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“This is such a mess,” he mumbles.
“Hey, don’t stress yourself out before the semester has even begun. You’ll have your tea, I’ll show you the spare bedroom, and in the morning you can get this all sorted out. No big deal.”
“Thank you. That…” He looks between his tea and me. “That weirdly does make me feel better.”
I flash him my best Boyfriend Café smile. “That’s what we do best here. You’re getting the Boyfriend Café experience for free.”
Thanks to the lights in the kitchen, I can see it this time when heat flushes into Diego’s cheeks. It makes me realize what I just said to a person who istechnicallya teacher at my university.
“Oh. Shoot. I mean,” I scramble. “I just mean because of the tea and everything.”
“I … I understand,” Diego says, but he looks into his tea instead of up at me.
“Anyway, um, would you like to see your room?”
Diego nods and I show him the room upstairs. It’s sparse, but Albert did throw a bed and nightstand in there at some point. We haul Diego’s suitcases upstairs, and I leave him there for the night before things can get any weirder. I didn’t mean to imply anything with that comment about the Boyfriend Café, but Diego clearly heard theboyfriendpart loud and clear.
Something clicks in my sluggish brain.
He reacted to the word boyfriend. That’s not exactly what you’d expect from a straight guy. Could he be…
I shake my head at myself as I brush my teeth. It doesn’t matter. Even if he is, he works at the university. Plus, I’ll almost certainly never see him again after he leaves in the morning. C U of M is a huge university. We have a ton of TAs who teach classes of all levels. Whether or not Diego is straight will soon be completely inconsequential. He’ll disappear from my life, and I’ll disappear from his, footnotes in each other’s wild anecdotes.
I head to bed absolutely certain that this will be the first and last time I ever make tea for Diego, much less torment myself with speculation over his sexuality.
HE LEAVES EARLY the next morning. I’m not even out of bed when I hear the door downstairs open and close. Later, I find a note on my kitchen table thanking me for my kindness and assuring me he got the car looked at this morning.
And that’s the end of it.
At least, I assume that’s the end of it.
So it’s really damn weird when I walk into a classroom a week later and find Diego of all people standing at the front of the room behind a lectern.
We both stop, locking eyes for a beat as the world goes weird and surreal around us. I blink, but he’s still there, staring back at me with eyes as wide as mine feel.
I look down at my syllabus. This is definitely the right time and the right room for my Queer and Trans History class.
Which means that Diego is definitely, beyond any doubtmyTA.
We’re going to spend the entire semester pretending he didn’t sleep in my house. Four months of acting like I never made that comment about the Boyfriend Café — and he never blushed about it.
Chapter Four
Diego
ANYONE. I COULD be a TA foranyoneexcept the person who just walked into this classroom. But of course I’m not. Of course the person staring at me wide-eyed is the same person who let me crash at their house after I broke down in front of it.
The start of my graduate career could not be going much worse.
Okay, wait, calm down. Just calm down. Nothing inappropriate happened. The school year hadn’t started. I was a complete stranger who broke down in front of Avery’s house and they were kind enough to help me out. That’s all. Nothing about that story is some damning secret I need to wear like an albatross.
I try to smile and nod. There’s no sense in pretendingI don’t recognize Avery, or that they don’t recognize me in return. Their wide blue eyes calm; their face softens, and they smile back at me, but fortunately don’t say or do more than that. I watch their black ponytail bobbing as they make for the back of the classroom, pretty much as far from where I’ll be lecturing as possible.
Good. They get it. They understand that this is all a horrible mishap and we should forget about it and move on. It’ll be awkward, but hopefully we can pretend we’re strangers, as we should be.
Of course, that’ll be tough in a class as small as this one. Queer and Trans History is a special class only for folks majoring in the niche subject of History of Race, Power and Gender. Even at a university as large as C U of M, it’s a rare major. It doesn’t surprise me when Avery greets their classmates. They’ve probably had a lot of other classes with the same mix of people all interested in this subject.
It’s just my luck that this subject so happens to be my specialty.
