For Lanna Michaels, with love and squalor
Bend with Me
Danny was attracted to Ivo. Not in the way he was always attracted to stronger older men. The way magnets are attracted to one another – the like ends pushing each other away while the opposites jump and attach. He liked Ivo's passion for his field, his disdain for the average person's tepid sampling of life. He liked his honesty and his genuine interest in things he didn't know, hadn't encountered before. He was afraid of him, afraid he would be rejected by someone he admired so much. He stayed away for the longest time, reluctant to break the fantasy that made each day exciting and livable.
Ivo had spotted him early on. Ivo noticed everything –a scar on the lip of a customer at the counter in the diner; a drift in the attention of the third student from the left, eighteenth row; the newest graffiti on the toilet wall. It was rather hard not to notice the most striking boy in his freshman lecture. He tried very hard not to look. It was wrong, he told himself, illegal to ogle one's students. Many a learned man before him had fallen from great heights for such thoughts. He tracked Danny Reyes' progress in his class and wished the boy would do better. He was convinced it was laziness and felt like slapping his ears back to make him shape up. The boy was too bright to be failing an intro geology course. (He wasn't entirely sure how he knew the boy was bright, he was just sure of it. And when Ivo was sure of something, there was no arguing with him. "There is no room for opinion here," he would always say. "It is an irrefutable truth.")
Danny did finally show up in his office - arrogant, the like end of the magnet. He wanted to be certain to reject Ivo before he could be rejected. Save himself.
Ivo recognized the tactic at once. Human beings are so limited in their emotional responses. It occurred to him the best approach would be to break the magnetic attraction, make it something else.
"Bend with me," he suggested to Danny.