I wanted to get out of the office and celebrate, but all of my research had left me short on friends to celebrate with. I felt like I should have been at a point where I could take some time for myself finally, but there didn’t seem to be much self to take time with. Everything I used to identify myself was sitting in the office with me.
I wanted to call my mom and to share the news, but she wouldn’t know I was even on the phone.
I stood up and walked to the window, looking down at the students and professors walking through the courtyard. Some were holding hands. Some had their arms around each other. I hoped one day that would be me, but I knew it was a long way out. I still had a lot of work ahead of me, and a lot of bills to pay between student loans and my mom’s medical expenses.
The reason I couldn’t call my mom was because she suffered from an early onset of Alzheimer’s, and it was advancing pretty rapidly. I’d moved her into a home while I was still working on my PhD. She required almost constant care, and as a student and research professor, I hadn’t been able to provide the kind of care she needed.
At times I found it easy to feel guilty, like I’d chosen my career over my family. But I reminded myself that she’d done the same, waiting until her late-twenties to settle down and start a family of her own, waiting until she had established herself as a doctor of linguistics.
I kept a picture of her on my wall from the day she graduated with her PhD, one of the proudest moments of her life. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree. On a trip to Russia when I was a child, while she was studying some of the lesser known Eastern European languages that had re-emerged after the fall of the Soviet union , I’d heard someone trying to talk to her in Russian, and I fell in love with the language. That was the beginning of my lifelong love affair with the people and their country, a country shrouded in mystery for most of my peers who had never visited it, thanks to the Cold War.
I pulled the picture out of a box and held it in my hand. “I’ve made it,” I told the young version of my mom, knowing that she would have understood what I was saying, and who was saying it.
There was a light knock at my door, bringing me back into the office. I turned around to see one of the professors’ assistants standing in my doorway, eagerly looking in on the boxes and stacks of papers cluttering the room.
“Dr. Danvers, there’s a gentleman here to see you,” the graduate student said uneasily. “Do you want me to tell him to come back?”
I looked around the room and sighed, dropping the picture of my mother back on top of the box it temporarily called home. “No, go ahead and send him in, I guess.”
“You got it,” he said, tapping the door frame and starting to turn away.
“Wait,” I said quickly, catching him before he could get away.
He poked his head back into my office. “What is it?”
“First, can you help me clear off my desk?” I asked him. “I don’t want to receive any visitors with this clutter in here. We don’t have to put this stuff away, but I’d like to look at least a little like my title.”
He laughed nervously. “I’ll be glad to.” He grabbed stacks of papers and set them on the floor in front of the cabinets along the bottom of one wall.
“Any idea who it is?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No clue.”
“Student or faculty?” was my next question.
“Neither.”
I set down the last stack of papers from my desk and tilted my head, wondering who was coming to see me. Today of all days. “Go ahead and send them in,” I told him.
I walked around behind my desk and stood with my hands on the back of the chair. Realizing it was almost a throne, the back of it tall enough that I felt like I was hiding behind it more than standing, I stepped to the side and waited for my guest.
A few moments after the teaching assistant left my new office, a tall, dark, musclebound mountain of a man entered the doorway. I let go of my grip on the back of my office chair as I looked him over. His body was a work of art. The definition of his muscles carried my eyes from his shoulders down his arms to the black leather cuffs on his wrists.
His face could have been chiseled from stone. He scowled with a hard, strong jawline and deeply set dark eyes. His dark hair was slicked back. He wore a closely cropped mustache and goatee.
He wore a bright, clean white t-shirt under an old black leather vest with patches on it. They looked like Boy Scout badges from hell. Tribal tattoos snaked out from underneath his short shirt sleeves and down his arms in thick black bands. He even had tattoos on his hands, most of them too small for me to see without getting up close, and I did not intend on doing that; I was close enough where I stood, thank you very much. He had something tattooed on each of his fingers in Gothic lettering, on both hands, but I couldn’t read it from where I stood.