It’s a story as old as higher education. I was nubile, nineteen, innocent (sort of), still plagued by the hangover insecurities of adolescence, five feet and five inches. It was the May of my sophomore year of college, and I had developed a friendship with one of the graduate students who lived in my dorm as an academic advisor and quasi-authority figure. We became friends because we both were forced to take lunch at 11:30 due to afternoon classes and shared vaguely similar academic interests. He eventually friended me on Facebook, which I thought was a little strange, but brushed off because I assumed he was gay due to his plethora of vibrant, floral shirts and the gulf of a decade that separated us in age. He soon messaged me, saying I should come to a sushi and sake study break he was throwing in his room for the undergraduates in his entryway.
This invitation gave me a bit more pause. There are strict rules in force governing interactions with the RAs—they are not supposed to serve alcohol to underage students, and they’re certainly not allowed to boink their charges. If the latter happens, they’re expelled from the dorm within twenty-four hours and receive a mark on their records—so he wasn’t trying to seduce me, I reasoned. Since I—especially as a nineteen-year-old—never turned down an offer for sake on a school night, I happily accepted the invitation and went to his room the next night.
There, it was a study break typical of many of the ones I had attended in my own entryway, except everyone was a senior and boozed up. I grabbed some sushi and a cup, mingling for a bit. The RA joined me on his couch to chat, while constantly, constantly refilling my cup. The party started to dwindle, and I made to go, but he suggested that another student and I join him in his study to view some art.
With the other student studying the painting, the RA started to snake his arm up my shirt and around my midriff, all while pontificating on the origins and meaning of the work. I immediately bee-lined for the restroom, wasted, and faced my reflection in the mirror, slurring to myself, “If you stay, you will get naked. If you stay, you will get naked.” I reemerged, the other student had left, I stayed, our clothes were torn off, we made out on the couch, he carried me to his bed, we touched each other; I decided in my consensual yet drunken haze that sex was a bad idea, and he complied.
I returned to my dorm room on cloud nine—drunk on sake and proud that I had finally caught the unicorn of undergraduates: I’d gotten naked with an RA. I spilled all to my roommates, who did not react the way I had imagined. Instead of incredulity and high-fives, I received incredulity, disgust, worry, and judgment (directed mostly at the RA, but a little saved for me). They also essentially forbade me from seeing him alone again.
There was a catch in that plan, as I had left my favorite necklace in his room amid the flurry of undressing. He texted the next day to suggest a return of the necklace over a drink at a bar—one that was too fancy to be swarming with undergrads to spot us. I agreed, and met him there, only to be turned down due to being nineteen. We returned to his room to chat—a trek full of espionage and fire stairs to remain unseen—and I noticed a slew of text messages from my roommates. He was explaining the finer points of necessary discretion in this affair when his phone began to buzz. Evidently my roommates, in a bout of motherly, well-intentioned over-protection, had tracked down his cell number, demanded to know where I was, and harangued him for being ‘creepy’ and in violation of his academic authority. Apologizing profusely, I fled his room to be met with the greatest shout-down of my life, where my roommates insisted that I must be an idiot (perhaps correctly) for putting his and my academic careers at risk. Understandably, I never returned to his room after that humiliation, and as he graduated that year and took a post-doc in a different city, I assumed I’d never see him again.
Fast-forward to my senior year, when I received a Facebook message from him stating that he’d received a job as a professor and lived down the street from the dorm we used to share. He asked me to meet him for a drink—at this point I was finally twenty-one, newly single, and in desperate need of a distraction from the Great Job Hunt. I met him that Friday at an out-of-the-way bar, where we consumed a multitude of Dark and Stormys before returning to his apartment. Sitting in his well-furnished place, drinking port and listening to some Nat King Cole, I felt like a f*cking grown-up and again full of hubris. He pushed me up against the wall, took of my clothes, and banged me all over his apartment. I stayed over, happy to not be sleeping in a twin extra-long, and he took me out to breakfast the next morning, happy to be sleeping with someone who showed a little more class the next day than your typical frat bro.
The affair continued until graduation in much the same fashion: out-of-the-way bars, fun nights over, breakfasts at cafés. This time around I went without telling my roommates, instead only confiding in a couple discreet girlfriends and using an elaborate system of code. There were never any romantic feelings, but he was an intelligent and amusing conversationalist—and we continue to catch up whenever he comes through my new city. In fact, we grabbed drinks (just drinks) last night.