Kevin

I wrote this a couple of years ago, so it's not my best work. But I like the ending.

It happened in the maths classroom.

I stayed late at college that day, doing revision with my maths teacher for an upcoming exam that I felt I had no hope of passing. I called him over to help me, once again, and he sat next to me. I asked him what I’d done wrong. As he scribbled down bearings and numbers and trigonometry, I looked at his face and tried to take in what he was telling me.

By now, my third hour was revision with only coffee breaks and lunch in the middle, the orange of the walls seemed to have a much more desolate meaning than what was originally intended. It was usually gaudy and distracting, but now it seemed to hold only notes of monotonous desperation. I didn’t want to stare into the walls that seemed to devour any hints of understanding, so instead I looked at my teacher’s face.

“Mel, are you listening?” he asked, breaking me from my thoughts. I nodded.

I was the only one who’d stayed behind today.

As I looked into my teacher’s eyes, I saw what I could have sworn to be tears.

“What did I just say?” he asked. After 18 years, you’d think teachers would stop asking that.

I didn’t answer him. Instead I asked, “Sir, what’s wrong?” You’d also think students would stop calling their teachers ‘Sir’ and ‘Miss’.

“Nothing, Mel.” I could tell he was lying, but didn’t press the matter.

It took about half a minute of staring at the page before I looked up in incomprehension again. But my worries were completely forgotten when I saw a tear streak down my teacher’s face.

“Sir…” My voice was a whisper this time. I absentmindedly reached towards him and used my thumb to wipe the tear away. I didn’t even think about it.

His surprise was evident on his face, but it was quickly washed away as the dams broke. He took off his glasses to wipe his eyes.

I decided to ignore the fact that he was my teacher – plow on in an effort to help instead of maintaining that strange wall between school and a teacher’s private life. “It might help to talk about it,” I ventured. I couldn’t stand to see this man, whose demeanour was usually so chipper and whose face was normally so beautifully happy, seemingly inconsolable. “Please, Sir…”

“Kevin,” he managed to choke out, through the feeling I remembered so well, the one that clogs your throat and stops you talking for ten minutes unless you want to sound part hyena.

His resolve was clearly breaking down. I slowly inched my chair a little closer. I tentatively reached out a hand towards his, and suddenly, like the barrier between school and personal life had never existed, his head was on my shoulder.

For what felt like hours but could have been no longer than ten minutes, Kevin’s face was buried in the crook of my neck, until, finally, he looked up at me with red rimmed, wet, tired eyes.

Kevin apologised for crying, but the words still came out strained and with difficulty. I told him it was okay. “It’s okay, you can tell me anything,” I said.

And somehow, he believed me. With one of my hands rested on his soft brown hair, the other on the back of his once crisp white shirt, and his head still peculiarly close to mine, he wept and explained. It was easier crying this time, lighter, softer sobs. Kevin told me it was the anniversary of his wife’s death. I knew he was only 29, so she must have died young. But I didn’t speak, just waited, instead of prompting him.

In his own time, Kevin choked out the story. His wife had been pregnant with his child, close to term at this point. This was a few years earlier. Still weeping on my shoulder, he told me they’d been married at 23, he told me that she’d always been depressed, how he’d never been able to do enough to help her. One day, he came home from work to find her unconscious on the floor.

“The paramedics saved the baby,” Kevin whispered, “But she died. She just snapped one day.” By now, his weeping had dissolved into sniffles and lazy streams, without the loud sobbing of before.

He suddenly turned his eyes to mine and I stared into them. Like wiping the tear away before, I didn’t think before I moved. Our faces were still bizarrely close and, before I realised what I was doing, I leaned forward and kissed the tears off his eyes, first the left, then the right.

We were both shocked by this.

What shocked me more, however, came as I slowly pulled my mouth away. His salty tears still wet my lips, though he’d stopped crying, and I was worried what his reaction would be. I knew I wouldn’t be able to look in his eyes this time, though. But before I could move my head too far from his, I felt his lips touch my face next to my right ear. They moved to the centre of my cheek and I smiled at him. A ‘thank you’. It was a token of thanks for caring about his problems enough to listen.

Finally, the biggest shock of all happened when I smiled at him. Time seemed to move achingly slowly and disconcertingly quickly all at once, and suddenly I found his soft lips gently pressed to mine for a moment.

I was confused. Kevin looked embarrassed. The tears were gone now.

“An appreciative kiss on the cheek is one thing,” he said quietly. He seemed apologetic and slightly uncomfortable. I knew what he was trying to say; I was a student, he was my teacher, we would keep things ‘business as usual’. He wanted to repair the barrier between his school life and his personal life. “But that was something entirely different,” Kevin continued. His expression was soft. I couldn’t quite read his eyes, but perhaps I had been wrong.