Since I made the first move last time, I decided to play it cool on this date, though my determination waned over that long, four-hour stretch when Ralph seemed entirely engrossed, and it didn’t feel appropriate to focus on our romance during a Shakespeare tragedy. But late in the movie when Ophelia has drowned, and Gertrude describes her death to Laertes, the camera gets close to the queen’s face while her description mesmerized me, of Ophelia singing a song near a brook and finding herself falling in, momentarily buoyed by her billowing dress, though that same dress eventually dragged her down into a muddy death.

Then, just a single, half-second shot of Ophelia in the water, drowned. My hand clutched Ralph’s arm, where it remained for the rest of the movie.

It was ten by the time Hamlet finished, and as Ralph and I walked through the broad, quiet streets of Kendall Square on our way to the T, I didn’t know what would happen next. I knew that Ralph lived in Beacon Hill, the opposite direction from Harvard, and as we walked through the revolving doors of a hotel to get to the subway stop, I noticed his body orient toward the side of the tracks that would take him across the river and away from me.

“Wanna get a drink in Harvard Square?” I asked.

Ralph turned his head as his gait slowed down. It was like I could see his mind while it tried to weigh the implications of a professor dating an undergrad, even if we were at different schools.

“All right,” he replied finally, and as we boarded the T on the same side, I wasn’t sure if he expected me to make good on the pretense of a drink when we got out. But I figured Café Pamplona was open late and across the street from my room, so I led him down Mass Ave toward Adams House after we got to Harvard Square.

Among the dim lights of closed shops, I could see the bright fluorescents of Harvard Book Store even from afar. Ralph checked his watch as we got closer; it was a quarter to eleven.

“Really, you have a bookstore open this late?” he asked.

“It’s a big perk.”

“Mind if we go in?”

I shook my head and mouthed “nope,” before I followed him inside, and wondered whether he was trying to slow things down. I took him through the store and my various enthusiasms, telling the story of how I once went in and bought every single book George Eliot wrote after finishing The Mill on the Floss.

“Do you know where the foreign language section is?”