I Locked My Professor's Office Door, and Left Belonging to Three Men novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Lock
Hannah turns the lock on Marcello's office door with two colleagues on the sofa, tells all three men she wants them, and takes Marcello's glasses off.
I turned the lock on Marcello Ferrigno's office door at ten past four on a Thursday.
Then I pulled the brass key out of it, with its loop of faded red thread, and put it in my cardigan pocket.
Two men sat on the green sofa behind him and watched me do it.
My chapter lay on the desk between us, forty pages, with his pencil running down the margin of every one.
The last note was on the last page.
"You are better than this chapter, and I think you know why you're afraid."
I had read it on the stairs an hour earlier, and I had read it again with my hand on the doorknob.
Marcello sat very still behind the desk, with his reading glasses pushed up into his gray hair and a pencil in his big hand.
"Hannah," he said. "What are you doing?"
"I'm not afraid of the chapter."
I said it evenly, and nobody laughed.
The radiator ticked under the window.
On the sofa, the man in the round glasses lowered his black notebook and set it on the floor.
I had never once seen him put it down.
His fountain pen rolled out of his fingers and he let it go.
Beside him the big one stood up, all six feet four of him, and the sofa springs creaked.
"Oh, yeah," he said softly. "No."
I did not look at either of them yet.
I looked at Marcello.
I had been his student for three years.
For the last two I had been in love with the way he wrote in my margins.
His notes said "Yes." They said "Go on." They said "This is the sentence" and "Say it plainer."
I had kept every page in a shoebox under my bed.
He had never once said my name in the hall above the weather.
"I'm married," Marcello said quietly.
"I know whose table I eat at on Thursdays."
"Then you know what you're asking," he said.
"I know exactly what I'm asking."
My voice shook a little on that, and I let it.
I put my back against the oak door and held the key in my pocket so hard the teeth bit my palm.
"I've wanted all three of you since the spring," I said.
The man with the notebook breathed in.
The big one's hand closed on the arm of the sofa.
"Nathan," I said. "At the colloquium you listened to my whole talk and never wrote a word. I watched you not write."
His dark eyes held mine behind his round glasses, and he did not look away.
"Colin," I said. "You carried the projector cart up three flights with one hand."
I let that sit.
"Then you asked me if I was warm enough."
Colin's ears went red.
"And you," I said to Marcello.
I stopped, because my throat had closed on it.
"You wrote 'Go on' in my margin on the fourteenth of March, and I went on."
Nobody moved.
"I'd rather say it here with the door locked than say it across Claudia's table tonight with the gravy going around," I said.
I did not say her name lightly.
It sat in the room with the four of us.
Marcello looked down at the gold ring on his hand.
He turned it once with his thumb.
When he looked up, his brown eyes had gone dark and steady.
I knew that look from a hundred conferences.
It was the one he gave a page when it finally said the true thing.
"Hannah," he said, once.
Colin took a step toward me, and Marcello lifted two fingers without looking at him.
Colin stopped.
"Come here," Marcello said.
My legs carried me across the office before I had decided to move.
The floorboards creaked at every step, and the green lamp on his desk made a pool of light on my pages and his hands.
I stopped in front of his chair.
He slid his chair back from the desk so I could stand between his knees, and he put two fingers under my chin.
His thumb lay along my jaw.
His hand was warm and dry and rough at the fingertips, and it was the first time he had ever touched my face.
"Say it again," he said, very low. "Slowly."
"I want you."
"All of us?" he asked.
"All of you."
His thumb moved across my lower lip, and I felt it down to my knees.
Behind me, the sofa creaked once.
Neither of the other two said a word.
I reached up with both hands and took his glasses out of his hair.
I folded them, and set them down on my chapter, on top of his last note.
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