Page 47 of Follows with Intent

“What the fuck was that?” Nico asked, eyes wide, his chest and throat and cheeks still mottled with the sex-flush.

Jadon grinned and shrugged.

“We are definitely doing that again,” Nico said.

Working the bar of soap for lather, Jadon tilted his head and said, “Come here and I’ll get your back.”

Sex, it turned out, was better than coffee. At least, in the short run. Jadon felt fine as he dropped Nico off at Eldridge Hall for the last day of the seminar. He was totally alert as he rushed back home and changed. By the time he got back to Chouteau for the symposium, though, the rush of endorphins had faded to a trickle. His head was starting to hurt, and exhaustion made his body heavy, slow, and clumsy. While trying to get to his seat, he knocked over Allison’s coffee—which they managed to save, somehow, before it flooded the multipurpose room—and then, a moment later, he kicked Vic’s ankle.

“Watch out, motherfucker,” Vic snapped.

Before Jadon could respond, Vic pushed out of his seat and clear of the aisle. He hobbled toward the hallway.

“He twisted his ankle last night,” Allison said to Jadon’s questioning look. “I told him it was stupid to play soccer with twenty-year-olds. What if you break your leg? How are you going to do your job?”

Jadon apologized when Vic came back, but Vic ignored him, and the rest of the morning passed in an uneasy silence among the three of them. As the hours dragged on, Jadon found himself struggling to keep his eyes open. The heat, and the crush of bodies, and the droning voices all conspired to put him on the edge of sleep. His lids drooped, and he clawed his way back from the edge again and again before they broke for lunch.

He waved off Allison’s invitation to join her and Vic for a meal in Waverley; he’d had enough student union food to last him a lifetime. Instead, he picked up one of the coffee shop’s to-go lunch options—hard-boiled eggs, a handful of almonds, carrot sticks—and ordered himself a twenty-four-ounce Red Eye. Espresso and black coffee might not be a magic potion, but it came close to a prepackaged heart attack, and Jadon thought that might be what he needed to keep him awake through the rest of the afternoon.

Food in hand, he made his way across campus to Eldridge Hall. It was his first time inside the building; waiting for Nico on the bench had already felt like pressing his luck. The building seemed completely empty, which meant Nico and the rest of his group were still breaking for lunch. Jadon found a spot in the main hall and watched the door and paced, eating his eggs and carrot sticks, saving the almonds for last. The Red Eye seemed to be working, but he didn’t trust himself to sit down.

A quarter of an hour later, the scruffy rich kid entered, talking loudly with the Harry Potter type. They both gave Jadon long looks. Clark, Jadon remembered. The kid—he certainly acted like a kid—wore a fresh set of scratches amidst all that movie star scruff. Where had those come from, Jadon wondered. Clark’s face was a challenge, eyes fixed on Jadon until he stepped into what must have been the seminar room. It wasn’t hatred, not exactly. Jadon had seen hatred. He’d seen crazy too, although they’d had sensitivity trainings, and he knew not to call it that. But this wasn’t crazy either. It was something else. He remembered it from his playground days. There had always been kids who thought certain toys belonged to them. And they might not have been willing to fight you for them, but they’d watch, and they’d wait, and then, when they had their opportunity, they’d take it back.

Nico entered next, with a handful of other grad students. He wore the corduroy blazer, oxford, and trousers that he’d dressed in that morning, but with a new addition: the fake glasses were back. Walking next to Nico, Maya cut off mid-sentence when she saw Jadon, and Nico followed her gaze. A smile bloomed on his face, and he hurried ahead of the group. Maya was beaming, and when she turned to whisper to the girl next to her, they both broke out into giggles.

“You look handsome,” Jadon said, straightening the collar of Nico’s oxford.

“You told me that this morning.”

“But it’s still true. Would it be unprofessional if I gave you a kiss—”

Before Jadon could finish, though, Nico swooped in to peck him on the lips. His smile broadened, and he said, “I feel like I’m going to shit myself.”

“Don’t do that,” Jadon said with a laugh. “You’re going to do great.”

Nico bounced on his toes and glanced over his shoulder. The other students were filing into the room.

“Do you want to go in?” Jadon asked.

“It’s fine. It’s okay. We’ve got a few minutes.”

With another laugh, Jadon rubbed his back. “Let’s go in.”

Jadon took a seat in the back, nodding reassurance to Nico’s questioning look, and Nico sat in one of the front rows next to Maya. Maya asked him something in a whisper and glanced back at Jadon. Several of the other grad students were also giving him looks, including Clark. Jadon ignored all of them, and when Nico turned around, Jadon was ready with a smile and a thumbs-up. Then he realized he’d left his coffee in the hall.

At that point, three people who had to be the professors filed in. One was a white man who must have been in his seventies, with a fluff of hair like cotton candy and a round, almost feminine face. The next was a wiry white woman in some sort of robe or dress that looked several sizes too big for her. The third was a white man, and although Jadon pegged him somewhere in his fifties, he’d kept it tight. He was toned, trim, his hair fashionably cut but in a way that didn’t look like he was trying to act young. When he went to take off his jacket, he winced. One arm seemed stiff, and it took him several long, clumsy attempts to get free of the jacket. All three of the professors noticed Jadon, but if his presence was a problem, none of them said anything.

The one with the cotton-candy hair spoke first, and Jadon tried to keep up, but it was clear that he’d arrived in the middle of an ongoing discussion. The professor in the baggy robe-dress argued with the first one, and occasionally the third one spoke up. Some of the grad students tried to get into the fray—the Harry Potter type was practically vibrating in his seat, waiting for his opening. And Clark clearly had something he wanted to say. Both of them looked startled when Maya managed to put a word in before them.

Even though the argument itself didn’t mean much to Jadon, he recognized the feel of the room. He’d seen plenty of pissing matches before—law enforcement tended to attract the kinds of personalities that enjoyed drawing lines in the sand—and it quickly became obvious to him that, in academia as in so many other parts of the world, the pissing matches were more about ego than about accomplishing anything productive. The seminar might have been designed to help grad students, at least nominally, but the reality was clearly that it was a chance for these professors to get on their soapboxes and showboat and, most importantly, prove they were right.

Watching the students attempt to get involved, Jadon had to admit, was mildly amusing. It reminded him of the dog park. There was always a pack of big dogs running around the enclosure. They were doing their own thing—chasing a ball, or chasing each other. And then you had the little dogs who yipped and sprinted along behind the big ones. A lot of the times, Jadon thought as the Harry Potter type tried to interject yet again, the little dogs didn’t even seem to realize there was a size difference.

“Well,” the professor with the trendy haircut said, cutting through the argument, “we’d better wrap up this part of the seminar. We have one more student presentation, and then we’ll have our closing remarks. Nico, you know the format by now. You’ll give your paper, and then one of the professors will respond.” He smiled and added, “I’m the lucky guy. After my response, we’ll open it up to everyone, and you’ll have a chance to answer questions. Sound good?”

Smiling, Nico nodded as he rose from his seat, collected his papers and moved to the lectern. He set the pages in front of him. He adjusted his glasses. His smile faded, and his features reassembled themselves into intense focus. It was a look, Jadon thought, few people had been privileged to see. And then he thought, He’s so beautiful. And then, Get rid of the damn glasses.

“‘Marry,’ Kierkegaard writes, ‘and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way.’ It is tempting to read these lines as evidence of Kierkegaard’s own ambivalence about marriage, or as more of the contrariness running through much of Kierkegaard’s work, or perhaps as the type of angst-producing absurdity produced by the limitations of finite beings in an infinite universe. But a closer examination of Kierkegaard’s aesthetics and their intersection with his soteriological construction of ethical love will show that rather than ambivalence, the complexities of choice and regret invite the Christian soul into the same kind of leap of faith Kierkegaard describes as a move beyond reason.”

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