Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 21: Secret
They were careful.
Not because they were ashamed — neither of them had the architecture for shame about something they’d both waited this long, this deliberately, to allow themselves to have. But the semester grades were not yet formally posted, and there was the matter of optics, and there was the matter of Dean Wallace who had an extremely well-developed ability to notice things before they became problems, and there was the practical reality that Amara was still technically in the English department’s graduate program and he was still technically a faculty member of the same department, which made a certain care appropriate even now.
They were careful in public.
In private they were not careful at all.
He took her to dinner on Friday. A small Italian place two neighborhoods from campus where the wine list was long and the lighting was low and no one from the university was likely to materialize at the next table. He had booked it three days in advance and wore the good suit again, which she noted, and he pulled out her chair with the slightly self-conscious formality of a man who knew he was being old-fashioned and had decided he didn’t care, and she sat down and looked at him across the table and felt the specific pleasure of being somewhere they were allowed to be.
“This is strange,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I keep expecting someone to walk in and ask us to move to separate ends of the table.”
“No one is going to do that.”
“I know. It’s just—” she picked up her menu. “Eight months of professional distance and now we’re having dinner in the actual world.”
“We’re allowed to have dinner in the actual world.”
“I know.” She smiled at him from behind the menu. “I’m mostly just noting it.”
He was looking at her with the expression he had — the one that meant he was paying attention to something and finding it more interesting than he was going to say. She was learning his expressions. She had been learning them for months, but learning them now was different: she no longer had to ration the knowledge, no longer had to pretend she hadn’t cataloged the exact configuration of his face when he was amused or thinking or finding something worth paying attention to. She could just — look. And know. And let that be fine.
It was more than fine.
He ordered wine. She ordered the gnocchi. They talked until the restaurant’s ambient noise settled around them into white sound, and the evening went from dinner to dessert to coffee without either of them noticing the hours go, which was one of the features of this specific person that she had understood since November and was finding more and more to be true: she didn’t notice time passing when she was talking to him. She only noticed it in retrospect.
The dating had a pattern. His place for dinner, mid-week, cooking being one of the things she discovered he did well and apparently found calming — elaborate meals for two, shared over the kitchen table in the book-filled apartment, the kind of evenings where the conversation never ran out. Her apartment on Sundays, where she cooked Somali food and he ate it with the genuine, absorptive attention he brought to experiences that were new to him, asking about every dish, learning the words for things he’d never tasted. Museums, bookstores, long walks through neighborhoods that had nothing to do with either of their professional lives, neighborhoods where they could walk side by side without the slight heightened self-consciousness of being on campus.
He was, as advertised, romantic in the Victorian sense — deliberate, attentive, someone who noticed things and acted on what he noticed without requiring the noticing to be acknowledged. She came to his apartment one Wednesday and found he had acquired a collection of Agha Shahid Ali’s other work, organized on the coffee table. He had read all of them. He had opinions about all of them, expressed with the same focused enthusiasm he brought to Victorian texts, which was the highest form of engagement she knew how to measure.
She gave him a B+ in her internal assessments.
“You gave me a B+,” he said, when she told him this, because she found, increasingly, that she told him things.
“For the dinner Thursday. The risotto was over-salted.”
“I was distracted.”
“By what?”
He looked at her. “You know by what.”
“You’ll have to be more specific.”
He reached across the table and tucked her hair back — the gesture he’d started in his apartment that first night, which had become his gesture, the specific physical vocabulary of a man who was learning to express things he’d kept internal for a very long time. “You. You were telling me about your committee meeting and you were animated, and I was watching you and forgetting about the risotto.”
“Academic integrity,” she said, gravely. “The risotto had done nothing wrong.”
“I’m aware.” He did not look particularly repentant.
“You gave me a B+ in my own paper.”
“You didn’t cite sources properly.”
“You gave me a B+ on my *own research paper.*”
“Academic integrity is non-negotiable.” He was not smiling but he was extremely close to it. “You earned a B+. I don’t give grades for effort.”
She stared at him. Then she started laughing, and he started laughing, and it was the particular kind of laughing that happens when you are relieved and happy and in the specific company of someone who can make you laugh without trying, and it went on longer than the joke warranted and neither of them minded.
She loved him.
She knew it then, in the laughing — not as a surprise, not as the conclusion to a logical progression, but as the simple recognition of something that had been there long enough to not require announcement. She loved him in the way she loved important things: entirely, practically, with both eyes open to what it cost and what it was worth.
She didn’t say it. Not yet. There was a timing to these things, she had learned, and she was patient, and the timing would be what it was.
But she thought it. She held it.
“When can we go public?” she asked.
He considered. “Let’s wait until grades are posted. Another week. I’d rather avoid any appearance of favoritism in the final evaluations.”
“You gave me a B+.”
“Which is what you earned.” He met her eyes across the table. “When grades are posted, we can go to faculty events together and hold hands in the courtyard if you want.”
“I don’t need the courtyard.”
“What do you need?”
She thought about it. “I need people to know you’re mine,” she said, simply. “That’s all.”
He looked at her for a long, still moment.
“One week,” he said. “Then everyone can know.”
She nodded and drank her wine and didn’t say the other thing, the four-word thing, the thing that was sitting in her chest waiting for its moment with the patient certainty of something that knows it’s true and doesn’t need to be validated before its time.
One week.
She could wait one more week.
She had, at this point, developed quite the talent for it.
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