Friday night rolled around and Harley showed up in Crane's classroom just like she was supposed to. She even made sure to show up thirty minutes early and knocked on the door loudly before entering.

Shockingly, the place was empty.

"Professor Crane?" Harley bit her lip and ventured a few steps into the room on tiptoe, looking around. "Professor Cra-ane?"

No answer.

Harley sighed and dropped her messenger bag onto one of the nearby chairs. It was her own fault for showing up early, she knew, but she'd figured that Crane would appreciate someone being well ahead of on time. She had imagined him sitting behind his desk, waiting for their appointment, tapping his fingers and counting the moments until she would officially be late, just to have the excuse to give her a thorough tongue lashing.

Thinking on it, though, it actually made sense that she'd been wrong. Given how exacting he was, Crane was probably the sort who thought that being early was a sign of being unable to be precisely on time just as much as being late was. He also seemed like the kind of man who didn't waste precious minutes waiting for people when he could be otherwise engaged in more useful pursuits.

Twiddling her thumbs, Harley looked up at the clock. She stared at it long enough to watch the little red second hand make one whole cycle around the clock face and blew out a breath. Well…she had twenty-eight minutes to kill. What was she going to do?

In theory, there was just enough time to get to the campus coffee shop and back, but factoring in how long it usually took to actually pry coffee from the mildly misanthropic baristas, it was better not to risk it. There was a soda machine near Crane's office down the hall, but on the off chance he was inside it (though she hadn't seen any indication that he was when she passed the door on her way in) she didn't want him to find her loitering outside.

Harley wrinkled her nose. She could always pass the time by poking around Crane's desk, but if she wasn't failing out of school now, she certainly would be if he caught her.

Still…she pressed her index fingers together as she thought, released them and then mashed them together again…she was going to be doing some kind of actual work for him, which was undoubtedly laid out on his desk. Presumably she'd be seeing his notes anyway, right? There was no harm in sneaking a peek…and if he had something blackmail worthy out in plain view, like certain other teachers she knew of, that certainly put her in a better position to change her grades for the better, right?

Craning her neck, Harley took a few steps closer to the desk. She wanted to get just close enough to see what was there, but also wanted to stay far enough away that she could jump back and claim innocence if she were caught.

Crane's desk was exceptionally well organized, unsurprisingly. Not a single paper was out of place. Even the bundle of ink pens that stood upright in a coffee mug on the corner of the desk seemed to be sorted by color—red, blue and black. Red pens greatly outnumbered the others, she noted ruefully, which certainly fit with everything she knew about Crane's teaching methods. Many times Harley found every page of her essays peppered with dozens of blood red notations in the margins, with comments ranging from corrections of fact and grammar to veiled insults.

Harley continued to scan the surface of the desk, keeping an eye out for anything remotely interesting or useful. The only items of particular note were a few file folders placed front and center, each of them closed. Though they had no labels on their tabs to give away their contents, she could see a little yellow paper peeping out from inside them.

After a moment's consideration of the risk versus the possible reward, Harley picked up her messenger bag and drew closer, close enough to touch the folders. She looked around herself to make sure she was still alone and with a "Whoopsie!" swept them right off the desk with a carefully aimed swing of her bag. They fluttered to the ground in front of her, sheets of paper flying every which way.

"Clumsy me!" she said a little too loudly, punctuating her fraud with a practiced, yet still nervous, giggle. Harley dropped to her knees and scrambled—as slowly as one could scramble—to pick up the papers.

In contrast to the neatness of his workspace, Crane's handwriting was a cramped, spiky scrawl. There was so much of it she couldn't even begin to make sense of it, not without sitting down for an hour to read over every single line three or four times. The notes did not shirk on lengthy scientific sounding words and several equations were scribbled here and there, both in the middle of the pages and along the margins. Some words jumped out at her—epinephrine, cortisol, Bupropion, dopamine—but she was in enough of a hurry to straighten up the papers that her eyes didn't linger on them for long.

Her mind raced with possibilities. Dopamine was one of the…love hormones. So was epinephrine. Bupropion, if she was remembering correctly, was a stimulant with a number of positive sexual side effects. Could Crane have been working on…an aphrodisiac of some sort? From what little she gathered while glancing over the pages, that was the only thing she could think of.

The classroom door slammed suddenly and Harley yelped in surprise—"EEP!"—sending the notes flying again. This time she really did scramble to pick them up, doing her level best not to look up when Crane's shoes came into view.

Crane cleared his throat loudly and, though no words were spoken, it was clear that his tone was just this side of furious.

"Professor! I…uh…there…was…a breeze?" Harley looked up at him. The sudden movement put her slightly off balance, but not nearly as much as his appearance did.

She'd never seen Crane without his tweed jacket before—he never removed it, not even when the air conditioning stopped working on the hottest of school days—and seeing him without it was something of a shock. He still wore the matching vest and tie, but the pristine white dress shirt he wore was rolled up to his elbows, making him look almost…casual. Most startling of all, the lack of jacket highlighted just how slender he was, something she'd never noticed before with the bulk of tweed fabric. There was nothing to him!

Harley stared at him, her perceptions positively rocked. He was still very much not a handsome man, but being a bit unbuttoned went a long way toward making him look like the sort of professor students might try to sleep with, either for good grades or perhaps even just for fun. He looked…well, not distinguished exactly, but not stiff, either. It was…odd.

She found she rather liked it. If this extra credit thing didn't work out, she mused, maybe she could find another way to raise her grades...

Crane folded his arms over his chest. "If you are quite through….?"

She giggled nervously, scooped the papers up into her arms and stood, telling herself she had not just developed a small crush on her professor, no way, no how.

Without warning, he snatched the notes out of her hands, crushing them between his fingers. His knuckles were white.

Harley gulped.

"If I had another student lined up to assist me," he said dangerously, voice sliding down into an octave that dripped with threat, "I assure you that your snooping would earn you a failing grade in my class for this and every other semester."

She shrank under the fierceness of his glare. "I'm sor—"

"You're sorry that you got caught," he snapped. "That I believe. Keep your empty platitudes to yourself, Miss Quinzel. I have no need for them."

He stepped away from her and moved toward his desk, straightening the papers with practiced precision. "I presume that you have some idea what we will be working on…"

"I can't read your handwriting," she said.

"I have no need for dishonesty, either." He didn't look at her as he laid the file folders down and continued sorting the papers. "What do you believe we will be working on based on your covert observations?"

Harley twisted her fingers together in front of her. Though she was not generally a shy young woman, she found it impossible to say the word aphrodisiac, not only out of embarrassment but partly out of wanting to keep him in the dark about just how much she knew. "A stimulant?"

"How astute." Crane snapped up a pen and wrote something down on the paper in front of him. "Perhaps you are not a complete waste of space after all."

"Gee, thanks, Professor Crane," she chirped. From him, that bordered on being a legitimate compliment.

"I am still in the experimental stages of developing the formula," he said, setting the pen aside. "You will be assisting me for two reasons. One, I need a second pair of hands for the more…delicate portions of the blending processes, as well as someone to take notes while my hands are otherwise occupied."

"And two?"

"I need a guinea pig."

Harley's eyes went wide. He wanted to test the stuff on her? Her? "Professor Crane, shouldn't you maybe…use a guinea pig for that?"

"Each of the compounds we will be mixing have already been deemed safe for humans and none are contraindicated," he replied. "The risk will be minimal."

"Oh." Harley brightened up, relieved. That didn't sound so bad. "Okie dokie."

Crane stepped away from his desk. "Come. I have set up a small laboratory in my office."

"In your office?" Harley grew suspicious. First he demanded she ditch her date, then he showed up without a jacket, now he wanted to work on—and experiment with—an aphrodisiac in his office? Was he trying to seduce her? Not that she was opposed to the idea or anything, especially not now with him standing there without his jacket, but he could at least be upfront about it…

"Did I stutter?"

"Nope!" Harley picked up her messenger bag, slung it over her shoulder and followed him out of the classroom. Whether he was trying to seduce her or not was ultimately immaterial; she was going to earn her extra credit one way or another.

Crane's office was a very short walk from his classroom past two other vacant offices, a soda machine and a janitor's closet. Taped to the door was a piece of paper with his name printed on it, which was strange considering most other professors had theirs etched directly onto the frosted glass. It suggested that this office was intended to be a temporary arrangement, but as far as Harley knew, Crane had been relegated to this building for more than a year. Unless the Dean was perpetually on the brink of firing him, it didn't make sense to give him such shabby accommodations.

Crane unlocked the door and it swung inward, revealing a room that didn't seem much bigger than Harley's closet. By her estimation, it was maybe six feet by six feet, and that may have been a little generous. There was an unforgiving-looking swivel chair on one side, a desk and a loveseat that appeared to have been slept on recently. The desk was cleared of all office supplies and a makeshift chemistry lab had been set up where they must have once resided. There was an Erlenmeyer flask, a centrifuge and a lab burner, some beakers and test tubes as well as a number of containers that were filled with various liquids, powders and plants. There was even a mortar and pestle, which somehow seemed both quaint and barbaric at the same time.

Harley entered the office and looked around curiously. Crane bumped into her when he closed the door behind himself and locked it but failed to apologize.

"Gee, Professor Crane," Harley said, looking around the cramped room, "your office is really…it's a real…"

"'Dump' is the expression you're groping for, I believe," he said, locking the door. He then moved to the desk.

"I didn't want to say so, but yeah…a dump." Harley perched on the arm of the loveseat, extending one leg to keep her toes on the floor and bending the other, clasping her hands just below her knee.

"You will certainly get no argument from me about that. But, these are the facilities Dean Yeager has so graciously provided me with…I'm afraid we must make do."

Both Harley's eyebrows lifted as he loosened his tie and removed it. "Soo…what's first, teach?"

"First," he said, crouching behind the desk to retrieve something, "you will need more appropriate attire."

"Ooh, spoiling me with a new wardrobe already, huh, Professor?"

He stood up straight, a piece of white folded fabric in his arms. "It's a lab coat, not a mink, Miss Quinzel."

"Oh well," she said, taking it from him. "A girl can dream."

Crane retrieved a lab coat of his own and slipped into it, as Harley did the same. He then provided her with a pair of latex gloves in a small enough size that they hugged her hands like a second skin.

"Now. Shall we begin?"