EMMA
When I walked in, the room was already half full.
The high windows let in a thin, pale light on this Friday afternoon.
It was the kind of light that made dust look like confetti.
A few students were finishing their coffees, others were pretending to look busy while checking their phones.
I put my bag on the desk, waited for everyone to settle down, and dove right in.
“Okay, last time we finished our work on Jane Eyre, including the symbolism, structure, and so on. Today we’re going to start drawing lines to Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. It’ll be the final book we analyse together this term.”
A quiet “Nooo” went around the rows.
I smiled and said, “I’m flattered. But sadly, I’m only here for a year.” The room let out a sigh of disappointment. “So let’s make the most of our last few classes. Take risks. Think out loud. Argue politely. The usual.”
A few students straightened in their seats, ready to take notes.
“Now,” I said, “Rhys didn’t plan to write a feminist novel, but a lot of people read Wide Sargasso Sea as one. Who wants to try to guess why that might be?”
Cecilia raised her hand right away, as she always does. “Because Bertha – Antoinette – gets a voice,” she said. “In Jane Eyre, she is a symbol, a plot device. In Rhys, she’s a person. We get her thoughts and feelings.”
“How?” I asked. “What choices put us inside her instead of outside her?”
Cecilia thought about it for a while. She said, “First-person narration. The way the setting reflects her emotions. And… the way Rochester – well, the unnamed Englishman – is no longer the centre.”
“Good,” I said. “Let’s hold on to that and build.”
What followed had the feeling I love most when a room full of people becomes one brain.
Someone said the book’s fragmentary style mirrored how Antoinette’s sense of self was chipped away, piece by piece.
We talked about the name change, how Antoinette became ‘Bertha’ as an act of control, and what it means to change someone’s name until they forget they had another option.
I listened and gave directions; I pulled threads together and pushed them. In the middle of a student’s sentence, which was about thresholds and doors you cross and can’t uncross, I glanced up, the way a person glances at a window when they feel a change in the weather.
He was there. Last row, last seat. Max.
He’d come in without making a sound. His hair was a little messy and he was smiling. He was sitting very still, and he wasn’t looking at the class like a bored visitor would. Those brown eyes were looking at me. Fully. Like the rest of it had gone slightly out of focus.
That look – the softened one, the one he probably didn’t know he had – hit me right in the chest. The smile came before I could stop it. He nodded his head in return.
I turned back to the room.
“Okay,” I said, “let’s write some of these down so we don’t lose them.
I turned to the board, summarising what we’d covered so far.
Next time,” I added, circling three subjects, “we’ll talk more about Antoinette’s mental breakdown: what’s inevitable and what’s made inevitable by other people’s decisions. ”
I put the cap on my pen, took in the room, and looked at the faces I’d come to know: the ones who sat too straight when they were bluffing and the ones who turned pink when they said something they didn’t know they were brave enough to say. I smiled to myself before finishing up class.
“Okay then. Homework: Read the middle section again, slowly. Bring me three sentences you think are important for the story. And of course, write down why.”
The usual end-of-class chaos kicked in: laptops closing, bags zipping, and voices getting louder now that the work was done.
A few students stayed behind and hovered by my desk with that look that said, “Please tell me I’m not failing.
” I kept it brief, offering a few quick answers and the kind of reassurance they mostly needed to hear.
The room finally fell silent when the last “Have a good weekend!” came my way.
Max walked down the aisle with his hands in his jacket pockets. A few students turned around and whispered. One of the bolder ones said “Finnnn” as if they were invoking a deity. He and I both pretended not to notice.
“You’re back already,” I said.
That irresistible grin of his came out. “I know. The plane left a little earlier than we thought it would. Figured I’d pick you up here instead of meeting at your place.
He tipped his head towards the rows. “Also, Grace couldn’t shut up about your class.
Thought I’d see for myself. She’s right.
You’re… yeah.” His mouth tugged. “You’re in your element. ”
His compliment caught me off guard in the best way. I stepped up to him, wrapped my arms round his neck and kissed him softly. He kissed back, matching the softness.
“I missed you,” he said against my mouth, voice low.
“I missed you too.” I ran my hand over the back of his neck and felt the familiar warmth of him. “How was it?”
“Exhausting. Back-to-backs will do that. The next one is worse. I’ll be gone for a little over a week.”
“Well, I’m very happy you’re here now.”
I looked at the bag on my desk for a second. “Come on. If I don’t drop it off at my office, I’ll take it home and end up working anyway.”
“You read my mind,” he said, reaching for the bag and slinging it over his shoulder like he’d been born carrying my things. It shouldn’t have been as attractive as it was.
We walked into the Friday rush. Students bounced around between noticeboards, someone argued mildly with a vending machine, and a poster for a poetry slam tried to look cool and almost managed it.
As we passed the teachers’ lounge, the door swung open and Simon came out with a cup of coffee in his hand. His eyebrows were already going up.
“Oh,” he said with a big smile. “Grace was right; your class is apparently sold out. First the sister, now the brother. You should start charging admission, Emma.”
“That’s one way to get the department out of its money problems.”
“Hey, Simon,” Max said. They shook hands briefly before Simon waved us away.
“Go on,” he said. “I won’t keep Toronto’s defensive wall from his weekend. Anyway, I’ve got undergrads who still think enjambment is a band, and someone needs to set them straight.”
“You’re terrifying,” I told him.
“I aim for encouraging,” he said, and breezed away.
I nudged my office door open with my shoulder, dropped my bag onto the desk, and turned to see Max quietly locking the door behind us.
“Max, what are you doing?” I asked, though I already knew from the look in his eyes.
He didn’t say a word. He just hooked a finger into the waistband of my skirt and tugged me straight into him. “Nothing,” he said, sliding his hands over my butt and squeezing it hard. “Just wanted to kiss you.”
Before I could answer, he pressed me back against the door. The wood felt cool against my spine, but Max was all heat. His mouth crashed into mine, the kiss rough, claiming, nothing polite about it. My head tipped back and hit the door with a faint thud.
He pulled back long enough to smirk. “Might not be a wall, but a door works just as well.”
“Max…” I meant to scold him, but it came out as a gasp when his hand slid under my skirt, climbing higher.
“Mm?” His mouth moved down my jaw, his teeth grazing my skin, before his tongue found the hollow spot below my ear – the exact spot that turned me to jelly. “Something to say?”
“Yes,” I managed, clutching at his shoulders. “We’re not… we aren’t supposed to– Oh God–”
His fingers found me through lace, pressing with an agonisingly perfect pressure that made my knees buckle. He laughed low in his throat, clearly feeling smug about himself.
“Not supposed to what?” he murmured against my skin. He pushed the fabric aside, fingers sliding against me bare and slick. He stroked in slow, maddeningly light circles until I was rocking helplessly into his hand, desperate for more.
“You’re… you’re unfair.” My nails clawing at him to pull him closer.
“Unfair?” He grinned against my neck and then slipped a finger inside me. The sudden fullness made me nearly cry out. “No, baby. This is me showing you how much I missed you.”
I tried to swallow a moan, but when he added a second finger that curled just right, the sound escaped anyway. My head thudded against the door again, breath breaking apart as he worked me with a steady, ruthless precision.
By the time I was trembling, on the edge, his hand disappeared. “No!” The protest tore out of me, raw and needy.
He didn’t answer with words. Instead, he dropped to his knees, his hands firm on my hips as he tugged my underwear down my legs.
“Max…”
He looked up at me, eyes dark. “Hold still for me.”
And then his tongue was on me, hot and devastating, and every word I’d meant to say dissolved into a moan that echoed far too loudly in the small office. I bit my lip hard, trying to muffle it, my fingers digging into the door behind me.
The first lick was slow and teasing. The second had me clutching his hair, my hips jerking forward as I lost the battle for control.
He hooked his arm under my knee, hoisting my leg over his shoulder to steady me, and slid his fingers back inside.
He moved in a perfect, punishing rhythm with the flick of his tongue.
The pressure built quickly, until it was too much to contain.
I came hard, my back arching off the door, stifling a cry so no one in the hallway could hear.
When he finally let go, he kissed the inside of my thigh and smiled like he knew exactly what he had done.
“I missed you,” he whispered.
Somewhere in the corridor, a floorboard creaked, the sound pulling me back into myself, my fingers tightening in his hair.
“You’re a terrible influence.”
He smiled against my skin before standing up. “Yeah. And you never seem to stop me.”
I reached behind me and unlocked the door.