Professor Hayes doesn’t hold office hours. His TA does.
The TA is a grad student named Liam. Liam is from Cork, has a beard he thinks makes him look older and a sweater collection that makes him look like he teaches at Oxford in a period drama. He holds office hours on Thursdays from 4 to 6 in the basement of the humanities building. Room B-14. It smells like old paper and floor wax. Nobody goes.
Nobody except me.
I should say up front: I’m not in the class. I took Hayes’s European History last spring, got an A that’s been on my transcript for six months, and I’m now in a fifth-year program supposedly writing a thesis about the Terror. Liam was my TA then. He is nobody’s anything to me now. That’s the only reason any of this happened, and both of us checked it, separately, like people checking the stove.
I started going in October. I told him it was for the thesis. I showed up every Thursday at 4:05 with a question about Robespierre I’d looked up on Wikipedia twenty minutes before.
He’d push his glasses up his nose and explain the Reign of Terror in this soft, careful Cork voice, very much not looking at my midriff, and I’d sit there in yoga pants and a cropped cardigan nodding like a person who cared about the Committee of Public Safety.
It worked for six weeks. Then the Thursday in November.
“Why did Robespierre fall,” I asked. I’d crossed my legs. I was letting the yoga pants do what they were designed to do.
Liam stared at me. “You know why. You wrote eleven pages on it.”
“I want to hear you say it.”
The radiator hissed. A lecture let out somewhere above us, footsteps in the ceiling, then nothing.
“He asked for too much,” Liam said, lower than usual. “He thought if he pushed hard enough, people would follow. They didn’t. They got tired, and they turned on him.”
I leaned forward and put my elbows on his desk.
“What if someone didn’t turn on him,” I said. “What if someone liked it. The pushing.”
He stopped breathing for a full second.
“What do you mean,” he said. Very careful.
“I mean — what if there was someone who wanted him to push.”
He took his glasses off. Put them on the desk. Rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.
“You’re not my student,” he said, mostly to himself.
“Haven’t been since May.”
“You should go.”
“It’s 4:17.”
“I know what time it is.” He looked at me without the glasses, which made him look younger and much less careful. “If you don’t go, I’m going to do something unprofessional.”
“Like what.”
“Like close the door.”
I got up. Closed it. Locked it. Came back and didn’t sit down. I stood next to his chair, close enough that my knee touched his.
“You were saying,” I said.
He kissed me sitting down, his hand on the back of my thigh pulling me in until I was standing between his knees, and he kissed like he’d been rehearsing an argument for six weeks and lost it in the first line. He tasted like Barry’s tea. I put my hands in his hair. He made a noise into my mouth that went straight between my legs.
“Tell me if—” he started.
“I’ll tell you. Push.”
So he did. He stood up, turned me around, and pressed me down over his own desk, right on top of somebody’s ungraded essay on the Girondins. One hand flat between my shoulder blades. Not hard. Just there, the way you’d hold a page open.
“Like that?”
“Yes. Like that.”
He peeled my yoga pants down to my thighs and swore softly in a way I didn’t know he could swear. I wasn’t wearing anything under them. I’d planned that. I’d planned it for three Thursdays and chickened out twice.
“You came to office hours like this.”
“I came to your office hours like this.”
He went down on his knees behind me on the floor wax and spread me with his thumbs and put his mouth on me, and I had to bite the cuff of my cardigan. He was slow and filthy and thorough about it, like he was footnoting. Tongue flat, then pointed, then pushing in, his beard scraping the backs of my thighs. My cock was trapped hard against the edge of the desk and every time he licked into me it rubbed, and I was saying his name into my sleeve, and somewhere above us a whole lecture hall was walking to dinner.
When he stood up his face was wet and his glasses were on the floor and he didn’t go looking for them.
“I’ve got—” he said, and opened his desk drawer, and there was a condom in there with a little packet of lube, tucked under a stack of blue books.
I looked at it. I looked at him.
“Since the second Thursday,” he said, going red to the ears. “In case I was wrong about what you were doing. I mean, in case I was right.”
“You were right.”
He fingered me open with the lube, one finger and then two, his other hand still flat on my back, and asked me twice if it was okay, and the second time I said, “Liam, I swear to God,” and he laughed and stopped asking.
He pushed in slow. The desk creaked. The essay on the Girondins slid off onto the floor. He held still inside me, all the way, breathing hard against my neck, and said, “Fuck, you’re—” and didn’t finish, and then he started moving, and he did exactly what I’d asked him to do.
He pushed. Long, steady strokes that shoved me up the desk an inch at a time until my hands were braced on the far edge. His hand slid from my back into my hair and held, and I made a sound I’m glad the radiator covered. I reached under myself and he caught my wrist and pinned it to the desk and said, very quietly, “No. Wait for me,” and I almost came from that alone.
I didn’t wait for him. I came with nobody touching my cock, just from him fucking me over a desk in a basement, gasping into a pile of Hayes’s lecture notes. He followed a few strokes later, pressed all the way in, his forehead on my shoulder, saying something that was definitely Irish and definitely not appropriate for a TA.
We stayed like that a while. The radiator hissed. His glasses were under the chair. His tea was stone cold.
“That essay,” I said into the desk, “is going to need a re-grade.”
He laughed so hard he had to pull out.
At 5:47 the door to B-14 opened. I walked out first, re-tying my shoe. Liam followed, re-buttoning his sweater wrong by one button. An undergrad was sitting on the floor outside with her laptop.
“Is he free?” she asked.
“He’s done for the day,” I said. “He’ll be back next Thursday. Four o’clock.”
My phone buzzed before I reached the stairs.
Liam: your sweater button thing. i see it now. why didn’t you say
Liam: also. thursday. 4. bring the thesis
At 3:58 the next Thursday, the door to B-14 was already locked when I got there. He opened it before I knocked.
