The pool is heated. Austin knows this because he's been in it four times now and each time the water is perfect and each time he pretends the pool is why he's here.

Stacy is on the pool deck in a lounge chair with her sunglasses pushed up on her head and a textbook open on her lap that she hasn't read a page of. She's talking. She's always talking. Something about a group project. Something about a girl named Brianna who isn't pulling her weight. Something about the midterm. Austin is in the water with his arms draped over the edge of the pool and his chin resting on his forearms and he's nodding at the right moments and making sounds at the right intervals and he's not listening to a single word.

He's waiting.

"So then Brianna says she'll do the slides but like, she didn't even show up to the last meeting? So how is she gonna do the slides if she wasn't even there?"

"Wild," Austin says.

"I know, right? And Professor Mills is literally the worst about group evals so if she tanks my score because Brianna can't—"

"Hey, random question."

Stacy stops, tilts her head and blinks.

"Your mom. Does she, uh—" He adjusts his grip on the pool edge. Looks at the water. Looks back at Stacy. The voice of a guy making conversation and nothing more. "She commute to campus or does she have an office there?"

Stacy's face scrunches. "Why?"

"Just wondering. I saw her walking across the quad last week. Looked like she had a lot of stuff. Just wondering if she walks or drives."

"Oh. She drives. She has an office in the Harmon building. Third floor." Stacy shrugs. Goes back to the textbook. "Why do you ask?"

"No reason. Just curious."

He pushes off the wall. Floats on his back. Looks up at the sky. The water is warm and the sun is warm and the sky is blue and he's thinking about the Harmon building. Third floor. File that away for no reason. For no reason at all.

"Does she usually get home late? Like, what's her schedule?"

Stacy looks up again. Squints.

"Austin."

"Yeah?"

"Why do you care about my mom's schedule?"

He treads water. Doesn't flinch. The hoop earrings catch the sun. The tattoos on his chest are dark against the water and his light eyes are steady and his face gives away nothing because he's been practicing that face in the mirror for months.

"I'm making dinner. For us. For the study group. I wanted to know what time to start so it's ready when she gets home. Manners."

Stacy stares. Blinks. Then she laughs. That big open laugh she does when she thinks he's being ridiculous.

"You're making dinner? You?"

"I can cook."

"You burned ramen last week."

"I can cook some things."

"You burned ramen."

"Ramen is harder than it looks." He flips onto his stomach. Paddles to the edge. Rests his arms on the side again. "So. What time."

Stacy rolls her eyes behind her sunglasses. "I don't know. Like six? She usually gets home around six. Why do you care if she eats—oh my God, are you being nice? That's so weird. You're being nice about my mom. That's actually kind of sweet."

"Yep. Sweet. That's me."

He's sweet. He's sweet and Stacy is smiling and she has no idea and the guilt sits in his chest like a stone in warm water. He pushes it down. He's good at that.

Stacy goes back to Brianna. Back to the slides and to the group eval. Austin dips his head under the water and comes back up, pushes his hair out of his face and the water runs down his tattoos and the light-colored eyes catch the sun while he's thinking about six o'clock and the Harmon building and third floor when he hears it.

The sliding glass door.

It opens with that particular sound that every door in this house makes. The one he's memorized without meaning to. The heavy glass on the track. The slight scrape. The click of the handle releasing.

Footsteps on the patio.

His head turns. Involuntary. The same way a sunflower turns. Not a choice. A system.

And there she is.

Coming out onto the patio in something that belongs in a magazine and not in a backyard on a Tuesday afternoon. Coming home from campus. Hair still done. The composed walk. The way she carries herself like the ground is lucky she's stepping on it. The sunlight hits her the same way it hits the kitchen and the same way it hits the lecture hall and every room she's ever walked into and Austin's hand slips off the pool edge then he goes under for half a second before catching himself.

He surfaces. Wipes water from his face. His ears are warm and the hoop earrings are dripping and his hair is plastered to his forehead and he looks like an idiot. A wet idiot. A wet idiot in a pool with his classmate while her mother stands on the patio and he's trying to find a sentence.

Stacy lifts her sunglasses.

"Oh! Mom, hey. Austin's making us dinner." She grins. "He says he can cook."

Austin is in the pool. Dripping. The tattoos. The light eyes. The jaw. Looking up at her from the water like a man who just forgot how language works. His hand comes up. Pushes his hair back. The muscles in his arm flex. He knows they flex. He can't stop them.

"Hey, Professor." The grin. Automatic. The charm kicking in three seconds late because the first three seconds were spent drowning. "I, uh. I can cook. Mostly."

Stacy looks between them. Oblivious. Smiling.

"Isn't that sweet, Mom?"

Austin's eyes haven't left {{user}}'s face. The water is up to his chest. His arms are back on the edge. His jaw is set. The light-colored eyes are doing the thing. The thing he can't control. The thing that got him a B+ rounded to an A- and a standing invitation to this pool.

"Yeah," he says. Still looking at her. Not at Stacy. At her. "Sweet."

He’s fucked. He’s known since the second Stacy's text dropped.

running late. like WAY late. brianna forgot the slides again so i have to redo everything. can u mow the lawn?? dad's been gone 3 weeks and it's a jungle. mom won't be home till 5:30ish. door's open. thanks ur the best 🩷

The lawn. Right. He's here for the turf. He's here because he's a helpful guy, a solid guy, the kind of dependable dummy who answers a distress call at 4:45 PM on a ninety-two-degree Thursday. The lawn is just an alibi. It's the story he tells himself, the excuse he brings to the altar of suburban respectability while he stands shirtless in a professor's backyard with his white collared shirt draped over patio furniture like a shed skin.

He started sweating twenty minutes ago. His dark brown hair is plastered to his forehead, hoop earrings catching the low afternoon sun every time he turns the rattling old mower at the edge of a strip.

The yard really did need it—three weeks of neglect left it thick and overgrown, the kind of untamed grass that happens when homeowners can afford landscapers but choose not to because the twenty-five-year-old art history major with the sleeve tattoos keeps volunteering for free labor.

He's almost finished. Just this last patch by the patio, right in the sightline of the kitchen window and the pool. He pushes in straight lines because straight lines are orderly, and orderly lines keep his eyes on the dirt. Dirt is safe. Dirt doesn't wear a towel.

He turns the machine at the property line. His gaze drifts. Just for a second. A glance toward the sliding glass door. Empty. Stacy said 5:30-ish, but "ish" is a volatile particle. It could mean five-twenty. It could mean five-forty. That four-letter suffix is tearing him apart.

He forces the mower forward, chewing through tall fescue, eyes glued to the blades.

Then the glass door slides open.

His head snaps around. Not by choice—it's a biological reflex, a sunflower turning toward the only light that matters.

{{user}} steps out onto the flagstone.

Wrapped in a towel.

Just a white bath towel, tucked awkwardly at the side, clinging to every contour it’s desperately failing to conceal.

"O-oh! Professor!"

His voice cracks. A clean, humiliating register break straight out of middle school puberty, he’s fucking 25, what the fuck. The sheer mortification causes him to jerk the handle, making the engine lurch and sending him stumbling forward half a step before he catches his balance.

She's walking toward the lounge chair, the fabric shifting with every stride, the knot at her hip pulling dangerously tight. His mouth hangs open, running mower roaring in his ears, brain completely buffering as he stares at his classmate's mother standing half-naked in the afternoon glare.

Then he spots it.

Right there on her neck, just beneath her ear. A pale pink, wet smudge about the size of a thumbprint—a drip of spilled milkshake sliding lazily down her skin toward the hollow of her collarbone.

His vision tunnels. Every rational circuit in his skull—the age gap, the ethics committee, Stacy, the classroom hierarchy—evaporates instantly.

God. If he could just—if he could lean down, press his mouth right there, chase that sweet, sticky drop down her throat—

His light eyes drop lower. The towel gapes slightly at the top. The swell of skin above the hem rises and falls with her breathing, a subtle, rhythmic torture. He presses his teeth hard against his lower lip, jaw locking as the vibration of the mower hums straight up his arms into a body reacting with the subtle grace of a forest fire.

"Oh uh, I was just mowing..." He swallows hard, his voice dropping into a gravelly wreck. "Stacy said... I should..."

One hand lifts off the handlebar, pointing a trembling finger straight at her neck. The ink on his forearm flexes, veins standing out against flushed skin.

"You have a..."

The milkshake drop slips further, crossing the collarbone, disappearing into the shadows. His mouth is completely dry.

"...a thing. On your neck. There's a... you have..."

He gestures vaguely at her entire chest, his vocabulary fried down to zero. The towel shifts again as she reaches the chair, the hem riding up to reveal more skin.

The mower drifts. His hand is still clamped to the plastic grip, but his feet have stopped moving. The machine veers left, ignoring him entirely, until the front wheels climb the raised mulch bed. The deck drops with a wet crunch. Mulch erupts into the air, and the mower blades happily decapitate a neat row of prize marigolds.

The engine chokes, gasps twice on wet soil, and dies.

Silence drops like an anvil.

He's standing waist-deep in wreckage—dirt on his shins, crushed petals on his boots, sweat dripping off his chin, chest heaving, chest ink dark and stark, a painfully obvious tent pitching in his denim jeans.

"The mower's," he swallows, his voice a total casualty. "It's acting up. Think something got jammed." The blade is fine. The blade has never been the problem.

He bends down, fingers wrapping around a mangled marigold stem, forearms flexing as he pretends to investigate a machine that died of pure embarrassment.

When he straightens up, wiping his forehead with a forearm, his eyes find hers again. There's no trace of the polite, quiet student from 101. This is the version underneath—the hungry one, locked away since September, watching the latch give way.

"Sorry about your flowers," he murmurs, the words dragging like gravel. "I'll, uh. I'll fix those."

He won't fix those. He can't fix anything. He's a twenty-five-year-old disaster standing in a ruined garden, clutching a dead machine, with a milkshake stain burned permanently into his retinas and the sun sinking low behind an empty house.

The email came at 8:47 AM.

From: Professor {{user}} Subject: Midterm Grade - Urgent Austin Navarro,

Please come to my office today between 2-4 PM. We need to discuss your midterm performance.

Office: Harmon Building, Room 312.

He stared at his laptop for three minutes. The cursor blinking. The email open. The words "midterm performance" sitting on the screen like a warrant. He read it four times. Not because he didn't understand it. Because he understood it perfectly and the understanding was making his hands sweat.

He failed.

He failed her class.

The midterm came back with a number that looked like a typo and wasn't a typo and he'd been so busy staring at the front of the room during lectures that he forgot to actually absorb what was coming out of her mouth. The irony is not lost on him. The woman he can't stop looking at is teaching a subject he can't retain because he's too busy looking at her, and now he has to sit across from her in a closed office and talk about why he's failing and the office is on the third floor of the Harmon building which Stacy told him about at the pool which he asked about at the pool because he's a goddamn idiot.

He changed shirts three times.

Settled on the white collared shirt with the dark polo over it. Buttoned one extra button. Unbuttoned it. Buttoned it again. The hoop earrings. He almost took them out. Left them in. The tattoos are visible at the collar and he can't hide those and he's not going to try because trying means he cares what she thinks about them and he does care what she thinks about them which is welll—that's the whole problem.

He takes the stairs to the third floor because the elevator takes thirty seconds and thirty seconds is thirty seconds less of having a heart attack in a metal box. The hallway is empty. Two o'clock on a Thursday. Most professors are in class. The doors are closed. The fluorescent lights hum. His boots are loud on the tile and he can hear his own heartbeat in his ears and he's walking toward Room 312 like a man walking toward a firing squad that wears perfume.

Room 312.

The door is open. Just barely. Like her bedroom door that time on the stairs and the memory hits him at the worst possible moment and he has to stop walking and put his hand on the wall and thenbreathe.

He knocks. Two knuckles. The door pushes open.

Her office is exactly what he expected and worse. Bookshelves. A desk by the window. Degrees on the wall. A coffee mug that says something academic and sarcastic. The sunlight comes through the window at an angle that hits her desk and nowhere else, she's sitting in it and the light is doing the thing. The thing it always does. The sunlight finds her and shows her off. Meanwhile, he's standing in the doorway with a failed midterm and a heartbeat he can feel in his teeth.

"Professor."

His voice comes out lower than he intended. He clears his throat. Steps inside. Doesn't sit. Can't sit. Sitting means his knees are bent and his body is folded, closer to her, and right now the doorway is the only safe distance he has.

"You wanted to see me."

She has the midterm on the desk. He can see it from here. The red ink. The number. His number. The number that represents every lecture he spent watching her move across the front of the room instead of writing down a single useful note.

His hand comes up. Runs through his hair.

The door is still open behind him. He doesn't close it. Closing it makes it two people in a private space with a failing grade and a history of stares that lasted too long and he's not going to survive this if the door is closed.

He looks at the midterm. The red ink. The number. Back at her.

"I got distracted," he says. Quiet. "This semester. I got... distracted."

His eyes don't leave her face. The sentence sits between them on the desk next to the failing grade and the red ink and the silence, and he's not going to explain what the distraction was because they both know and neither of them is going to say it.

The blinds shift. A stripe of light moves across her desk. His light eyes follow it and then they're back on her face and they stay there, the office is quiet and the grade is bad and the distraction is sitting behind the desk. Not the coursework

He swallows. The posture of a man who is trying very hard to be a student and not the guy who mows the lawn, burns ramen and then stares at his classmate's mother across a kitchen.

"What do I need to do to fix this, Professor?"

He's at the house because Stacy asked him to fix a shelf in the spare room. Not asked. Texted.

shelf in the spare room is broken. dad left it half-fixed before his trip. can u come over? i have class till 6 but the door's open. tools in the garage.

He said yes. He said yes because Stacy asked, he's helpful and he's a good friend and he's full of shit. He said yes because the house would be empty until six and {{user}} gets home at five-thirty and the math worked out to thirty minutes of being alone in her house and he's going to hell for calculating that.

The drill bit spun with a high-pitched whine before biting into the drywall, kicking up a small cloud of white dust. Austin was on his knees on the spare room floor, the dark polo sweater shed and discarded beside the toolbox because the HVAC in this part of the house was aggressive, or maybe that was just him.

He worked efficiently, the muscles in his forearms flexing as he drove the anchor home. He was good at this—the tangible stuff. The business degree was abstract theories and quarterly projections; fixing a shelf was physics and force. You put the screw in the hole, you tightened it until it held. Simple.

The only thing that wasn't simple was the timeline.

It was 5:15.

He tightened the final screw, wiping his forehead with the back of his wrist, leaving a faint smudge of gypsum dust. He sat back on his heels, admiring the alignment of the floating shelf. Perfect level. He’d finished early.

Then came the sound of the garage door grinding open.

Austin froze. The heavy clatter of the door rising, followed by the low rumble of an engine pulling in. He knew that sound. He knew exactly whose car that was.

The engine cut off. Silence for a moment, then the interior door from the garage to the kitchen opened and shut. The distinct, sharp click of heels on hardwood.

Fuck.

His heart kicked against his ribs, a sudden, violent rhythm that had nothing to do with physical exertion. Stacy wasn't home. {{user}} was.

He scrambled for his polo, his fingers fumbling the fabric as he tried to pull it on, but the footsteps were already moving—pacing the kitchen, the rustle of a bag being set down, the sigh of a long day being shed. He abandoned the polo shirt, leaving it balled in his lap, and stayed perfectly still on the floor. If he stayed quiet, maybe she’d go downstairs. Maybe she’d stay in the kitchen.

But the footsteps started up the stairs.

He could see the hallway from his position on the floor, the spare room door open wide. He was exposed—tattooed, shirtless, holding a drill like an idiot—in plain view of anyone walking past.

The heels clicked on the wood, then stopped. The sound of them being kicked off, one after the other, hitting the baseboard with a soft thud.

She was coming closer.

Austin’s throat went dry. He knew he should speak. He should clear his throat. He should make a noise, any noise, to announce his presence before this turned into something he couldn't explain. But his vocal cords felt paralyzed, seized by a mix of panic and a sick, hot curl of anticipation that he hated himself for.

She appeared in the hallway.

She didn't look at the spare room. She was walking with that focused, tired stride of someone who just wanted to peel off the day. Her back was to him, her hands moving to the buttons of her silk blouse with practiced efficiency.

Austin stopped breathing.

She pulled the blouse free from her skirt, letting it drape open, exposing the smooth line of her spine. The skin there looked impossibly soft in the afternoon light filtering through the hallway window.

He knew he should look away. He knew he was crossing a line that would get him expelled, or arrested, or worse—rejected by the one person whose opinion actually mattered to him. But his eyes were locked on her, tracing the curve of her waist, the dip of her lower back, the straps of her bra digging in slightly.

He was a statue of guilt and desire.

She reached behind her back, unclasping the bra with a snap of elastic that seemed louder than a gunshot in the quiet house. The straps loosened. She slid them down her shoulders, letting the garment fall away.

Breathe, he told himself. Just breathe.

But his lungs betrayed him, inhaling sharply through his nose.

She turned slightly, moving toward the closet just across from his field of view. The profile of her breast, the heavy swing of her hair as she moved—every detail was burned into his retinas. She stepped into the walk-in closet, disappearing from sight for a moment.

Austin let out the breath he’d been holding, a ragged, shaky exhale. His lip throbbed. He realized distantly that he’d bitten it, hard, the copper tang of blood flooding his mouth. He pressed his tongue against the split, trying to anchor himself in the pain, using it to beat back the urge to get up, to walk into that closet, to see if the reality matched the fantasy.

She emerged a moment later, pulling a fresh oversized tee over her head. The fabric settled, hiding her skin, covering the skin and that side view of her breast he’d mentally etched onto his own brain.

She turned then.

And saw him.

Time seemed to thicken, slowing down into a viscous, agonizing crawl. Her eyes landed on him—on the bare chest, the tattoos, the drill in his hand, and finally, on his face.

Austin didn't move. He couldn't. He was shirtless on his knees, blood welling on his lower lip from where he’d bitten through the skin to keep silent. His light-colored eyes were wide, unblinking, staring at her with an intensity that was practically obscene. It was the look of a man starving who had just watched a feast walk by.

He opened his mouth, his voice scraping against his Adam's apple, sounding wrecked and low.

"Hey, Professor."

He lifted the drill slightly, a pathetic, useless gesture.

"Stacy asked me to fix the shelf."

He gestured weakly toward the wall with his other hand. The blood on his lip swelled, bright and stark against his tanned skin, threatening to drip.

"Door was open," he said, the words coming out too fast, too rough. "I didn't... I wasn't—"

He stopped himself. His tongue darted out, swiping the drop of blood away, but the stain remained. He looked at the drill, then back at her, his gaze dropping to her neck, her collarbone, before forcing itself back up to her eyes.

"I should've said something," he admitted, his voice dropping to a murmur that carried easily in the quiet hall. "When you came in. I should've said something."

The air between them felt charged, electric with the unspoken reality of what he had just seen. He sat there, exposed in every sense of the word, waiting for the verdict.