Chapter Thirty-SixCaleb“Why would you assign a paper to be due one week before the final?” Thalia asks. “Who does that? What educational purpose can it possibly serve? No one is doing their best work at that point. No one is really absorbing information, it’ll all just be incoherent nonsense brought on by too little sleep and too much caffeine.”
“Sadists?” I ask, leaning back on the couch, lacing my fingers over my head. “Or maybe masochists, because then they’ll have to grade the final and also read all those papers?”
I’ve never once assigned a paper. I had to write them occasionally in undergrad, and every single time, it made me regret taking a humanities course for ‘fun.’
Turns out that I like reading books, but writing papers and analyzing them feels like someone pounding nails into my brain. What’s the whale symbolize in Moby Dick? I don’t know, a whale?
“It’s monstrous,” Thalia says, also leaning back, looking up at me. “And stupid. And dumb.”
“So you’re not staying over?” I ask, even though I already know the answer from her brief tirade.
“I can’t,” she sighs. “I gotta go back and finish this dumb thing, it’s due by eight a.m. And I still have to write four more pages and a conclusion, and then put together my bibliography because Callahan is a maniac about bibliographies.”
Then she curls into me, one knee over my thigh, her head on my shoulder, and I wrap an arm around her smooth, bare skin.
“Sorry,” she says.
We’re both naked on my couch because we didn’t make it upstairs this time. Forty-five minutes ago she texted me and asked me what I was doing, and fifteen minutes after that she was on my doorstep.
Then, in short order, she was naked and I was naked, on the couch, her knees on my shoulders and I was wearing a condom that she’d magically produced from somewhere, and she was breathing hard, both hands on my thighs, and then I carefully, slowly slid inside her and she moaned.
She didn’t last long. I didn’t last long.
I’m starting to think that Thalia might be a sex fiend, and I’m okay with it.
“Better you than me,” I tease, and she laughs.* * *When she comes over the next night, the first thing she does after she comes in the door is hand me a neatly written, numbered list.
“These your demands?” I tease, before I actually read it.
Thalia just laughs.
“Sort of,” she says, and then my eyebrows go up as I actually read the list.
1. Cowgirl
2. Missionary
3. Doggy
4. Froggy
5. Plow
6. Wheelbarrow
7. Reverse Cowgirl
8. Pretzel
9. Piledriver
10. Side-lying“Tell me more about how you’re a shy, innocent virgin,” I say.
“I never claimed the first two, and I got over the third,” she laughs. “I did some research during a study break and you know how I like lists. And goals. And achievements. And achieving goals.”
“And fucking me silly,” I say, still scanning the list, and she laughs. “Is there a Powerpoint? I don’t know what all of these even are, and if I try to Google them you know I’ll just get porn.”
“You have to start using Safe Search,” she says.
“That only works sometimes,” I tell her. “If you’re searching, I don’t know, best corkscrew it’ll work but there’s no such thing as a Safe Search when you’re trying to look up doggy style.”
“I thought you’d know that one,” she teases.
We’re still standing in my front hallway as she takes off her coat, puts her bag down, then runs her fingers through her hair, shaking it out.
“Want to help me figure it out?” I ask, grinning, and I pull her to me.
“Duh,” she says, laughing. “That’s the point of the list.”* * *For the next two weeks, I essentially become Thalia’s late-night booty call. It’s the end of the semester and then finals, not to mention the last few grad school applications are due, and she’s completely swamped with work.
I’m not mad. There are far worse things in life than Thalia coming over for sex and then either leaving or falling asleep in my bed.
Far worse.
We do talk. She tells me about how Bastien found Javier, sort of. I admit that Levi and Seth both know about us. We talk about our families and Thanksgiving and the upcoming Christmas break, about whether we should wait until she graduates to tell our families, or whether we can do it once she’s no longer my student.
Though I could still get fired once that happens. The Virginia State University guidelines are very clear, but once I’m no longer grading her homework it just becomes wrong and ethically questionable, not Wrong and Unethical.
Speaking of Wrong and Unethical (and an affront to professors everywhere, and a perverse man who gets off on having power over her, and unambiguously corrupt), I’m still getting the emails. Every other day, like clockwork. In a twisted way I’m starting to look forward to them. They’re at least creative.