Beneath The Pages

"You wrote come to office hours at the end of my paper," Emmett said. "So I came."
Julian looked at him across the desk.
"That was professional feedback," he said.
"Was it," Emmett said.
It was not.
✦
He is not supposed to be a problem.
He is supposed to be a TA. Office hours Thursdays, two to four. Grades papers on time. Knows his Benjamin. That is all he is supposed to be.

Emmett did not come to Harwick University to fall for someone he cannot have. Julian did not spend five years on a PhD to lose his mind over a student in the third row. Neither of them planned this. Neither of them can stop it.

There is a rule. Simple, clean, reasonable. Nothing happens until the semester ends.

The semester is very long.
✦
"He is a poem and a painting too.
Everything he said sounded like a song
and every silence was music.
He is an old soul with young eyes,
a vintage heart and a beautiful mind."

-- Julian, on Emmett