Author's Note: This is a slow-burn and very long.
My first crush was my eighth grade history teacher, Ms. Noel. It was also the first indication to myself that I was attracted to women.
In my eighth grade mind, I thought that I wanted to be Ms. Noel, but it wasn't envy that made me nervous around her. Her eyes were a soft hazel, and I found it hard to look into them lest she could sense how much they affected me.
Towards the end of eighth grade, she got engaged to her boyfriend. I didn't know anything about him, but when she announced her engagement to the class, I excused myself to the restroom to cry. That was when I realized that I, in fact, didn't want to be Ms. Noel, but I wanted to be with her.
I was an eighth grader, though, and she was my thirty-something-year-old teacher.
From that point on, I went on to discover more crushes that confirmed that I was a lesbian. I met my first girlfriend in tenth grade. Sarah Jameson and I were both in the same AP Psychology class and had been paired up for a project. She was assertive, whereas I was shy.
The first time we met up to work on the project, she lead while I followed. We talked about nothing else besides the project. It was the third and final time we met up for the project that she asked what my hobbies were. Then we talked, and I found out that we both had an interest in books with queer protagonists.
Sarah Jameson was not my first love, but she had been my first and I was hers. We were clumsy, and we didn't know what we were doing the first couple of times. But over the course of the five months we were together, we learned a lot about each other's bodies.
I had a couple of relationships after Sarah, but none of them lasted long in impression or length. That was until I met my first love and heartbreak in the form of Vivian Wu.
Vivian Wu was incredible in looks and ability. A senior and so a year above me, she was the setter in the girl's volleyball team, the top of her class, and one of the prettiest girls in school. I was infatuated with her the moment she walked up to me in the school library and asked for an interview for the yearbook.
Her eyes were a shade darker than Ms. Noel's, her lips full, and her lashes long. There was a freckle below her bottom lip, and I looked at it while Vivian asked her questions about the book club I had started with the help of Mr. Garcia.
I didn't remember any of the answers I gave her, but it must have been good enough because it was published in the yearbook and distributed at the end of the year.
Whatever the case, seven months before the yearbook was distributed and three days after my interview with Vivian, she found me again in the library. This time, it was not for an interview.
She wanted to join my small book club, which included my ex-girlfriend-turned-friend Sarah. I wasn't surprised because Vivian was interested in everything, so she joined the book club. My crush on her grew as I listened to her talk about books and characters with so much passion and energy. But it was hopeless because she was dating Liam Matheson, the quarterback, and she was incredibly straight.
At least that was what I thought until she came over to my house to help make cookies for the book club's bake sale. The other members weren't able to make it, and my parents were at work. It was just the two of us, and that made me more nervous than anything else because I had never spent that much time alone with her. I was afraid she would be able to sense my crush on her, but whether or not Vivian knew, I never asked.
What did happen that day was we lost control of the mixer and got milk all over us. I brought her upstairs to my room, where I offered her one of my shirts. She reluctantly agreed, and as I handed over a tee, her fingers brushed mine and lingered. I looked at her then, at those chestnut eyes, that tiny freckle below her mouth, and the dampness of her shirt and what laid beneath it.
I could have been more subtle about it, but I was a sixteen-year-old standing in front of her crush. My body was a raging sack of hormones. For Vivian, it must have been the same because she had moved closer, and I caught her gaze lowering to my lips. She swallowed, her fingertips still touching mine. I didn't know if maybe her lack of confidence had boosted mine or maybe my hormones had taken my confidence into flight, but I took a dangerous step forward and lowered my lips onto hers.
She responded immediately and very eagerly. Our bodies were sticky with sugar and milk, but we didn't care anymore. Her lips parted for my tongue to slip through and sought hers. My hands snaked around her waist, and she moaned against my lips.
From that moment on, my tenuous and secret relationship with Vivian began. We always met at my house when my parents weren't home, but what made me believe so furiously in our relationship was not the sex even though the sex was great. No, it was the conversations we had. She told me so much of herself: her insecurities of being the only child and meeting her parents' high expectations, her unloving relationship with Liam, and her desire to be with me. I had believed that she loved me like I loved her, but Vivian's fear of her sexuality far exceeded any feelings she had for me.
At the end of the school year, she slowly began to distance herself from me. At first, I didn't understand what had changed. Now, I know that nothing had changed. It was always going to end like that. I was nothing more than an outlet for her, and she was graduating soon while I had another year left. Besides, she and Liam were going to the same university.
I was still a blubbering mess when she finally decided to break it off with me for the final time. I never thought I would move on from her. I spent the whole summer mourning a relationship that seemed like it never existed.
But as the summer passed and senior year started, I moved on from Vivian Wu. I didn't fall in love with anyone else, though.
Not until now in my second year of college.
This time, it was my English professor that caught my attention. She was young for a professor, perhaps in her late twenties to early thirties while I was merely twenty-one now.
And Professor Keller was hot. Vivian was pretty like a daisy, her face round and soft. Professor Keller's face was angular, her features sharp. Her eyes were an intense blue, cool like the arctic. Her straight hair was dyed blonde with brown roots.
I couldn't stop looking at her, and every night before her class, I thought about her. My stomach did flips and somersaults each time I looked at or thought about her. I mean, really, I thought my attraction to teachers were over, but now I realized, I just had a thing for older women.
"Lily," Professor Keller said now.
I snapped back into the present, where a majority of the students were looking at me. Professor Keller was looking at me too, her expression stern. I felt my face flush with heat.
"Do you have any thoughts you would like to share with the class?" she asked cooly. "Preferably about the passage Jackson just read?"
I looked to Jackson now, who sat a couple of seats away. He returned a sympathetic look. I lowered my gaze to my textbook, lost.
"I don't have any thoughts," I said quietly. "Sorry, Professor."
And with that, the classmates averted their gaze back to Professor Keller, who then asked if anyone had opinions about the passage. Several hands shot up.
My ears rang, and I burned holes into the textbook for the remaining duration of the class. When class was dismissed, I had never packed my backpack faster than today, but before I could get to the door, Professor Keller called my name.
"Can you stay back for a couple of minutes?" she asked.
I glanced at the door and hesitated. I wanted to tell her that I couldn't, that I had a class right after across campus even though, truthfully, this was my last class of the day.
But something compelled my body to turn towards her, away from escape. "Sure."
She waited for the last of the students to file out of the class room before she pulled out a couple of stapled pages out of her binder. She handed it to me, and I recognized it as the paper I had submitted a couple days ago. Red markings and annotations marked the pages, and I flipped through it wordlessly. Before I could read any of it, though, she spoke.
"That was a well-written paper," Professor Keller said. "Probably one of the best I've ever read."
I looked up at her, shocked.
She continued. "It seems like you have a lot to say, but I've never heard you speak in class. I was wondering why that is?"
