My Professor's Office Hours

I was failing his class. Not dramatically, just steadily, week after week, the way you fail something you're too distracted to focus on. And the distraction, if I'm being honest, was him.

He taught art history, late afternoon lectures, and he had this way of talking about Caravaggio like he'd personally known him, passionate, a little intense, sleeves rolled up, chalk dust on his hands. I sat in the third row and took notes I never read and watched his hands move through the projector light. By midterms, my grades were a disaster and my crush was a catastrophe.

So I went to his office hours. The last slot, Thursday evening, rain hammering the windows of the humanities building. Strictly academic intentions. I told myself that all the way up the stairs.

His office was small and drowning in books, stacks on the floor, prints pinned to every wall, a desk buried under papers. He looked up when I knocked and smiled like he was genuinely glad to see me, and gestured to the chair across from him. We went through my midterm. He was kind about it, which was worse than if he'd been stern. He said I was clearly bright, clearly not trying, and asked what was going on.

I almost told him the truth. I almost said: you. You're what's going on.

The truth was, I'd been distracted since the first lecture, the way he got lost in a painting, the way he'd go quiet in front of a slide of some marble saint and the whole hall would go quiet with him. I'd started sitting in the third row just to be closer. I'd started staying after class with questions I didn't need answered. Once, our hands had brushed when he handed back my essay, and I'd thought about that half-second of contact for a week.

Instead I burst into tears. Mortifying, ugly, hiccuping tears, right there across his desk. He came around the desk immediately, of course he did, he was a decent man, and crouched beside my chair, and handed me tissues, and told me it was going to be all right. His hand rested on my shoulder, warm and steady, and I leaned into it without thinking, and suddenly his face was very close to mine, and neither of us moved away.

What happened next is the reason I'm writing this professor age gap taboo confession at two in the morning instead of sleeping. He kissed me. Or I kissed him. The truth is it happened in the space between us, mutual and inevitable, and within a minute I was in his lap in that creaky office chair with his hands in my hair and the rain loud against the windows covering every sound we made.

He lifted me onto the edge of his desk, papers sliding, a mug of pens toppling, and stood between my knees, and looked at me with this raw hunger that no lecture hall had ever shown me. He unbuttoned my cardigan slowly, like unwrapping something precious, and kissed his way down my throat while his hands learned the shape of me through my skirt. I was shaking. I'd wanted this for months and now that it was happening I could barely breathe.

He was careful with me and wild with me at the same time, careful with his hands, wild in the way he couldn't stop touching me, like he'd been holding back for weeks too. He kissed my throat, my collarbone, the tops of my breasts above my bra, murmuring things against my skin that made me shiver. His desk was solid wood under me, scattered papers sticking to my bare legs, and I didn't care about any of it. I tugged his shirt free of his trousers and ran my hands up his back, and he groaned, actually groaned, and that sound undid me completely.

When he finally pushed my skirt up and settled between my thighs, the desk creaking under us, I wrapped my legs around him and pulled him closer and forgot every reason this was supposed to be a bad idea. The rain kept time against the glass. Somewhere down the hall, a door closed. Nobody came. It was just us, and his mouth on my neck, and the impossible heat of finally having the thing I'd been aching for since September.

Afterward, we sat on the floor of his office with our backs against the desk, half-dressed and laughing quietly like conspirators, sharing the granola bar from his drawer because neither of us had eaten dinner. He told me my grade could still be salvaged. He told me I was trouble. He walked me to my car under his umbrella, and at my door he told me, very seriously, very professorially, that I needed to come to extra tutoring sessions. Twice a week. Until finals.

Finals are in three weeks. I've been to four tutoring sessions so far, and my midterm grade is the last thing on my mind when that office door clicks shut behind me. I don't know what happens after the semester ends. I don't know if I'm brave enough to find out. But I know that every Thursday evening, rain or not, there's nowhere else in the world I'd rather be than on the wrong side of his desk.