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student at an Ivy League school without a long term plan.
    But what happens if someone shows up and messes with your head? Could there be a possibility for me to change something? A student's life, maybe. A career or even an entire idea about life and education.
    I have little hope, but at least they'd be forced to listen to me for an entire semester.
    If she doesn't decide to drop out of my class after our first encounter this week, little Miss Harlington will be one of them.
    I can't let her get to my head too much, but it's hard to keep her out of it. She poses a challenge, a dilemma and attends to a desire deep within me. It's been a while since I had the pleasure to act on it.
    I know it'd been on the back of my mind when I took this class, despite the taboo nature of an intimate relationship with a student.
    I didn't expect to meet someone like her, but I knew there was a chance I could. And I knew it would cause trouble.
    I open the door to the faculty lounge, my eyebrows furled deep in thought. It's still early and the meeting won't start for another twenty minutes, but the room is inhabited by a handful of teaching staff nonetheless.
    I lift my chin and greet the room, met by the eyes of about half the present teachers. Most of them are perpetuating a stereotype, drinking coffee by the gallon while chain-smoking and lamenting their profession.
    I sit down in the far back of the room with some distance between me and a group of three, two younger female lecturers and a Professor whose name I've forgotten.
    "So the rumors are true?" I hear one of the two younger staff members ask, while I get out my tablet to answer a few e-mails for work. Being a guest lecturer for one semester doesn't mean that I can completely ignore my business for the time being.
    "As nasty as it sounds, yes," the other woman says.
    "I'm having trouble believing this," the Professor interjects.
    He leans forward, and so do the two women, making the whole group look like three little rodents sharing a carrot.
    "No man in his right mind would risk his career for something like this," he whispers, but not soft enough to escape my ears.
    The women huff and shake their heads.
    "Oh, men would," one of them says. She has blond hair with a disproportionately big head on top of a skinny body, making her look like a lolly pop.
    "A cute little student swooning all over them- isn't that every Professor's dream?" she asks. The other woman nods enthusiastically, while the older Professor is now the one who's huffing with disgust.
    "A man in his right mind, I said," he repeats. "I'm not talking about the idiots who lose track of what matters just because they're chasing some skirt. I always thought of Professor Miller to be one of the former."
    "Well, clearly he's not," the blonde argues.
    She looks over her shoulder, and our eyes meet before I can turn away and act as if I wasn't listening to their conversation. Her eyes widen with fear and she looks as if I just caught her with her hand in the cookie jar.
    "Mr. Portland," she says, blushing and nodding toward me. She knows my name, but I have no idea who she or who the other two might be.
    They all turn around to me, the other woman with a similar expression on her face as the first, while the Professor displays the same absentminded gaze that most of his kind wear on a daily basis.
    "I'm sorry if we were disturbing you," the blonde says.
    "Not a problem at all," I say, waving her off. "I wasn't aware that the teaching staff at such a renowned school is just as prone to gossip as people are at any other workplace."
    All three of them lower their eyes for a moment, and the Professor is the first to recover from this short moment of shame.
    "Gossiping is only human," he states. "And after all, we're all humans."
    Humanities. I guess that's where they teach you, that even disrespectful behavior is nothing to be ashamed of. We're all human, after all.
    "Besides," the blonde adds. "This concerns issues on a meta