The Professor's Wager

*This one's for anyone who's ever had a crush on someone they shouldn't have, and then found out the crush was mutual. I wanted a story that felt flirty and fun, with two women who know what they want and aren't afraid to play for it. Hope you enjoy the game as much as they do.*

The rehearsal room at St. Cecilia's still smelled like dust and old hymnbooks, which I suppose is what you get when your arts center used to be a church basement. The pews they kept for seating didn't help. Neither did the radiator that clanked like it was auditioning for a percussion part.

I sat in the back, third pew, coffee in hand, and watched Sydney run her choir through the Mozart Kyrie as if she had personally offended every one of them and intended to do it again.

"Stop. Stop. Altos, you're rushing. You are always rushing. Why are you like this?"

"We're not rushing, you're dragging," called an alto I didn't recognize.

"I'm the conductor. By definition I cannot drag. Start again from forty."

I sipped my coffee and felt the old familiar pull, the one I'd been managing more or less successfully for eight years. Eight years. Sydney was thirty now, thirty and standing in front of a community choir with a pencil behind her ear and a scowl that could curdle milk, and I still got that stupid flutter every time she pointed at somebody.

The first time I ever saw her, she was twenty-two, sitting in the third row of my intro choral techniques course at the college, doodling in a notebook instead of taking notes. I remember thinking two things. One, that girl has perfect pitch or no business being in this room. Two, and this is the thought I've felt appropriately guilty about for nearly a decade, I would very much like to have coffee with that girl.

It was the second thought that caused problems. She was my student. You don't act on that. You grade her sight-singing, you write her a recommendation letter when she graduates, and you keep your mouth shut. Which is what I did. I kept it shut so hard I think I pulled something.

Then two years ago she turned up as the new choir director at St. Cecilia's, all grown up and gainfully employed, and we became colleagues. Friends, even. Which is its own special torture, if you're wondering.

"Professor Vane. Are you going to sit there judging me all night, or are you going to say something useful?"

I looked up. Sydney was staring at me over the top of the piano, one eyebrow up.

"I'm not judging. I'm observing. There's a difference and it involves coffee."

"You're three rows back with your arms crossed. That's judging posture."

"She's got you there, Cheyenne," Tamara said from the piano bench without looking up. Tamara, our accompanist, was twenty-eight and had the emotional investment of a woman who just wanted to go home.

"I'll adjudicate from here, then. The altos are rushing."

"Thank you!" Sydney threw her free hand up. "Finally, someone with eyes."

The rehearsal limped on. I watched her work, and I'll admit I wasn't always thinking about the Kyrie. She had this habit, when a phrase finally landed right, of closing her eyes for half a second like she was banking the moment. I used to see it in my classroom and pretend I didn't notice. I notice it a lot more now.

At the halfway point she called a break, and the choir did what choirs do, which is scatter toward coffee and gossip like the building was on fire. Priscilla, our tenor section leader and retired schoolteacher, age fifty-five and allergic to silence, planted herself next to me in the pew.

"You're staring again," she said.

"I'm resting my eyes."

"You've been resting your eyes on that woman for two years. In my day we called that a crush and resolved it by June."

"In your day you also smoked in the teachers' lounge, Priscilla, so I'll take your counsel under advisement."

Sydney came over, unwinding her scarf, and dropped onto the pew across from us. She sat facing backward, arms folded over the pew back, which is a posture that should not be charming and yet.

"You could at least sit with the sopranos," she said. "You're a ringer. We pay you in coffee."

"I'm a guest artist. Guest artists sit in the back and are mysterious."

"You're a college professor who owes me a favor."

"Those can be the same thing."

Priscilla leaned in like she was settling in for a play. "You two always were like this. Even before Sydney was on staff. Remember that summer workshop, Syd? You argued about vowel placement for forty minutes and Cheyenne bought you a drink after."

"That was not a drink, it was a gas station iced tea."

"It was a peace offering," Priscilla said, "and you drank it."

Sydney's ears went a little pink. I filed that away with a sense of professional satisfaction.

"We argue because she's wrong about vowels," Sydney said.

"I'm wrong about vowels. I have a doctorate in this."

"Paper doesn't make you right. Beethoven dropped out of school."

"Beethoven did not drop out of school, and also he never met you."

Tamara, without looking up from her music, said, "You two should just get a room with a whiteboard."

"We're debating pedagogy," Sydney said.

"You're flirting with extra steps," Tamara said.

The room got very quiet, or at least the corner of it did. Priscilla made a sound like a kettle starting.

"We are not flirting," I said, and even I heard how it came out.

"We are absolutely not," Sydney agreed, far too fast.

Priscilla held up both hands. "Old chemistry. That's all I'm saying. You could power the boiler with it. Some of us are cold and would appreciate the effort."

"You're seventy percent of the reason the alto section knows my business," Sydney said.

"I'm a retired teacher. Gossip is my pension."

The break wound down and people drifted back to their seats, and Sydney stood to call the room to order, and I should have let it go. Eight years of practice said let it go. But she paused by my pew and looked down at me with that half-smile she does, the one that's mostly challenge, and my mouth went ahead without the committee.

"You know, for somebody who thinks I'm wrong about vowels, you've never once taken me up on a chance to prove it. One on one. I'd come to you. Bring my doctorate and everything."

Sydney stopped mid-scarf-adjustment. "Is that a professional invitation?"

"It's a standing offer you've been ignoring for two years."

"And here I thought you liked the distance."

Priscilla, three feet away, made zero effort to pretend she wasn't listening. Tamara had even stopped flipping pages.

"It's not distance," I said. "It's diplomacy."

"Diplomacy." She said it like she was tasting it. "Sure. The woman who once told a state adjudicator his rubato was 'a choice' believes in diplomacy."

"He deserved it."

"He did," she conceded. "Okay. So if I asked you to come to my place and argue about the Credo, would you, or would you suddenly remember an urgent grading emergency at the college?"

"I would come."

"Tonight?"

The question hung there. I looked at her and she looked at me and neither of us blinked, which in choir director terms is a staring contest that ends in marriages.

"Tonight," I said. "But I'm bringing notes."

"Bring whatever you like. I still won't be wrong."

She turned and walked to the front of the room and clapped her hands, and thirty people resumed singing the Credo as though nothing at all had happened, and I sat there in the third pew with my cooling coffee wondering what exactly I had just agreed to.

Priscilla slid back into the pew beside me. "Well," she said, "it's about time. Do you want to know her coffee order or should I text it to you?"

"How do you know her coffee order?"

"Cheyenne. I know everyone's coffee order. It's how I know you take yours with too much vanilla."

The second half of rehearsal, I watched her conduct and she watched me back about twice as often as was strictly professional, and every time our eyes met she'd point at the score like she'd caught me doing something. The altos still rushed. Nobody cared.

When it ended, the room emptied out in the usual shuffle of coats and sheet music, and Sydney passed me on her way to the robe office with her bag over her shoulder.

"Eight o'clock," she said. "Don't be late, Professor."

"Wouldn't dream of it, Director."

"And Cheyenne?"

"Yeah?"

She smiled, and it was the smile from eight years ago, the one from the third row, the one I'd spent a very disciplined decade not thinking about.

"Wear something you can lose an argument in."

Then she was gone down the hall, and Priscilla appeared at my elbow like a pension-paying ghost.

"I'll text you the address," she said. "You're welcome."

She lived in a third-floor walkup near the river, a place that smelled like coffee and sheet music and radiator heat, and she answered the door in a sweater and socks and nothing about it was a performance, which somehow made it worse. Or better. I hadn't decided yet.

We argued about the Credo for two hours. That part was true to the invitation. We sat at her kitchen table with scores spread over the dinner plates and argued about vowels, about whether the tenors could handle the tessitura, about whether Priscilla had been singing flat on purpose since 2019 or whether that was just her voice now. She poured wine. I lost the vowel argument. I want this statement recorded because she will claim otherwise.

It was around the second glass that she put her pencil down and looked at me across the table.

"Here's my problem with you," she said.

"One of them."

"One of them," she agreed. "My problem is that you've spent eight years being extremely careful with me, and I can't figure out if that's respect or cowardice."

"Can't it be both?"

"No. Pick one."

I picked up my wine to buy a second. "Respect, mostly. Some cowardice in the margins."

"See, that's an honest answer, and I don't know what to do with an honest answer." She turned her glass in a slow circle on the table. "When I was your student I used to sit in the third row and think, if she ever just once looked at me like a person instead of a soprano section, I'd probably do something stupid."

My spine did a thing. "You never said anything."

"Obviously not. You were my professor. And then I graduated, and you were careful at a distance for six years, and then I took this job and you were careful at close range, and it turns out careful is its own kind of torture." She looked up. "So here's my proposal."

"Go on."

"You've got two days until Saturday's rehearsal, and I've got a bet with myself about you, and the bet is that you won't actually do anything. You'll be charming. You'll be witty. You'll leave before anything happens, because leaving is your whole thing."

"That's a little unkind."

"It's a little accurate." She stood up, collected our glasses, took them to the sink. "So. Dare. Try to kiss me before Saturday's rehearsal. Ten a.m., St. Cecilia's, in front of God and Priscilla and everyone."

"Priscilla will take out an ad."

"Then you'd better be motivated." She turned around at the sink, drying her hands. "Unless you'd rather keep being careful."

"You understand," I said, "that if I accept this, I'm going to actually try."

"Oh, I'm counting on it." She came back to the table and stuck out her hand, entirely businesslike, like we were agreeing on a tempo. "Shake on it."

I shook. Her hand was warm and she held on maybe half a second longer than the wager required, and then she said, "Goodnight, Professor," and walked me to the door like a lady, and I walked down three flights into the cold with my heart doing something undignified.

The texting started the next morning.

You should know I am not a flirty texter. My texts are things like "rehearsal moved to 7" and "did you return the percussion mallets." But I had a dare to lose, so I put my thumb on the scales.

First text, Friday, 7:14 a.m.: "Thinking about the Credo. Also about your kitchen table. Mostly the Credo."

Her reply took eleven minutes: "Mostly."

"90/10."

"Which part is the 10?"

"An audit is not appropriate, Director."

"Chicken."

So she was going to be like that. Fine. At noon I sent: "If I concede the tenors could handle the tessitura at pitch, would that count as seduction?" She replied with a single thumbs up, which, from her, is practically a marriage proposal, and then, "Flattery is not seduction. It's accounting."

That afternoon I went physical. I stopped by St. Cecilia's between my afternoon classes, when I knew she'd be in the robe office doing inventory, and I left a single red rose on the piano bench in the big hall. One rose. Nothing to sign. Nothing to explain. Then I drove home like a person who had not just committed a small crime in a church basement.

She texted a photo of it forty minutes later. Then: "This is from the gas station on Delmore. I recognize the tag."

"Sentiment doesn't ask where it was purchased."

"You watched me close my eyes on the Kyrie and thought, 'she'd fall for a gas station rose.'"

"Did you close your eyes?"

She didn't answer that for an hour. Then: "That's not the point."

"It's a little the point."

"You're still chicken, Vane."

I saved nothing, obviously. I printed nothing. But she saved the rose, because by five o'clock Tamara had told Priscilla, who told me, that Sydney had put it in a juice glass on the piano in her office, which meant she carried it out of the hall and kept it, and Priscilla reported this to me with the satisfaction of a woman reading a winning lottery number off her own ticket.

"She's going to make you work for it," Priscilla said, when she called me at six, which she had never once done before.

"I'd be worried if she didn't."

"She's also going to make you lose if you're not careful. That girl has been careful right back at you for eight years. Two careful people. It's a wonder either of you breathes."

Friday night, the night before the deadline, I stopped at the coffee place on Halden to pick up something to sustain me through grading, and there she was, at the corner table, in a scarf and reading glasses, with a score open and a hot chocolate the size of a fire hydrant. There was no