the doorway of his own office the way he imagined Marcus must have stood in his, eighteen months ago, a man about to leave a room he wasn't sure he'd get to keep. The comparison unsettled him more than he expected. He made himself walk out anyway, because the alternative — standing in doorways indefinitely, afraid of every room he might eventually have to leave — was its own kind of banker's box, just one that never got packed and never got carried anywhere at all.