The Trip The Way I Wish It Had Gone, Part Three

Published early on our Previews page on Friday, August 7, 2026.

Official publication date for the main page of our site: Saturday, August 8, 2026..

This story was submitted by Jack aka lkngjst@yahoo.com

To read the 1st part of this story, go to "The Trip The Way I Wish It Had Gone, Part One".

To read Jack's 1st story, go to "Love Affair With A Shoe".

"The Trip the Way I Wish It Had Gone"

Series. Fantasy framed as "what I wish had happened."

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## Part Three

We were useless in the meetings. I'd warned her.

The next morning we sat on opposite sides of a conference table pretending to care about a roadmap deck, and every time she caught me looking she'd do this small thing with her mouth, not quite a smile, that put me right back in that hotel room. By the lunch break I'd stopped pretending. We slipped out, grabbed coffee from the place on the corner, and found a bench in the sun where nobody from the conference would wander.

For a while we didn't say much. It was easy quiet, which surprised me a little. Then she wrapped both hands around her cup and said, without looking at me, "Can I tell you something, and you don't make it weird?"

"I'm fifty-five. I've made everything weird at least once. I'll do my best."

That got the real smile. Then it faded into something more careful.

"It's not that I just have a thing for older men. I want you to know that, because I think that's the lazy version and you'll hear it and file me away." She turned the cup. "There was a professor. Sophomore and junior year. Two years I had it so bad for him I could barely sit through the lectures. It wasn't his looks, really. It was the way he talked. The way he knew things and didn't have to prove it. He'd ask me a question in front of everyone and I'd forget my own name."

"What happened?"

"Nothing. That's the whole point." She laughed, but it didn't have much in it. "Married, or gay, I genuinely never figured out which, and it didn't matter, because nothing was ever going to happen. I spent two years wanting something I was never going to get to have. You learn to live with that. You tell yourself it was a phase."

"What did you used to imagine?" I asked, careful with it.

She went a little pink, but she didn't look away. "Office hours. Always office hours. Everyone else gone, the building quiet, me finding some reason to stay late. Him getting up and closing the door. Not rushing it — just deciding. Telling me he'd noticed me all semester and couldn't talk himself out of it anymore." She turned the cup in her hands. "I wanted to be the thing the careful, brilliant man couldn't resist. I replayed that closed door a thousand times. In my head it never even got past the door, because I never really believed I'd get to be that girl."

She finally looked at me.

"And then there's you. Older, the way you actually pay attention, the way you noticed my feet before you noticed anything else and didn't apologize for it. You're the first time the thing I always wanted and never got to have actually... happened." She shook her head. "Do you have any idea what that does to a person? I'm not chasing a type. I'm collecting on something I gave up on."

I didn't say anything for a second, because it landed harder than I expected. Twenty years of being the guy whose interest was a liability, and here was a woman telling me my attention was the prize.

"For what it's worth," I said, "from this side of the table, you're not collecting on anything. You're the one who's out of my league and decided to slum it."

"Stop."

"I mean it."

She bumped her knee against mine and left it there. "Okay. Then while we're being honest." A beat, that careful look replaced by something with a little heat under it. "I went online last night after you fell asleep. I ordered a few things. White stockings. A polish I think you'll like, a deep red, almost burgundy. And — don't laugh — some of that barefoot jewelry, the anklet-and-toe kind. It comes to the hotel tomorrow."

I must have made a face, because she grinned. "You told me what you like at dinner. I was paying attention too."

I have spent a lot of my life keeping this part of me small, tucked away, half-apologized-for. Sitting on that bench in the sun while a woman half my age told me she'd gone shopping specifically to undo me, I felt the size of the thing I'd been shrinking for years. And it occurred to me, sitting there, that she'd just handed me hers too — that closed door she'd never gotten to walk through — and was waiting to see if I'd make it weird.

"The stockings are for me," I said. "Let me do something for you. Tonight."

She tilted her head. "Like what?"

"Tell me how it went in your head. The office, the door, all of it." I held her eyes. "And then let me be him. The version where he doesn't panic. Where he closes the door, and you don't go home wanting."

She was quiet for a second, and I watched two years of an old ache rearrange itself into something present-tense. When she spoke her voice had dropped.

"Room 1301. Nine o'clock." She stood, gathered her cup, and the smile she gave me over her shoulder was a new one — not the confident one, something softer and hungrier underneath. "Don't be late. Professor."

*To be continued.*