The first time they met, she extended her hand and said, "Welcome to the department." The new hire shook it with a smile so warm it felt like an insult.
Her name was Dawn. She was thirty four, fresh from a tenure track at a small liberal arts college, and she had the audacity to look happy about it. Her office was across the hall. Her laugh carried. Her students adored her, which meant they started complaining about the other professor. The tough one. The cold one. The one who demanded perfection and gave nothing back.
That was her. Beck. Forty one years old, fifteen years at this university, a publication record that spoke for itself and a personality that did not. She did not mind being disliked. She minded being compared.
Dawn taught the same survey course, but differently. Where Beck assigned dense critical theory, Dawn brought in podcasts and graphic novels. Where Beck held office hours by appointment only, Dawn kept her door open and brewed tea for anyone who knocked. The students flocked to her. The faculty adored her. The chair started giving her the good teaching schedules, the committee assignments that mattered, the quiet nod of approval that Beck had never quite received.
She told herself she did not care. She was a scholar, not a popularity contestant. Her work mattered. Her students learned. She did not need to be loved.
Then the building renovation happened.
The English department was being recarpeted, rewired, repainted. Offices were reassigned on a temporary basis. Beck lost her solo space and gained a shared one. Across the hall. With Dawn.
"No," she said to the chair.
"It is only six weeks."
"I would rather work in the broom closet."
"The broom closet does not have windows."
She lost the argument. Of course she lost. She always lost these days, to Dawn's warmth and the chair's exasperation and her own inability to explain why the thought of sharing four walls with that woman made her skin prickle.
The office was small. Two desks, two chairs, a window that faced the parking lot. Dawn arrived first, already rearranging the furniture, already making the space hers. A plant on the windowsill. A kettle on the filing cabinet. A photograph of a woman who was probably a wife, though Dawn never wore a ring.
Beck set her laptop on the remaining desk and tried not to look at her.
"Thank you for being gracious about this," Dawn said.
"I am not being gracious. I am being outvoted."
"Same thing, in a department meeting."
She had a nice laugh. Beck hated that she noticed.
The first week was excruciating.
They worked in silence, punctuated by the click of keyboards and the hum of the kettle. Dawn made tea constantly, herbal and fragrant, and the smell of it drove Beck to distraction. She drank black coffee, bitter and strong, and Dawn wrinkled her nose every time she poured a cup.
They disagreed about everything. Grading rubrics, course texts, the importance of attendance policies. Dawn thought deadlines should be flexible. Beck thought flexibility was the enemy of rigour. Dawn thought students needed encouragement. Beck thought they needed discipline.
"You treat them like they are trying to fail," Dawn said one afternoon, after Beck had refused a third extension request.
"I treat them like adults."
"They are twenty years old. They are children."
"They are paying twenty thousand dollars a year to be here. They can manage a deadline."
Dawn looked at her. Her eyes were dark and bright and full of something that was not quite anger.
"You are not as hard as you pretend to be."
"You do not know me."
"I know that you stayed late last week to help a student who was struggling with theory. I saw the email. You did not have to CC me."
Beck felt her face flush. "That was professional courtesy."
"You could have let her fail. You did not."
She had no answer for that. She turned back to her laptop and tried to ignore the way Dawn was looking at her. The way her chest felt tight. The way her hands trembled slightly on the keyboard.
The second week, Dawn started bringing her tea.
Not asking. Just placing a mug on her desk, wordlessly, the same way she had been making it for herself. Chamomile in the afternoon. Peppermint in the evening. Beck drank it without comment, which was comment enough.
They started talking. Not about work. About small things. The weather, the news, the stray cat that Dawn had adopted and named after a Victorian novelist. Beck found herself telling Dawn about her own cat, a senior rescue with thyroid problems and an attitude problem. Dawn laughed. The laugh was warm, genuine, and Beck felt something shift in her chest.
"You are not a monster," Dawn said.
"I never claimed to be."
"You act like one. But you are not."
Beck looked at her. The office was dim, the overhead light too harsh, the window dark with evening. Dawn's face was soft in the glow of her laptop screen. Her mouth was soft too. Beck had been looking at that mouth for two weeks, telling herself she was just observing, just noticing, just cataloguing the features of a colleague she did not like.
"Maybe I am," she said. "A monster. Maybe I have been one for so long that I have forgotten how to be anything else."
Dawn reached across the space between their desks and touched her hand. Just her hand. Just for a moment.
"Then let me remind you."
The snowstorm started on a Friday.
They had both stayed late to finish grading. The forecast had called for flurries, nothing serious. By eight o'clock, the parking lot was buried and the roads were closed. The university sent an alert: shelter in place. No travel until morning.
Beck looked out the window. The snow was still falling, thick and relentless, erasing the world beyond the glass.
"We are trapped," she said.
"It appears so."
"Together."
"Yes."
Dawn did not sound unhappy about it. She stood up, stretched, walked to the filing cabinet where she kept her emergency supplies. A blanket. A bag of dried fruit. A bottle of wine that she had been saving for no particular occasion.
"This feels like a metaphor," she said, uncorking the wine.
"For what?"
"Two people who have been circling each other finally forced to stop moving."
Beck accepted the glass Dawn poured her. Their fingers brushed. She did not pull away.
They drank the wine. They talked. Not about work this time. About real things. Dawn told her about the woman in the photograph, her partner of twelve years, the one who had left two years ago because Dawn was too chaotic, too scattered, too much. Beck told her about the woman she had lived with in graduate school, the one she had almost married, the one who had told her she was incapable of love.
"She was wrong," Dawn said.
"You do not know that."
"I know that you stayed late to help a student who was failing. I know that you drink the tea I make you even though you prefer coffee. I know that you have been looking at my mouth for two weeks."
Beck's breath caught. "You noticed that."
"I am not blind."
"Then you also noticed that I am terrible at this. At feelings. At being close to anyone."
Dawn set down her glass. Moved closer. Her knee touched Beck's knee. Her hand touched Beck's face.
"I noticed that you are afraid. That is different."
She kissed her.
The kiss was soft at first, questioning, giving Beck room to pull away. She did not pull away. She kissed Dawn back with the same hunger, the same need, the same desperate and unfamiliar wanting. Her hands found Dawn's waist, her hips, the warm skin beneath her shirt.
Dawn made a sound, low and pleased, and the sound undid something in Beck. Something she had been holding together for years. Something she had not known she was holding.
"I have wanted this," Dawn whispered against her mouth. "Since the first week. Since you drank my tea without complaining."
"I have wanted it longer. Since you smiled at me in the hallway and I had to pretend it meant nothing."
"Let us stop pretending."
They made love on the office floor, on the blanket Dawn had brought for emergencies. The snow fell outside. The building was silent. There was no one to hear them, no one to see them, no one to interrupt the slow and careful undressing of two women who had spent months learning to hate each other and discovered that hatred was just the other side of desperate, aching want.
Beck learned that Dawn's hands were not just warm. They were deliberate. They knew where to touch, how to touch, when to be gentle and when to be firm. Dawn learned that Beck's body was not cold. It was hungry. It had been waiting for someone to feed it.
When Beck finally came apart, crying out against Dawn's shoulder, she felt something break open in her chest. A wall. A habit. A lifetime of pretending she did not need anyone.
Dawn held her through it. Whispered her name. Kissed her forehead, her closed eyes, the corner of her mouth.
"You are not a monster," Dawn said.
"I am not sure what I am."
"You are mine. That is enough for now."
The snow stopped by morning. The roads were cleared by noon. They packed up their things, walked to the parking lot, stood beside their cars in the cold and glittering light.
"See you Monday," Dawn said.
"Yes. Monday."
Dawn kissed her. Quick and warm, like it was the most natural thing in the world.
"Do not be a stranger."
Beck watched her drive away. Watched the tail lights disappear around the corner. She stood in the snow for a long time, not feeling the cold, not feeling anything except the ghost of Dawn's mouth and the impossible fact of what had happened.
She went home. She graded the rest of the papers. She thought about Dawn. She thought about the office, the blanket, the way Dawn had said her name.
On Monday, she brought her own kettle to the shared office.
She made tea.
