Her Favorite Student
He sat in the third row. That was two years ago.
What happens in Goa, stays in Goa.
On Friday afternoon Aditi opened her husband’s office door without knocking, because she had left her reading glasses on his desk and because she had knocked on that door four thousand times without once waiting for an answer.
She stood there for ten seconds. Then she pulled it shut without a sound.
She went home. She said nothing. She slept beside him that night, left before he woke, and was four hours down the line before he thought to ring.
Forty years old. Seventeen years married. Seventeen years teaching economics to rooms full of nineteen-year-olds who mostly were not listening.
One of them had been.
Paulo Fernandes sat in the third row and read ahead. He is twenty-one now. He runs his father’s resort on a Goan beach, he buys the fish himself at four in the morning, and he has grown into someone she does not recognise at all. He gives her the best villa on the property. He has dinner sent up to her deck. And somewhere between the second glass of wine and the third, he tells her what he has been carrying since he was nineteen.
She has one weekend. Nobody knows where she is. And for the first time in years she is sitting across from a man who cannot stop looking at her.
A standalone erotic novelette, explicit and told without euphemism. Both leads are adults and the classroom was two years and one lifetime ago. This story ends where it ends — no wedding, no epilogue, no tidy bow.
A glimpse beneath the sheets…
Aditi is forty. She teaches economics at a Bombay college where her husband Bhaskar is the principal. On Friday afternoon, seventeen years into the marriage, she opened his office door without knocking and found him with his secretary. She stood there for ten seconds, pulled the door shut without a sound, said nothing to him that evening, and took a train to Goa the next morning.
The small beach resort turns out to be run by Paulo Fernandes. She taught him two years ago. He left college halfway through his final year when his father had a stroke, and she has carried a quiet guilt about it ever since. He is twenty-one now.
It is her first evening. He has sent dinner up to her private deck, and he has come with it himself.
***
He had arranged it properly. Candles on the table, three of them in glass holders so the sea breeze did not kill them. A bottle of local wine already open, two glasses.
She sat down. She hadn’t expected this elaborate setup and she hadn’t expected him to be dining with her.
He poured the wine. Below them the Arabian Sea went dark and the sound of it did not stop.
They ate. He was easy to eat with. He had opinions and he stated them without hedging and then asked her what she thought, actually asked, the way people who are genuinely interested ask, not the way people ask while they wait for their turn.
He poured the second glass.
“You know what I used to love about your class, Ma’am?” he said.
She raised an eyebrow. “The reading list?”
“Nobody has ever loved a reading list.” He turned his glass. “You never taught out of the book. Second week you came in and did the whole of price signalling on the Dadar flower market: what happens at four in the morning, who sets it, why it collapses by nine. Twenty minutes. No slide.”
“That’s because the book was written by a man who has never bought a flower.”
“Ma’am, I had spent my whole life on a beach watching my father buy fish off three men at four in the morning, and nobody had ever once told me that was economics.” He shrugged. “You did. On a Tuesday. And then I couldn’t stop seeing it.”
She looked at him. It was the single most flattering thing anyone had said to her about her work in her entire career and he had not been trying to flatter her.
“You know what I regret most about dropping out, Ma’am?”
She expected the degree. The credential. The year he had lost.
“You,” he said. “Not seeing you every day.”
She laughed before she could decide whether to be uncomfortable. It was a real laugh, the slightly embarrassed kind. “Paulo.” His name as a gentle correction.
He shook his head. He meant it.
He poured the third glass. She did not stop him.
She was warm with the wine and warm with the sea air and the candle between them had nothing left to do but burn.
“Can I tell you something, Ma’am? If you won’t be angry.”
“I won’t be angry.”
He leaned forward across the small table. Like a secret. She leaned in towards the candle, their faces close, the flame between them.
“I used to touch myself thinking about you, Ma’am,” he said. His voice was low and steady. “For two years. I’m not ashamed of it.”
The sea below. The candle. The sound of the waves doing what they did regardless.
She looked at his mouth. She was thinking about Bhaskar’s office and about the black dress she had put on for nothing in particular, and then she stopped thinking about any of it.
She kissed him.
She put her hand on his jaw and she kissed him. It was a decision, not an impulse. For one second he was still with the shock of it. Then both his hands came up and he kissed her back with two years of wanting it in every movement of his mouth, his hands pulling her in by the face, not gently, and the candle guttered in the sea breeze. Neither of them noticed.
He came out of the chair after her without breaking the kiss and the chair went over behind him. Neither of them picked it up.
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