It was the kind of Miami heat that felt personal. Like the sun had beef with you specifically and was determined to air-fry your soul.

Your apartment AC had died again — third time this month — and the landlord’s response was a vague “mañana” text you knew translated to next week if you’re lucky. You’d given up fighting it and resigned yourself to the sticky, glistening, hair-frizzing hellscape that was your living room.

Senior year wasn’t supposed to feel like slow roasting in a convection oven while drowning in assignments. Yet here you were: marine biology lab reports open on one tab, Tiktok open on another, oscillating between writing about benthic community sampling and watching a girl in Key Biscayne feed an iguana a strawberry.

Normal twenty-two-year-old life, right?

Except… you had the secret.

Your baby, your chaos child: @TheRosenstielConfession. the slightly infamous page where grad students vent, undergrads overshare, and postdocs send unhinged 2 a.m. rants, anonymously submitted, brutally unfiltered gossip hub for the Rosenstiel School. You’d started it as a joke sophomore year, thinking it would be two drunk first-years sending “the guy who stole my fins at the Grove pool party is a menace” messages. Now? You had over 12k followers and Google Form submissions so unhinged they could get someone expelled, arrested, or nominated for a reality TV show.

You’d learned to separate the trash talk from the actual juicy stuff. Someone’s roommate selling expired bait shrimp on Facebook Marketplace? Post. Someone’s confession about that hook-up on the research vessel? Post. Someone dropping an entire espresso machine into the wet lab tank? Definitely post.

But the last two weeks?

Oh, it was one man. One subject. One… professor.

Weston. Fucking. Broecker.

Your new tenured professor in Oceanography — specifically, physical oceanography with a focus on ocean currents and climate interactions — aka the hottest man to ever grade someone’s coral reef dynamics report with a red pen. He was tall, broad-shouldered, swimmer-built, with hazel eyes and stubble like he’d just walked out of a National Geographic photo shoot where he discovered a new current system and simultaneously ruined marriages.

Unfortunately for the entire student body, he graded like the peer review process at Nature. No mercy. No curves. No “oh you tried.” And that stern, almost gravelly voice when he lectured about thermohaline circulation? Yeah. People weren’t surviving.

Your confession inbox was drowning in him.

If Professor B ever tells me to check the salinity again, I might just drown myself in the tank.” “He can bend me like an isopycnal layer idc.” – @ZTABADDIES199 “Do you think he knows what he does to people???”

You were currently in the blessedly frigid faculty library, hunched over your laptop, moving the best submissions from Google Forms to Canva for tonight’s post drop. AC cranked so high you could almost feel your soul returning to your body. You’d just adjusted your ponytail and added a ridiculous sparkle overlay to “bend me like an isopycnal layer” when—

“That’s… an interesting choice of font.”

Oh no.

No. No no no no no no—

You knew that voice. Low. Rough. Carried like it didn’t need to be loud to command the room.

You turned slowly.

And there he was.

Professor Weston Broecker. Standing right behind you, holding a stainless steel travel mug, dressed in a crisp white button-down rolled at the sleeves, khaki trousers that looked unfair on his frame, hazel eyes glancing from your laptop screen to your face with unsettling calm.

You froze like a reef fish spotting a barracuda.

He tilted his head. “Is that Canva?”

Your brain: delete the tab, delete your life, flee to the Mariana Trench. Your fingers: doing absolutely nothing.

“I—uh—” you stammered, the words evaporating in the cold air that suddenly wasn’t cold enough.

“That,” he said, pointing faintly toward the sparkly graphic of “bend me like an isopycnal layer,” “looks… academic.”

And it wasn’t sarcastic. It was worse. It was curious.