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“Well, basically, we need to carry on as things were before, minus the sexting. That means almost no contact on college grounds including the parking lot, above and beyond the usual student-teacher interaction. No coming to my office without an appointment, no approaching my car late at night. We will come and go from the campus according to our separate schedules, never together, or in any way co-ordinated.
“Sometimes I might say hi or bye in the halls as I would to any other student, others I will walk on past without acknowledging your presence, just like anyone else. Likewise in class—I might call on you if you have a question, or vice versa, but no more or less than I would anybody. As for assignments, I’m sure you know by now I’m a hardass—no extra favors of any kind.”
“Not even sexual ones?”
“Don’t be a smartass. You know those are the only kind I can offer.” She grinned and my heart performed an Olympic-gold-winning gymnastics routine in my chest. “No extensions, no discussing papers or questions outside of the formal channels, no preferential grades. Nada.”
“Okay, well you know you can count on me to do all that—I’m already doing it.”
“Apart from the sexting and lurking outside my car, yeah, you are “
“Okay, yeah, apart from that.”
“But that’s not all, and here’s where it gets real hard. We can’t really do any of the shit together that most couples take for granted.”
“Wait. You want us to be celibate?” I laughed, trying to lighten the mood a little. Natalie looked at me as though I’d just taken a dump in her sandwich.
“We can’t be seen together in public, so no movies, no meals out. The picnic in the park was a risky one-off, but I figured it being the middle of a working day, and a little way away from the college, it would be okay, just this once. But we won’t be able to do it or anything like it again. I know this is a big city, but the reality is that it’s more like a bunch of small towns shoved together, and like any small town, we’re never far from someone we know, either personally, or by a few degrees of separation, so we can’t risk it. It might seem romantic now, but we’ll probably get sick of these four walls fairly early on.”
“Okay I can do all that.”
“I’m not done. Outside of your closest friends and relatives—basically the guys in the band, and your brothers—you can’t tell anyone about us. Not even a peep. There was a phrase during World War II: ‘loose lips sink ships’—basically meaning that telling other people secrets leads to disaster. And it’s so fucking true. People are just pathologically incapable of keeping their mouths shut. Whether it’s bragging rights, jealousy, or the stress of holding in other people’s shit, if you tell one person you may as well tell everyone. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying people are assholes for the sake of it, but the fact is that it’s been scientifically proven that we can’t easily keep secrets, so the fewer people you tell, the less risk there is.”
