Free Sample
Preview from chapter one
After Class
I never meant to stay after class.
But Ms. Harlow had a way of making the ordinary feel dangerous. She taught Contemporary Literature on the third floor of the humanities building, room 312. Twenty-nine students, harsh fluorescent lights that buzzed faintly overhead like insects trapped in glass, the low constant hum of an air conditioner that never quite managed to cool the room properly no matter how high it was set. The windows looked out over a narrow courtyard that stayed in shadow most of the afternoon, the brick walls close enough that you could hear conversations from the path below if the windows were open. She was thirty-six, maybe thirty-seven. Dark hair usually pinned up in a loose twist that always seemed one pin away from falling loose around her shoulders. Soft mouth. Eyes that held a second too long when they landed on you, as if she were measuring something she hadn’t yet decided to name.
I was twenty. Second-year student. Not the brightest in the room by any measure—there were sharper minds who argued theory with her easily—but I paid attention when she spoke in a way the others didn’t. Something about the cadence of her voice—the way it dropped slightly, became almost private, when she read certain passages aloud—made the words feel heavier, more intimate than they had any right to in a classroom full of half-asleep undergrads scrolling through their phones under the desks. I found myself listening for those moments, the small shifts in tone that felt like they were meant for someone specific.
I had noticed her from the first week of the semester. The way her blouse stretched across her chest when she reached up to write a quote on the board, the fabric pulling tight for just a second before settling again. The faint scent that followed her when she walked past my desk to hand back papers—clean skin, something warm and faintly sweet, like coconut mixed with plain soap. The way she sometimes paused beside my chair a beat longer than necessary when collecting essays, her fingers brushing the edge of my notebook as if by accident. None of it was obvious. None of it was anything I could point to in a complaint or a confession and call deliberate. But I felt it anyway. A low, constant pull that made it harder to focus on the actual literature, that left me shifting in my seat and counting the minutes until the end of class so I could watch her gather her things.