University Confessions: A Professor & Student Love Story
Professor Jeffery O'Connor was almost sixty one. He looked like he might be forty – if those crow's feet hadn't finally caught up with his eyes. Yet he always marched with his head up and intention in his step. The boys loved to go out and drink with this man who owned the world and if he didn't know something was in it he learned about it. Well, that's if he wanted to learn about it.
He'd broken laws, lived, chased girls, rode motorcycles and done everything from cut down trees to drive big-rigs because he loved life that much. He knew the dark and light of this world, held a license for everything from handguns to the legal pitch to drive hazardous waste across international boarders. He knew his way around any city sub-line like he was a born and bred street-fighter and could be dropped off within a hundred miles of the nearest other human life form and he could survive.
There was nothing he hadn't really exploited that someone might envy – after all, he was sixty one and been there and done that. At the end of each day a glass of brandy and a cigarette over stipulating nothingness left him aligned with the world. Jeffery had arrived upon all the pedestals of the world – over the hearts of his students, and the abandoning loneliness that was his life. He could probably die a happy man.
Except there was Adi – a sparkling shimmer of youth and the ignorance such agelessness brings. Adi was a twenty two year old student that had haunted him for the last four years in his undergraduate and graduate classes, as his assistant, gopher and great friend. There was something about how that girl moved, spoke and enjoyed the world like he did that made him shiver. Someone finally met the world with the same eyes that he did – someone reached across the board and grabbed what he had to say with so much admiration and love – but this time it was this strong young filly, not some young man he could pat on the back and send on his way.
He admired her, took her for granted, and needed her.
Her world was consumed by his. She worked for him in his department and stayed around to drink with him – she left no rock unturned, no drama squished and came out on top by a fluke of her nature. She danced to his music, one of folk singers and ageless tunes by talented musicians, not the things children of this world appreciated. She was a liberal and conservative and was a contradiction of existence because she sat on the fence of both worlds. Life itself is a contradiction. She shot guns, rode horses, got dirty but always looked so collected.
She wore a corset in the office, dressed in sweet skirts and wore pretty sandals. Once she ran with a bunch of boys out of the south part of town in a motorcycle gang and had blue hair, piercings and a knack for being naughty. When the exterior metal was taken off, the hair cleaned up and the boys shuffled off as connections she battled addictions and fiascos. She became an EMT, danced around a major, attached herself to the Professor and spent most nights sleeping in the office. She smoked, spit, drank, laughed, and still managed to be disgustingly human but so pretty with her hazel eyes, unwavering smile. She had no invented elements to her and shared, in confidence, all the secrets and troubles in her world.
Jeffery would come in early in the mornings laying on the office couch and her face cloudless, undisturbed. It treated him to some sort of misconception he was missing out. Sure, he had girlfriends and sex – but the older woman of some chained nature to pre-disposition. He was making this woman.
Any man able to craft, mold, and frame such a beautiful and experienced creature was one very blessed, he recognized. The man who could enjoy such a woman was one who was probably doing something wrong, he also recognized. The sometimes carnal nature of man wanted to reach out even further into the lessons of life than college or university taught but a good teacher and disciplined knowledge of this world's taboos kept him away from that one.
Over his Friday evening beer he mulled about the day. He'd slipped up – he'd been slipping up.
She had asked to go get her mail – he thought he heard 'my male' and Adi would be the kind of girl to state something like that. He also knew she caught that when he asked who she was talking about – probably more protective than he should have said it too.
Adi came back to grab a bag and left abruptly, a little red in her face and in that silent state he hated. She had a telling enough face he got the message. After four years and seeing each other six out of seven days a week for sometimes eight to twelve hours a day they could now just read each other like an open book.
He had to watch himself better – she was too young, he was too old, this should not be an issue.
Adi was picking some groceries up from the open market down the road from the college about two miles a walk from the campus and a quarter mile from Jeffery's little dot on the map. She was throwing together a fruit dessert she saved for birthdays, holidays and stress days.
This was one of them.
Adi, since day one, had crushed on Mr. Jeffery O'Conner – a sweltering, taller man who was some sort of Highwayman in her dreams – the bad guy, good guy and character that met up with hers. But he was older than her father and the fact that the two of them lived around each other so much it was a sad displacement in their quiet Shangri-la at campus.
She loved drinking with him, bullshitting with him and exploiting his knowledge base. To her it was a misery she could live with – since women, after all, can live with many things that men cannot. Disappointment is usually a woman's constant battle – men just let things go.
Adi had remained single all this time – her love life shattered by the emblematic love she had for her work with Jeff. There was one young man who had remained steady in her life – Andrew. But the box of a bouncer was a problem and a drama in his own right. He stirred up fights, was brazen more than brainy and had no pretty track record of control. She'd slept with him when she turned twenty – the only man she'd ever slept with – but in the pitfall of their absolved sexual contact she broke it off.
The fact was Andrews's persistence was a good reason why they were at the grocery store and as he poked holes in a few watermelons and popped a few grapes – to the shop-keepers horror, Adi got her dessert supplies together.
"You don't have to do that every time we come in here."
"Yeah but what else is there to do?" He had his mouth full of grapes.
"Buy the food?"
"Like you've never stolen something."
"That's not what I'm saying – it's about how you act in public."
"Fine, check that shit out and let's go. I'll meet you in the car."
Adi let him truck off in a huff as she got to the counter. The manager was snarling as she checked out.
Andrew left tracks on everything – be it his sexually conquered space, like Adi, or simply the places he shopped. And because of the inconsiderate stomping he gave them they never would be fondly remembered marks. Andrew really was the guy who would die a certified asshole.
Adi made it to the car and within five minutes Andrew and her got into it. The anger and esteemed hatred they felt for each other was present in full force. Andrew new how to dig deep into Adi's nerve center after the shopping incident and made sure payback was swift.
"What do you fucking expect from me?"
"A little consideration, that's all."
"Like I'm not considerate enough."
"You aren't."
"Figures you'd think that."
"You ass!"
"So is it the fact you think I'm an asshole or a bad lay, Adi? Do you enjoy sabotaging me?"
"Bullshit! Absolute fucking bullshit, Andrew. You do this to aggravate me and you do a damn good job of it. She's eighteen, Andrew, eighteen and a friend of mine – not some newly post-pubescent teenager you picked up at a nearby high school. You're sheer association with her has to do with us and you trying to get back at me because you really are that juvenile."
"Yeah, because you're so fucking special."
"I was to you, you jackass. If I remember correc-"
"Shut the fuck up."
"Pull over."
"No."
"Fuck you, Andrew, pull the god damn car over."
"Fine."
He pulled over so fast he almost careened into the bumper of another car and caused a mid-day traffic pile up on the narrow, packed street. Thankfully bad driving was compensated by everyone else on the road and only a few gestures of road rage were broadcast.
Adi had opened the door, slammed it into the metal 'No Parking' sign and stormed off – not even willing to shut it as Andrew screamed at her from the car. She'd made it into the local coffee shop before anyone identified why exactly a young man was screaming, beeping his horn and causing a ruckus during high noon traffic.
By the time he peeled away Adi had slipped out of the coffee shop for a cigarette and mused to step on sidewalk ants. The walk back wasn't bad – it was the fact Andrew had her groceries that really pissed her off.
The Friday evening was an empty basin for Jeff. The television was muttering something in the backdrop and the cascading twilight ran through the windows as light filtered out of the day. He was half napping and nearly getting a good buzz going when, like a bolt of lightening had struck, the apartment buzzer went off. It scared the bejesus out of him.
He shuffled up from the lounge chair with a grumble to lean on the wall.
"Yeah, who is it?" he asked over the intercom.
"Jeff – hey, uhm, if... if it isn't a good time, I-"
