A tricky problem
The message sat open on Luis's screen for a long time. He read it three times—four—the words blurring slightly as the evening light through his window shifted from amber to gray. Your teacher. The phrase had a weight that pressed against his sternum, a mix of absurdity and thrill that made his fingers feel slightly numb against the phone case.
His first impulse was to text Lauren. Screenshot. Capital letters. The kind of keyboard smash that expressed what language couldn't.
But Russo had asked for discretion. Explicitly. The word sat right there in the message, casual but deliberate, like a door gently closed.
Luis rolled onto his side and stared at the ceiling. His ceiling had a water stain in the corner that looked vaguely like Australia. He'd stared at it many times—during exam stress, during existential crises, during the aftermath of questionable hookups. It was a good ceiling for thinking.
The torso in the profile. Bald head. Ginger beard. Those brown eyes that had swept the lecture hall and paused on him.
Not imagined. Not coincidence. A professor. His professor.
His thumb hovered over the keyboard. Typed. Deleted. Typed again. Deleted again.
What did you say to someone who held your academic future in one massive hand and a gym bag in the other? Someone who'd just spent ninety minutes demonstrating exactly how much smarter he was than everyone in the room, and then followed it up with a winking emoji?
He finally typed: "The lecture was intense. You don't go easy on the first day."
Sent.
Then, before he could overthink it: "The combination of academic and Hyrox athlete is unexpected. I have to admit it works though."
He locked his phone and set it face-down on his nightstand. The room was dark now, the last of the sunset faded to a thin orange line on the horizon. Somewhere outside, a car alarm went off and then stopped. His roommate's key turned in the front door, followed by the familiar sounds of someone trying to be quiet after ten and failing at every possible opportunity.
Luis didn't check his phone again that night. He didn't expect a quick answer—the torso profiles never gave quick answers, and this one had more reason than most to be careful about when and how he responded. Besides, there was something almost pleasant about the waiting. The anticipation. The secret sitting warm in his chest like a swallowed ember.
He fell asleep thinking about reaction mechanisms and brown eyes and the way fabric had pulled across a chest that belonged on a Roman statue.
Monday's schedule appeared on his phone the next morning: Advanced Analytical Methods at nine, Inorganic Chemistry at eleven, lunch, then nothing until the following day. No Advanced Organic Synthesis until next Monday. He'd already known that—he'd checked his registration confirmation twice over breakfast, just to be sure—but seeing it laid out in his calendar made something in his chest tighten.
One afternoon a week. That was all the contact he'd have with Professor Giuseppe Russo. One lecture, ninety minutes, surrounded by two hundred other students.
The ratio felt simultaneously too much and not nearly enough.
He met Lauren at their usual spot near the east staircase at eight-forty-five. She was already there, leaning against the wall with a cup of coffee in one hand and her phone in the other, her electric-blue hair pulled back in a messy bun that suggested she'd woken up approximately eight minutes ago.
"You look like you didn't sleep," she said, not looking up from her phone.
"I slept fine."
"You're lying. Your face is doing that thing."
"What thing?"
"The thing where you're trying to look casual but your eyebrows are having an entirely separate conversation." She pocketed her phone and fixed him with the particular stare that had extracted more confessions from him than any priest ever could. "Spill."
Luis glanced around the corridor. Students streamed past them toward various lecture halls, coffee cups and laptop bags and the general shuffle of Monday morning. No one was paying attention to them. No one was close enough to hear.
"I will. But not here. After class."
"Luis."
"Lunch. I promise. It's—" he paused, searching for the right word. "It's a lot."
Lauren's eyebrows shot up. "Is this about the torso?"
"Lunch."
"You can't just say 'it's a lot' and then make me wait four hours."
"I can and I will. Consider it revenge for the time you made me watch the entire first season of that terrible reality show without telling me it had been canceled on a cliffhanger."
"That was different. That was art."
"That was cruelty."
But she was smiling now, the particular smile that meant she was already constructing theories. "Fine. Lunch. But I want every detail. Every single one. If you leave anything out, I'll know."
Dr. Chen's morning class passed in its usual blur of mass spectrometry and chromatographic resolution. Luis took notes dutifully, sketching a small vine of ivy up the margin of his page when his attention wandered. By the time they reached the dining hall, the sun was high and the campus had warmed into one of those perfect September days that made you forget winter was coming.
They claimed their usual table near the windows. Marcus and Kiran hadn't arrived yet—some scheduling conflict with Kiran's physics seminar—which meant Luis had Lauren's full, undivided, and slightly intimidating attention.
"Okay," she said, setting down her tray with the ceremony of someone beginning a religious rite. "Talk."
He told her. The message. The photo. The words: your teacher.
Lauren's expression cycled through about six different emotions in sequence. Surprise. Delight. Impressed appreciation. Concern. Surprise again. Then she settled on something that looked like gleeful disbelief.
"Your organic chemistry professor is the Grindr torso."
"Yes."
"The bald one. With the arms. The one who made half the lecture hall question their sexuality yesterday."
"That's the one."
"And he messaged you. Specifically you. With a photo of his face. And a request for discretion."
"Correct."
Lauren leaned back in her chair. "Okay. Okay. I need a moment to process this. This is the most interesting thing that has ever happened in this dining hall. This is more interesting than anything that has ever happened in this entire university." She leaned forward again, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "What did you say back?"
"I told him the lecture was intense and that the academic-slash-Hyrox combination was unexpected but impressive."
"That's it? That's all you said?"
"I didn't know what else to say. What's the protocol for this?"
She spread her hands. "There is no protocol. You're in uncharted territory. This is like if a celebrity slid into your DMs except the celebrity also controls whether you graduate."
"That's not comforting."
"It wasn't meant to be comforting. It was meant to be accurate." She took a long sip of her coffee. "What happens now?"
"I don't know. He hasn't answered yet. I don't expect him to be fast about it—he's a professor, he's got to be careful." Luis paused, pushing a piece of lettuce around his plate. "You can't tell anyone."
"Obviously not."
"Lauren, I'm serious."
"I'm serious too." She held up three fingers. "Scout's honor."
"You were never a scout."
"The principle stands. This stays between us. I'm your best friend, not the campus newspaper." She reached across the table and grabbed his wrist. "But you have to keep me updated. Every development. Every message. Every single thing that happens. I'm emotionally invested in this now."
"It's just a few Grindr messages."
"It's not just a few Grindr messages. It's a power dynamic. It's a secret relationship. It's forbidden attraction. It's—"
"It's not forbidden," Luis interrupted. "I checked. There's nothing in the student handbook about professors and students who are both consenting adults. It's... ethically complicated, probably. But it's not against any rules."
Lauren's expression shifted. "You checked?"
"I did some research last night. There are guidelines about harassment and discrimination, obviously, but nothing about consensual relationships. As long as there's no direct supervision outside the classroom, it seems like it's technically allowed."
"Technically allowed and advisable are two very different things."
"I know."
"And you're still interested?"
Luis thought about the photo. The smile. The way Russo's brown eyes had crinkled at the corners. The glimpse of the campus lake through the office window behind him, sunlit and serene, a private world tucked away from the lecture halls and the students and the noise.
"I'm interested," he said quietly. "I'm really interested."
They sat in silence for a moment. Outside the window, a group of students tossed a frisbee across the south lawn, their laughter filtering through the glass like distant music.
"Okay," Lauren said finally. "Then I'm interested too. For gossip purposes. And moral support. And in case I need to provide an alibi."
"What kind of alibi?"
"I don't know yet. But I'm ready."
Marcus and Kiran arrived a few minutes later, and the conversation shifted to safer territory—a group project for Inorganic Chemistry, a professor who'd assigned four hundred pages of reading for the first week, the ongoing mystery of whether the dining hall's "chef's special" was actually just leftovers repurposed with different sauce. Luis laughed in all the right places, but part of his brain stayed elsewhere. Back in the lecture hall. Back on the phone screen. Back in that moment of recognition when the pieces had clicked into place.
He checked his phone under the table. No new messages.
Tuesday was quiet. Wednesday, quieter.
Luis threw himself into his coursework with the particular intensity of someone trying not to check his phone every thirty seconds. He read three chapters ahead for Inorganic Chemistry. He outlined a paper for Dr. Chen that wasn't due for another month. He went swimming at the campus pool and pushed himself until his arms burned and his lungs ached and he could think about nothing except the rhythm of his stroke and the blue blur of the lane markers beneath him.
The Grindr app stayed silent. Giuseppe's profile showed no activity—no green dot, no "online now," no sign that he'd even opened the app since their exchange. Not that Luis was checking obsessively. He was checking a perfectly reasonable amount. A healthy amount. The amount of checking that any person would do when their absurdly attractive professor had revealed himself on a dating app.
Thursday night, he was sitting at his desk at eleven-forty-three, reviewing his notes on pericyclic reactions for the third time, when his phone buzzed.
The notification was from Grindr.
His heart did something that felt medically inadvisable.
The message was from Giuseppe: "I know. The professor who does Hyrox. It's unexpected. Most people picture academics as frail and bookish. I prefer to disappoint expectations."
Luis read it twice. The wording was careful—no mention of anything explicitly inappropriate, nothing that couldn't be explained away. But the tone was warm. Playful, even.
He typed back: "You definitely don't fit the stereotype."
The response came faster this time: "The body is a machine. The mind is a machine. I maintain both with the same discipline."
"Discipline comes with time that most people don't take."
"Most people are boring."
A pause. Then, Luis typed: "Then you're not most people, I guess."
Luis felt his face flush. It was ridiculous—he was twenty-one years old, he'd had relationships before, he'd exchanged messages with attractive men before. But something about the combination of Russo's physicality and his intellect, the way he commanded a lecture hall and then appeared shirtless on a dating app, the careful formality of the messages that still somehow felt charged with intent—it short-circuited his usual composure.
"Neither are you," his professor wrote.
The conversation continued in fragments, pauses between messages that stretched from seconds to minutes. Giuseppe talked about his training regimen—the Hyrox competitions, the discipline required to balance physical and intellectual pursuits. Luis talked about swimming, about the campus pool, about the summer that had sharpened his body into something he was finally proud of.
"You're lean," Giuseppe wrote. "Swimmer's body. I noticed."
The words sat on the screen. I noticed.
Luis's throat went tight.
"Hard not to notice you either," he typed. "The whole lecture hall noticed."
"The whole lecture hall has a short attention span. I'm more interested in the students who pay attention."
He didn't know how to respond to that. He stared at the screen for a long moment, his pulse beating in his ears. Then the green dot beside Giuseppe's name went gray, and he knew the conversation was over for the night.
He closed the app. Set his phone down. Realized he'd been holding his breath.
Friday passed without a word. Saturday and Sunday, the same. Luis stopped checking his phone obsessively and started checking it with a resigned acceptance. The professor was busy. The professor had a life. The professor may even have a husband or a wife, even an entire family. Of course he had business.
Monday arrived with a sharpness in the air that hadn't been there the week before. Autumn announcing itself. Luis pulled on a sweater and walked to campus through leaves that had begun their slow transformation from green to gold.
The lecture hall was fuller this week. Word had spread about Russo's intensity, and the students who'd skipped the first class to extend their summer had apparently been warned. Luis took his usual seat beside Lauren, who gave him a look that communicated approximately seventeen questions in three seconds.
"Any updates?" she whispered.
"Nothing since Thursday."
"Nothing at all?"
"He's been offline. I checked."
"You checked."
"A reasonable amount."
"Mhm." She pulled out her notebook with the air of someone who had many opinions and was choosing to keep them to herself.
Russo entered at precisely two o'clock, same as before. Same leather briefcase. Same gym bag. Different shirt—this one a deep burgundy that somehow made his shoulders look even broader, the fabric pulling across his back as he set his things on the desk. The beard was slightly longer, Luis noticed. The bald head gleamed under the lecture hall lights.
"Good afternoon," Russo said, and the room fell silent with an immediacy that was almost reverence. "Last week we discussed nucleophilic acyl substitution. This week we build on that foundation. If you didn't do the reading, you will be lost. If you did do the reading, you will still be confused, but you'll be confused at a higher level."
Nervous laughter rippled through the room.
What followed was ninety minutes of intellectual assault. Russo moved through mechanisms with the speed and precision of a machine, layering concepts on top of each other until the whiteboard looked like a conspiracy theorist's fever dream. He called on students at random, pressed them when they stumbled, nodded curtly when they got something right. He never raised his voice. He never needed to.
Luis took notes until his hand cramped. Beside him, Lauren was chewing on her pen with a ferocity that suggested she might bite through it.
At one point, Russo posed a question about regioselectivity and scanned the room. His eyes passed over Luis without stopping. No pause. No acknowledgment. The same sweep he gave everyone else.
It was deliberate. Luis could tell. The careful neutrality of someone who knew exactly what he was doing.
"I want an answer by Friday," Russo announced as the lecture wound to a close. "An at-home exercise. You'll find the problem set on the course portal by this evening. Email me your solutions by midnight Friday. No collaboration. No AI. I can smell ChatGPT from across a room, and the penalty for using it will be... memorable." He smiled, and the expression was not entirely comforting. "This is a diagnostic. I want to know what you actually understand, not what you can Google. The results will determine where we focus our attention for the rest of the semester."
He gathered his things and was gone before the clock struck three-thirty, the side door swinging shut behind him with a soft click.
Lauren let out a breath. "I think my brain is bleeding."
"Mine too."
"Did he look at you? I was watching. I don't think he looked at you."
"He didn't."
"Is that good or bad?"
Luis packed his notebook into his bag. "It's careful."
The problem set appeared Monday evening as promised. Six questions, each more complex than the last, requiring a mastery of material that the course hadn't officially covered yet. Luis downloaded it, skimmed through, and felt the familiar mixture of panic and excitement that came from being genuinely challenged.
He worked on it Tuesday between classes. Wednesday evening. Late into the night, his desk lamp the only light in his room, papers spread around him like a defensive perimeter. The problems were brutal—the kind of questions that required not just knowledge but intuition, the ability to feel your way through a mechanism before the logic caught up. Russo wasn't testing facts. He was testing thinking.
At eleven-thirty, Luis's phone buzzed.
Grindr notification. Giuseppe.
He opened it with fingers that trembled slightly.
"Working late?"
Luis glanced at the papers around him. "Your problem set. Question four is trying to kill me."
A pause. Then: "Question four is the hardest. The others are manageable once you crack that one."
"Any hints?"
Another pause. Longer this time. "You don't strike me as someone who needs hints."
The warmth in Luis's chest spread outward. "I don't. But I'm not above asking."
"No hints. But I'll tell you this—you're approaching it correctly. I can tell from your earlier answers. The intuition is there."
"You read my earlier answers?"
"I glanced at your assignment after you submitted it. The quality stood out."
Luis stared at the message. The assignment wasn't due until Friday. Giuseppe had already seen it. Had opened the file. Had read his work.
He didn't know what to do with that information.
"Thank you," he typed. "I think."
"You're welcome. I think." A pause. A longer pause. Then: "You're always careful in your messages. Formal. Almost too formal for this app. What are you looking for here, Luis?"
The question was direct. Sharper than the previous exchanges. The kind of question that demanded an honest answer.
Luis stared at the screen. His fingers froze over the keyboard.
The truth was simple but felt complicated in the context of everything else. Student and teacher. Grindr and lecture halls. Public spaces and private messages.
He couldn't answer. Not yet. Not so directly.
He set the phone down and went back to question four, but his concentration was shattered. He lay in bed for hours, the question looping through his head. What are you looking for here?
In the morning, after a night of restless sleep and a shower that didn't wash away the uncertainty, he typed his answer: "Honestly? I'm here to meet people. For sex. That's what the app is for. I wasn't expecting to find my professor, but I'm not complaining."
He hit send before he could overthink it.
Then he attached his completed problem set to an email and sent it to the address listed on the course syllabus. The message was formal. Professional. The kind of email any student would send: "Dear Dr. Russo, please find attached my solutions for the diagnostic exercise. Best regards, Luis."
Two different channels. Two different tones. The split made his head spin.
Friday passed without a Grindr response. Saturday morning, Luis woke late, the sunlight cutting through his blinds in sharp stripes. He reached for his phone with the habitual movement of someone who'd been doing the same thing every morning for a week.
A Grindr notification. From Giuseppe. Sent at one in the morning.
"Good. I'm looking for the same. Something physical. No strings. Discretion is important to me, as I said. But I'm interested."
Luis read it three times. Four. The words were simple, but the weight behind them was anything but.
He was about to respond when another notification appeared—this one from his university email. He tapped it open.
The subject line read: "Re: Diagnostic Exercise Submission."
The body of the email was brief:
"Luis,
Thank you for your submission. Your work was interesting—one of the more intuitive approaches I've seen to question four, despite your struggles with it.
I would like to discuss your solutions further. Please come to my office after Monday's lecture. I'm in the Caldwell building, room 312.
Best,
Dr. Russo"
The contrast between the two messages was jarring. One, playful and direct, acknowledging attraction and interest. The other, formal and professional, requesting an academic meeting.
Luis lay back against his pillows and laughed—a short, breathless sound that was half anxiety and half exhilaration.
Two channels. Two tones. One man who somehow contained both.
Monday was going to be interesting.
