Four Years Later

I'd been in love with Ms. Carver since junior year.

Not that I ever did anything about it, she was my English teacher, and I was seventeen, and even if I'd known what I was feeling back then, I knew enough to know it was inappropriate. So I buried it. Wrote her poetry assignments that were really love letters. Stayed after class with questions I already knew the answers to. Graduated with the memory of her smile tucked away like a secret.

And then, four years later, I walked into a bookstore and saw her standing in the poetry section, holding a collection by Mary Oliver.

* * *

She looked exactly the same. Dark blonde hair, intelligent eyes, the kind of quiet beauty that sneaks up on you. She was wearing a sundress, and I could see the curve of her shoulder, the line of her collarbone, and suddenly I was seventeen again, desperate and confused and convinced this was the most beautiful woman in the world.

She looked up, and her eyes widened.

"Alex? Alex Chen?"

"Ms. Carver. Hi."

"Oh god, please call me Rebecca. I'm not your teacher anymore." She laughed, that warm, throaty laugh I'd dreamed about. "How are you? What are you doing now?"

"I'm at Berkeley. Finishing up my masters in creative writing."

"Creative writing! I always knew you'd do something with words. Your essays were..." She paused, something flickering in her eyes. "They were remarkable. Genuinely."

"I had a good teacher."

We stood there in the poetry section, and the years collapsed between us. I wasn't her student anymore. She wasn't my teacher. We were just two adults who shared a love of books and, apparently, Mary Oliver.

"Would you want to get coffee? Catch up properly?"

"I'd love that."

* * *

Coffee became lunch, which became a walk through the park, which became dinner at a small Italian place neither of us wanted to leave.

Rebecca was thirty-eight now, divorced for three years from a man she described

as "perfectly nice and completely wrong." She was teaching at a private school across town, the same school I'd graduated from, though she'd started the year after I left. She was writing poetry in her spare time, "terrible poetry, don't worry", and had recently adopted a cat named Sappho.

"Sappho? Subtle."

She laughed and looked away, a blush creeping up her neck.

"My ex-husband never understood the reference. That should have been a sign."

"A sign of what?"

She met my eyes, and the look there made my breath catch.

"That I was looking for something he couldn't give me."

* * *

We exchanged numbers. Started texting. Then calling. Then spending weekends together at bookstores and coffee shops and long walks where we talked about everything and nothing.

I didn't tell her how I'd felt in high school. But I suspected she knew.

And I was starting to suspect she'd felt it too.

The way she looked at me when she thought I wasn't watching. The way her hand lingered on my arm during conversation. The way she mentioned, casually, that she'd been exploring her sexuality since the divorce, that she'd always known she was attracted to women but had never acted on it.

"Better late than never, right?"