Work Text:
A burgundy scarf falls in a heap at Stark’s feet on a blustery January morning, and that is the beginning of it all.
He is tenting the hedges against the wind and frost, though he can’t imagine what good it’s going to do. The scarf appears at his feet in the wake of a gust that nearly took his hat, too, and he picks it up and examines it with interest until a woman’s voice inquires after it.
She looks young. Maybe a graduate student. But then, most of those don’t look as elegant. She is wearing a tan duster coat and high brown boots and shivering, and when he hands her the scarf she takes it with the effusive, practiced warmth that no one ever bothers with when they are truly young. He watches her wrap it around her neck, and pull her long purple hair free from beneath it, and tuck her button nose into its folds, and he decides she is twenty-eight and she teaches literature or philosophy or something and the briefcase she carries is full of graded papers to return. It is a life that suits this stranger.
He sees her again when the weather clears, this time only wearing a sweater, and no scarf, and a gauzy purple dress with tights, and when she catches him looking at her, she smiles.
Stark is supposed to be taking the plastic from last week off of the hedges. He forgets, temporarily, that it is there.
By virtue of his always tending to the hedges at this time of the morning on Wednesdays, Stark infers that the woman’s class is around nine, and that although it might meet on other days, this is the only one he’s sure of. He finds himself thinking about that on Wednesdays when he wakes before daylight for the gym, and after, when Stoltz is driving him to the university. On Tuesdays he can remind himself of her and the thirty-second glimpse he’ll get tomorrow morning when she walks past his hedges.
The woman with the red scarf which she never wears again is almost a mythical creature by the fifth week of the new semester, and Stark does not quite know why she fascinates him this way.
Any number of women are beautiful, and this one is off-limits, anyway. She looks young, but she’s probably thirty if she’s teaching here, maybe more. She would probably laugh and ruffle Stark’s hair like a child’s if she understood why he is always looking at her when she walks by. She has a motherly kind of air in addition to the elegance of her dress and carriage, and she would probably look at his open face and the stubborn baby fat on his cheeks even at twenty and think: oh, how adorable. He is probably just a child to her.
Then, in the first week of March, she comes a little early and approaches his hedge and nearly makes him drop his clippers on his feet with shock when she speaks.
“Morning,” she says, and with both gloved hands she holds out a paper cup with steam escaping through the opening in the lid.
“H…huh?”
She holds out the drink. “It’s Staff Appreciation Week.”
Stark blinks. “That’s…that’s a thing?”
The woman beams, evidently delighted to be able to inform him of this. He notices prominent dimples in her cheeks that he’s always missed before.
“And I always see you over here, so I thought…”
Stark catches on, his cheeks bright with sudden embarrassment. “I…you…”
“Thank you for taking such good care of our hedges,” she says, hands him the cup, and then walks off as fast as he wishes he could, her sensible pumps clicking brightly as she goes.
Stark almost drops the drink before he regains his senses and brings it to his freezing nose, taking a deep breath in. Hot chocolate, it smells like. He wonders how she knew to get hot chocolate for an absolute stranger. He messages the grounds crew, but none of them have been handed a hot drink by a beautiful woman, with the questionable exception of one who stumbled upon a paltry Staff Appreciation Week celebration which consisted of weak coffee in paper dispensers and leftover muffins from the dining hall. Certainly not the good kind of hot chocolate. He is soundly congratulated on this achievement. No one bats an eyelash when he waits outside the building like a creep until classes let out, hoping she will come back by, and that he will be able to thank her and tell her that none of the other gardeners were as lucky as he was, and that he feels very lucky indeed.
But when she does, he is almost too afraid to approach her, and it’s only after she is almost out of view that he sprints after her like a fool with an empty paper cup in his hand and shouts, “ma’am!”
She, like most of the crowd she is walking through, turns around.
“Thank you,” he pants, holding up the cup. “Wanted to say thank you.”
She pauses for a moment, confused, and then she steps aside from the crowd, just like Stark had hoped. He follows.
“Did you enjoy it?” She asks.
“Yeah! It was great.” He rotates the cup pointlessly in his hands. “Uh. How was your class?”
She looks briefly surprised that he’s asked, but answers, “well…”
“Hm?”
“It’s not my favorite class, truth be told.” She lowers her voice. “My professor isn’t…”
It takes a moment for that to sink in.
“…you’re not the professor?”
“Goodness, no, what?”
“But you look so much older and…and fancier? Than the students? I thought…”
Then Stark trails off, soundly embarrassed.
“How old do you think I am?” She asks, amused.
“I dunno, like…” He remembers something Stoltz told him once about being careful not to step wrong on the question of a woman’s age. “Older than me, at least.”
“I’m eighteen,” she says. “I doubt that.”
“You’re…we’re…”
“I wish I was, though,” she says, pursing her lips. “Because if I taught this class, we’d have gotten our paper grades back two weeks ago.”
He doesn’t doubt it for a second.
Fern—that is her name, he learns—is the kind of person who is always on top of things. He should have guessed it from her clothes and the way she talks. It makes Stark a little nervous, knowing that she is younger and yet so polished, because he doesn’t think the same could be said of him at all, but it sort of amazes him, too.
What kind of first-year undergraduate carries a briefcase?
(The kind who brings him a flourless chocolate cookie the size of his face wrapped up perfectly in cellophane and tells him that she made it herself and had extras and is blushing with enough intensity to convince even Stark that she is lying about this through her teeth, of course.
The kind who looks like she doesn’t speak whatever language is coming out of his mouth when he hands her a slip of paper with his phone number written on it.
That kind of first-year undergraduate.)
He hears nothing for two days. She compensates for her silence with a wall of text that could probably be commercially published and the gist of which is that she wishes to have coffee with him, and that she knows a café with a wonderful ambience and better cake, and she knows it isn’t proper to be so forward but would he like to go there, and even though he suspects this is the kind of café where he will never fail to feel out-of-place, he is so elated he nearly throws his phone across the room.
My treat, she adds after that.
He smiles, and pictures her walking into an elegant café with marble floors in her red scarf with the air of somebody who knows this place well, and eating a slice of some absurdly beautiful cake, and replies: No, mine.