Page 1 of Office Hours
1
BAD GIRLS TAKE RISKS
SIMONE
I’m late to class—again—which means everyone’s already assembled when I slip in, and all heads are pointed at the front, watching Professor Thomas write MELVILLE in long, decisive strokes on the whiteboard. His broad back ripples beneath the blue button down, his ebony hair gleaming in the light. He caps the marker with a little pop, and I swear, the girl three rows down from me gasps audibly because Professor Thomas is that magnetic.
I drop into a seat in the back row, and immediately cross my legs. The pleated skirt creeps up; the hemline’s a little much, but I’m a scholarship kid and this is the best I could do at the Buffalo Exchange on 6th Street. The baby tee is tight enough to push my boobs up, which is exactly the point. Everyone here knows why you sign up for Thomas’s class, and it has nothing to do with 19th-century American literature.
It’s the professor himself—Liam Thomas, PhD, thirty-five, black hair swept back in waves, blue eyes like a North Sea murder mystery, and the kind of chest that makes you wonder if he played rugby professionally or if he just benches a lot ofexistential guilt. He paces, hands behind his back, reading off a thin stack of notecards while never really looking at them. I think:if I flunk this class, I lose my scholarship and get sent back to West Texas. But I also think: I want him to look at me the way he looks at that Melville book in his briefcase. Maybe it’s just a book, but I can feel the fire.
He sweeps the room with his eyes, speaking low and even, like the words are secret and he’s not sure who’s worthy of them. “Why is Moby Dick white?” he asks. Nobody says anything. The question hangs in the air, sticky and moist, the kind that makes people squirm in their seats. “McCall?” he asks with a pointed look my way.
I sit up straight, ponytail bouncing. “Um—” I realize I wasn’t listening, which is the story of my academic life. “Melville uses the color white as a symbol for ambiguity. Innocence, but also emptiness, blankness. It’s like a paradox. The whale is everything and nothing.”
Professor Thomas gives me a slow nod, just enough approval to keep me hooked. “Good. Melville’s ambiguity is part of the novel’s terror.” He walks down the aisle, voice growing softer as he nears the back row, where I sit alone. Everyone else is clustered up front. He stops right by my desk. I feel his presence like a hand around my throat, gentle but unyielding. “Do you agree, Miss McCall? Is terror a lack, or an abundance?”
My lips are dry. “Both, maybe.”
He stares at me for a second longer than necessary, and my cheeks catch fire. I swear he’s about to say something else, but then the girl in the front row—Victoria, or Veronica, or something with a V—leans over the table, her platinum extensions gleaming in the dusty sunlight, and raises her hand.
“Yes, Miss Vasquez?”
She blinks up at him, lashes like windshield wipers. “Isn’t Ahab’s obsession with the whale also a metaphor for sexual repression?”
The room titters. Thomas smiles—more with his eyes than his mouth—and perches on the edge of the desk, one arm braced on his knee. “That’s an interesting reading, Miss Vasquez. Melville’s language is famously charged, but whether it’s about sex is…debatable.”
Victoria/Veronica doesn’t blink; she’s in full attack mode. “But the language is so, like, penetrative. All the harpoons, the chase, the penetration of the whale’s body…”
He holds her gaze, then turns his face slowly back to me. “What do you think, McCall? Is the whale hunt about sex?”
My tongue tangles. For a second, the only thing I can think is: He’s talking to me. Only me. “I think it’s more about obsession. Like, the violence of wanting something you can never really have. The way it eats you up.”
Professor Thomas looks down at his notecards, but I catch the corner of his mouth curve upward. “Well put.”
I sink back in my seat, heart drilling. There’s a tremor in my hands as I doodle a sperm whale on the margin of my notes. The guy three rows in front of me, who smells faintly of bong water and deodorant even from afar, cranes his head and whispers, “You nailed it, Simone.”
I force a smile and twist my pencil between my fingers, resisting the urge to snap it in half. Why can’t I just pay attention for once? I should be absorbing every word, but all I can do is replayProfessor Thomas’s voice in my head, the roughness in it, the way he savors certain syllables. I imagine him grading my essay, his big hands tearing the paper in two, and then my brain goes blank.
“Let’s take a five-minute break,” Professor Thomas announces, and half the class bolts for the hallway, desperate for caffeine or nicotine or a moment away from the sexual vortex that is Dr. Liam Thomas.
I stay put. I’m not going to humiliate myself by chasing after him like a lovesick Bambi, so I keep my eyes down and try to read the excerpt he’s assigned. But all I see is white, blankness, like the inside of my head.
Voices drift in from the corridor—some girls giggling, one guy trying to sell another on the virtues of delta-8 gummies. I catch the sound of heels clicking against the linoleum and glance up to see Professor Thomas stalking back into the classroom, mug in hand, eyes narrowed like he’s already trying to solve a problem.
He stops at the front, scanning the nearly-empty room, and catches me watching him. He doesn’t smile, but there’s something in the way he tilts his chin, like he’s daring me to look away.
I don’t.
For one long second, the world shrinks down to just the two of us and the faint, chemical smell of dry-erase markers.
He breaks eye contact first.
The class files back in. Victoria/Veronica sashays to her seat, her lipstick freshly applied, and then flips her hair over her shoulder. Everyone else returns to business as usual: tapping on laptops,surreptitiously scrolling TikTok, or playing on their phones. But the air is denser now, weighted by everything left unsaid.
“Let’s continue,” says Professor Thomas, voice even deeper than before. “Chapter 42. The Whiteness of the Whale.” He reads aloud, each word rolling over us like a wave. I’m spellbound, helpless. My phone buzzes in my lap: a text from my roommate asking if I want to skip dinner and go for margaritas. I ignore it.
I watch Thomas instead, the way his biceps flex when he points at the board, how his lips form words like ‘ineffable’ and ‘transcendent.’ There’s a rough edge to his jaw that makes me want to touch it, to see if it’s as sharp as it looks. I imagine his hands on my body, pinning me to the desk, and the thought is so electric I have to clench my thighs to keep from squirming.
