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What didn’t happen in the past few days? Bad customers, awkward gender questions, plus whatever the hell is going on with Diego. He went from sticking his tongue down my throat to pretending I’m not sitting right in front of him in his class. I want him to give me another chance. I want him to stop running away. But I don’t know how to convince him to do that when he won’t even look at me.
“Avery?”
“A little of everything,” I say.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
I shake my head because if I try to say it out loud, she’ll hear the lie. Idowant to talk about it. I want all of these mixed up feelings about Diego to come gushing out of me so I don’t have to hold them all myself. Yet I know ifDiego ever learned I’d breathed a word about us to anyone he would somehow grow even more distant than he already is.
Mia drops her legs off my lap and scoots over on the couch to hug me. I sink into her embrace, and for a while she simply holds me, accepting my refusal to talk but seeing my need for comfort regardless. I got so much more than a manager for the café when I hired her.
“I think,” I say slowly, “I think you and my brother are right. I think I am missing out on part of my college experience.”
“You’re just so busy, baby,” Mia says. “When was the last time you really had fun?”
When my TA was groping me on a dark dance floor.
“I don’t know,” I say in place of the truth.
“I really want to go out with you some time,” Mia says. “There are a couple places that I know we could get into. We just have to play it cool and stay away from the bar. My friend can get us into this one place near the city.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“You better. Otherwise I’ll have to kidnap you and drag you out there by force. You need some fun in your life, Avery.”
I agree entirely, but the most brilliant, fun, enticing person I’ve ever met insists on pushing me away.
I am exhausted from talking tonight. Talking about me, talking in my head about Diego, talking withcustomers about gender. I’m exhausted with all of it. I curl up on the couch, my head in Mia’s lap while she obligingly combs her fingers through my long hair.
Fun. How the hell am I supposed to make time forfun?
Chapter Twelve
Diego
I’VE AVOIDED THE university often since that night at the drag show. Someone is going to notice all the time I don’t spend on campus sooner or later, so I’ve forced myself into the library today, but I’m as jumpy as a skittish cat backed into a corner. I choose the table that sits farthest from everything, a nook in a back corner, then settle in with a stack of textbooks from the paltry bit of the history section that actually focuses on queer history.
The work is calming. I do a bit of prep for that Queer and Trans History class (trying very hard not to think about Avery the entire time) then move on to work for my own studies. I don’t have a ton to work with based on what’s available in the university library, however. And that’s not a dig at C U of M itself. Their selection is actuallypretty decent, but this is a vastly under-studied field. There isn’t enough research on it, or enough people doing the research. That’s why the field is so important. That’s why people like Avery need to be mentored and guided.
But not by me.
Definitely not by me.
I’m no fit mentor for anyone. After what happened at the drag show, I should probably resign my position, pack my things and drive home. I don’t deserve to be here after letting myself do that with a student. What was I even thinking?
My body answers before my mind can stop it, heat stirring in my gut, the same heat that sparked on that dark dance floor. When Avery took my hands and danced, I lost myself. I lost control. I let the music and the dark and Avery’s touch lull me into believing we were far enough away from our real lives that I could violate every bit of ethics I know. If we were strangers on that dance floor, fine. But we weren’t. We knew. We knew the entire time what we were doing. And we did it anyway.
I swallow hard. A book sits open before me, but I haven’t read a single word in minutes. A cursor blinks condescendingly at me from a blank word document on my laptop. Even here in the library, I can do nothing but think about them. It doesn’t matter whether I’m on campus or off, my mind inevitably loops back to those moments in the dark.
I force myself to focus, and even manage to take some notes and begin an outline of yet another paper I should be writing. The assignments never end, and the stress certainly isn’t helping with my … other predicament.
I’m still begging myself to focus when someone joins me at my table. They sit right next to me, in fact. The library must have filled up while I was busy thinking about things I shouldn’t be thinking about. I ignore the other person, who’s likely a student intent on ignoring me too, and finally turn to the textbooks and that outline taking shape on my dying laptop.
“I don’t have cooties, you know.”
I freeze when Avery speaks beside me. I was trying so hard not to look at the person next to me that it never crossed my mind that it could be them. Now, I turn my head just enough to sneak a glance at them. They’re relaxed beside me, cheek perched against a fist as they smirk at me.
“What are you doing?” I say under my breath.
