As soon as the semester started, all thoughts of Rex and his strange hot-cold switcheroo were replaced by teaching, office hours, putting books on hold, finding the best printers on campus, course planning, grading, finding the best coffee in town, getting a school ID, making nice with/avoiding my colleagues, and so on.
Well, maybe not all thoughts.
At night, in the uncomfortable bed that Carl left in the apartment for me, thoughts of Rex still trickled in. Like, I still hadn’t seen him completely naked. That I wondered what his come tasted like. That, although I usually topped, I was fairly desperate for him to fuck me.
Then there were the other thoughts. Idiotic, sappy, confusing thoughts that must have meant I was half-asleep. Like, I wondered how his mouth tasted in the middle of the night, just woken up from sleep. I wondered if he let Marilyn sleep in bed with him. Did he shower in the morning to get ready for the day, or at night, falling into bed clean, with the day washed away? What would it feel like to kiss his stubbled cheek?
And somehow it’s those thoughts—the sappy, confusing ones—that flood through me when he appears in my office doorway. I realize that I’ve never seen him in the daylight before and that there’s a lot of red in his brown hair and in his stubble, and a little gray in his sideburns. I wonder if there’s a chance at all that giving him a hug so that I could smell him and feel his heavy arms enfold me could be seen as in any way normal, and immediately answer no.
“Hey,” he says, sounding confused. “This is your office?”
“Yep, every last crumbling inch of it.” He’s still hovering in the doorway, looking around. “Um, do you want to come in? Watch the glass.” He closes the door behind him and I can hear the glass crunch under his heavy footfalls. “So, do you work for the school?” I can’t believe I never asked him what he did when we met in February. I guess I was too busy freaking out.
“No,” he says, setting down his toolbox on the corner of my desk. “Well, yeah, I do work for them, but they don’t employ me.”
That clears things up.
“Um,” I say, “what?”
“I mean, I’m not a janitor. I fix things. For lots of folks around town. And the school sometimes calls me to fix things for them. And I make furniture.”
Does he think I’d think there was something wrong with being a janitor? Well, maybe so. A lot of professors are weird about class shit—crusading for the working classes in their lectures about Dickens but thinking anyone who does a blue-collar job is too stupid to do what they do.
“That’s cool,” I say. “That you can fix things, I mean. My dad has an auto shop in Philly and all my brothers work there. I’m not very good at it, though. I mean, I can do basic maintenance and fix easy stuff, but I never really got into it the way they did.”
Rex visibly relaxes.
“Cars are one thing I never really learned to fix. So, your light fixture fell,” he says, shifting into professional mode. His whole posture changes: his shoulders loosen and he shifts his weight from foot to foot in a wide stance as he looks up at the ceiling.
“More like it committed suicide,” I say. “This student slammed the door and that’s what made the crack. I think the light fixture just decided it couldn’t stay in this office one day longer.”
Rex turns to me, his eyes intense.
“What happened?” He looks weirdly protective, like if I told him that students complain about bad grades he’d offer to beat them up for me or something.
“Just an entitled brat pissed off because I wouldn’t change his grade. First-semester freshman. Some of them are so nervous to be in college they work really hard. But some of them have never been told no before. They’re convinced they’ll never have to sacrifice anything. Like, they can skip class and party and still get all As, you know? It wears off.” Jesus, Daniel, stop rambling.
Rex nods.
“How come you don’t have a bunch of books in here?” he asks, looking around at my tiny cluster of books on the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that gape around the perimeter of my office. “Most of the professors’ shelves are full. Did you not unpack yet?”
All my grad school friends had tons of books: old favorites from when they were kids, all their books from college, a ton of books for research. They thought it was weird that I didn’t because almost all of them came from smarty-pants families, but I never got books as a kid. I got a library card when I was in sixth or seventh grade, but I never wanted to check books out because I shared a room with Brian and he could be counted on to destroy anything I owned at any moment. Then, later, I never had cash to spare on buying books when I could get them from the library—especially not the pricey books of literary criticism or theory that my classmates spent thirty or fifty bucks a pop for.