“He taught a class on sexuality through history. My favorite course. He wasn’t…gauche, or lewd. Matter of fact, and a wonderful lecturer. Eloquent, and a great storyteller. He could tell all these historical anecdotes off the cuff.” She chased a piece of sausage around her plate. “He was…I don’t even know how to describe him.” Her eyes closed. Pain filled her features. “Tall, really tall. Like six-four, six-five. Strong, fit. Not a dad-bod, but not, like, an athlete. Dark salt-and-pepper hair, a neat beard. His voice was this silky magic. He had the hot, sophisticated professor look down pat—chic round-framed glasses, tweed or wool blazers with actual patches on the elbow. Wore real oxfords.”
“Wow. Sounds like a caricature of a professor, really.”
She nodded, laughing. “That’s Marcus.” A bitter sigh. “It happened the way it always happens, I guess. I wrote a paper, he gave me a shitty grade. I disagreed, went in to argue with him about it.”
“Of course you did.”
“It was a good paper! I had sources, and a logical development of my thesis. I was articulate. He just didn’t like my position, I guess, so he gave me a shit grade. We fought. It got ugly. Finally, he agreed to let me rewrite it, so long as I, and I quote, ‘toned down the hard left feminist vitriol.’”
I winced. “Ooh, I bet that went over well.”
She bit her lip, holding back laughter. “Yeah, not so much. I rewrote it, all right.”
“And let me guess…the hard left feminist vitriol went on afterburner.”
“Yeah. I tripled my sources. Wrote an additional eight pages. When I turned it in to him, he called it inflammatory rhetoric of the worst sort. But, he gave me a decent grade.”
“And that was that,” I said, smirking.
“I wish. But no. Once that class was done, he emailed me, asked to see me.”
“Oh dear.”
“It was innocent enough. At first.” A long pause. “He said he’d been doing his job as a professor in the grading of my papers, but that he admired my passion. Got me a gig writing for an underground campus paper. We’d meet once a week in his office to talk. He was…smart. So smart. Interesting. He knew so much—he could talk off the cuff with absolute authority on everything from the Boxer Rebellion to Stoic philosophy to the hippie movement of the sixties. We could talk for hours, and we did.”
“And then?”
A shrug, a shake of her head. “And then nothing. That was it, for months. We just talked. Emailed. It was all on the up and up.”
“But?”
“I fought it, Charlie. I fought liking him. He was a professor. He wasmarried. He had kids, three of them, not that much younger than me.” She rubbed her forehead with a knuckle. “But he was sointerestedin me. When we talked, it felt like I was the only person on earth. I liked that. I’d never felt that way before, you know? Most of my relationships, before him, were, honestly, mostly just casual sexual liaisons, at best. Louis, in high school, but that’s really it.”
“He paid attention to you.”
She nodded. “You could hit that with a pretty heavy psychoanalytic hammer, if you wanted. I talked about Dad, how he had been gone a lot, and not reallythere, despite being there.”
“NowthatI understand completely.”
“You too?”
“Oh yeah.” I touched her hand. “All of us have that stuff. But that’s a different conversation.”
“Yeah, it is.” Another long silence, as Lex dredged through her memory. “Shit went down kind of unexpectedly. I was at a party, off-campus. I’d ridden with friends, but then we all got hammered, and we got separated, and then Tanya, who’d driven, went home in someone else’s car, and Leah was off chasing dick, and I was bored. The only hot guys at the party were the most cliche fucking douchebag jock frat bro assholes, and dumber than a bag of hammers, which is just a turn off. So I was just bored. So I left. Alone. On foot.”
“Oh dear, not a great move.”
A snicker. “No shit, considering I was smashed out of my head and had no idea where I was. Not a great part of town, and dressed like a skank.”
I arched an eyebrow. “You go apeshit if anyone says that about you.”
“I can slut-shame myself, but no one else can. And I really was dressed pretty slutty. Basically, I may as well have been carrying a sign that said ‘please rape me.’”
“And cue Professor Marcus Tyne to the rescue.”
“Not quite. Sort of. I emailed him. I didn’t have his phone number, just his email address. I don’t remember how it happened, but he emailed me back like, tell me where you are. So I told him I had no fucking clue. I think I gave him my phone number, and he FaceTimed me. Triangulated my location based on who the fuck knows what, and next thing I knew I was in his car.”
“Drunk, dressed like a slut.”
