Room 304 is in the humanities building. Third floor. Corner classroom. It has a projector, a whiteboard, and windows that face the quad. It’s used for lectures during the day. At night, it’s empty.
The door locks automatically at 10 PM. The building manager has the only key.
Nobody is supposed to be in Room 304 after 10 PM.
Nobody except me. And — as of last Wednesday — nobody except Sam.
Sam is the guy from the study group. The one with glasses who reads textbooks upside down. The one who blushed so hard his ears glowed when Tyler and Devon found out about me and Marcus.
He’s also the one who texted me at 9:47 PM on a Wednesday: “you still awake”
I texted back: “yeah”
Sam: “i’m in room 304. studying. come keep me company.”
I: “the building closes at 10.”
Sam: “i know. i have ten minutes.”
I: “i’ll be there in five.”
I got to Room 304 at 9:52 PM. The door was open. Sam was at a desk in the front row. Textbook open. Laptop charged. He looked up when I walked in.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
“You came.”
“You asked.”
“I wasn’t sure you would.”
I sat down in the desk next to his. Close enough that our chairs touched.
“What are you studying,” I asked.
“Nothing. I’m not studying.”
“Then why are you here.”
“Because I wanted to see you.”
I looked at him. He looked at me. His glasses were fogged. He pushed them up. They were still fogged.
“You have eight minutes,” I said.
“I know.”
“The building locks at 10.”
“I know.”
“If we’re still here, we’re stuck.”
“I know.”
I tilted my head. “You planned this.”
He didn’t answer right away. He closed his textbook. Closed his laptop. Turned in his chair to face me.
“I planned this,” he said.
“You’ve been planning this.”
“Since the study group found out.”
“That was three weeks ago.”
“I know.”
“You’ve been thinking about this for three weeks.”
“Every day.”
I smiled. “Show me.”
He took his glasses off and put them on the desk. That was the first thing. Then he leaned across the gap between our chairs and kissed me like he’d been rehearsing it in the mirror, which, knowing Sam, he had. It was too careful for about three seconds. Then I bit his lip and it stopped being careful.
He pulled me out of my chair and into his lap. The desk-chair combo was not built for that. It tipped. We both grabbed the desk. He laughed against my neck, this breathless, giddy laugh, and his hands went under my hoodie and up my back like he was checking I was real.
“Professor’s desk,” I said.
“What?”
“I’m not doing this in a desk built for a fourth grader. Professor’s desk. Front of the room.”
He stood up so fast he almost dropped me.
The professor’s desk in Room 304 is a big laminate thing with a computer bolted to one corner and a box of dry-erase markers. I swept the markers into the drawer. I hopped up on the edge and pulled my hoodie off over my head and threw it at a chair. Sam stood between my knees and looked at me in the light from the quad like he’d been handed a test he’d actually studied for.
“Three weeks,” I said.
“Every day.”
“What did you think about?”
He went red to the ears. “This,” he said. “You. On a desk. Me— on my knees.”
“So get on your knees, Sam.”
He did. Right there on the industrial carpet. He hooked his fingers in my sweatpants and pulled them down and I lifted my hips off the desk to help him, and then he just stared for a second, close, without his glasses, like he had to get his face very near to see.
“You can,” I said, and touched his hair.
He took my cock in his mouth like a guy who had watched a lot of tutorials and was now finding out the tutorials had not covered the part where your partner’s thighs shake. He was slow. He was so earnest. He kept looking up at me to check. I leaned back on my hands on the laminate and watched the clock over the door tick past 10:00 and didn’t say a word about it.
The lock clicked at 10:03. I heard it. I think he did too. Neither of us stopped.
When I was close I pulled him up by the collar and said, “I want you to fuck me. Here. Do you have—”
“Front pocket of my backpack,” he said, and then, at my face: “I said I planned it.”
There was a condom and a little bottle of lube in the front pocket of Sam’s backpack, next to a TI-84 and a granola bar. I’ve never been more charmed by anything in my life.
I bent over the professor’s desk with my cheek on the cool laminate and my sweatpants around my ankles. Sam stood behind me and slicked his fingers and opened me slow, one, then two, his other hand flat on the small of my back like he was steadying a lab sample.
“Tell me if—”
“I’ll tell you. Keep going.”
When he pushed in, I grabbed the far edge of the desk and the box of chalk nobody had used since 2009 slid off onto the floor and exploded. Neither of us looked.
“Oh,” Sam said. Just oh. Like he’d solved something.
He fucked me over the desk where some poor adjunct teaches Intro to Ethics at 9 a.m. on Mondays. He started slow, so slow I thought I’d lose my mind, and then he found a rhythm, and then he found the angle, and then I stopped being able to form sentences. The desk shifted an inch across the floor with every thrust. Somewhere around the fortieth inch I reached back and grabbed his wrist and said “harder,” and he gave me harder, his hips slapping against me in the empty room, the sound bouncing off the whiteboard.
“You’re so—” he kept saying. “You’re so—”
He reached around and took my cock in his hand without being asked, which, for Sam, was a breakthrough. I came first, all over the front of the professor’s desk, with my forehead pressed into the laminate and his name coming out of me in pieces. He came a few seconds later with his face in the back of my neck, his whole body shaking, mumbling sorry, sorry, sorry for no reason I have ever been able to identify.
At 10:47, I noticed.
“Sam.”
“Yeah.”
“The door is locked.”
“I know.”
“Until 7 a.m.”
“I know.”
“Do you have water.”
“No.”
“Snacks?”
He thought about it. “Half a granola bar.”
“Phone?”
“Twelve percent.”
I had eight. We were sitting on the floor in front of the whiteboard, his back against the desk and me between his legs, both of us in our hoodies and nothing else. There was chalk dust on everything.
“We’re going to die,” I said.
“We’re not going to die.”
“We’re going to die in Room 304 and they’ll find us in the morning covered in chalk.”
He laughed, and I felt it against my back, and then he stopped laughing, because I’d turned around in his lap.
“There’s one condom left,” Sam said.
“You brought two?”
“I said I planned it.”
The second time was slower. Me on top of him on the floor of Room 304, riding him with my hands on his chest and the campus lights coming through the windows, his glasses back on because he said he wanted to see me this time. He did see me. He didn’t look away once.
At midnight my phone died. At 1 a.m. his did. At some point we fell asleep on the floor with his hoodie spread under us and mine on top.
At 7:03 a.m., the building manager unlocked the door.
He looked at us. He looked at the chalk on the carpet. He looked at the professor’s desk, which was about three feet from where it was supposed to be.
He didn’t say anything. He just pulled the door closed quietly and walked away.
At 7:17 I woke up and pushed the desk back to where it belonged. Sam woke up to me wiping the front of it down with a dry-erase eraser.
“Is that going to work?” he said.
“No,” I said. “Breakfast?”
“Breakfast.”
He picked up the exploded box of chalk and put it back on the desk, empty, like an apology. Then he took my hand and we walked to the dining hall. Somebody’s going to teach ethics on that desk on Monday.
