Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 20: Court you
His apartment was nothing like she had imagined.
She had not imagined it, of course — she had been very disciplined about that — but in the moments when she had involuntarily constructed a version of it, she’d assembled something sparse and controlled, the spatial equivalent of his professional persona. Minimal, precise, cold.
It was none of those things.
The apartment occupied the top floor of an old building six blocks from campus, and it was full of books in the organic, unpretentious way of someone who read constantly and had never bothered to curate his shelves for appearance. Not the designed disorder of a man who wants you to know he’s well-read — the actual working library of a person who uses books the way other people use furniture, who stacks them on the coffee table and leaves them open on the kitchen counter and has three going simultaneously in different rooms. The furniture was worn in the comfortable way of things chosen for function rather than aesthetics. There were papers on the desk and a half-finished mug of coffee from what might have been this morning or several mornings ago, and through the tall window at the far end the city was doing its evening thing, lit up and indifferent and beautiful.
She stood in the middle of it and felt, with a slight shock of pleasure, that she liked it very much.
“I’ll make coffee,” he said.
“It’s nine o’clock.”
“Tea.”
“Yes. Good.” She turned slowly. “This is not what I expected.”
“What did you expect?”
“Fewer books.” She picked one up from the coffee table — a Penguin edition of *Daniel Deronda,* thoroughly annotated in pencil. “More controlled.”
“The books are how I’m controlled.” He was in the kitchen, moving with the ease of a man in his own space. “If everything I need to think about is contained in a book, then the rest of the room can be—”
“Lived in?”
“I was going to say managed.”
She set the book down with a smile she didn’t bother hiding. She sat on the couch. He came back with two cups of tea and sat at the other end, which was close and not close — both of them newly inside this thing they’d stepped into and understanding, without having to discuss it, that they were not going to rush it.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Yes.” She considered. “You?”
“I haven’t — I haven’t done this in three years,” he said, with the particular blunt honesty of someone who has stopped performing anything. “I mean. Something like this. Anything like this. So there’s a likelihood that I’ll be somewhat—”
“Careful?”
“I was going to say old-fashioned.”
“You’re thirty-seven.”
“I’m thirty-seven and I’ve spent three years deliberately not wanting things, which leaves a person—” he paused, looking for the word. “Rusty.”
“At wanting things?”
“At—” he set his tea down. “I want to do this right. I want to court you, if that’s not a completely absurd word to use in the context of two people who work in Victorian literature. I want to take you to dinner. I want to learn what you want the morning after to look like before we create a morning after.” He was looking at her with the full attention, the unguarded one. “I’ve waited — I’ve wanted this since November, and waiting has made me very certain about what I want, and what I want is not to rush.”
She looked at him for a moment.
“You’re very old-fashioned,” she said.
“So I’ve been told.”
“I’m twenty-five. I’m not fragile.”
“I know you’re not fragile. This isn’t about fragility.” He reached across the small distance between them and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, slowly, with the absorbed precision of someone paying close attention to what he’s doing. “It’s about — wanting to know you. The rest of you. The parts that weren’t available to know while I was your supervisor.”
She sat with this.
She was a patient person. She had demonstrated this conclusively over the last eight months. But she also had a tendency to process things quickly and then move on them, and she was aware that his pace was different from hers — more deliberate, more careful, moving through decisions the way he moved through arguments: thoroughly, accounting for everything.
“Okay,” she said. “Court me, Professor.”
“Just Theo,” he said. “I’m not your professor anymore.”
“You’ll always be a little bit my professor.”
“That should feel stranger than it does.”
“Does it feel strange?”
He looked at her. Something moved in his expression — something warm, carefully unguarded, not quite a smile but the territory around one. “No,” he said. “It feels — correct. Which is possibly the most alarming thing I’ve said today, given what the day has contained.”
She smiled. Fully, without managing it. “Probably.”
She stayed until midnight. They drank the tea and then more tea and they talked — not about Victorian literature, not about the seminar or the students or any of the structures that had held them at proper distance for months. They talked about him: his childhood in Edinburgh (she had not known he was Scottish by birth, had only heard the trace of it in certain words, which explained the trace), his relationship with his father (complicated, loving, fundamentally shaped by a man who believed scholarship was the highest purpose and had pushed accordingly), the marriage that had begun as intellectual partnership and dissolved into something he described with the spare, non-self-pitying economy of a person who has made their peace with a hard thing.
He asked about her. She told him about Minneapolis and her mother and the scholarship that had brought her east and the moment at nine years old when she had understood that books were going to be the central project of her life. He listened the way he always did — entirely, not waiting for his turn to speak.
At midnight she stood up.
“Dinner,” she said. “Friday.”
“Friday,” he agreed. He stood too, which brought them close again, and for a moment they were simply standing in proximity with everything that had happened still warm around them.
He kissed her again — slower this time, less urgent, the kind of kiss that has time in it. She kissed him back with the same deliberateness and pulled back and pressed her forehead briefly against his jaw.
“Just Theo,” she said. Trying it out. The weight of it, the two plain syllables of him.
She felt him smile against her hair.
She let herself out into the night, walking home through streets that looked exactly as they always had and felt completely different, and she texted Yara: *It happened.*
Yara’s response was instantaneous and contained, in order, three exclamation marks, a question, three more exclamation marks, and the words *TELL ME EVERYTHING.*
She called instead. She walked home and talked to Yara and laughed at things that weren’t that funny because the laughing wasn’t really about the funny, and at one-thirty in the morning she got into bed and lay in the dark and thought about a man who wanted to court her.
Who wanted to know the rest of her.
She was thirty-seven chapters into the story of her own life and she had never been less interested in any of the previous ones.
She turned over and closed her eyes and let the feeling of the evening settle into something solid.
*Theo.*
She liked the sound of it.
She slept.
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