“Wait, like your actual professor?” Ophelia says. “Not just aprofessor in your program but, like, the one that is teaching your course?”
“Yep. Well. Sort of.” I lift my head and blow a wad of hair away from my mouth, where it had gotten stuck to my lipstick. “He kicked me out of his class.”
“Hewhat?” Diego sounds scandalized but the kind of scandalized you get while watchingLove Is Blind. He’s enjoying this.
But it’s still validating to see someone else as pissed off about Wyatt as I am. “I know. It’s bullshit. He says he doesn’t want to be in charge of grading me or whatever. Which I guess is fine; that’s his decision. It’s just that he’s the whole reason I came here,so…”
Ophelia leans forward, offering me her teacup—which makes sense until I realize it’s full not of tea but red wine. I shake my head and offer her a thin, grateful smile so I don’t seem too weird.
“That really sucks,” she says. “I mean, he’s right that he probably shouldn’t be in that position. But it’s not like you slept with him on purpose.”
“Exactly.” I exhale heavy. It’s the kind of exhale that feels like collapsing into a pile on the floor. “At least he said he would help me with my portfolio separately. So I still get to, like, benefit from his genius. Just not as his actual student.”
And now that I’m explaining it to the two of them, I wonder how serious Wyatt is about the offer. It’s easy to say he’ll help me with my capstone, but I want more than that. I came here for a whole summer of learning from him and hearing his feedback on my work. What’s he gonna give me instead—a quick glance through some of my photos and a hearty clap on the back?
“That’s still shitty,” says Ophelia, and I could hug her; I really could. But I’m pretty sure we aren’t there yet friendship-wise.
“Agreed. Like, is this dudethatcertain he can’t keep it in his pants? We’re all grown here,” Diego says.
I finally push myself up to sit properly, toeing off my shoes soI can cross my legs on the couch. “Well, there’s nothing I can do about it. I have to take what he’s willing to give me.”
Even if I hate it.
Even if it feels a little bit like he’s punishing me.
I don’t get a choice in any of this, after all.
6
WYATT
I’ve spent the majority of my career practicing calculated invisibility.
Fortunately for me, photography isn’t one of those fields where you need much of a public social presence to succeed. When news outlets want to talk about my work, they use a reproduction of one of my artistic photos, not a picture of my face.
But taking the Parker job means interacting with people in an actual flesh-and-blood space—something that seemed a lot easier until I actually had to do it.
“This is obligatory?” I ask Ava Zhu for the third time, standing in the doorway to her office while she packs up her bag at the end of the second day of classes.
“Oh yes,” she says. “It’s supposed to give the students an opportunity to mingle and get to know all the professors in the program. And each other.”
“Surely the students want to see less of us, not more.”
“Count yourself lucky there aren’t icebreakers. Last year Scott made us all go around in a circle and tell the story behind our favorite scar.”
Ava smiles at me as she squeezes past, out into the hall. And I stand there, awkwardly watching her lock up, imagining all the disgusted ways she’d look at me if I told her the main reason I’m not looking forward to tonight.
It feels like the kind of coincidence that shouldn’t happen in real life. New York is huge. That’s one thing I like about this city: the anonymity. I’ve lived here long enough to have plenty of stories about missed connections, people I ran into one time on the subway or at the grocery store and never saw again. I have neighbors in my building who I’ve only met one time in six years. A part of me thinks I should deconstruct my office and search for hidden cameras, because surely this is some kind of joke.
It’s not, though, and I know it’s not. I just have that kind of luck.
I wonder if I brought it on myself. I mean, I gave Ely my number for a reason. I wanted her to call me. I didn’t want it to be only one night—I had all these secret hopes for a second date, a proper one this time, in a sit-down restaurant with zero glitter or glow sticks. I do like dancing in a club like Revel from time to time. But I’m not really in the habit of having one-night stands either, so maybe the universe thought it was trying to make things easy on me. Well. Thanks for the effort, universe, but I was good on the relationships front.
Now I’m not the cool, mysterious, hot guy from the queer club. I’m the creepy perv professor sleeping with his students.
“You’ll be fine, Wyatt,” Ava says as we start off down the hall toward the elevators. “Promise. The students’ bark is worse than their bite. And you already know the rest of us.”
Which is true—thanks to Ava herself. Ava was one of my first art friends when I moved to New York. She introduced me to everyone at Parker, which is how I got nepotismed into this position in the first place. I’ll have plenty of people to hide behind.
