1
Jaz
Let me tell you, a special place in hell is reserved for women who want to fuck their thesis supervisors.
It’s about the most shameful thought a person could have, isn’t it? To sit across from someone with the most brilliant mind you could imagine, a person more incredibly accomplished at her young age than most could hope to be in a lifetime, a woman people pay tens of thousands of dollars to listen to…
And to only be able to think about easing the frameless glasses off her Grecian nose, sweeping a hand through the neatly combed brown locks, and taking off the tailored blouse one button at a time…
It was a crime.
“Jaz? Any thoughts on what I just said?”
My back straightened, and I placed both hands on the desk that—unfortunately—separated us. In the cramped confines of her office, we would’ve been practically on top of each other without it.
I exhaled, willing my subconscious to remember what she’d been asking about. But now all I could think of was us on top of each other.
“I’m sorry, Dr. Erwin. I lost track of myself for a second. Would you mind repeating that?” I squirmed subtly in my seat.
The sympathetic smile the professor gave me softened her eyes and rounded her cheeks, somehow making her look even more attractive. “Again, please call me Faye. We’re going to be working together quite a bit. It’ll be much more pleasant if we’re on a first-name basis.”
Faye. The woman whose presence had dominated an entire lecture hall in my sophomore year wanted me to call her Faye.
Not Dr. Erwin. Not even Faye Charlotte Erwin—yes, I may have stalked her a little—but Faye.
“In any case,” she went on, “I was asking whether you might want to include the works of Nikki Giovanni in your research.”
“Ah…” Giovanni was an important Black American poet of the sixties and seventies, and one I hadn’t considered. I already had five poets to analyze. “Don’t you think it would be taking on a lot?”
Faye shuffled through her papers, silent for a long moment—too long. “You have Emily Dickinson, Margaret Atwood, Dorothy Parker, Sylvia Plath, and Kathy Acker here,” she said at last. “Do you see the problem?”
“I’m not sure.”
Her tongue emerged to wet her lips, and as she leaned forward, the slightest hint of cleavage revealed itself at the collar of her teal blouse. Cleavage! I gulped, my mind racing off in a thoroughly inappropriate direction.
You cannot reach over and undo those buttons. No, not even the top one! Stop thinking with your cooch and keep your mind on the conversation, would you?
The problem was that in all my research, I hadn’t come up with a single piece of evidence that Dr. Faye Charlotte Erwin was anything other than straight.