Read Hold Still for Free Online Page B

knocks and Maya jumps and faces Laura, who turns toward the door, flattening her hair down against her head.
    â€œProfessor?”
    Charles wears a sweater zipped up to his neck. It’s gray over a dark green T-shirt; both look impossibly soft. He’s awkward, bumbling, tall, and very quiet. He’s her teaching assistant, a graduate student, twenty-eight or -nine she figures, younger, possibly.
    He studies Tennyson: Someone had blundered! Maya always thinks when she sees him. Someone had blundered! And she hopes it isn’t her or him.
    â€œCome in,” Maya says.
    Laura pulls her face back to the shape it always is when facing almost anyone but Maya: warm, a little hard at the edges, ready to laugh or attack in equal measure, sharp and tight around the lips.
    â€œCharles,” says Maya. “Please.”
    She nods toward the seat next to Laura, but Charles shakes his head and remains standing.
    â€œI’m good.” He smiles at Laura. “Hi.”
    Laura grins, crosses her legs, and turns to face him.
    â€œHi,” she says.
    Charles bites down on his lower lip, which is full and pops out still from underneath his teeth. He has a broad flat nose that scrunches up when he sits with Maya and talks about his thesis. Sometimes she keeps an eye turned toward his nose when she’s teaching, knowing if it’s scrunching she’s said something that has made him think.
    She sits up on the edge of her chair and holds the corners of her desk. “How are you?” she asks.
    â€œFine.” He nods. “Good. I’ve been thinking . . . I wanted to tell you.” She watches him reel in whatever it is he means to say as Laura watches him.
    Laura leans forward and wraps her hand around her ankle as Charles starts to speak again.
    â€œI think I have some ideas for the fall.”
    His dissertation is due next month. Only now does Maya realize how much she’ll miss him when he leaves here. He’s been sitting in the front row of her classroom, at office hours, department meetings, for the past six years.
    â€œTomorrow?” Maya says. “You ready?” She’s asked him to teach the class of hers for which he’s an assistant. It’s a year-long course, required for all the undergrads in the major, and he’s spent the last semester observing her and grading the papers she assigns.
    He nods and repositions his squared-off thick-rimmed glasses on the bridge of his nose and seems to stand up straight. “Yes,” he says. “I think.”
    She smiles at him. “We’ll talk about fall after?”
    He looks down at her desk. His hair has grown long in the past couple years and falls down now in his face. Sometimes Maya wonders if he simply hasn’t thought to get it cut, if she might offer to cut it for him, as she’s done for Ben most of his life.
    â€œYou’ll be great,” she says.
    â€œWonderful,” Laura says.
    Maya watches Laura’s purple fingernails tap methodically against her shin.
    â€œI’ll email you my plans?”
    â€œIf you want,” Maya says. “I trust you’ll do fine.”
    He reddens. He’s taller than she’s realized. As he leaves, Maya smiles at the paperback folded and shoved into the back pocket of his pants.
    â€œHe’s in love with you!” Laura has uncrossed her legs and almost stands up with the force of her assertion. The door has hardly shut before she speaks.
    â€œChrist, Laura. Of course he isn’t,” says Maya. There have been moments in the past year when she’s worried Charles looks a bit too long at her, listens too intently. In those moments, she wants to run his hands over the wrinkles of her face, to lift her shirt and let him roam the curves of stretch marks on her belly, to finger the thin line of her cesarean scar.
    â€œOh, sugar. He is.”
    â€œHe’s twenty-something,” says Maya.
    Laura grabs hold of her left earring,