"DOLLEY, HOLY SHIT; please tell me you're already home." Y/N's words were breathless as she hurried across the quad, muttering under her breath into her phone. She'd darted out of her lecture hall the moment they'd been dismissed, having no desire to stick around for the confrontation she knew was inevitable.

"I'm just getting out of class, dear," Dolley responded, but when she continued, her words were teasing. "What sort of trouble did you manage to get yourself into while I was gone?"

"I cannot begin to explain." Y/N let out a huff, glancing over her shoulder and ducking her head as she whispered, "but it's not good."

"Oh, good lord, Y/N; I was joking." She could hear the genuine worry begin to creep into Dolley's voice and couldn't help but wince.

"Yeah, I wish I was, too." She chalked the subsequent rush of static through the line up to Dolley's sigh. "Where are you right now? Can I meet you somewhere?"

"Want to go to dinner?"

"Too broke for that."

"Packaged ramen from the drugstore on the east side of campus?"

"Now you're speaking my language." Y/N grinned, and she could only picture Dolley rolling her eyes from wherever she was. "I'll be there in a few."

"You'd better. I can't wait much longer to hear what sort of nonsense you've been up to."

______________

"YOU SLEPT WITH a professor?!"

"Shh, Doll; not so loud," Y/N hissed, pulling her back into the soda aisle and frantically checking for any prurient eavesdroppers. Her voice was low when she added, "It was the guy at the bar last night. I had no idea he was a professor here."

Dolley let out a dry, disbelieving laugh, pinching the bridge of her nose. "This is... a mess."

"You're telling me."

"So, what's the plan going to be?"

When Dolley folded her arms, raising an amused eyebrow (a little too amused, in Y/N's humble opinion), but Y/N furrowed her brow. "What d'you mean, 'what's the plan?'"

"What are you going to do the next time you run into him?" Dolley asked. There was a pause; Y/N hadn't thought that far. "You don't really think you can make it through the semester ignoring this, do you?"

"I... Maybe? I don't know!" Y/N let out a frustrated huff. "That's what I need you to help me figure out. What else are you here for?"

"Oh, you make an excellent point," Dolley sighed. "All I do is pay half the rent and help you get laid at bars downtown."

Y/N scowled. "You helped me get laid by a professor. Just help me."

"Mmh, I don't think I heard a 'please' in there."

"Please, Dolley, my white knight to whom I owe my life," she pleaded, clutching her roommates arm and sighing wistfully. Dolley's lips were pressed into a line, but that didn't stop her smile from showing through. "I would be nothing without you; just please, do me this one final favor."

"Alright, alright," she conceded with a huff, shaking free from Y/N's grip. "Drama queen."

Y/N shrugged shamelessly. "I bring excitement into your life. Don't be ungrateful."

"Whatever you say, dear." The defeat in her words made Y/N grin. "So back to your excitement, then."

"I'm so lost," Y/N groaned, finally emerging from the soda aisle with shoulders slumped in defeat. "If the sex hadn't been so good, I'd probably just pretend it never happened."

Dolley creased her brow. "Was it really that good?"

Y/N turned to her with a serious demeanor, a hand on her shoulder as she looked her in the eye. "Dolley. I am covered in hickeys from my neck to my hips. That man damn near threw my back out. I won't bullshit you; there's no way I'm gonna be able to sit comfortably for—"

"Okay, alright! A 'yes' would've sufficed," Dolley cut her off, pushing past her to the shelf of instant noodles. Y/N looked disproportionately self-satisfied when she followed. "That's about enough details for one evening."

"You asked!"

"But you can't spend the entire semester ignoring him, Y/N," Dolley continued, ignoring her words. "That class is notoriously difficult — the only people I know who didn't frequent his office hours were the ones who got 'C's."

Y/N sighed, rubbing her temples as her roommate pushed cup after cup of beef ramen into her basket. "So then shouldn't I just put this whole thing behind me? I can't really start asking him to help me analyze Kant if I open the conversation with, 'hey, good to see you again, you're almost as good at teaching as you are in bed.'"

Dolley laughed at her dry tone. "I don't mean that, of course."

"Then what do you mean?"

"If you never agree to put this all behind you, I think it's going to be on both of your minds for the rest of the semester," she said matter-of-factly, hesitating when the freezer at the side of the room caught her gaze. "Should we pick up pizza rolls, too?"

"What kind of question is that? Of course we should," Y/N scoffed, brushing past her toward the Totino's section. "But if he and I both just ignore it, wouldn't that be an easier way to put it behind us?"

"Oh, grab a bag of the cheeseburger flavor, would you?" Dolley leaned in to look over Y/N's shoulder, ignoring her words altogether, and she glanced back with a raised eyebrow.

"Can you focus for five seconds?" She dropped three bags of pizza rolls — pepperoni flavor — into her basket with a huff. "Anyway, the cheeseburger flavor is disgusting. Get some taste."

"Don't discount the nostalgia of it!"

"Dolley." Y/N fixed her with a pointed look, and she sighed.

"We both know ignoring it is a poor idea, even if it is the easier option." Dolley didn't waste a second in pushing right past Y/N when she stood, grabbing a bag of the cheeseburger pizza rolls (an oxymoron in itself, as Y/N would've told her) before the freezer door could fall shut. "Just talk to him after class one day. Don't make it take more than five minutes."

"I don't even know where I'd start with that. I've dealt with awkward fallout from one-night stands before, but never with a professor." Her footsteps stalled within the last yard of the frozen section. "I've just gotta ignore it and focus on the coursework, Dolley. Wanna get some Ben and Jerry's?"

"Are you trying to distract me with a pint of chocolate fudge brownie?" Dolley asked incredulously, before adding, "Because it's working. Let's get two."

She grinned. "Excellent."

Y/N figured that was the end of it, that two pints of ice cream and an incredibly vague game plan would be enough to satiate her friend for the time being, but after they checked out, trying to figure out how many meals they could extend one pack of ramen to (because, really, if you just add more water, doesn't it make the servings bigger?), Dolley felt the need to return to it as they walked through the sliding glass exit doors, her words holding an air of finality.

"If you really want to insist on not just communicating with the poor man, Y/N, then fine." Y/N raised a quizzical eyebrow, not yet following where Dolley had abruptly turned the trajectory of their conversation. "But after his lecture on Wednesday, when you realize that leaving the subject untouched just makes it more unbearable—" ("'When'?" Y/N muttered dubiously.) "—then I need you to agree to go talk to your professor."

Dolley didn't wait for her response, squinting at the nutrition facts on the ramen labels as her focus drifted elsewhere (sure, it said two servings, but she was fairly sure that only the bourgeoise couldn't have stretched it to three), but Y/N let out a surrendering sigh.

"Wednesday's going to be just fine," she said, realizing but not caring that Dolley was no longer listening. "But if it isn't, I'll talk to him."

________________

WEDNESDAY WAS NOT 'just fine.'

Y/N spent the entire class on edge, trying futilely not to let her thoughts drift back to the other night in the bar, then on the street in front of her building, then in the elevator, in her living room, even in the kitchen— but no, she was getting off track. Little did she know, Thomas was having precisely the same issue.

She jotted down his words almost robotically, the meaning of them going into one ear and out the other, more focused on the sound of his voice than on what he was actually saying.

Only once did she manage to focus for long enough to actually process a thought, but when he was fielding questions about the material, Thomas conveniently managed to miss her having raised her hand from where she was seated. She supposed she'd just positioned herself too far back and thought no more of it.

Despite how 'not fine' that day had been, she dismissed it as a fluke, showing up the next Monday with her head on straight, her readings prepared and annotated, and took a seat several rows further forward. Her motivation may have been misplaced, leaning a bit too far toward wanting to impress her professor and not far enough toward a desire to understand the material, but she was familiar enough with the content to feel comfortable giving her input on the questions he posed to the class throughout the lecture.

Again, her efforts bore no fruit. Her notes were better that day, so that was certainly something to count as a plus, but she left feeling put-out by the fact that she hadn't even had a chance to participate. Usually, she wouldn't have been so perturbed by this — sitting through a Socratic seminar playing tetris on her laptop was no unfamiliar experience — but this class accounted for six of the twelve credit hours she still needed for her chosen major. She didn't suppose that it'd be a good look to have the class dragging down her GPA to be the same one she was supposedly most passionate about; generally speaking, that wasn't what graduate schools were looking for.

Besides, she liked the subject, too. Surely that had to count for something?

And that was how she kept pushing off the inevitable conversation with Thomas — sorry, Professor Jefferson — and coming up with increasingly creative excuses as to why her efforts were being so plainly ignored, not only that following Wednesday, too, but also the Monday and Wednesday after. She'd made it through three weeks of classes before she could finally work up the nerve to confront him.

Unfortunately, that task proved to be no easier than her previous one.

Thom— her professor was always the last one into the lecture hall and the first one out, leaving no opportunities for chatter, or in her case, a supposedly inevitable clash she'd already begun arming herself for. She'd nearly caught him in the halls at various times, but he always seemed to have somewhere he urgently needed to be. The same doctrine followed in his office hours; apparently, another student had scheduled a meeting with him three minutes after every single time she arrived, without fail, so could she please just come back another time? Surely, another time would be better for both of them.

That time never came.

It was near the end of the fourth week that she was entirely fed up. They'd moved from Kant to Machiavelli, and so far, The Prince had her ready to tear her hair out. It didn't help that they'd all just finished the book, their first paper of the year on it due the next Monday.

She was far past lying to herself about her motives being purely academic while she continued to privately just want his attention — no, by then, she was hopped up on forty ounces of sugary coffee and just a touch of RedBull, and she hardly had a thesis for her paper. She'd read the same passages time and time again — she likely could've recited them word-for-word by the time she demanded feedback — and any shallow, vain desires for recognition were the furthest thing from her mind. She needed a professor, and she was pissed that Thomas didn't seem to have any interest in acting like one.

It was late Thursday evening when she marched across the green from the library to the building that housed his office in a fury. Yes, it was the last week of January; yes, the entire city was still coated in snow, but no, she could not bring herself to care about the very real possibility of frostbite as she trudged through the snow in sweatpants, slippers, and a tank top. Practicality wasn't her priority. Finishing her paper was.

Thomas's office hours were from 7 to 10 PM every evening, a schedule he stuck to religiously. It was 9:24 when Y/N began tracking snow through the bottom floor of his building, and 9:31 when she finally managed to locate and reach his actual office.

It was reluctant when she finally knocked, struggling to resist the urge to simply bust in and rip him a new one, but to her relief, it was simply met with a 'come in.' That was when she threw the door open in a fit of annoyance.

"You've been avoiding me," she said, eyes narrowed and tone accusatory before he could so much as react to her presence.

"Y/N, I—" His eyes were wide; he seemed to be at a loss for words as his eyes drifted down to her sweatpants and Hello Kitty slippers. He couldn't have convinced her it wasn't a dignified look even if he'd tried. "What are you doin' here?"

"We need to talk." She dropped her bag into one of the chairs in front of his desk, though she chose not to take a seat, instead glaring down at him, arms folded.

He sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose, and though his head was down, his shadow of a grimace told her everything she needed to know: he'd been dreading this conversation far more than she had. "Look, right now really isn't a great time. I've got—"

"Don't bullshit me, Thomas."

"Professor Jefferson," he corrected her, the words hissed through gritted teeth, and she huffed, rolling her eyes.

"My bad. Don't bullshit me, Professor Jefferson." Y/N scowled as she took another step towards him. "Your office hours don't end until ten. There's no way you have time for a meeting between now and then if you haven't already started one."

He let out a heavy sigh. "Alright. Alright, fine. And I know what you're gonna say, but—"

"Do you really?" she challenged him, head cocked to one side. "Because the fact that you haven't given me one chance to speak to you in almost a month tells me pretty clearly that you don't. Generally, you find out what people have to say by listening to them."

"We can't have this conversation here. You've gotta come find me some other time." The urgency in his voice only served to infuriate her further. What right did he have to be dictating this when he'd tried to stop the conversation altogether?

"Oh, believe me, I've tried," Y/N huffed. "I'm done accommodating. If you wanted to talk about this some other time, I would've been happy to, but we're well past that."

He held her burning gaze warily for another moment, but she didn't let up. Finally, he sighed. "Fine. Say your part. I'm listenin'."

"You've been completely freezing me out. You haven't been answering my questions in classes; you haven't been letting me contribute to discussions; you, most recently, haven't let me talk to you for more than five seconds, hence why I'm here." She launched into an irate monologue without any further encouragement, and to his credit, Thomas at least had the decency to look guilty. "You've been turning me away at your office hours; for fuck's sake, Thomas, you haven't even answered any of my emails!"

"I know, I know," he said, and though she could see the exhaustion written across his face, she didn't let him continue. "But you've gotta understand—"

"I'm not done," she cut him off, and it was then that he raised an affronted brow. "Anyway, I get why you're keeping your distance. Really, I do. And honestly? I can't really blame you for it."

"Well, great, so—"

"But with that said," —she gave Thomas an expectant look as she continued to speak over him, challenging him to try and interrupt— "You've been doing more than keeping your distance. You've been outright ignoring me, and that's where I'm drawing a line in the sand. Refusing to engage with me doesn't help either of us."

She let out a heavy breath when she finally reached the end of her rant, and though he was certainly taken aback, Thomas looked unimpressed.

"May I speak now?" he asked mockingly, and she scowled. "Or are you just gonna keep cuttin' me off?"

"Depends how much bullshit comes out of your mouth."

He rolled his eyes. "Sure." He put his pen back into the cup on the edge of the desk before drawing himself up to the fullest height he could reach in a rolling chair. With how he was looking at her, with how cross his tone was, Y/N may have backed down in another context, but quite frankly, she was beyond having anything to lose. "I understand that you're hurt, Y/N, and for that, 'm honestly sorry, but—"

"I'm not hurt, I'm ticked!"

"Y/N." That time, his hard voice, his barely-contained anger, did make her shrink away, just a bit. "You've gotta realize that what happened is in the past. It was a mistake. I didn't know you were a student here — you even told me you went to school in Chicago."

"I did, for two years."

"Doesn't matter. Moral of the story is that you've gotta leave that in the past. I'm your professor now, and that's a boundary that can't be crossed. We both need to stop dwellin' on it." His saying 'we' rather than 'you' certainly didn't go unnoticed, but Y/N deemed it not worth addressing.

"Great. It's behind us. Can you stop ignoring me now?"

"Come on, Y/N—"

"Seriously? You're gonna argue with that?" She threw her hands up in a huff, beyond exasperated and crossing the line to indignance. "You wanna remind me that you're my professor? Then stop acting like I don't exist. It's that simple, Thomas."

"It's Professor Jefferson. And I'm not tryin' to ignore you," he defended. "But don't you see the position this puts me in? My job's at stake here. This can never happen again!"

"And who said I wanted it to?" she bit back immediately, and for just a moment, Thomas was rendered silent.

"If that's not what you're lookin' for, then what are you here for?" His voice was quiet, his gaze searching, and Y/N sighed.

"Seriously? I haven't made myself clear enough?" She raised an eyebrow, but his blank look told her all she needed to know. The tension in her shoulders dropped; her combative stance went neutral when she reached into her bag, pulling it from the chair in front of his desk. "You're the one who keeps emphasizing that you're my professor — and that's what I need you to be right now."

He raised an eyebrow, clearly lost as she withdrew Machiavelli's The Prince from her bag, beaten up and slathered in colored tabs around the edges. She added in a small voice, "I've been struggling with the reading. I did it all, but there are just a couple passages that... I need help with."

Thomas — no, Professor Jefferson (god, was she ever going to struggle with getting that down) — looked stunned, plain and simple. Y/N had expected all of his assumptions for why she'd shown up there. Two weeks earlier, they may have also been accurate ones, but ultimately, she was still just a student. He'd really had to have had a big head to think he'd take priority over that for any extended period of time.

His eyes were wide. He continued to look toward her, but his gaze was blank, slowly drifting to his desk, until finally, he sighed. "Well, shit. I, uh... I'm really sorry, Y/N. Really." If the growing guilt behind his shock hadn't been clear enough in his demeanor, it was woven tightly into his voice. His stare flickered back up to her, and despite her lingering irritation, the apology in it softened her. "I got so caught up in my own problems that I didn't even consider. I didn't mean to assume that you... y'know."

"Came here to try and get dicked down?" Y/N supplied, voice dry as she watched him expectantly. He cracked a sheepish smile.

"Somethin' like that."

"As though it'd be worth the effort," she snorted. "There are, like, thirty frats on campus, and I have a paper due Monday — in case you'd forgotten. If I wanted to get laid, I'd do it much more efficiently."

"Mm, but would it be as good?" At the clear ego in Thomas's playful stare, Y/N's eyebrows shot toward her hairline.

"Now who's crossing boundaries?"

Despite the skepticism in her voice, Thomas laughed. "'M just kiddin'. Promise."

"Hilarious." Her small, persistent smile undermined her sarcasm, and his gaze was soft.

"Alright, alright, come take a seat. Show me which pages you're strugglin' with."

"Yeah, so it's less full pages and passages than it is key phrases I just can't seem to connect to the rest of the work." Y/N lowered herself into the chair that wasn't already holding her bag as she flipped open her book to her third pink tab, turning it to show him. "Like, here. Chapter 19."

"Mhm."

"I understand what the whole page is getting at, but look at this..."

They sank easily into the text, despite being focused more on one another's voices than on the writing itself. Ten PM had long since come and gone, but as the night stretched on, the pair only continued to pass Y/N's book back and forth, bouncing from passage to passage, idea to idea as though no time had passed at all. Neither of them bothered to check any sort of a clock until Y/N let out a loud, drawn-out yawn. Thomas raised an eyebrow.

"You gettin' tired?" Y/N gave a halfhearted shrug as he finally checked his watch, and his eyes widened. "Shit, it's past eleven. We should get you outta here."

"Yeah, yeah, you're right." Her voice was weary as she lifted herself out of her seat, tucked her book back into her bag. "I've got everything I need for my paper, anyway."

"Glad to hear it." Thomas reached for his coat as she made her way to the door, but she paused when he asked, "You're not thinkin' of walkin' home, are you?"

She glanced back over her shoulder. "What if I am?"

Thomas furrowed his brow. "Tell me that's a joke. That's gotta be a joke." Y/N shrugged, and Thomas groaned lightly. "In that outfit, you freezin' and gettin' abducted are equally likely, you know that?"

"Aw, thanks for letting me know! Now I feel so much safer," she said, plastering on a mocking smile.

"Lemme call you an Uber," he offered, and Y/N quirked a brow.

"Are you that much of a one-trick pony?"

"If makin' sure women get home safe is my only trick, I think it's a pretty good one to have," he said matter-of-factly, and Y/N had to laugh.

"I can appreciate that. An Uber would be great." Y/N pulled her bag up her shoulder as she returned to his door. "I'll see you Monday?"

"Mhm. Your driver's named Amy, and she's drivin' a blue Camry, by the way," Thomas informed her, and Y/N smiled. "G'night, Y/N."

"Night, professor."