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yes.”
    Middle of the second row.
    “Yes?”
    “Is there an example we can reference?”
    “No, I want to see what you come up with. Have fun with it.”
    “So there’s no reference, then?”
    “Correct”
    Front row on the left.
    “Yes?”
    “How will we know if it’s right?”
    “It’s open to interpretation.”
    Ten hands up at once.
    I looked over at Ashton, snarky beast that he was, small and blond and perfect, the kind of man that both women and men dreamed about at night. His expression held nothing but disdain for them and sympathy for me.
    I picked one of the many hands in the air. “Yes?”
    “Are we supposed to have read more than the plays you had us read?”
    I wanted to say, “As lit majors, I would hope so,” but I refrained because being a sarcastic asshole was no help to anyone. “It would have been helpful” was what I said instead.
    He looked distraught.
    After class Ashton was venting about how most of the papers he’d just read didn’t even reference other sources.
    “You realize that most of these kids haven’t read Virgil or Plato or even Homer, for crissakes. I mean, Jesus, Nate, you need to flunk them all. How can they understand what they’re reading if they don’t get the mythology behind it, or the history?”
    “You’re very scary,” I assured him. “They’re only juniors.”
    “When I was a sophomore, I was already taking your tragedy class, and—”
    “I pity the kids that take classes from you when you’re a professor.”
    “Novelist,” he enunciated for me. “I’m going to write books, not teach idiots all day like you do. God, I’d have to start doing drugs again.”
    “Shakespeare while high?” I chuckled. “Really?”
    He growled.
    “Just take deep breaths.”
    His gorgeous cobalt-blue eyes narrowed. “You’ve got a date.”
    “That’s impressive, actually. How do you know that?”
    “You’re all shiny and happy today.”
    I smiled, stuffing books into my courier bag.
    “Congratulations, by the way.”
    My eyes flicked to him. “For going on a date?”
    “No,” he snapped. “I saw that your paper on Marlowe got into the Cambridge Quarterly . Very impressive.”
    I waggled my eyebrows.
    “You shit.”
    “Don’t be jealous, kitten.”
    “I’m not jealous, you know that. You deserve everything you—” He took a breath, cutting himself off. “I finished my book. Will you read it?”
    “Of course I’ll read it.”
    “And you won’t be nice. I don’t need nice, Nate.”
    “I’m never nice,” I said, closing my bag. “According to you.”
    He sighed heavily. “I e-mailed it to your personal one, okay?”
    “I’ll read it before the weekend. I promise.”
    “Thank you.”
    “C’mon, coffee’s on me.”
    And he walked with me and put his hand on my shoulder and was basically the guy he never was with anybody else but his mother and his boyfriend, Levi Stone.
    The day got better after that. The lower-level classes were fun, as I was teaching Shakespeare’s comedies, and in Chaucer we were writing as though the writer were speaking to the character and what he would say. My office hours went by quickly with a lot of students just coming by to visit. When I was on my way out that afternoon, leaving my office in Walker Hall and passing the office of our department chair, Richard Hampton, Gail Chase, our chair’s secretary, popped out of her office.
    “Hey, you.” She smiled.
    “Hey back.” I stopped, pleased to see that she had returned to work. “How are you feeling?”
    “Better, thank you,” she said, her eyes soft as she looked at me. “And thank you so much for sending over all the groceries, Nate, that helped so much. Being a single mom and recovering from gallbladder surgery at the same time was a little rougher than I thought it was going to be.”
    I reached out and squeezed her shoulder, and she patted my hand.
    “But that’s not why I stopped you.” She smirked.
    “Did you get my flowers?” I smiled big