Nadia was three semesters out of her undergrad degree, and she was failing the one class she’d been embarrassed to fail.
She’d failed things before, in the usual ways. She dropped a semester sophomore year, stayed out too late, fell for the wrong person, and spent the whole summer after getting over him. This was worse and smaller. She went to every lecture, kept the textbook open the whole time, and could do the math whenever she could see the math. Hand her a closed-book exam, a quiet room, a clock, and her brain went soft. She missed the midterm by four points, and four points was going to cost her the semester.
So she emailed the professor.
Professor Chen looked like a man who’d been told to smile and had smiled exactly as much as the instruction required. Office hours were Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, third floor of the math building, which went up in the seventies and still smelled like old carpet and an air conditioner working too hard in August.
She knocked. He said come in.
Up close he was taller and thinner than the photo, with his sleeves rolled past his elbows and a thin scar on his left wrist that she kept not looking at. A teacup sat on the desk with DO NOT ASK ME ABOUT INTEGRALS in Sharpie on the side.
“You must be Nadia,” he said.
“I must be Nadia.”
“You’re failing my class.”
“I’m trying not to.”
“That’s the spirit. Sit down.”
She sat. The chair was too low, so her knees came up higher than she wanted and she put her bag on her lap to cover it. He looked at her a while, longer than a professor needs to look at a student, and something in her chest went tight and stayed that way. Then he opened a drawer and took out a yellow legal pad.
“Tell me what you understand,” he said. “Then tell me what you don’t. I’ll figure out which of those are real and which are you panicking.”
She came back Tuesday, then the Tuesday after, and by the third one she’d stopped dressing for it, which was a lie she told herself.
He explained the chain rule four ways, and on the last one his finger was on the page next to hers, close enough that she could see the ink smudge on his knuckle. Her pen stopped. He waited. She started again.
On the fourth Tuesday he asked if she wanted Fridays too, and she said yes. On the fifth he asked if she’d eaten, and she hadn’t, so he came back from the faculty lounge with a sandwich and set it on the legal pad like part of the lesson.
The office got smaller as the semester went on. She started noticing where he put his coffee, how he capped his pen, the way he leaned back when she finally got something right. She caught herself replaying it on the drive home, the good part, the second he said her name like it was a fact he’d checked.
On the seventh Tuesday she made a joke and he laughed. First time she’d heard it, and she thought, very clearly, I want that again.
By the ninth Tuesday the tutoring had stopped being about calculus.
It was still about calculus. He still explained the chain rule and the quotient rule and what a second derivative does, and she still wrote it down, but the explanations had a shape now. He explained the second derivative with a car: first derivative is your speed, second derivative is how fast your speed is changing, and you care because you’re about to brake.
He said brake. She blushed. He saw her blush, and she saw him see it.
“Am I making you uncomfortable,” he said.
“No.”
“Your face is doing something.”
“My face is doing calculus.”
“Your face is doing something I haven’t seen a face do in this office.”
She looked at him. He looked back. The teacup said DO NOT ASK ME ABOUT INTEGRALS and neither of them asked.
“Professor Chen,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Can I ask you something that’s not about calculus.”
“You can.”
“Should I.”
“Probably not.”
“I want to ask anyway.”
“Then ask anyway.”
She didn’t. She picked up her pencil, which was worn down to nothing, and wrote with the side of it anyway, and he went back to the second derivative in the same patient voice while her hand went unsteady on the page. Twenty more minutes of that. Then he said it quietly.
“I’m going to ask the registrar for a different tutor for you.”
“What?”
“A different tutor. I’ll request one today.”
“Why.”
“Because I’m your professor and you’re my student and whatever’s happening in this room shouldn’t be taught by me.”
“What’s happening in this room.”
He looked at her for a long time.
“You tell me,” he said.
She looked at the legal pad, then the teacup, then his hands folded on the desk, which had been close to hers on the page and hadn’t been close since she blushed.
“You’ve been making me feel like the only person in this room,” she said. “Nine Tuesdays. On purpose. You shouldn’t be doing it on purpose.”
“No,” he said. “I shouldn’t.”
“Should you be doing it at all.”
“No.”
“Are you going to keep doing it.”
“I don’t know.”
“What happens if you do.”
He didn’t answer, and she didn’t ask twice. The radiator knocked once in the corner and neither of them looked at it. She put the legal pad in her bag and stood, and he said her name and she stopped, and he said the rest fast, like it had been sitting in his mouth all afternoon. The answer is yes, I’d keep doing it. The answer is that’s why I’m sending you to someone else. The answer is I’ve taught nine years and this hasn’t happened before and I want you to know I take it seriously.
“Okay,” she said.
“I’ll refer you to my colleague.”
“Okay.”
“You can refuse.”
She stood there with her hand on the strap of her bag, thumb gone white on it.
“Then refer me,” she said. “I’ll pass with your colleague. Then I’m not your student anymore.” She held his eyes. “Then you can stop telling me what I should and shouldn’t do.”
He looked at her a long time, and then he wrote a name and an office number on the pad, tore the sheet off, and held it out.
“Dr. Okafor. Wednesdays. She’s better at the chain rule than I am.”
“Nobody’s better at the chain rule than you.”
“Nadia.” He didn’t let go of the paper. “Grades post December nineteenth. If there’s a conversation you still want to have after that, I’d like to have it.”
Dr. Okafor was better at the chain rule. Nadia passed with an 88, and she found out at 12:04 a.m. on the nineteenth, cross-legged on her bed with Sum the cat on her feet, refreshing the portal like a maniac.
At 12:06, an email.
Subject: not about calculus.
Grades are in. You’re not my student. I checked the registrar’s rules twice and my conscience once. The coffee shop on Hanover opens at seven. — D.
She read it four times, put the phone face down, and picked it right back up. Then she got in the shower and stood in there until the water went cold, and she was still early. She was there at 6:52.
He came in at 6:58 with the DO NOT ASK ME ABOUT INTEGRALS teacup in a paper bag, because it was the only one he trusted. He sat across from her at a table too small for both their knees and said, “Eighty-eight.”
“You looked.”
“I looked. I’m still a professor. I’m just not yours.” He turned the cup in the bag. “My name is Daniel.”
“I know your name.”
“I wanted to be the one to say it.”
They lasted forty minutes at the coffee shop. The walk to his apartment is fifteen, and they did it in eleven, and he kept his hand flat against her back the whole way like he was steering her.
Second floor of a triple-decker, green velvet couch, bookshelves on every wall. Ten teacups on the top shelf, each with Sharpie on it, and she didn’t read them. He shut the door and locked it and she was already against him with her hands flat on his chest, and he put his hands over hers.
“Tell me what you want,” he said. “Then tell me what you think you don’t want. I’ll figure out which is which.”
She laughed into his shirt. “You’re doing the office-hours voice.”
“Is that a problem.”
She thought about it, honestly. The patient voice that had walked her through the quotient rule for nine Tuesdays, that had waited out every stupid question she had.
“No,” she said. “Keep doing it. Tell me what to do. Slowly. And if I say stop, you stop.”
His breath went out of him.
“Okay,” he said. “Take off your sweater.”
She took off her sweater. Her hands were cold and the wool caught in her hair.
“And the rest.”
She stood in the gray December light and took off the rest, jeans and bra and underwear, and folded nothing, dropping all of it on his floor. He watched the whole time without touching her, and by the time she was naked her thighs were slick and she was shaking a little.
“Sit on the couch,” he said. “Knees apart.”
The velvet was cold on the backs of her legs. She sat and opened her knees, and he knelt between them still fully dressed, sleeves rolled to the elbows, that scar right there at eye level, and put his hands on her inner thighs and looked. His thumbs didn’t move. She could feel her pulse in the spot where he was looking.
“You’re blushing,” he said.
“My face is doing calculus.”
He laughed, the laugh from the ninth Tuesday, and then he put his mouth on her.
She grabbed the arm of the couch. He was slow the way he was slow about everything, building up from the simple version, flat tongue and then just the tip, and then two fingers sliding into her while he sucked her clit until she heard herself make a sound she’d never made in front of anyone.
“Good,” he said against her. “Tell me.”
“There. Don’t—that. Keep doing that.”
He kept doing that. He curled his fingers and she came with her heel digging into his shoulder and her hand fisted in his hair, louder than she meant to be, the teacups watching.
He stood up and undid his belt while she lay there boneless, and she watched him the way he’d watched her. He was hard, flushed, bigger than she’d let herself think about on the long Wednesdays at Okafor’s office. He took a condom out of his wallet.
“You had a condom in your wallet.”
“Since the nineteenth,” he said. “Of November. I’m an optimist.”
He covered her on the couch, braced on one arm, and stopped with the head of his cock pressed against her.
“Yes?” he said.
“Yes.”
He pushed inside her and stopped halfway, and she grabbed his hips and pulled, and he made a sound into her neck that she wanted to hear for the rest of her life.
He fucked her slow with the velvet sliding under her back, his hand at her jaw turning her face so he could watch it. He talked her through it, and that was the part that undid her. Breathe. Good. Look at me. Put your hand there, between us. There. Show me how you like it. She touched herself while he moved, and he watched her fingers and changed his angle and asked if that was better, and it was, and she told him so.
“Brake,” she gasped near the end, joking, and he stopped dead, and she had to say “No, no, don’t, it’s a second derivative joke, keep going,” and he dropped his forehead to hers and laughed and went faster.
She came again with him deep inside her. He followed a second later, low and wrecked, his whole weight settling onto her with his face in her hair.
Later, under a blanket on the couch, she read the teacups.
TENURE IS A STATE OF MIND. I WAS TOLD THERE WOULD BE NO PROOFS. PROBABLY FINE.
“Which one’s next?” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“You buy a new one when something happens. Right?”
He was quiet a second.
“I’m thinking,” he said, “DO NOT ASK ME ABOUT DECEMBER NINETEENTH.”
His thumb was still resting in the dent of her hip, and under it there was a mark, small and red, the shape of him. She put her hand over his and left it there.
