Freshman Orientation

I'm nineteen years old, and I'm about to ruin a man's career.

I don't mean to. When I walk into the lecture hall for my first class of freshman year—English Literature 101, required for all liberal arts majors—I'm thinking about coffee and whether I remembered to pack my highlighters and how my roommate's alarm went off at 5 AM for the third day in a row.

Then I see him.

Professor Dean Calloway stands at the front of the room, writing the syllabus highlights on the whiteboard in precise, masculine strokes. His back is to the class, but I'd recognize those shoulders anywhere. That dark hair, silvered at the temples. The way he holds himself like a man who knows exactly what he wants and how to get it.

My stomach drops through the floor.

No. No, no, no.

Three weeks ago, I was in a bar in the city. Not a college bar—I'd gotten a fake ID last spring and wanted somewhere more sophisticated for my last night of summer freedom. Somewhere with actual cocktails instead of keg beer. Somewhere adults went.

He was sitting at the end of the bar, nursing a whiskey, looking like the loneliest man in Manhattan. Forty-two, he'd told me later. Divorced for three years. Hadn't been with anyone since his marriage ended.

I told him I was twenty-three. A lie, but only by four years, and I was legal. That's what mattered. He never asked for ID, and I never offered the truth.

We talked for hours. About books—he said he worked in publishing, another lie as it turns out—about travel, about the peculiar loneliness of being surrounded by people and still feeling utterly alone. When he kissed me outside the bar, I melted into it. When he took me back to his hotel room, I let him do things to me I'd only ever read about.

I never got his last name. He never got my real age.

And now he's turning around, and his eyes are scanning the room, and—

They land on me.

I watch the blood drain from his face. Watch the recognition hit him like a physical blow. His hand tightens on the dry-erase marker until I'm afraid it might snap.

"Good morning," he says to the class, but his eyes don't leave mine. "I'm Professor Calloway. Welcome to English Literature 101."

I should leave. I should get up right now, walk out that door, and drop this class before the add/drop deadline passes.

But my legs won't move. And there's a part of me—the same reckless, wanting part that followed him to that hotel room—that doesn't want to run.

He looks away first. Begins his lecture with the smooth professionalism of a man who's been teaching for fifteen years. His voice is steady. His hands don't shake.

But I see the tension in his jaw. The way he avoids looking at the front row—at me—for the entire fifty-minute lecture.

When class ends, students stream past me toward...