Chapter 2
Put It on the Table
He sees me right away when he comes in the door. I wave. He puts a hand up in return while he pulls off his hat—it’s still cold for March—then he points between me and the counter, eyebrows raised. Do I want a coffee? I raise my cup and mouth, I’m good.
See, he’s thoughtful, as well as a dreamboat.
I try not to watch him too closely as he orders his usual flat white—steamed milk and four shots of espresso! How is that healthy? He is totally unaware of me, though, so I kind of stare. I stare at the line of his jaw, the curve of his bottom lip, the movement of his larynx when he orders. There are laugh lines just beginning to be visible around his eyes—I can’t really see them from here, but I imagine I can, behind his glasses. He’s wearing his shitty beige duffle coat, his hat stuffed halfway into the pocket. The ducklings have decided among ourselves that his coat used to be the color of baby puke, but years of neglect have left it somewhere between the color of baby puke and rainwater in a ditch.
But I’m telling you, it is a mercy to the world that the man doesn’t try to look good, because even with his shitty beige duffle coat, eyes are turning to watch him. It happens every time. Does he know this goes on? Does he hide it on purpose?
We ducklings have speculated that under the shitty beige duffle coat and inevitable—and inevitably wrinkled—blue Oxford shirt is the body of a Greek god. We’re pretty sure this is true. We have no evidence, but we’re pretty sure.
When he gets to my table, he puts his stuff down, hangs his coat over the back of his chair (revealing the wrinkled blue Oxford shirt—it’s the stripy one today), and sits down opposite me.
“Sorry I’m late. You know how Diana gets. How are you, Annie?”
Of course I know it’s just polite to ask someone, “How are you?” at the start of a conversation. I do know that. It’s just, when Charles asks you how you are, he’s really asking. My pulse accelerates by about fifty beats per minute, I fight off a stupid grin, and I debate just spilling my guts right then. As a matter of fact, Charles, lustbucket of my loins, I have been masturbating to fantasies of you for a year and a half, and if I graduate without at least trying to actually be naked in a bed with you, I will live with that regret for the rest of my life.
But with my heart now pounding audibly in my head, I opt for the slightly more conventional, “I’m good. How are you?”
I am a conversational goddess, weaving a magical spell. No, I’m not. Headdesk.
“Good, good,” he answers. “You’re having difficulty with your data?”
So we’re getting right to it, are we, Charles? No gentle buildup, just straight to the data I don’t need to talk about?
And this is the moment. This is when . . . I chicken out completely.
Instead of confidently propositioning him, I pull out my laptop and mumble something about variance to cover the awkwardness as I open a spreadsheet full of correlations.
“Uhhhh . . .” I say persuasively. “Not so much difficulty as I’m just feeling uncertain about whether I saw everything there was to see. I’d just like another pair of eyes to go over it and see if maybe there was something I missed.” I’m making this up as I go.
“Sure, glad to.” He pulls my laptop to his side of the table and runs his eyes down the columns. “Not like you, eh? Usually you dot every i and cross every t and never look back to consider whether one might have slipped past you.”
“Well”—I shrug into my coffee—“they kinda never do slip past.” This is not arrogance; it’s just true. I am detail-oriented. Even Professor Smith says so.
What a shame that skill is of no help to me in asking a man to have sex with me.
He grins. “True enough. The pink cells are the .001 significance?”
“And the yellow are .01, yep.” I nod. I am an abject coward. I am a groveling little troll. Ass balls fuck.
He says, “Hm. This is interesting.... How much time have you got?”
“I have class at three,” I say.
“Well, it won’t take that long, but let me . . .” He’s copying an array from the raw data and pasting it into a new spreadsheet. He saves it to our shared Dropbox (we share a Dropbox, he and I. No big deal), then pulls out his own computer and opens the file there with the statistical software. “This’ll take a moment,” he says. As he labels variables, he says, “Feeling a little unsure about the thesis?”
“No, not really,” I say, and it’s true.
He raises an eyebrow at me, skeptical. “You’re looking a little rough around the edges, if you’ll forgive me for mentioning it. It’s normal to feel anxious about a big project. I was a wreck when I was writing my senior thesis.”
He’s being so nice, I can hardly stand it.
“Dude, you were, like, twelve when you were writing your senior thesis.”
“Eighteen,” he grins at his screen.
“Same difference! Everything causes anxiety when you’re eighteen.”
“As opposed to the confident, striding age of twenty-two. So, not the thesis then. Personal? Should I not ask? Boy troubles?”
“Um, not as such,” I say.
“Girl troubles, then?”
That makes me laugh. And then I decide to tell the truth—most of it. “It’s a man, not a boy, and it’s not so much trouble as . . . a profound lack of trouble, when I would like very much for there to be trouble.”
“You’re not going to tell me you’ve got a crush on a professor, are you?” he says, teasing.
And there it is. My window of opportunity. I can let it pass, or I can step through into possibility.
With my throat thick and my heart racing, I step through.
I look right at him, lick my dry lips, and say, “Not a professor.”
He looks up from his screen and blinks. As my meaning settles into his brain, he flushes pink, the way he does when anyone compliments him or thanks him for anything.
“I . . .” he says.
“You . . . er,” he continues.
“That is . . .” he concludes.
Oh, this is way worse than I expected. So. Much. Worse. But what did I expect? Was there any point at which I really imagined him saying no? Saying yes? Saying anything? Or did I only think as far as the asking?
I shake my head and wave the subject away. “Don’t worry about it. Forget it.”
“Okay,” he says with immediate and mortifying relief, and he looks back down at the screen, where new analyses are running.
And I think to myself, But . . . just ask and let him say no. You’ll never regret asking, and you’ll always regret not knowing for sure what could have happened.
So I say, “It’s just . . .”
He looks up again with the expression of a man facing a firing squad.
“You don’t want to hear this, so I’ll just say it fast and get it over with and then we can forget it. The thing is, I think you and I have A Thing, and I know if I don’t at least put it on the table, I’ll always wonder ‘what if,’ and so I’m just . . . putting it on the table, you know, and leaving it there. Like bread. For sharing.”
“Bread?” he asks, looking no happier.
I give him some side eye and say tentatively, “I’m talking about sex?”
He’s nearly fuchsia now. “Jesus,” he says weakly.
“Feel free to say no! Honestly! I won’t take it personally—I mean, even if you mean it personally, I’ll just chalk it up to a boss-student thing.”
“Exactly,” he agrees. “A boss-student thing. So. No. Er. Thanks.”
And that was my window.
It has closed.
It is officially time to let go.
But instead I say, “If it’s a boss-student thing, once I’m not a student, that’s not a thing anymore, and I’ll be in Bloomington until early June....” But his eyes are on his screen.
“You did miss something,” he says abruptly.
“What?”
“In your data. I can’t tell for sure what it means yet, but I think it might actually be quite important. Do you want me to show you, or do you want to find it yourself?”
“What?” And by What? I mean: Fuck you, Charles Douglas! I am done with the analysis! I am writing up my results and discussion! I am presenting these data at a conference in three months! You just turned down sex with me, and now you’re finding errors in my analysis? I repeat: Fuck you, Dr. Charles fucking Douglas!
“I’ll save the SPSS file to our Dropbox so you can see how I found it,” he says. “But it’s there to find in your spreadsheet. Look at it by stimulus.”
I take my computer back, and I look. It takes me a few minutes, and Charles sits, patiently drinking coffee while I search ... but then I see it—the pattern I missed.
Oh fuck.
“Oh fuck!” I say, looking up at him in horror and despair.
“Sorry,” he answers, and he really does seem sorry.
But then. Then he fights a grin and loses. I watch a smile spread across his face, and it’s like watching a glass of red wine fall, in slow motion, and spill all over a tablecloth.
“I am sorry, truly!” he says. “It’s just that this may be the most awkward conversation I’ve ever had—and I’m British, so that’s saying something.”
I smile too, but as his eases to a warm little smile directed right at my humiliation, my chin wobbles dangerously, and my eyes fill with tears.
“Shit,” I whisper.
He looks at me sympathetically, but he doesn’t tell me not to cry or not to worry about it. He says, “I cried almost every day for the last month of my undergraduate work. I’d lock myself in the lab overnight and alternate between data analysis and weeping.”
“Did you fuck up this badly?”
“No,” he says, but kindly. “Next time ask for a second pair of eyes sooner. Nobody sees everything.”
I nod, causing one tear to drip down my cheek, and it just makes me angry.
“Well, I guess I’ve got some work to do,” I say gruffly. “I better get back to the lab.” I shove my stuff into my backpack. Charles starts packing up too.
“Me too. Want me to wait here and let you have some time on your own, or may I walk with you?”
“No, we might as well show up together.” I start toward the door, and we make our way out into the cold March sunshine as I add, “That way when they see I’ve been crying, they’ll think it’s your fault instead of mine. ‘Charles, what did you do to Annie?’ And you can be like, ‘I pointed out an obvious error in her analysis, but only after turning down her highly inappropriate offer of sex.’ And Professor Smith’ll be like, ‘Oh, well, that explains that.’”
He laughs. “As offers of sex go, I’d say it was as appropriate as it could be. Which is to say, not at all, but at least you made an effort not to sexually harass me.”
As we cross Indiana Avenue onto campus I whine, “Man, what am I gonna do?”
“About your data or about sex?” he asks. He’s teasing me now, and I respond by thwapping him on the arm with the back of my hand. “You’ll work your arse off and get the work done,” he says easily. “I hope you didn’t have plans for spring break.”
I had planned to go home.
That is not going to happen.
When I get back to the apartment that night, I lie on Margaret’s bedroom floor and tell her the whole story. She listens sympathetically as she tries on outfits for tonight, nodding and furrowing her brow as appropriate, with the occasional “No, you didn’t!” and “Oh my god, Annie.”
“And now not only am I not going to get laid, I’ve embarrassed Charles, and I have a fuck ton of new work to do.”
She doesn’t say anything; she just gives me a hug.
“Is it because I’m not cute?” I whimper.
“You’re totally cute,” she contradicts. “You know, for an androgynous white girl.”
Margaret’s girlfriend, Reshma, is Indian and femme, and Margaret is in love, so anyone who isn’t South Asian and into dresses and makeup doesn’t look cute to Margaret anymore. Margaret herself is Thai American and also femme, and when the three of us go out, it’s like Kelly Kapoor from The Office hooked up with London Tipton from The Suite Life of Zack & Cody . . . and they’re being followed around by Bobby frickin’ Brady. I stopped feeling cute a long time ago.
I ask, “Is there some book I could have read that teaches you how to find out if someone would like to have sex with you without completely embarrassing yourself and them?”
“Probably.”
“It’s not even the rejection I feel bad about, it’s how uncomfortable I made poor Charles. He doesn’t deserve that. I should have thought of that.”
“What was it he said about sexual harassment?”
“He said at least I made an effort not to sexually harass him. I think he meant it was better that I was just like, Hey, you wanna? instead of trying to flirt with him or something.”
“Annie, you are many things, but a seductress is not one of them.”
I wrap my arms around my head. “Quite the opposite, in fact.”