Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~6 min read
Chapter 16: Spring break
He had not realized how much of his daily life she occupied until she wasn’t in it.
Spring break was ten days. He had not anticipated ten days feeling like a substantially longer unit of time than ten days. He had not anticipated sitting in his office on the first Monday with her desk in the anteroom visible through the open door, the surface of it clear and impersonal in a way it hadn’t been since October — no papers, no annotated printouts, no pen left uncapped on the corner — and feeling the absence as a physical thing.
He had work. He had substantial, meaningful work — the book chapter that had been overdue for eighteen months was finally coming together, and he had a conference paper to revise and three letters of recommendation to write, and the quiet of a campus during spring break was the ideal condition for the kind of sustained concentration that teaching terms made difficult. He had always valued spring break precisely for this reason.
He sat at his desk on Tuesday morning and read the same paragraph of his chapter four times without retaining a word of it.
He put his pen down.
He thought about her.
He thought about her with the helpless specificity of someone who has spent months constructing elaborate internal barriers and returned from a week’s absence to find that none of the barriers had held. He thought about her laugh — the one he heard occasionally through the anteroom door, when she was on the phone with Yara or surprised by something she was reading. He thought about her arguments, the way she came at a text from an angle that was slightly unexpected and consistently more interesting than the angle he would have taken. He thought about March — the way the one-on-ones had been reinstated and they had sat across the seminar table on Thursday afternoons again and talked about teaching and Victorian literature and the particular quality of those forty-five minutes that he had been protecting from examination for so long.
He missed her.
Not the idea of her, not the abstract category of “intellectually stimulating presence.” He missed *her* — specifically, precisely, with the particular ache of a thing you have grown accustomed to without meaning to.
He tried reading. He walked the empty campus in the cold March air, past the library and the courtyard and the dormitories with their spring-break quiet. He worked on the chapter, and it was better than it had been — something about the sustained focus of a clear week — and he still broke concentration every forty minutes or so on no particular account.
On Thursday evening, he opened his email.
He had not intended to write anything. He had opened it for the usual professional purposes — letters of recommendation, a response to the Victorian Studies editor who had responded warmly to Amara’s submitted paper and wanted a faculty endorsement — and then he had opened a new message.
*To: a.hassan@whitmore.edu*
He typed.
*Amara,*
He stopped. Deleted: *Amara.* Typed it again. Left it.
*Amara — I have been sitting with something I haven’t been able to say for a very long time, and I find that in your absence I am less able to justify my silence than I was when you were here. This may be the most honest I have been with myself in years, so I ask you to receive it accordingly.*
*I cannot stop thinking about you. Not in the professional capacity of a supervisor who values his TA’s contributions — though that is also true and entirely genuine — but in the way that is inappropriate and inconvenient and that I have been managing very badly since approximately November. You are the most interesting person I have encountered in a long time, and the fact that you are also brilliant and kind and absolutely certain of your own worth without being diminished by it, and that you push back when I’m wrong and you’re right and you don’t apologize for either — these things have made my controlled, quiet, carefully arranged life feel smaller than it did before I met you.*
*When this semester ends, may I take you to dinner? Not as your professor. Not as your supervisor or academic mentor or any other category we have spent eight months hiding inside. As a man who is hopelessly and, I think, irrevocably falling for a brilliant, beautiful woman who has challenged him daily and ruined his concentration for months and who he would very much like to know for a long time.*
*If the answer is no, I will understand. If the answer is yes — tell me.*
*— Theo*
He read it.
He sat with his hand over the trackpad.
He thought about Dean Wallace. He thought about Monica. He thought about the harassment claim and the investigation and the thin ice and the careful, disciplined life he had built precisely to avoid this. He thought about what he had to lose.
He thought about ten days of reading the same paragraph four times.
He moved the email to the draft folder. He sat back. He pressed his knuckles against his mouth and breathed.
Then he went to the draft and he looked at it for a long time and then he moved it to the trash.
He closed his laptop.
He sat in the spring-break quiet of his empty office for a while, in the last of the March light, and thought about the version of himself who had written that draft. Who had sat at a desk and typed the truest thing he’d felt in three years without apology or hedge. Who had used her first name without formality, without the professional distance that kept everything in its proper place.
*Theo,* he’d signed it.
Not Professor Lancaster. Not Theodore. *Theo* — the name she’d called him, once, in a hallway at a hotel, the name nobody called him anymore except the memory of it.
He sat in the dark for a while.
The draft was in the trash. It would stay there.
Two weeks.
He put on his coat and went home and poured a drink and thought about dinner, and spring, and a woman with dark eyes who said *well done* like she didn’t quite know how to accept a compliment but was trying anyway, and he sat with it all in the quiet of his apartment and let himself want it, just for one evening, without any of the counterarguments.
Just for tonight.
Tomorrow he would be disciplined again.
Tonight he would let himself want what he wanted.
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