Grinding at school
The September air hung thick with the last gasp of summer, warm and sweet with the scent of cut grass drifting through the open windows of the chemistry building’s east corridor. Luis shifted his messenger bag higher on his shoulder, the canvas strap digging in just enough to remind him he’d overpacked again—three notebooks, his tablet, the Van Gogh monograph he’d been reading at breakfast and couldn’t leave behind.
“Tell me again why we thought five courses was reasonable.”
Lauren snorted beside him, her Docs squeaking on the polished linoleum. “Because we’re brilliant and ambitious and slightly delusional. Also, the alternative is graduating late and explaining that to my mother.”
“Right. The mother thing.”
“The mother thing,” she confirmed, tugging a strand of electric-blue hair behind her ear. “She still asks if I’ve met any nice boys. I’ve been out for four years, Luis. Four.”
He laughed, the sound bouncing off the high ceilings of the old building. The place had been built sometime in the 1920s—all arched doorways and brass fixtures and windows that actually opened, the kind of architecture that made you feel like you should be wearing tweed and smoking a pipe. But the labs inside were pure twenty-first century, gleaming with gas chromatographs and NMR machines that cost more than his entire degree.
The corridor opened onto the main atrium, a three-story space with a glass ceiling that flooded everything with pale gold light. Students clustered around the central fountain—a mossy stone thing that had probably been there since the building’s foundation—laughing and comparing schedules and generally performing the ritual chaos of a new semester.
“There they are,” Lauren said, pointing toward a familiar cluster of faces near the east staircase.
Marcus spotted them first, raising both arms like a referee signaling a goal. “The dream team! Chemistry’s most codependent study duo graces us with their presence.”
“We’re not codependent,” Luis said, sliding into the group. “We’re collaborative.”
“You shared a toothbrush once.”
“That was an emergency.”
Kiran, perched on the edge of the fountain with a physics textbook already open on his lap, raised one eyebrow. “I’m almost afraid to ask.”
“Weekend trip to Lauren’s family cabin,” Luis explained. “I forgot my toiletries. She offered.”
“It was a brand new toothbrush head,” Lauren added. “I’m not a monster.”
The easy laughter that followed felt like muscle memory. Luis had spent three years with these people—late nights in the library, early mornings in the lab, the particular intimacy that came from collectively losing your minds over organic synthesis problems while running on caffeine and desperation. Marcus with his endless supply of bad puns and surprisingly tender emotional intelligence. Kiran, who could probably build a functioning particle accelerator from spare parts but still couldn’t figure out how to use the department printer. Lauren, his best friend, who’d held his hair back the one time he’d tried tequila and never mentioned it again.
“First class of the year,” Marcus said, checking his phone. “Advanced Analytical Methods with Dr. Chen in twenty. Who’s ready to have their summer brain atrophy exposed?”
“I did some review,” Kiran said.
“Of course you did.”
“Only the first six chapters.”
“I hate you,” Luis said, without heat. “I spent my summer working at the campus pool and forgetting that thermodynamics exists.”
The pool job had been good, actually—early morning shifts that left his afternoons free for sketching, the repetitive rhythm of swimming laps after his shift ended, the way his body had tightened and leaned over the three months until his reflection in the locker room mirrors surprised him. He’d always been fit, but something about the daily routine had sharpened him, defined lines where before there’d only been suggestion.
Not that he’d admit to checking. Much.
Dr. Chen’s class passed in the particular blur of first-day syllabus review and pre-requisite quizzes designed to humble you before the real work began. Luis filled three pages with notes he probably wouldn’t look at again and sketched a small sunflower in the margin—habit, comfort, the way his fingers always found their way back to drawing when his brain needed a secondary channel.
By the time noon arrived, his stomach was making noises that Marcus described as “geological.”
The campus dining hall was packed, the noise level hovering somewhere between “busy restaurant” and “jet engine.” They claimed a table near the windows, looking out over the south lawn where the groundskeepers had planted a new arrangement of chrysanthemums that caught the light like small fires.
Luis ate his sandwich one-handed, the other hand scrolling idly through his phone.
“Let me guess,” Lauren said, spearing a cherry tomato with her fork. “Instagram?”
“Not yet.”
“TikTok.”
“No.”
Her eyes lit up with understanding. “Ah. The grid.”
He didn’t dignify that with a response, but his thumb was already tapping the familiar orange icon.
Grindr loaded with the usual efficiency—faces and torsos and empty profiles arranging themselves by proximity in a cascade of thumbnail images. The campus grid was always active during the first week of the semester, a mix of returning students updating their profiles with new photos, freshmen tentatively dipping their toes into the app’s particular ecosystem, and the occasional faculty or staff member who hadn’t bothered to change their location settings.
Luis scrolled past a few familiar faces. There was Tomás from the biology department, who’d ghosted him after two perfectly pleasant dates last spring. A profile featuring nothing but a close-up of someone’s left bicep and the phrase “not here for conversation.” A blank profile with no photo and no stats that was almost certainly a bot.
The usual.
“Anything interesting?” Lauren asked, leaning over his shoulder with the casual boundarylessness of someone who’d never quite internalized the concept of digital privacy.
“Same old. Tomás is still here.”
“Ugh. Swipe him into the sun.”
“That’s not how this app works.”
“It should be.”
He was about to close the app when a notification pinged—a tap, followed immediately by a message.
He tapped it open.
"Hey, you look very cute 😉"
The profile was sparse. Name: G. Age: listed as 38. One photo. Luis squinted at it—a half-naked torso in harsh gym lighting, ginger hair curling across a chest that looked like it had been carved from something denser than ordinary flesh. Biceps that strained the definition of “casual workout.” A stomach that suggested a relationship with core exercises that bordered on the religious. The photo cut off just below the collarbone, leaving everything above the neck a mystery.
The profile info had exactly two words: Top. Discreet.
“Okay,” Lauren said, her voice shifting into the particular register she reserved for being impressed. “That’s a body.”
“Right?”
“Like, that’s not a normal person body. That’s a Marvel movie body.”
Luis typed back quickly: "Thanks. Very muscular body but any face pictures?"
He sent it and tucked his phone face-down on the table. “Probably won’t answer.”
“Because of the discretion thing?”
“Because those profiles never do. They want you to meet them in some dark parking lot without knowing what they look like, and I’m not about to end up on a true crime podcast.”
“The fact that you assume it would be a podcast and not just local news says something about your media consumption.”
“It says I have standards.”
He checked his phone five minutes later. No response. Ten minutes. Nothing. He wasn’t surprised—the mystery torso types were reliable only in their unreliability—but some small part of him had been curious. The body was objectively spectacular, and the message had been polite. Sometimes that was enough to spark a little hope, irrational and persistent as a candle in a draft.
“Show me if he answers,” Lauren said as they gathered their trays. “I’m emotionally invested now.”
“You’re bored.”
“Both things can be true.”
Their afternoon course was in the Caldwell Lecture Hall, a newer addition to the campus that managed to feel sterile despite the university’s obvious effort to make it match the older buildings’ aesthetic. The result was something like a hospital wearing a heritage costume. Luis and Lauren walked through the connecting corridor that linked the dining hall to the science complex, a glass-walled bridge that looked out over the university’s central park.
The view was one of Luis’s favorite things about the campus—acres of green rolling down toward a small lake where ducks conducted their inscrutable duck business, ancient oak trees that predated the university itself, students scattered across the grass like a living pointillist painting. In the spring, cherry blossoms would turn the whole scene pink. Now, in September, everything was gold and green and beginning-to-rust.
“That’s him,” Lauren murmured.
“What? Who?”
She nodded almost imperceptibly toward the opposite end of the bridge. “Tall drink of water approaching at two o’clock. Do not look obvious.”
Luis looked obvious.
The student walking toward them was, objectively, hard not to look at. Tall enough that Luis had to recalibrate his sense of scale—somewhere near two meters, easily, with the lanky grace of someone who hadn’t quite grown into their frame. But the frame itself was promising, broad through the shoulders in a way that suggested eventual mass, like a building still under construction but already impressive.
His hair was the first thing Luis really noticed: a deep copper-ginger that caught the afternoon light and held it, cut short on the sides but longer on top in a way that looked deliberate without seeming styled. The second thing was his face—sharp jawline, pale skin scattered with a constellation of freckles across the bridge of his nose, completely smooth. No stubble. No shadow. The kind of face that looked younger than it probably was.
And he was smiling. Directly at Luis.
Not the polite, reflexive smile of passing strangers on a narrow walkway. A grin. Wide and knowing and just slightly crooked, like they shared a secret Luis hadn’t been let in on yet.
The eye contact held for maybe three seconds. Luis felt it in his stomach, a warm drop like honey sliding off a spoon.
Then the student was past them, and Lauren was making a noise that could only be described as a squeak.
“Did you see that?”
“I saw it.”
“He looked at you like you were dessert.”
“He was probably just being friendly.”
“Luis. Honey. Light of my life. That was not friendly. That was a full-body once-over disguised as a smile.”
Luis glanced back over his shoulder. The tall ginger student had already disappeared around a corner, but the impression of him lingered—the improbable height, the freckles, the grin that had felt like a private communication.
But the profile photo had shown a muscular torso. Broad and dense and built. This student, for all his height and promise, was lean. Almost lanky. His clothes—a simple henley and jeans—hung on a frame that was more swimmer than bodybuilder.
The math didn’t add up. Unless he’d sent a very old photo, or someone else’s photo entirely. Which, unfortunately, wasn’t unheard of.
“Could be a coincidence,” Luis said as they pushed through the doors into Caldwell Hall.
“What could?”
“The ginger thing. The smile. Him looking. Plenty of people have red hair.”
“Mhm.” Lauren’s skepticism was a physical presence. “And plenty of people wear the same clothes they were wearing in a Grindr photo they definitely didn’t send.”
“The photo didn’t have clothes. That’s the problem.”
“Details.”
"In addition, the profile says he is 38 years. In which Edward Cullen universe did I woke up this morning?"
"We will see", say Lauren as a final response to this debate.
Caldwell Lecture Hall was already half-full when they arrived, students scattered across the tiered seating in the particular pattern of early-semester optimism—front rows occupied by the genuinely eager, middle rows by the strategically anonymous, back rows by those who’d already given up. Luis and Lauren claimed seats in the middle, pulling out notebooks and water bottles and settling into the particular posture of people about to be intellectually dominated for ninety minutes.
The course was Advanced Organic Synthesis. New professor—some Italian name Luis had glimpsed on his registration confirmation and promptly forgotten. The department had been buzz about this hire all summer, whispers of someone impressive poached from a research institute in Milan, credentials that extended across three continents and more published papers than most people had hot dinners.
“I heard he made a post-doc cry once,” Marcus had told them at lunch, with the relish of someone sharing particularly good gossip.
“That’s not a selling point.”
“Depends on the post-doc.”
The lecture hall’s side door opened at precisely two o’clock, and the ambient chatter dropped like a stone into water.
The man who entered was not what Luis had expected.
He was bald—completely, smoothly bald, the kind of shaved head that suggested choice rather than circumstance. A gingery beard, close-cropped and precise, traced the line of his jaw and framed a mouth that seemed set in a permanent suggestion of a smile. His eyes were deep brown, almost black in the lecture hall’s lighting, and they swept the room with the calm assessment of someone who’d been doing this long enough to read a classroom in a single glance.
The olive shirt he wore strained across his shoulders in a way that suggested violence—not actual violence, but the threat of seams giving way, of buttons reaching the limits of their tensile strength. Biceps that pushed against the short sleeves with every movement of his arms. A chest that made the fabric pull taut across his pectorals, the faint outline visible even from Luis’s seat twenty rows back.
In one hand, he carried a leather briefcase. In the other, a gym bag with a logo Luis recognized—the local Hyrox facility, the one that had opened last year near the river, catering to the kind of people who considered a half-marathon a warmup.
The combination was jarring. Academic and athlete. Professor and predator.
Luis’s throat went dry.
“Good afternoon,” the man said, setting both bags on the desk at the front of the hall. His voice carried without apparent effort—warm and lightly accented, the Italian vowels softening the English consonants like butter on hot bread. “I’m Dr. Giuseppe Russo. You may call me Dr. Russo, or Professor Russo, or simply ‘sir’ if you’re feeling traditional. I answer to all three, though the third makes me feel approximately a thousand years old.”
A ripple of nervous laughter moved through the room.
“This is Advanced Organic Synthesis. If you are in the wrong lecture hall, now is the time to discover that and make a graceful exit. I won’t be offended.” He paused, scanning the room again. “No one? Excellent. Then let’s begin.”
What followed was ninety minutes of the most intellectually demanding teaching Luis had ever experienced. Russo moved through concepts with the precision of a scalpel—never rushing, never wasting words, but never pausing for the stragglers either. He referenced material from the previous three years of study as though it were assumed knowledge, which technically it was, but the speed with which he expected students to retrieve and apply it was dizzying.
“Nucleophilic acyl substitution,” Russo said, sketching a reaction mechanism on the whiteboard with broad, quick strokes. “You learned this in second year. I’m not going to re-teach it. What I will do is show you what happens when you apply this to a system with competing electrophilic sites and then ask you to predict the product distribution under thermodynamic control. If you can’t remember the basics, the textbook exists for a reason.”
Luis’s hand cramped from note-taking. Beside him, Lauren was chewing on the end of her pen with the particular ferocity of someone who was understanding just enough to know how much she was missing.
At one point, Russo called on a student in the front row—a nervous-looking young man who’d been furiously typing on his laptop. The question was about stereoelectronic effects, and the student’s answer was halting, uncertain, partially incorrect.
“Interesting,” Russo said, and somehow the word didn’t sound like a compliment. “You’re thinking mechanistically, which is good. But you’re missing the orbital symmetry argument entirely. Anyone else?”
No one volunteered.
Russo’s eyes swept the room. They paused on Luis—just for a moment, just long enough for Luis to feel the weight of that gaze like a physical touch—and then moved on.
“The frontier molecular orbital approach predicts selectivity that classical mechanisms can’t explain. If you leave this course understanding nothing else, understand that. Electrons don’t care about your intuition. They care about symmetry.”
By the time the lecture ended, Luis felt like he’d run a mental marathon. His notebook was a mess of diagrams and arrows and hastily scribbled marginalia. Lauren looked vaguely shell-shocked.
“I need coffee,” she said. “And possibly therapy.”
They gathered their things and filed out with the rest of the students, the hallway filling with the low murmur of post-lecture decompression. Luis caught a glimpse of Russo at the front of the hall, packing his notes into his briefcase, his gym bag already slung over one massive shoulder. For a moment, their eyes met again. Russo’s expression was unreadable—faintly amused, perhaps. Curious.
Then the moment passed, and Luis was in the corridor, swept along by the current of students toward the exit.
“That was intense,” Marcus said, materializing beside them. He’d been in the back row, which meant he’d probably spent most of the lecture playing games on his phone. “Did you see those arms? How does he even find shirts?”
“He has them custom-made by terrified tailors,” Lauren said.
“Probably just tears the sleeves off everything like the Hulk.”
Luis laughed, but it came out distracted. His brain was still processing—the lecture, the intensity, the way Russo had looked at him. Looked at everyone, probably. He was a teacher. Looking at students was literally his job.
The campus had settled into late afternoon by the time Luis walked back to his apartment, the sunlight going amber and long through the oak trees. His apartment was a ten-minute walk from the main campus, a slightly shabby two-bedroom in a building full of graduate students and the kind of young professionals who still bought furniture at IKEA. His roommates—a doctoral candidate in comparative literature and a barista who was “taking a semester off to find himself”—were both out, the apartment quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator.
Luis dropped his bag by the door and collapsed onto his bed.
The Grindr notification was waiting when he checked his phone.
A new message from G. Sent thirty-two minutes ago, while he was walking home.
His thumb hesitated over the screen for just a second before he tapped it open.
What he saw made his breath catch.
The first message was text: I hope this first lesson as your teacher was great. And that this year will be very interesting. But I would appreciate discretion, if things will go any further 😉
Beneath it, a photo.
Giuseppe Russo, standing in what was clearly his office—bookshelves visible in the background, a window showing the campus lake—wearing a wide, easy smile that crinkled the corners of his brown eyes. He’d changed out of the straining olive shirt into a simple black t-shirt that somehow made his frame look even more imposing. His bald head gleamed under the office lights. His ginger beard framed that knowing smile.
Those dark eyes looked directly into the camera.
Directly at Luis.
Luis stared at the screen for a long moment. His heart was doing something complicated in his chest—not quite racing, but not calm either. More like it was trying to communicate in morse code.
Organic chemistry teacher. Hyrox gym bag. Bald with ginger beard. The torso in the profile photo—that massive, sculpted torso—lined up now with the body he’d watched lecture for ninety minutes. The arms. The chest. The way fabric had pulled across muscles that seemed to challenge the very concept of clothing.
And those eyes. That grin. The way he’d paused on Luis during the lecture.
Maybe he hadn’t imagined it.
