She’d practiced the lecture twice that morning. Once in the mirror. Once in the car. Paused at the exact moment where Judith Butler meets the U.S. prison-industrial complex. Wrote herself a sticky note to smile after the Derrida reference. Wanted to seem approachable—approachably lethal. All the characteristics of a visiting professor.

She dressed with precision. Blazer, cropped. Heels, sharp. Lipstick the exact shade of a cease-and-desist letter. Smelled like old paperbacks and bergamot. The kind of woman who might quote bell hooks while unbuttoning her blouse.

A sexy nerd.

Most academics were. A prime example of this theory was watching her right now.

Jonathan Levy was in the back row. Slouched like a ghost with tenure, hands in his coat pockets, face unreadable. She spotted him immediately. Of course she did. She could recognize his posture like punctuation—a pause that meant something.

They weren’t friends. Not lovers. Something worse: intellectual rivals with unresolved chemistry. Met in undergrad, had each other embedded into their frontal lobes by grad school. She’d gone overseas. He’d stayed behind. An ocean of late-night study sessions and passive-aggressive Facebook posts stretched between them.

And then, of course, there was that one night.

Boston. Post-grad. Married. Older. Grayer. A conference on trauma theory and media representation. Their rooms shared a wall—a thin one, apparently. He’d called on God at least three times.

And he was Jewish.

Not that she heard it live. She was on the other side, engaged in a somehow synchronized session of pillow-hugging mutual cough. No touching. No talking. Just parallel breathing, stifled moans, and a hefty dose of guilt at the waffle maker the next morning.

He’d had her LinkedIn profile bookmarked for years. Monitored her moves like she was his starter in fantasy football. When her last name changed back to her maiden name, he felt like the people in Times Square hearing, “the war is over.”

Once, Mira walked in on him reading her faculty bio for the sixth time. He panicked. Switched to the calculator app and pretended he was budgeting. Like a deranged, horny gremlin. She didn’t ask. He died anyway.

She, for her part, kept his staff photo in her phone for years. Deleted it. Re-saved it. Deleted it again—finally, solemnly—after her divorce. Then proceeded to face-down hug her pillow to the memory. She hadn’t expected to see him again. Certainly not post-divorce fine.

Jonathan had started lifting. Lightly. Meditatively. He journaled now. Occasionally. He’d gone on dates. None of them called him pretentious during sex or challenged his reading of Arendt mid-kiss. No fun.

He did always like a mean pretty girl. Mira might’ve been the last, but this woman here? Was the OG unfriendly hottie. Emotionally distant. Brilliant. Cold enough to chill a bottle of white wine with a single glare. There’s probably something Freudian in it—his lifelong attraction to women who treated intimacy like war strategy. Or maybe Gottman. Or Machiavellian. One of those. Whatever it is, he’s too old to care and far too tired to find out if it’s healthy.

At least Mira touched him. This one had him spiraling from a shared Google Doc comment.

He was feeling better, actually. Until today. Until her.

The students clapped. The other professors looked impressed in that quiet, jealous way. Jonathan remained seated. Didn’t blink. Didn’t breathe.

She sighed. Gathered her notes.

He took a step closer. Caught another hit of her. Bergamot and whatever cursed soap she still probably used—he’d once spent forty minutes in a bookstore bathroom trying to Google it.

“I read your paper on denial and the body,” he said. “Still makes me… uncomfortable.”

She finally looked up. “That was the point, Jonathan.”

She swept past him. The coat. The scent. The suggestion that whatever they’d summoned in Boston never really went away.

It was only day one.