They passed each other on the way to and coming back from their Friday afternoon classes, at the checkout desk in the library, at Black Student Union and Latino Student Association events, and always around Mark Hall. They’d even run into one another at the grocery store late one night when Deja’s freezer had been shockingly barren of frozen pizza. She’d thrown a long coat — that looked much too similar to a housecoat — over her pajamas and driven to the store, only to run into Alejandro with a cart full of actual groceries, fresh fruit and vegetables even. She’d felt terrible in her not-a-housecoat coat and satin bonnet and practically ran to the self-checkout line to get away from him, grabbing a bag of spinach on the way. It was one of the worst nights of her life, but she still remembered how sexy he’d looked in his gray sweatpants and sneakers; he never dressed casually on campus.

It sometimes felt as if her infatuation with him grew exponentially each time she saw him, which was unfortunate since she was certain she didn’t see anyone with the kind of random regularity with which she encountered Alejandro. And then she’d picked up the Faculty Senate service assignment after one of her colleagues had to take an emergency medical leave, sat down in her chair next to Toni, and looked across the auditorium only to see Alejandro.

For the past year, these monthly meetings gave a kind of structure to their brief encounters. He smiled at her — and Toni and Marie. Sometimes they stopped and talked to him and Mike, and every now and then, he caught her watching him take off his coat, or their eyes met in the middle of a pointless debate about homecoming dates, and he rolled his eyes playfully at her. It wasn’t a real friendship, few relationships in the university were, but it fed her immediate attraction, keeping the logs burning on an ill-advised infatuation that her friends loved to tease her about.