“This isn’t about court,” I said. “This is about Jason Warren. This is about Angie.”

“Angie?”

She’s got a bullet in her, Eric.”

“She…?” He held a hand out in front of him as if not sure what to do with it. “Jesus, Patrick, is she going to be okay?”

“I don’t know yet, Eric.”

“You must be losing your mind.”

“I’m completely fucking deranged right now, Eric. Take that into consideration.”

He winced, and a tide of something bitter and hopeless washed through his eyes.

He turned his back to me, leaving the door open, and walked back into his apartment. I followed him through the wreckage of a living room strewn with books and empty pizza boxes, bottles of wine and empty beer cans.

In the kitchen he poured himself a cup of coffee and the coffee maker was stained by days of splattered coffee he’d neglected to wipe off. It was also unplugged. God knew how old the coffee was.

“Were you and Jason lovers?” I said.

He sipped his cold coffee.

“Eric? Why’d you leave U/Mass?”

“You know what happens to male professors who sleep with male students?” he said.

“Professors sleep with students all the time,” I said.

He smiled and shook his head. “Male professors sleep with female students all the time.” He sighed. “And in the current political atmosphere on most campuses, even that’s becoming dangerous. In loco parentis. Not a terribly threatening phrase unless it’s applied to twenty-one-year-old men and women in the one country where the last thing we would want of our children is that they actually grow up.”

I found a clean spot of counter, leaned against it.

Eric looked up from his coffee cup. “But, yes, Patrick, a prevailing attitude exists that it’s okay for male professors to sleep with female students as long as those students aren’t currently taking those professors’ classes.”

“So where’s the problem?”

“The problem is gay professors and gay students. That sort of relationship, I promise you, is still frowned on.”

“Eric,” I said, “give me a break. This is Boston academia we’re talking about here. The most strongly fortified bastion of liberalism in America.”

He laughed softly. “You think so, don’t you?” He shook his head again, a strange smile playing on thin lips. “If you had a daughter, Patrick, and let’s say she’s twenty, she’s smart, she’s at Harvard or Bryce or B.U., and you found out she was fucking a professor, how would you feel?”

I met his hollow gaze. “I’m not saying I’d like it, Eric, but I wouldn’t be surprised. And I’d figure she’s an adult, it’s her choice.”

He nodded. “Same scenario, but it’s your son and he’s fucking his male professor?”

That stopped me. It stirred some deeply repressed part of myself that was more Puritan than Catholic, and the image I had in my head—of a young man in a tiny cramped bed with Eric—revolted me for just a moment before I got control of it, started to distance myself from the image, grasp on to the intellectual handholds of my own social liberalism.