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It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. – Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

This semester I will take a seminar on Gilles Deleuze it is being taught by two of my favorite professors, Thomas and Jack. These are also professors that I have no small level of longing for. Afterall, how could I resist them, I am young and impressionable, eager to please and desiring to be intellectually sexy to my idols. They are freshly minted PhDs with good looks, charisma, and a laid-back approach to instruction. They intentionally blur the line between teacher and student. They cultivate casual relationships with students, curse in class, and teach incredibly sexy theory. In the bar a few nights ago, I ran into Thomas and my friends and I sat down with him for a drink.

One drink became several, the conversation got intense and personal, and everyone I had come there with trickled away to go home. Thomas and I were alone at the bar now and continued to talk. Then Thomas made a remark that changed everything.

I wish I remember the exact thing that I said directly beforehand but I can’t. It was hopefully insightful and sexy. Perhaps it was relatively mundane but regardless it elicited a significant response.

Thomas shrugged his shoulders forward, resting his head in his hands with his elbows on the bar and said, “I have to keep reminding myself that you are my student.”

I look away, facing forward, bars are good for diverting a gaze in that way. “So that’s where we are,” I reply.

We said some more things in the following minutes, they were pithy and flirtatious and in the spirit of negotiation. I knew I wanted him but I also knew it would put both of us in a peculiar position starting on Monday.

In a moment of courage and brilliance, I look up from my drink, gesture to the bartender and say, “Hey Paul, can I borrow a pen?”

Paul used to fuck a roommate of mine, they aren’t dating anymore and she doesn’t live with me but I still feel guilty when I see him since I was the one that convinced her to break up with him. Paul delivers the pen and I murmur my thanks.

I take two cocktail napkins from the stack in front of us and put one in front of Thomas and one in front of myself. I write down the URL for this website, fold the napkin in half and pass it to him along with the pen, “Your turn.”

He writes something and passes it back to me.

I look in his eyes and desperately want him to kiss me but I gather the resolve to say, “That is all I can give you tonight.”

But by way of consolation (and perhaps to convince myself as well) I continue, “The best stories like this climax at the moment of desire being expressed, I always end up writing them that way.”

He nods, seemingly unconvinced.

I know that there are other possible endings to this story: outright rejection, a torrid affair, kinky sex that is never repeated, a teary regretful morning after, he has done this with half a dozen students before, I am not special, someone falls in love, everything is peachy, or many hot encounters. They flare out before my mind as possibilities that are entwined and intersecting, weaving their way through the landscape of my sexual consciousness. I feel a surge of warmth like the first sip of a coctail but I know I’m on my fifth.

I know that I’ll see him on Monday, that this is far from over, that my resolve might not be sustained through another night of coctails. But for that evening, the story is over and I stand up and say, “Goodnight.”