“You know what I hate?” I say to Lily over lunch.

“No, what?”

“The way British people can use words in ways we can’t,” I say, staring down at my food and frowning.

“How’s that?” Lily asks absently, as she crams a fork full of potatoes into her mouth.

“Let’s take...I don’t know...Good Day, for instance.”

“Good Day means Good Day,” Lily says, her mouth still full.

“No, Lily. First off, Americans almost never even say ‘Good Day’ anymore as a greeting. So British people get to use it as a greeting to make themselves sound all sophisticated.”

“Uh huh,” Lily mumbles.

“But you know what’s even weirder? They can use it to say good-bye, too. Like...imagine I’m creating a scene somewhere, and they want to ask me to leave as politely as possible—”

“Why would you make a scene?” Lily asks, raising an eyebrow.

“Just pretend,” I snap. “Imagine I’m making a scene, and some annoying posh British lady looks at me, pretends to care about whatever it is that I’m saying, and then she says while looking toward the door, ‘Yes, well, Good Day, Ms. Faria.’”

I watch Lily to gauge her reaction, but she just looks at me like I’m an idiot.

“Come on, Lily! Wouldn’t that be the most obnoxious way to ask someone to leave, to just dismiss them without even saying what they really mean?”

Lily shrugs. “I guess. More importantly, don’t you think that German Lit professor was pretty hot?”

I bite my lip and glance away from her.

Lily laughs. “You do! You totally think he’s hot. What were you talking to him about after class...Oh. My. God. He said ‘Good Day’ to you, didn’t he?!”

I shake my head. “No, that wasn’t—”

“He totally dismissed you by saying, ‘Good Day, Ms. Faria,’ didn’t he? This whole what-if thing you were pulling on me, if you wanted me to get into this, you should have just told me it really happened to you!”

“It’s really annoying,” I mutter, crossing my arms.

“What the hell did you say to him? Did you make a scene? You slut!”

I tell her the course of events, and she laughs in my face. “Nikki, he’s like thirty years old, and you’re not even nineteen. Just find a hot guy who is like twenty-two to fulfill your little older guy fantasy. There are so many hot guys here, and they seem to think our American accents are hot. God knows why.”

“I actually Googled him,” I say. “He’s only twenty-eight. Not even thirty. You said he was thirty, but he’s much younger.”

“Listen to yourself,” Lily says. “Let’s just go to a bar tonight and find you someone to get your mind off this guy.”

“I need to study,” I say.

While Lily goes to the bar that night, I study — Professor Leeds’ office hours. I also write down a list of topics I can argue with him about when I go to his office. I noticed that he got the most emboldened when I questioned and argued with him. I want to see that happen again.

But I have to avoid another ‘Good Day.’ I shouldn’t push too hard, at least not at first.

* * *

I had to wait until Wednesday morning for Professor Leeds’ office hours. That’s more than a full day without seeing him. A full day for my mind to wander and my imagination to get the best of me. I put on a really low-cut shirt and a nice short skirt, grab my annotated copy of Steppenwolf, and walk into his office ready to go.

“Miss Faria,” he says, his accent nearly melting my insides straight away.

“I thought we decided on Nicole,” I say, pouting.

“Um,” he mumbles. “Of course. Have a seat, Nicole.”

“You remember in Steppenwolf,” I say, “when Hermine and Haller first meet?”

He nods.

“Maybe my translation is bad, but I don’t really understand what they are talking about…”

“Oh,” he says, leaning forward. “Let me explain.”

I smile, knowing he’s fallen right into my trap.

Professor Leeds grabs his copy of the book off the corner of his desk. “Haller keeps calling Hermine by the formal version of ‘you’ in German, which is ‘Sie.’”

He opens his book and flips right to the page in question.

I look up at him through my thick, dark lashes and lean forward over his desk so he can get an eyeful of my cleavage. My copy of the book actually has good footnotes for this part of the translation, but I’m playing dumb for the fun of it. I lean even closer toward the book, realizing his copy is in German.

“Why does she call him that?” I ask. “If she’s part of him, wouldn’t she be less formal?”

“He’s a…” Professor Leeds says, “stiff old man.”

Our eyes meet, and I part my lips, desperately hoping he’s making an intentional callback to my innuendo from our previous meeting.

“I see,” I say. “So stiff old men like to be formal?”

“Haller does,” he says, pointing. “It takes several pages until Hermine finally goes off on him, telling him to relax and just call him ‘Du’—the informal version—instead, because honestly who wants to drink with someone who is calling you ‘Mr.’ or ‘sir’…”

He trails off, realizing the trap he’s walked into, and I grin at him. “So, since you keep calling me Ms. Faria, does that make you a stiff old man, too?”

He slams the book shut and looks darkly at me from across his big, imposing desk. His eyes trail down across my body. He doesn’t look away quickly this time, he takes his time looking me over. Only after many long moments does he meet my eyes once again.

“How old are you, Ms. Faria?”

“Nicole,” I say. “Almost nineteen.”

“So you’re eighteen,” he says. “I’m twenty-eight, ten years older than you. I’m also your professor, and that means you call me Professor Leeds and I call you Ms. Faria. We’re not having a drink together, we’re discussing your reading assignment. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” I say, nodding.

“Good,” he says, running his fingers up along his strong forearms.

“Does that mean we can’t enjoy a drink together? Later on, I mean?” I ask innocently. “Or does there have to be this stifling wall of formality between the two of us?”

“It would be entirely inappropriate,” he says.

That’s what he says and his lips remain pursed, but his eyes are betraying him.

“Languages like German, French, Spanish, and Russian,” Professor Leeds says. “They all have the formal and informal forms of ‘you.’ It helps to establish the correct...distance...between people. Germans will often call co-workers that they spend dozens of hours per week shoulder-to-shoulder with by the formal “Sie,” and refer to them only as ‘Herr’ or ‘Frau.’ Why do you think that is, Miss Faria?”

“Hmm,” I say, pushing my arms down so that my breasts smoosh together. I bite my bottom lip and look right up at him. “It’s probably a subconscious way to remind themselves that they aren’t really friends and are just co-workers, to keep distance between each other so that they can form a super-efficient German workforce. It’s probably why the trains run so perfectly on time.”

“Your sarcasm makes it sound like you don’t entirely agree,” he says.

“Well,” I say, looking into his beautiful brown eyes.

I put a finger to my lip and touch my tongue to it, and then I run my wet finger along my lips. I watch as his dark eyes trace my movement. I have him where I want him.

“It just feels so cold,” I say. “Doesn’t it? Maybe it’s just because I’m an American, but we like to be friendly with people who we are around a lot. If I work with a guy, I want to be able to talk to him normally. Like at my old job, I’d go to the guy in the stockroom and be all, ’Hey, Chuck, how was your weekend? You get laid?’”

He gives me the slightest smirk at that. “Stockroom? You worked in a grocery store?”

His condescending tone tells me he thinks that’s funny.

“I was a cashier,” I say. “But I didn’t turn my nose up at anyone, so I’d shoot the shit with the guys in the stockroom, sure. No, ‘Good Day to you, sir, Mr. Wellington! Top of the day to you!’”

“We don’t talk like that,” Professor Leeds says, laughing through his nose. He grabs my book off the desk and flips idly through it.

“This is why I’m studying abroad,” I say, “to understand these cultural differences. Already I’m understanding the relationship between Haller and Hermine so much better.”

He slams my book down onto his desk and slides it toward me. “Ms. Faria, it looks like your copy has footnotes explaining everything I just told you. You’ve even highlighted them.”

Damn it. Why the hell did I let him take my book? I should have never left it lying on his desk like that. Now he knows exactly what I was up to.

“I have students with real questions,” he says, standing abruptly from his chair and walking past me to the door. He opens it and looks down at me, shaking his head. “So if that’s all, Good Day, Ms. Faria.”

* * *

The semester abroad turns into more of me studying Professor Leeds. He is a puzzle. If I work him just right, I can get him to smile at me. His real smile, the one that makes it looks like he is considering risking his career to fuck me right on his desk.

It takes wit, charm, and perseverance to get him to look at me like that, though, and I still haven’t figured out how to follow up from there.

Several times, I try to turn up the heat, say something just barely masked in innuendo, something like, “Well, I personally see a lot of phallic symbols in Kafka, but maybe it’s just because I’ve got dicks on my mind.”

Anything like that earns me an immediate “Good Day, Ms. Faria,” and a prompt signal for me to get out of his office or his lecture hall.

If, on the other hand, I decide to chill out after I get him to look at me like a real woman, he...chills out. He goes back on-topic, talks about literature, and allows me to keep asking questions. When I get him on-topic, he never looks at me like I want him to look at me, and there’s no way to take things further without getting booted from his office.

With the semester rapidly coming to a close, I decide I need to take some serious initiative. Sometimes I build it up in my head that Professor Leeds and I really do have some kind of relationship. I like to pretend that every one of those looks he gives me means more than it probably does. I think of it like one of those images of a glacier: a little ice visible on the surface, but a mountain of it hiding beneath the water. So, in my mind, each time Professor Leeds smirks at me, he is secretly professing his love to me.

It’s a stupid, schoolgirl’s fantasy. In reality, I’ve spent ninety percent of the semester here just showing up to his office hours under weak pretenses, or making doe eyes at him during lectures. Aside from some wandering eyes—or what were probably just polite smiles—Professor Leeds stays professional and turns down each one of my advances.

That’s probably it: he’s probably just not into me. But I can’t go back to Pennsylvania and wonder my whole life if maybe, just maybe, he was into me.

So I decide I have to figure out for sure. There’s only two weeks left of classes, so I’ve got nothing to lose.

“You’re going to stalk him?” Lily asks me, laughing. “Nikki, I’ve fucked like, four hot British guys since I got here, and you’re hung up on one you can’t have. Don’t do this to yourself.”

“I didn’t intentionally stalk him!” I snap. “I was getting some curry late at night a few weeks ago, and I saw him go into this pub. If I was stalking him...I’d have followed him in. Or I’d have gone back there, or—”

“You just said you’re going to go there tonight,” Lily says.

“Yes, but...okay, call it stalking if you want. But I need to see this guy outside of his stupid office and off that stupid campus.”

“It’s a beautiful campus, Nikki.”

“Shut up. You know what I mean. I need to see him in a dark, dingy pub, where the lighting makes me look older, and where the beer that he’s hopefully downed lowers his good sense, and…”

“Okay,” Lily says. “I think it’s actually a solid plan, now that I hear you walking it through like this.”

“You do?” I ask, incredulously.

“Yeah,” Lily says. “Just make sure you look hot as hell when you go in there.”