CHAPTER FOUR
“Can you crack open that window?” Taylor pressed her hands to her stomach. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have eaten so much at lunch,” Meghan replied, yet did as she was asked.
The eleven-passenger school van that provided transportation to our off-site practicum site bumped and jostled down the street. Because my friends and I sat in the back, it felt like the driver—our practicum professor—was purposefully hitting every pothole.
“But it was chicken nugget day,” Taylor defended. “You know I have no willpower when nuggets are in play.”
“Big lunches on practicum days are a bad idea,” Erica muttered, not looking up from a stack of note cards. “Hey!” she yelled when Cheryl snatched them out of her hands.
“What are you even studying?” Cheryl asked, flipping through the cards. “It’s only bedside manner today.”
Erica grabbed her note cards back and held them to her chest. “There’s no only anything. All the practicums are weighted equally. One bad test and the entire semester is a bust.”
“But how do you study for bedside manner?” Cheryl challenged. “Just smile and nod, and you’ll be fine.”
“Professor Brick hasn’t told us where we’re going today,” Erica stated. “How can we properly prepare if we don’t even know who our patients will be today?”
“That is pretty weird,” I chimed in my agreement. “Normally she’s really transparent about what to expect.”
Meghan gazed out the window as our small city passed by outside. “Where do you think she’s taking us?”
“Oh, God. I hope it’s not a children’s cancer ward,” Taylor worried. “I’m gonna cry, and be sick.”
“It’s going to be fine,” I assured everyone. “We’re all going to do fine.”
“You’ve got nothing to worry about, Hunter,” Meghan opined. “You’ll hit them with your Minnesota Nice and you’ll ace the damn thing.”
“You’re from Minnesota, too,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, but I’m from the Twin Cities. It’s not the same kind of nice.”
“What about me?” Erica exclaimed. “I’m a Masshole from Massachusetts. I’m totally screwed.”
“You’ll do fine, Erica,” I said. “Just remember to smile every once in a while. And breathe. That’s important, too.”
“Thanks, Coach,” Erica grimaced.
“I think I’m really going to be sick,” Taylor groaned.
I cast a furtive eye to Professor Brick in the driver’s seat. She seemed to not hear my friends’ complaints or was ignoring them.
We perked up in our seats when the van slowed and Professor Brick activated her turning signal.
“She’s not going in there, is she?” Cheryl panicked.
“You’re shitting me,” Meghan cursed.
“Dear God, no,” Erica muttered.
Cheryl shuddered beside me. “Old people. Anything but old people.”
The van pulled to a stop and Professor Brick turned off the engine. She turned around in the driver’s seat to address us. “Listen up, everybody. Today’s bedside manner test will take place at Evergreen Landings. Evergreen Landings accommodates seniors who require assistance in their day-to-day lives, but who can’t afford or don’t have access to an in-home caregiver. The residents will have just finished with their lunches, so you’ll be spending an hour or so with them in their rooms. We’re not asking that you do any heavy lifting today. If your patient requires going to the bathroom, for instance, leave that to the trained on-site staff. Your task today is simply to be a decent human being. Think you’re up to the task?”
Her question was responded to with a murmured affirmation from the vehicle’s ten passengers.
We filed out of the van and, walking two-by-two, followed Professor Brick into the residential building. She led us down a wide hallway. Bulletin boards announced daily recreational programming and the cafeteria’s offerings. It almost reminded me of a college dorm.
“It smells like diapers in here,” Cheryl complained under her breath.
“Don’t tell your patient that,” I returned.
As we traveled down the hallway, Professor Brick assigned each of us to a specific room. I covertly waved to each of my friends as one-by-one they disappeared into a new room. I didn’t want to be nervous about the practicum, but I still was. Bedside manner should have been innate for someone whose chosen career was to be a caregiver—far easier than finding a vein in someone’s arm, at least. The elderly didn’t make me uncomfortable. I’d spent a lot of time with both sets of my grandparents before they’d passed. And I typically got along with people, regardless of their age.
My patient’s room was nearly at the end of the hallway. The furniture was spartan—an elevated twin bed, a rocking chair, a side table, and a dressing bureau.
A small woman sat in the rocking chair in a corner of the room. Her short white hair was in tight curls, close to her head. Her dress was more like a shapeless shift, paired with thick beige nylons and white tennis shoes. She looked breakable, fragile—like a strong wind might carry her away.
I spied no electronics, save for the digital alarm clock that doubled as a radio. No TV, no computer, very few reading materials. The artwork on the walls didn’t look like it belonged to her; it reminded me instead of the art in a generic chain hotel. The room smelled strongly of dying flowers, which I attributed to the vase of withered carnations in a vase on her dressing bureau.
Professor Brick consulted a piece of paper before initiating introductions.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Grange. How are you today?”
She pronounced the woman’s last name like Grand, but with a G instead of a D at the end. The woman briefly cast her eyes on us, but then returned her gaze outside.
“Mrs. Grange, this is Hunter,” Professor Brick announced. “She’s from the local college, and she’ll be keeping you company this afternoon.”
Still, there came no response.
“Mrs. Grange will be scoring your performance today,” Professor Brick informed me.
“You’re not going to observe us?”
Professor Brick shook her head. “It’s a bedside manner test. If the patient is dissatisfied, she’ll tell you herself, not me.”
I hadn’t expected that curveball. Normally we were closely scrutinized by our instructor who then provided feedback on our performance.
“Have fun, you two.”
I wanted to beg to be reassigned, but that wouldn’t have looked good in front of my instructor. Instead, I gave Professor Brick a brave smile as she left the room.
There was no place for me to sit. Mrs. Grange occupied the only chair, and I wasn’t going to sit on her bed. I remained standing near the doorway, feeling even more uncomfortable than what was typical for me.
I rocked back and forth in my white tennis shoes. “The weather’s been so strange this week, don’t you think? Snowing one day and warm and sunny the next.”
Mrs. Grange sighed loudly and continued to ignore me.
I tried again to initiate a conversation. “Your room gets a good amount of natural light though; that must be nice in winter.”
“What are you wearing?” Mrs. Grange’s voice was loud and clear.
I looked down at my white scrubs with the school’s mascot embroidered on the shirt pocket. “It’s a nursing uniform,” I said. “My school’s nursing program makes us wear it on days we do visits.”
“You look like a sailor,” she said.
I cracked a small smile. “You’re absolutely correct.”
The color was impractical for the kind of duties required of us, but the white set us apart as different from certified nurses; beyond practicums where we performed basic tasks like practicing our bed-side manner and setting patients up with IV fluids, we were new and inexperienced. We would eventually graduate from the white scrubs to traditional blue in the fall when we started our year-long hospital internship. And in our final semester we would get to pick whatever color or pattern we wanted for our specific internship locale.
I could still remember my first day of practicum as a freshman when we’d been given our scrubs. I’d liked the look of the all-white uniform until I’d actually put it on. We looked more like sailors on leave than medical professionals. To make matters worse, the outfits were mandatory on days we had a practicum test. Even if the test was off-campus, we had to wear the clothes during the entire school day. We stood out like giant marshmallows among the general population of students. Luckily, my winter jacket covered most of it so I could almost blend in.
“Did that woman really say your name was Hunter?” Mrs. Grange asked.
I nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
She sighed again. She was doing a lot of sighing. I could feel my A slipping away with each disgruntled burst of air.
“I suppose it’s a good thing I’m trapped in here,” she remarked. “I don’t belong to this world anymore. You have children, raise them up, sacrifice for them, feed and clothe them and provide them with a better like than you ever had. And for what? So they can hide you away in a nursing home when you’ve become an inconvenience.”
Mrs. Grange’s speech reminded me of my own mother and her complaints about my brother and me. I never knew how to respond to my mom when she went on one of her tirades, and I similarly didn’t know what to say to Mrs. Grange.
Mrs. Grange broke into my distracted musing. “You find that funny?”
I banished the nervous smile from my lips. “No, ma’am. I’m sorry.”
“It’s bad enough that parents today give their daughters boy’s names and name their sons after girls. Can’t hardly tell the difference between boys and girls anymore. It’s all pants-wearing and short hair and tattoos.” She regarded me with an intense look. “Do you have any tattoos?”
“No, ma’am.”
Mrs. Grange grunted. “It’s only a matter of time.”
“Things aren’t so bad nowadays,” I tried gently. “Think of all the technological advantages we have. All of the medical advancements,” I listed off. “And women have made great advances in the past fifty years.”
“And yet you still want to be a nurse,” she challenged.
“I like helping people.”
“Then why not be a doctor?”
I opened my mouth and closed it, having no ready response. My parents had been ecstatic that I’d decided on such a practical career choice, and they’d never questioned why I’d chosen nursing over studying to be a medical doctor. Maybe I was taking the easy route. Maybe I doubted my ability to succeed in a medical school.
“As a nurse I get to spend more time with my patients.” I replied. “I’m treating the person and not the disease.”
Mrs. Grange grunted again. “Are you going to stand there all day? You’re making me nervous.”
I helplessly looked around the room. I still wasn’t going to sit on her bed. There was always the floor, but that felt unprofessional. Thinking quickly, I peeked into the hallway and found a hard plastic chair to carry into her room. Mrs. Grange watched me with sharp blue eyes as I maneuvered the chair past her bed and set it down a few feet from her own chair.
For the rest of our time together, I floundered to maintain any semblance of a conversation. Mrs. Grange ignored the majority of my questions in favor of whatever was happening outside—which, admittedly, wasn’t much in the month of February. The trees were barren and few birds had stuck around. Only the most desperate of squirrels scurried around in search of a forgotten acorn cap.
A gentle knock on the open door alerted me that our time was up. Professor Brick stood in the doorway.
She smiled, looking between us. “How’d it go?”
Mrs. Grange snorted, and her attention returned to the squirrels wrestling each other outside.
I picked up my chair so I could return it to the hallway. I swallowed hard and regarded the woman responsible for my grade. “It was nice to meet you, Mrs. Grange,” I said stiffly. “I hope the rest of your day is pleasant.”
I fought back tears of frustration as I retreated down the nursing home hallway. I’d completely failed the exercise. The most basic of nursing practicums, and I’d crashed and burned.
Someone grabbed my elbow as soon as I stepped outside. I swiveled my head to see Meghan beside me. She linked our arms and we walked together to the parked van.
“How did it go?” she asked.
I gave her a thumbs down with my free hand.
Meghan’s wide eyes showed her surprise. “Really?”
“She hated me.”
“You’re your own worse critic. I’m sure it was fine.”
“She only wanted to talk about how tragic it was that my parents gave me a boy’s name and about her ungrateful kids who put her in a nursing home.”
Meghan made a face. “Ouch.”
“How was your person?” I asked.
Meghan shrugged. “Fine. She showed me pictures of her grandkids the whole time. Easiest practicum I’ve ever had.”
“Lucky,” I muttered.
Professor Brick was already in the front seat when we piled back into the school van. “Did today’s practicum inspire any of you to work with seniors next year?” she asked.
Erica—always ready with a response if she believed her grade depended on it—spoke up: “I have a lot more respect for nurses who choose that career path, but I don’t think it’s for me.”
Professor Brick observed the rest of us through the rearview mirror as she drove us back to campus. “Anyone else? Any takers?”
The rest of the group was conspicuously silent, which indicated their experience had probably been a lot like mine.
CHAPTER FIVE
I stood in the hallway outside of Professor Graft’s office, with my rough draft pinched in my hands. Her door was ajar, and I could hear the feminine murmur of voices, punctuated by laughter, coming from inside. She was still in a meeting with another student when I’d arrived nearly ten minutes before our scheduled conference time. It wasn’t that I was eager to be alone in a room with my professor; I just hated the commotion of being late.
“Okay, well let me know if you have any questions about the paper between now and the due date,” I heard her say.
A moment later the door swung all the way open, and the student with whom Professor Graft had been meeting walked out. We exchanged smiles as she left. I recognized her from class, but even though we were in the same writing seminar, I hadn’t paid close enough attention to know her name yet.
There were fifteen other students in my class, and Professor Graft probably taught several more sections of the writing seminar. These conference days must have been like a marathon for her.
I waited a moment longer in the hallway before announcing my presence. I knocked with a light touch on Professor Graft’s door and poked my head inside her office. “Hi. Are you ready for me?”
She looked up briefly before returning her attention to a yellow legal pad on her desk. “Yep. Come on in, Hunter.”
I sat down in the empty chair opposite her desk. The meeting was only scheduled for fifteen to twenty minutes, so I didn’t bother taking off my jacket.
“Sorry,” she apologized, not looking up. “Just writing down an idea for a book I’m working on.”
That would have been the part of the conversation where I—being a normal human being—should have asked a follow-up question about what her book was about, but instead I sat like a statue while she scribbled down notes on her pad of paper.
I scanned her office while I waited for her to finish. Some professor’s offices were a chaotic mess of book piles, exam booklets, and old graded student papers, but Professor Graft’s office was missing all of those. The room was windowless with no art on the walls. There were no framed advanced degrees or pictures of friends or family or significant others on her desk or filing cabinets. Nothing in her office provided a window into who she was outside of her teaching responsibilities. It looked like she hadn’t moved in or had no intention of staying.
When she’d finished writing down her notes, she slid the pad of paper into the top drawer of her desk. She finally looked up, giving me her undivided attention.
“Sorry about that,” she repeated her apology. “I learned early on that I’ve got to write down ideas when they first come, otherwise I’ll totally forget about them.”
The window to talk about her book wasn’t completely closed, yet I stupidly remained mute. I had so many questions—I’d never known anyone who had written a book—but I couldn’t formulate a single one. Instead, I stared at her beautiful face with its high cheekbones, visible even without a smile. Her hair was pulled up for the first time of the semester, which allowed me to appreciate the slender lines of her neck, which then drew my eyes down farther to the hint of visible collarbone revealed at the open neck of her button-up blouse. Even though she was seated with a desk between our bodies, I knew instinctively that she was wearing a skirt.
She folded her hands on top of her desk. “How’s your semester going?”
“Good.”
“You’re a junior, right?”
I bobbed my head. “Uh huh.”
“How do you like your other classes so far?”
“They’re fine.”
She continued to make phatic conversation, but my words got caught in my throat. I could only muster simple, terse responses. I felt terrible for being so tight-lipped; it was like my bedside manner practicum with Mrs. Grange, but the roles had been reversed.
Say something funny, an inner voice prompted me. Why had she been laughing with the student before me? What was wrong that she couldn’t joke around with me?
“Okay, so you’ve got a strong start on your paper. The introduction starts with a solid attention grabber, but I want you to take another look at your thesis.”
The opportunity for casual conversation had passed. She scooted her chair closer to her desk, and I picked up the nonverbal cue to do the same.
We bent our heads together to look over my assignment. Being in such close proximity, I was granted unadulterated access to how good she smelled. Her scent was sweet and sugary without being too heavy or childish. Instead, it felt familiar and comfortable.
She discussed the strengths and weaknesses of my rough draft, but as usual, I was having a hard time staying focused. Her instructions were intended to help me improve on the final essay, but all I could do was watch her hands as she wrote suggestions in the margins of my draft.
Her fingernails were trimmed down to small, white crescent moons. Her long fingers, curled around a pen, were smudged with blue ink as if she’d been doing a lot of writing that day. Were her hand bones proportionate to her height? I wondered. What did that even mean? Did lesbians have longer hands than straight women? Is that why they didn’t need a man in the relationship? Oh God, stop thinking about sex!
Every once in a while she would brush hair that had escaped her bun away from her eyes. The action turned my attention to her unlined forehead and the smooth skin around her dark sapphire eyes. How old was she? I wondered. She was obviously older than me, but it couldn’t have been by much, yet she had a PhD, and I knew those took time to achieve.
Professor Graft straightened and leaned back from my paper. “Any questions?” she asked.
I’d zoned out for at least the past five minutes. I squinted at the comments she’d written in the margins of the essay. It was in the same flowery handwriting that she’d written at the top of my homework on the second day of class. “No-no questions,” I fumbled.
“Well if any do come up between now and when the paper is due,” she said routinely, “let me know.”
I gathered my wits as I collected my things. It didn’t take long since I hadn’t removed my jacket, and I only had my backpack with me. I didn’t bother returning my rough draft to the English folder in my bag. With my luck, I’d unzip my backpack and my life would spill out on her office floor.
I hovered near her office door and held my essay loosely in my hands. “Thank you for taking the time to look at my paper.”
I hadn’t been able to hold a conversation, but at least I hadn’t entirely forgotten my manners. My mom would have been proud.
The sight of her smile caused a knot to form in my stomach. “It’s no problem at all,” she dismissed. “It’s what I get paid the big bucks for.”
I left the humanities building, feeling only mildly annoyed with myself, and crossed campus to the cafeteria. As a small college we only had one dining option. It reminded me more of my high school than actually being at a university. There was something to be said for being a name and not a number in the classroom, but there were other times when I wished I’d chosen to go to a bigger school.
I paid for my hot lunch and held the plastic tray close to my body. The cafeteria was crowded at that hour, but I knew exactly where my friends would be seated without having to scour the crowd. We’d sat at the same table, in the same chairs, since freshman year.
“Hey,” Meghan greeted when I approached the group. “I thought you were standing us up.”
I set my tray on the table and hung my backpack on the back of my chair. “I had a meeting with Professor Graft.”
“In trouble already?” Cheryl teased.
“No,” I bristled. “She meets with everybody one-on-one before papers are due.”
“Dang, she has less of a life than even us,” Meghan quipped.
“Or, she’s dedicated to her job and goes above and beyond expectations because she wants her students to succeed,” Erica opined, “unlike a male professor.”
Meghan held up her hands. “Okay, okay,” she demurred. “I’m sorry I ever said anything.”
“Michael Davis at ten o’clock,” Taylor warned in a panicked whisper.
All conversation subsided, and my friends seemed to hold a collective breath as the First Team All-American, Division III basketball player lumbered by. I personally didn’t think there was anything special about Michael Davis. But as a star athlete with moderately attractive features, people on campus tended to treat him like a celebrity. A chorus of Nice Game! or Good Luck Tonight! tended to follow him wherever he went.
It wasn’t only Michael Davis, however. My nursing friends were a little boy crazy, but they were all talk and no action. Since I’d known them, not one of them had ever had a serious boyfriend, or even something that resembled a date. No one, including myself, ever ventured beyond the protective nest that our lunch table or library study sessions provided.
“Okay ladies, I’ve got something very serious to discuss with you,” Cheryl announced. “It involves two words.” She grinned as she held us in suspense. “Spring. Break.”
Erica wrinkled her nose. “No.”
Cheryl threw her hands up in despair. “You haven’t even heard my pitch!”
“Because I don’t have to,” Erica said. “It’s the same every year.”
“I have to agree with Erica on this one,” Meghan concurred. “What’s the fun of spring break in Florida if we can’t drink?”
“Someone will buy us drinks,” Cheryl insisted. “Alcohol flows down there like the Mississippi.”
“No way,” Erica dismissed. “I’m not spending my one break from school begging frat boys to buy me beer.”
“What about Canada?” Taylor proposed. “The drinking age is only 19 in Ontario.”
Meghan snorted at the suggestion. “Spring break in Canada? I’m not that desperate.”
“You don’t go some place colder for spring break,” Cheryl agreed. “That defeats the purpose.”
“Why is spring break so important anyway?” I finally chimed in. “Who decided that our one week of freedom in March should be filled with alcohol and one-night stands?”
“MTV?” Taylor shrugged.
“We can’t all be perfect like you, Hunt, and build houses for Habitat,” Megan said.
I couldn’t help rolling my eyes. I’d spent the previous vacation in North Carolina on an alternative spring break experience, and Meghan had been salty ever since, like I’d abandoned her and made a decision without consulting her first.
“It was fun, and I learned a lot,” I defended.
“Are you going again this year?” Taylor asked.
I shook my head. “I haven’t really thought about it.”
My parents—my mom mostly—had been uncomfortable with me being so far away even if on a school-sanctioned trip. The only way I’d convinced them to let me go was a reminder of how good it would look on a resume. I doubted I’d be able to convince them to let me go again that year.
“So what I’m hearing is no spring break again,” Cheryl complained.
“We have the rest of our lives to go on spring break,” Erica reasoned. “But we only have one shot at passing our boards.”
“I thought you could take the NCLEX eight times a year,” Taylor stated.
“You know what I mean,” Erica scowled. “I don’t want to leave it to the last moment.”
“You’ve got to at least promise me that when all of this is over and we’re all gainfully employed that we take vacations together—Girls Getaways,” Cheryl proposed.
“I don’t know. I’ll have to check with my future husband, Michael Davis, before I can make a commitment like that,” Meghan said.
Her pronouncement was met with a balled-up napkin to the face.
At the end of lunch, we dumped our empty trays off near the exit. Erica continued to complain about her art history class, which she was convinced was going to ruin her G.P.A., while Cheryl tried to assure her that no hospital was ever going to look at our course transcripts as long as we passed our state board nursing exams.
My friends’ conversation faded into the background while I hesitated in front of the To Go station. The cafeteria kiosk provided students rushing between classes pre-made sandwiches and snacks.
I thought about Professor Graft, trapped in her office all day. I hadn’t seen any food around her desk—not even a bottled water or coffee mug. Maybe I should get her something to eat. It wouldn’t mean anything, I tried to reason to myself—just a person being concerned about another person. It would be the altruistic thing to do, not an excuse to make her smile.
“You coming, Hunt?” Taylor called to me.
My friends stood a few feet ahead of me, waiting. After lunch, we always walked to our next class together—organic chemistry.
With a final glance at the deli sandwiches, I shouldered the strap on my backpack. Practicality won again.
“Yeah. Coming.”
+ + +
The books lived in the basement, which is where I met my professor. She’d agreed to meet me outside of her regular office hours to help me compose the rough draft of my upcoming paper. The campus library was empty at that hour, or at least it felt that way. I heard only the low humming noise of the overhead halogen lighting and the nervous pace of my heart, which I was sure she could hear as well.
The large wooden table was better suited for group study like my Tuesday and Thursday study sessions with my friends. In a one-on-one setting, the table was too large to sit across from each other, so we sat next to each other so we could both access my latest draft.
Professor Graft was wearing another skirt. I thought that maybe with the library table hiding her legs that I would finally be able to concentrate, but I found other things to distract me instead. Musty hardcover books surrounded us, yet her light perfume was enough to banish the old book scent. Whenever she leaned her head forward, her hair slipped in front of her face, forcing her to push it behind her ears. Even under the unflattering lights of the library, her glossy hair shone like a model’s in a shampoo commercial.
“So remember, your thesis should be a response to the author’s argument,” she instructed. “Essentially you’re going to agree with him, disagree, or something in between. The rest of the essay will support your argument with evidence from the text.”
Her voice in a one-on-one setting took on a round, silky-smooth register. I let the syllables slip over me like warm liquid.
“I’m not sure I understand the author’s argument enough to know if I agree with it or not,” I admitted.
“Well, what do you think he’s saying?” she challenged me.
I chewed on my lower lip in thought. “Uh, that we shouldn’t blame people who have health complications from eating too much fast food because they have a lack of nutritional options?”
“That’s right,” she acknowledged. “And food deserts—a lack of grocery stores, particularly in low-income neighborhoods—exacerbate the issue.”
“But couldn’t the fast food industry provide healthier choices?” I questioned.
“That’s a good point; how do you think the author would respond to that argument?”
I tapped my pen on the table. “That … that people will still choose fries over the apple slices if given a choice?”
Professor Graft beamed. Her high cheekbones became even more accentuated when she smiled. “Exactly. See? You’ve got this.”
“It must be the teacher,” I demurred.
Our eyes locked for a brief, intense moment before she cleared her throat and broke eye contact. “Your topic sentences work well, but I want to challenge you to find evidence from the text that better supports what you’re trying to argue. Body paragraph one needs a little rethinking.”
She bent forward to get a closer view of the text, and once again her hair escaped its previous confinement behind her ear. After watching her stubborn chestnut waves defy her one too many times, I moved without thinking. My fingertips grazed her temple, gathering the chaos, to tuck it neatly behind her ear.
When I realized what I’d done, the words of apology caught in my throat, much like my frozen fingers still touching her soft curls. I resisted the urge to fully run my fingers through her hair, but only barely.
“I’m sorry.” I dropped my bold hand to my lap and averted my eyes. “I don’t know why I did that.”
I watched Professor Graft’s lower lip disappear as she tucked it into her mouth. “I think you do.”
She swept her arm across the library table, clearing the surface but also knocking my assignment and textbook onto the floor. The noise rattled in my head, made all the more loud in the silent library.
She took advantage of my disequilibrium by grabbing onto the front of my shirt. With one determined tug, our mouths crashed together.
I jerked awake and found myself in my bedroom, not the campus library.
My breath came in short bursts, and my heart thumped rapidly in my chest. Erotic dreams about study sessions? That was a new low, even for me.
At some point in my fitful sleep I’d torn the sheets loose, and the top blanket was twisted around my legs like a hangman’s noose. The radiator in my room burned hot, but my skin was more enflamed than usual. An experimental dip down the front waistband of my sleep shorts found me wetter than usual there, too.
“No, no, no,” I muttered as my fingers slid through wetness I couldn’t blame on the room’s temperature.
I shouldn’t have my professor’s scent memorized. I shouldn’t want to run my fingers through her hair. I shouldn’t want to touch her bare knee. I shouldn’t want to feel her full lips against mine. I should have taken my hands out of my pajama pants.
I was so turned on, it hurt.
My fingers traveled lower as I thought about those skirts. Those long, lean legs. Her sapphire, stormy eyes. Full, soft breasts contained under a button-up blouse. I wanted to unfasten the top button for a view of whatever undergarments she hid underneath. I wanted to bury my hand beneath the fabric of her skirt. I wanted to tease her clit through her underwear. I wanted to make her as wet as I now found myself.
There was only one name on my lips when my orgasm consumed me: Elle.
When I finally removed my hand from my pants, I felt no blissful afterglow or satisfaction. I felt only unadulterated guilt. It was bad enough to be lusting after another woman. I should respect my professor, not objectify her.
I couldn’t continue like this.
I threw off my sheets and got out of bed. It took only a moment for my laptop to wake up and to open my school’s e-mail server. I was pretty blind without my contacts, but I could see just enough to compose a brief email:
Hi Professor,
Are you available to meet either today or tomorrow?
Thanks,
Hunter
My laptop speakers confirmed when the message had been sent. I felt moderately better that I’d taken the first step to solving my problem.
Instead of going back to bed, I sat a moment longer at my desk. It would be around nine in the morning in France. Colette might have been around, but I couldn’t talk to her about this. I didn’t even know what I’d say. The realization of that fact didn’t sit well in my gut or in my brain. I’d always told Colette everything.
I shut the lid on my laptop and the machine went to bed. I exhaled, long and exhausted, into the room. If only I could do the same.