My Professor(25)

She emailed me tonight, along with everyone else.

I suppose we’ll have to celebrate the next time you’re in Paris.

What a wonderful achievement, Jonathan.

XX,

Miranda

Reading her words does nothing.

My heart thumps its same steady rhythm as if trying to emphasize to me that there is no way to force yourself to love someone. You do or you don’t.

I hate that my thoughts slip back to Emelia.

I’m aware she’s become something akin to a mirage. What real memories I possess have been tainted by fantasy and longing and despair for so long that I can’t trust myself when it comes to my real feelings about her. I’ve put her on a pedestal and made it impossible for any other woman to stack up, not because of some ridiculous once-in-a-lifetime connection we shared but because I likely have an undiagnosed commitment phobia or something.

At first, years ago, I berated myself for not pursuing her after the night we shared at the bar.

But what the hell was I going to do? Try to start a relationship with a student? God, she’d just turned twenty-one. She was young and wrong for me in so many ways. That doesn’t mean I didn’t fantasize about her. It doesn’t mean I didn’t let things play out between us in my head. For the remainder of that semester at Dartmouth, I walked into ARC 521, looked at that wooden chair, and wished Emelia were sitting in it. I searched for anything I could find about her online, I stalked her semester schedule, I penned more than one letter to send to her university email address—only to wisen up and hit delete at the last minute. Over and over again, I picked up the phone to call Emmett, to ask him about his sister, but when we spoke, I could never gain the courage.

I imagined how that conversation would go.

Oh, Emelia was enrolled in your class at Dartmouth? Was she a good student?

And what would I have said to that?

I don’t know, Emmett. I was an asshole to her for a few weeks, and then after reprimanding her for something that seems insignificant now and forcing her to drop my class, I slid my hand up her skirt in a bar bathroom.

Playing it all back in my head should make me feel guilty and depraved.

But I don’t.

As pathetic as it sounds, I was obsessed. I kept track of her work at Dartmouth, followed her thesis project, and the day she was due to present it, I snuck into the reception hall, after everyone was seated and the crowd was filled in, and I stood in the back, out of her line of sight, and listened. Her project was a conceptualized French Quarter eco-tourism campaign, a way to bring clean energy and green building practices to New Orleans while maintaining the quintessential architecture it’s known for. She spoke of the problems surrounding the city: how infrastructure, fragility, and regulations protecting historic construction can make green improvements difficult or prohibitive. Not only that, many businesses that were damaged in recent floods expended their rebuilding resources to get back on their feet, forsaking going green, which was an understandably missed opportunity. Her thesis suggested New Orleans could at once restore a few key historic buildings within the French Quarter, specifically near Bourbon Street, and in the process, bring about the city’s first LEED-or Green Seal-certified hotels.

To her, there was no limit. She wanted a reduction in motor traffic and an increase in pedestrian-friendly thoroughfares, better drainage to prepare for future flooding, and solar energy hidden on rooftops along with outdoor gardens.

While idyllic and naive in some ways, the fact is, her project was the best one among her peers. I would have commended her for that, rewarded her, if it were my place. But I was a good enough man to know I couldn’t cross that line with Emelia again. Still, it didn’t stop me from wishing I had.

After the last time we spoke on campus, when she swore to me she’d never tell a soul what happened between us, she never came back to that bench outside my office window. Whatever peace and solitude she’d found in that courtyard was gone, thanks to me.





Chapter Eleven





Emelia



* * *



I can’t believe I’m here sitting inside the Banks and Barclay offices in downtown Boston, doing a lot of nervous foot tapping while I wait for the interviewer to stroll out of the conference room and call my name.

They’ve been taking applicants back one by one for the last two hours. But here I sit, staring at the coffee station with the breakfast spread laid out that not a single one of us has had the stomach to touch. Flakey croissants and heavenly cinnamon rolls, all left to go to waste. What a pity. Maybe if my interview goes horribly, I’ll wrap up a few on my way out and tell myself the trek here from New York City wasn’t in vain.

At the start of the day, there were twenty of us spaced around the small lobby that faces a conference room. We were the applicants who passed a rigorous interview process to be here. Three weeks of back-and-forth submissions, emails, phone interviews, and Zoom interviews, and now this is it, the final circle of hell.

Today we either walk out of here with a new job or go back to life as we know it.

I try not to let the idea depress me.

It took a lot of courage to get myself here today. When Banks and Barclay first landed the contract to renovate the Belle Haven Estate, I checked their website and found—just as I suspected there would be—ten new job listings posted overnight. Of course they were bringing people on. A job of this magnitude requires a large team. At the head, there’d likely be Professor Barclay or his partner Christopher Banks, then a senior project manager, at least two or three junior project managers, a principal architect, lord knows how many other architects, mechanical and electrical engineers, technical designers, and architectural conservationists. That’s where I come in.