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VIRGINITY WAS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT. This was a fact, and it was a fact you knew well.
Anaxagoras was aware that you were aware of this fact, which was why his brain buffered for approximately two minutes (not more than that, because he was a genius after all; most facts which left fools gaping were common knowledge to him) when you sidled up to him and asked, with utmost earnestness, “Will you take my virginity?”
“Repeat that,” he said.
“Will you take my virginity?” you repeated, just as earnest as before. You even lifted your brows, as if to say, What part of this isn’t clear?
“I beg your pardon,” Anaxa said. “You know well enough that virginity is an invented metric. An arbitrary label crafted by societies that confuse the act of sex with the measure of worth. You know I know this.”
“Yes,” you said promptly. “That’s why I asked.”
“My brain is attempting to reconcile three truths simultaneously: one, that you’re not an idiot. Two, that you are indeed asking me to take your virginity. And three: that I have, Gods help me, not already dismissed you outright.”
“So that means you’re considering it.”
He leveled you with a stare that could reduce marble to dust. “That means I’m thinking, which is not the same as agreeing.”
“You didn’t say no,” you said.
“Nor did I say yes,” he said.
“Well, you could.”
Anaxagoras exhaled. He stood, crossing the room with deliberate calm. “You understand,” he said, “that if one is to deconstruct the concept of virginity, then one must likewise deconstruct what it means to take it. The verb is flawed. Ownership implied. Agency muddied.”
“Then don’t take it,” you said, shifting in your seat. “Share it. Witness it. Call it whatever you like, you’re the philosopher.”
“Right,” Anaxa said. “Let’s just divvy up your virginity. What’ll it be, a sixty-forty split or a seventy-thirty?”
The words left his mouth before he could stop them—brittle sarcasm, the armour he wore whenever something scraped too close to the heart. He heard the faint lift of your breath in answer, a grin he didn’t need to see to know existed. You thrived on his barbs, mistaking them for signs of indulgence. Perhaps, in some way, they were.
He turned away before you could reply. Motion anchored him: the familiar feeling of his loose pants, the kind he only wore at home, pooling around his ankles, the soft thud of each step across his bedroom floor. His hands busied themselves with the nearest stack of books on his desk. Paper rasped against paper, a soothing, orderly sound. He didn’t need to read them; he only needed the illusion of control.
You had asked him plainly, and though he’d mocked, dissembled, retreated into the safety of semantics, the fact remained that he hadn’t dismissed you outright. It would have been the simplest thing in the world to crush the absurd request beneath the sureness of his reasoning, to leave you floundering in the ruins of your own words. And yet here he was, stacking his books like a madman while the question still hung in the air, bright and insistent.
He was, he realised grimly, considering it.
The thought was almost laughable. Him—Anaxagoras, who prided himself on detachment, on clarity, on the ruthless precision of logic—entertaining the notion of tumbling headlong into something so bodily. He had spent a lifetime dissecting abstractions, stripping them of sentiment until only the skeleton remained. Virginity was one such abstraction: flimsy, contrived, propped up by centuries of superstition. Worthless, really. A measure designed to tether flesh to morality. He had written papers denouncing it. He had lectured as a teaching assistant until his voice gave out, insisting to anyone who’d listen that virginity didn’t exist except in the collective imagination of fools.
Still.
You had asked him for it. Not as a fool, but with that relentless earnestness that undid him in ways even he couldn’t articulate. You knew it was a construct. You’d said so yourself. And still, you offered it to him, as though you’d plucked some fragile, shining thing from your chest and set it trembling in his hands.
He hated that his first instinct had been not rejection, but silence. Thought. Consideration.
You shifted in your seat again, the sound small but enough to break his spiral. He glanced back despite himself.
“Hypoethetically,” he said, raising a warning finger, “assume I humour your proposal. What do you imagine will occur?”
“Sex,” you said promptly.
“Define it,” he said.
“Define sex?”
“Correct.”
“Are you being serious?”
“I’m always serious,” Anaxa said. “Particularly when people ask me to perform acts whose parameters they themselves can’t clearly articulate.”
You blinked at him. “Sex is sex, Anaxa.”
“Incorrect,” he said flatly. “Sex is a catch-all, a container into which people throw everything from the brush of a hand to the most elaborate gymnastics of bodies. Without definition, the word is as meaningless as the construct you’ve so generously offered me the honour of dismantling.”
“I think most people know what sex means without having to define it,” you said.
“Most people don’t give a fuck.”
You tilted your head, chin resting on your hand now. “So what—if I don’t draft a treatise and footnote it properly, you won’t sleep with me?”
His hand froze on the spine of a book. Slowly, he turned his head to look at you over his shoulder, gaze sharp and cutting. “Do not reduce my objections to a matter of… paperwork.”
“Then what are they?” You spread your hands innocently.
Anaxa drew in a breath, though his pulse had begun to tick a little faster. “My objections are rooted in clarity,” he said. “If we’re to speak of taking virginity, then I demand a definition precise enough that we both know what has, or has not, transpired.”
You blinked once, twice, then laughed. The sound scraped across his composure, lodging under his skin like a splinter.
“You’re unbelievable,” you said, shaking your head. “Most people would either say yes or no.”
Anaxagoras stiffened under your appraising grin—it made your face brighter, younger, unbearably alive. He turned fully back to his books, though his hands betrayed him by tapping against the desk.
“Alright, then,” he said. “If you can’t define it, then you have no grounds for requesting it.”
“I can define it,” you said quickly.
He glanced over again, eyes narrowing. “Then do so.”
“I want you to sleep with me.”
Anaxagoras, for the first time in longer than he cared to admit, had nothing at all to say.
The truth of the matter was this: Anaxagoras was, also, a virgin himself.
Not that the fact surprised him. He had long ago reconciled himself to it, much as one might reconcile to living in a drafty house or dealing with a persistent ache in the knees. A fact of circumstance, not identity.
That was not to say he wasn’t aware of how sex worked. Of course he was. He knew the mechanics, the structures, the permutations. He had read enough to qualify as an academic authority on the subject. The Hindu Kāma Sūtra, for instance, sat tucked away in the third row of his shelves—more annotated than he would ever admit. He had cross-referenced it with Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, compared its positions against Greek medical treatises, and filed the results neatly away in his notebooks.
Sex, like any other human endeavour, could be catalogued; broken into categories; reduced to verbs and diagrams and the precise angles at which limbs might intersect. If one asked him to define it anatomically, he could do so with dispassionate clarity. If one asked him to chart its historical significance, he could draft a lecture complete with citations.
What he had never done—what he had never allowed himself to do—was cross the line from study into practice.
It was not because of shyness. (He was not shy. Aloof, perhaps. Exacting, certainly. But not shy.) Nor was it prudishness. He had written entire essays dismantling prudishness as a social performance. No, his abstinence had been a deliberate, almost ascetic choice. He had simply never found the point.
Others seemed to seek sex as release, as connection, as proof of something—adulthood, desirability, intimacy. To him, all those aims seemed either crude or unreliable. Connection could be had in conversation. Intimacy in trust. Desire in observation. What remained of sex, stripped of its mythologies, was little more than friction.
Yet your words still lingered. Will you take my virginity?
He had laughed, derided, dissembled. But behind the barbs, behind the definitions and counter-definitions, there was an echo of something else. Something he hated to name.
Because the simple truth was that in all his years of carefully arranging himself as philosopher first, man second, he had never been asked. Not like this. Not so plainly. Not by someone who knew exactly what they were saying and said it anyway.
The thought of his own virginity, gnawed at him now. He disliked the term—loathed it, in fact, with its crude binary logic, its presumption of loss where there was nothing tangible to lose. And still, he could not escape it. He, Anaxagoras, who dismantled it in lectures and debates, was nevertheless shackled to the same word.
Virgin.
It carried the taste of dust in his mouth.
He found himself pacing, hands behind his back. He had made peace, long ago, with the notion that he would go to his grave uninitiated. It had seemed almost elegant, in a way: a philosopher’s rejection of the corporeal in favour of the eternal. A refusal to muddy himself in the chaos of flesh.
But your face swam before him when he tried to summon that old certainty. The way your brows had lifted—earnest, insistent, as though daring him to dismiss you. And, worse, the way you’d smiled when he parried with sarcasm, as though even his cruelty was a kind of closeness.
He sat down heavily at his desk, fingers drumming against the wood.
Perhaps, he thought, he had miscalculated. Perhaps sex was not simply an act of friction, nor a hollowed-out construct bound up in myth. Perhaps its meaning lay not in what was done, but who asked.
The idea unsettled him. He disliked being unsettled. At the end of the day, Anaxagoras was a philosopher armed with all the theory in the world, and none of the practice.
He pinched the bridge of his nose, exhaled slowly, and admitted—for once, and only to himself—that he was at a loss.
Well, there was nothing more he could do. He had papers to grade, and he had to grade them quickly. With this new resolve in mind, he climbed down the winding staircase that led out of his study and hastened to the Library of Philia, so that he could set his thoughts aside and focus on the tedious task of marking his students’ papers.
The library was mercifully empty, as it usually was on Friday evenings. Most of the general student populace tended to have other pursuits to pursue rather than the pursuit of knowledge, and this was something that provided Anaxagoras with the silence he required in order to focus on the task at hand. He sat down at his usual spot—a large, mahogany table with straight-backed chairs that looked out into a large window that gave him a view of the courtyard—and pulled out the first sheet in his stack.
The first line read thus: The experiment—
Oh, but what a marvellous experiment it would be! He desperately wanted to know what it would feel like, when your lips finally moulded against his. Would you gasp into his mouth? Or would you deepen the kiss, licking and suckling on his lower lip? What about when he ran his hands down your sides? Would you shiver, or would you lean into his touch?
Anaxagoras blinked. He uncapped his pen and continued reading: The experiments conducted by Aristotle were more observational and analytical—
Ah, now, this was something Anaxagoras could comprehend. He would map out all the various facets of your body; he would note it all down with such clarity that, should you ever decide to proposition him again, he would know at exactly which angle to curl his fingers such that you would moan the loudest, where to mouth at your neck such that you gasped out his name, which manner of movement of his tongue would cause you wrench your fingers in his hair and—
“My dear scholar! Are you feeling alright?”
Anaxagoras’ eyes flew open. He realised, belatedly, that his jaw was slack (embarrassing) and his breath was short (shameful). He cleared his throat, dropped his pen, and turned in his seat to stare back at Aglaea, whose mouth stretched in a small, concerned smile.
He scowled. Everything about Aglaea was dazzling golden, from her sunshine-like eyes to her flaxen hair. It annoyed him, somewhat. Not because she was beautiful—though she was, and knew it—but because her beauty came packaged with a relentless optimism that grated against the sharper edges of his temperament. She radiated light in a way that made him feel perpetually overexposed, his flaws glaring like inkblots beneath her sunshine.
“I’m perfectly fine,” he said, picking up his pen again. “Simply… engaged in thought.”
“Engaged?” Aglaea’s brows arched in amusement. “You looked rather like a fish gasping for air.”
Anaxagoras’ ears burned. He pressed his lips into a thin line. “I was breathing.”
“You were sighing,” she corrected, dragging a chair out beside him without asking for permission and plopping herself down. “Heaving, really. The sort of sigh one associates with either unrequited love or digestive distress.”
“Aglaea,” he said, “I assure you, my digestion is functioning within normal parameters.”
“Then it must be love.”
Her smile was merciless, bright as the sun reflecting off water. He wanted to swat it away, the way one swats an insistent insect, but unfortunately one could not swat fellow teaching assistants and fellow PhD scholars—especially not ones who had a knack for noticing things best left unnoticed.
“Hardly,” he muttered, glaring down at the student’s essay. Aristotle, the poor fool, stared back in spidery undergraduate handwriting.
Aglaea leaned her chin into her hand, studying him as though he were some rare insect pinned to a velvet board. “Your face does this thing, you know,” she said.
“What thing?”
“It softens.”
“Impossible. My face maintains a constant degree of severity at all times.”
“It doesn’t,” she said cheerfully. “It only softens when you’re thinking about something—or someone—you shouldn’t be.”
Anaxagoras felt his pulse spike. He schooled his features into neutrality. “You are projecting, my dear Aglaea.”
“I’m observing,” she said. “There’s a difference.”
He had no rejoinder for that. Not a good one, at least. So he hunched over his paper, making a show of marking the margin with bold red ink. Poor argumentation. See Book Gamma of Aristotle’s Metaphysics for reference.
“So,” Aglaea continued. “Who is she?”
He didn’t look up. “There is no she.”
“Then who is haunting you so persistently that you’re grading Aristotle as though he personally slighted your mother?”
He jabbed another line of commentary into the essay. Circular reasoning. Fallacy.
Aglaea leaned closer. “You know, it’s alright. Even philosophers are allowed to fall in love. Shocking, I know.”
“I’m not in love,” he snapped. His scowl deepened. “I’m in possession of an intellect, not an affliction.”
“Mm. Then perhaps your intellect is simply… preoccupied.”
He hated how right she was. How she could crack him open with a single word. Preoccupied. Yes. That was the problem. Preoccupied by your words, by your insistence, by the phantom heat of scenarios he had no business entertaining.
Aglaea’s gaze softened, which was somehow worse than her teasing. “Whoever she is, you should know—it’s not a crime to want.”
He stiffened. Want. The word landed like a stone dropped into still water, rippling through all his carefully ordered thoughts. He wanted to deny it, to dismantle it, to prove that his desire was nothing more than misfired neurons or the echo of your grin. But he couldn’t.
So he did what he always did when cornered: he retreated into sarcasm.
“Thank you, Aglaea, for your unsolicited psychoanalysis,” he said. “Perhaps next week you’ll cure me of hubris and rearrange my humours while you’re at it.”
“Perhaps I will,” she said, laughing. “In the meantime, do try not to drown in your sighs. The library has a very strict no-puddles policy.”
The logical course of action, Anaxagoras concluded, was to ignore you completely. After all, was that not what one did to remove noise from data? Drop the missing values or, in his case, the outliers, and keep the remaining data intact.
This approach, he found, was vastly redundant due to one simple adage that he was loath to believe in: Murphy’s Law, which stated that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.
And go wrong, it did.
It began with the flutter of paper. He had been in the middle of composing a meticulous set of margin notes on a student’s essay—an uninspired critique of Heraclitus’ fragment on flux—when the library doors yawned open and the sound of your laughter could be heard. He had not looked up first. He had, in fact, pressed his lips into a thin line and forced his eyes back onto the neat, narrow rows of handwriting before him.
Ignore, he told himself. Ignore, ignore, ignore.
But then your voice followed, bright, lilting, asking some half-formed question of the librarian at the front desk, and the sound had him clenching his pen so tightly, the nib threatened to snap.
You should not have been there. This was his space, his sanctuary. The Library of Philia was not meant for your kind—for the vivacious, the meddling, the ones who wove themselves into the lives of others, whether or not they were wanted. It was a solace for minds like his: solitary, meticulous, consecrated to silence.
He kept his gaze firmly on the page, though his ears strained towards every shift of your tone, every clatter of your bag, every step of your shoes against the marble floor. A rational man would have continued reading. A rational man would not have counted those steps, nor registered the way they grew louder, nearer, until they stopped just shy of his table.
“Fancy seeing you here.”
He didn’t look up. He underlined a phrase in the Heraclitus essay with unnecessary force. “The library is hardly an exotic location.”
“Yes, but you’re here.”
“And where else would I be?” He lifted his pen, examined the ink blot now marring the edge of the page, and clicked his tongue. “Unlike some people, I do not require novelty to function.”
A scrape of chair legs. Horror bloomed in his stomach. You were sitting down. He finally glanced up, just to confirm the calamity. Indeed: you had dropped yourself into the seat opposite him, propping your chin into your palm. He sighed and said, “There are sixty-three other tables available.”
“Yes,” you said. “But none with you at them.”
“That is precisely the point.”
“What are you working on?” you asked.
“Student papers,” he said curtly.
“Anything good?”
“No.”
That earned him a laugh—light, unrestrained, the kind that drew the eye of the librarian at the desk. Anaxagoras stiffened, mortified by the disturbance. “Must you?” he hissed.
“Yes,” you said. “Do you ever get bored of it?”
“Of what?”
“Grading. Reading the same tired argument over and over.”
“Boredom is not the correct term,” Anaxagoras said. “Repetition, perhaps. Predictability. But there’s a kind of grim consistency in it. One doesn’t go to a graveyard expecting novelty; one goes expecting headstones. Much the same with student essays.”
You laughed again. “You’re unbelievable.”
“That’s a factual statement,” he said, though he felt heat creep into his ears.
You began tapping your fingers against the wood, not in any rhythm he recognised, but erratic, like rainfall against a tin roof. He wanted to snap at you to stop. Instead, he found himself asking, “What are you doing here?”
“Research,” you said.
“For what?”
“For…” You tilted your head, and he had the distinct impression you were stalling on purpose. “Something personal.”
“That’s not an adequate answer!” he protested.
“Do you give adequate answers when people ask you personal things?” you retorted.
He scowled. He didn’t appreciate the accuracy of the point.
You leaned forward, elbows on the table, closing the space between him and you. “What if I said I came here ‘cause of you?”
“Then I would accuse you of having too much time on your hands,” Anaxagoras said.
“Maybe I like wasting it on you.”
Anaxagoras’ mind scrambled to refute the words, to disprove, to categorise, but nothing emerged. Only the dull roar of blood in his ears. He pushed back in his chair, spine rigid. “You should redirect your energies to a more productive pursuit.”
“Like what?”
“Anything.”
You tilted your head. “Well. I also came here to invite you out for dinner and drinks tonight. A couple of the other PhD scholars wanted to spend the evening outside. I’d really like it if you came, Anaxa.”
Anaxagoras blinked. “Dinner,” he echoed.
“Yes,” you said. “And drinks.”
“You’ve a remarkable ability to confuse categories. Library, work, silence; dinner, drinks, socialising. They’re not related sets.”
“They can be.”
“No.” He tapped his pen twice against the paper, a staccato of frustration. “I have work.”
“You always have work.”
“That’s because work always exists,” he snapped, before catching himself. He inhaled slowly, forcing the bite out of his voice. “In any case, my presence would contribute nothing to your evening.”
“That’s not true,” you said.
“Why?” he asked. “Why would you want me there?”
“Because, Anaxa,” you said, “you’re my best friend.”
He blinked again. “I am… not.”
“You are!”
“I am irritable, pedantic, and almost universally disliked.”
“Maybe,” you allowed. “But you’re also sharp, and funny when you don’t mean to be, and you listen.”
“I don’t listen,” he said automatically.
“You’re listening now,” you pointed out.
Anaxagoras shut his mouth.
The silence between you stretched. In the corner of his eye, the librarian—an elderly man with steel-rimmed spectacles—pretended to be absorbed in his ledger but clearly kept glancing at the two of you. Anaxagoras could feel the heat rising to his ears again.
“You should go,” he said at last, quietly.
“Why?”
“Because I’m not…” He faltered. Words, normally his most obedient tools, refused to arrange themselves. “I’m not built for what you’re asking.”
You leaned back now, folding your arms loosely across your chest. “I’m not asking you to marry me, Anaxa. It’s just dinner. You eat, right?”
“I eat,” he said, affronted.
“Then come eat with us,” you said.
“It’s not that simple.”
“It could be!”
“No!”
“Why not?”
He stared at you, trying to formulate an answer that would make sense, one that wouldn’t reveal the ridiculous hammering of his heart. “Because—because I don’t enjoy crowds. Because I have papers to grade. Because… Because it wouldn’t be just dinner.”
You blinked, caught off guard by the shift. “What do you mean?”
He pushed his papers into a neat stack, giving his hands something to do. “It would be…” He groped for the right word. “It would be an incursion. Into a system I’ve spent years optimising for solitude.”
In the end, Anaxagoras went.
He told himself it was out of politeness, out of some vestigial sense of obligation, but the truth was simpler and far less noble: he was curious. Curiosity had always been his downfall. It was the reason he had read through the entirety of Ovid when he could’ve stopped at the highlights; the reason he’d once spent three months cataloguing the difference between three rival schools of thought on metaphysics that no one else remembered. And it was the reason, now, that he found himself striding stiffly through the dusky streets towards the little restaurant by the river where you had said you would meet him.
The restaurant was small, unassuming, and far too warm inside. Lanterns flickered along the walls, casting everything in honeyed light. Students clustered around wooden tables, their voices weaving together. It wasn’t unbearable, but it wasn’t something he was used to.
You were seated at a long table with the others: three or four fellow scholars, all far more at ease than he had ever been in company. Your laughter cut through the din like the bell-tone of glass. Against his better judgement, he felt it tug something inside him.
You spotted him almost at once, and waved him over with such enthusiasm that the others turned to look. Their eyes brightened—some in recognition, some in surprise. You leaned toward him, smiling when he took a seat. “You came!”
“As promised,” he said.
At first, it was tolerable. He was asked no questions. The conversation swirled around him like water around a stone. He sipped at the cocktail placed before him and pretended to listen. He even allowed himself, in moments, to glance at you across the table—your laugh, your hand movements, the way your eyes sparkled when you teased one of the others.
It was perfectly tolerable—until the boy leaned in.
Bright-eyed, chestnut-haired, with a nose that bent slightly to the left as though it had been broken once and never properly reset, he leaned too close, his shoulder brushing yours as he whispered something in your ear. Whatever it was made you laugh, soft and conspiratorial.
Something unfamiliar curdled in Anaxagoras’ chest.
He recognised its outlines, of course. He’d written entire treatises on the mechanics of envy and its roots in scarcity logic. He had dissected jealousy in the margins of Plato, and annotated its manifestations in medieval court poetry. He knew the term, the taxonomy, the history.
But knowing was not the same as feeling. And feeling it was something else entirely.
It was heat, rising from the sternum to the throat. It was the clench of his jaw, the ache in his molars from grinding them. It was the irrational need to catalogue every inch of the boy—his laugh, too loud; his hands, restless; his shirt, wrinkled; his posture, insufferable.
Most of all, it was the thought—sharp, unwanted—that you were allowing it. That you tilted your head towards the boy, not away. That your smile was not only his to irritate out of you.
Anaxagoras stared at his drink. The surface trembled faintly in the light, as though mocking him. He told himself he was above this. That jealousy was nothing more than an instinctual by-product of competition, a relic of evolution, a nonsense impulse unworthy of serious attention.
And yet—when the boy leaned closer again, when his hand brushed the edge of your sleeve—Anaxagoras found his fingers tightening around the stem of his glass until it threatened to snap.
He lasted another hour. Perhaps less. He couldn’t tell; time distorted, melted into the dull roar of voices, the scrape of chairs, the pulse in his temples. He answered when spoken to, clipped and exact. He resisted the urge to interrupt. He failed, once, when the boy misattributed a fragment to Parmenides, and the correction left the table in awkward silence until you smoothed it over with a joke.
By the time the evening wound down, he was exhausted—not from talk, but from restraint.
The group began to scatter, pairing off, calling goodnights. You rose with the others, stretching your arms above your head, your smile lazy with alcohol. Before he could think better of it, before he could cage the impulse in reason, Anaxagoras spoke.
“I will walk you home.”
You blinked at him, surprised. “Oh. You don’t have to—”
“I insist.” He cleared his throat. “The streets aren’t safe.”
You tilted your head, studying him, and then nodded. “Alright.”
The boy with the crooked nose opened his mouth—perhaps to offer the same—but Anaxagoras turned on his heel so abruptly the matter was closed.
Outside, the air was cool, carrying the faint smell of river water and eucalyptus leaves. The streets were quieter here, cobblestones damp from a late rain. You walked beside him, hands folded behind your back.
For a while, neither of you spoke. Anaxagoras told himself this was good. Silence was preferable. Silence meant control.
But silence also left him alone with the roil in his chest.
At last, you said softly, “You didn’t have a bad time, did you?”
He hesitated. “It was… tolerable.”
“High praise.”
He glanced at you, at the curve of your smile in the streetlights, and something inside him broke loose. “That boy,” he said.
“What about him?”
“He was leaning too close.”
You arched a brow. “Was he?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“And it was inappropriate,” he said, “and distracting.”
“Distracting to who?” you asked lightly.
“To me,” he snapped, before realising what he had admitted.
You laughed, low and delighted, and he wanted to throttle you and kiss you in equal measure. “I see,” you said.
He pressed his lips into a line, but the damage was done. The admission hung between you, undeniable. He felt it tightening in his chest, twisting his thoughts into knots. Finally, you stopped walking. He turned to face you, his expression drawn.
“Anaxa,” you said quietly. “Are you jealous?”
He froze. “I dislike imprecision.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I don’t…” He exhaled, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I don’t want you wasting your attention on anyone who’s not me.”
The words slipped out before he could stop them. They sounded naked and absurd in the open air. He half expected you to laugh.
Instead, you stepped closer. “Then claim it.”
His breath caught. “What?”
“You heard me,” you said firmly.
Anaxagoras’ hands twitched at his sides. Every instinct screamed to retreat, to mock, to dismiss. And yet he found himself saying, very softly, “I told you. Virginity is a construct.”
“Yeah,” you murmured. “And we can dismantle it together.”
He closed his eyes briefly. He could catalogue the arguments against this. He could draft them into an essay. He could defend them in debate. But none of them mattered when you were standing this close, when your gaze pinned him, when the curdled heat in his chest demanded release.
When he opened his eyes again, he said: “Yes.”
You tilted your head. “Yes?”
“Yes,” he repeated, firmer now. “I will walk you home. And then—and then I will take what you offered.”
The door to your apartment closed with a soft click, and Anaxagoras found himself standing in the centre of your living room with the distinct sensation that he’d made a terrible miscalculation. Not in coming here—no, that decision, however reckless, had already been committed to. But in assuming he would know what to do once he arrived.
Anaxagoras had read enough to know how men usually treated such things. He had annotated more than one passage in Aristophanes where a woman was no more than a vessel, and he had snorted his way through Xenophon’s pious lectures on wives and household management. Children, lineage, bloodlines; that was the rhetoric, always.
But this was not a theory. This was you.
He had removed his shoes by the door, which he considered a practical decision. Shoes tracked dirt, and disorder was the enemy of clear thinking. Not that clear thinking was currently something he was capable of doing. His thoughts skittered like mice across a marble floor, refusing to settle into anything resembling coherence.
He clasped his hands behind his back and let his gaze sweep over the room. Book on the coffee table. A half-empty mug by the window. A jacket draped carelessly over the sofa arm. He catalogued each item with meticulous attention, as though your living space was a text to be annotated rather than a place where he was about to—
His mind stuttered over the thought, refusing to complete it.
“Would you like some water?” you asked.
“No,” he said. “Thank you.”
You moved towards him, and he tracked your approach. When you stopped before him—close, too close, close enough that he could smell the faint scent of your soap—his throat went dry.
“Anaxa,” you said softly.
“Yes.” The word came out strangled. He cleared his throat.
“You can touch me.”
“I’m aware.”
“Then why aren’t you?”
Because, he wanted to say, I have spent years reconstructing a life of pure intellect, and you’re asking me to dismantle it with my bare hands. Because I have read seventeen texts on human intimacy and none of them prepared me for the reality of you standing before me, warm and patient and waiting. Because if I touch you, I will have to admit that I want to, and want has never been part of my vocabulary.
Instead, he said, “Because I’m attempting to establish a methodology.”
You blinked at him. “A methodology.”
“Yes.” He shifted his weight, acutely aware that his palms were sweating. Sweating! As though his body had decided to betray him in the most pedestrian way possible. “Foreplay, by definition, is preparatory. It implies a sequence. A progression. I’m simply—”
“Overthinking it?”
His scowl returned with the force of old habit. “Strategising.”
“Right,” you said. “And what’s your strategy?”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. The honest answer (that he had no strategy, that every carefully constructed plan had evaporated the moment you’d looked at him with those eyes) was unacceptable. The dishonest answer (that he knew exactly what he was doing) was transparent even to him.
So instead, he did something reckless.
He raised his hand and placed it against your cheek.
The contact sent a jolt through him, sharp and electric. Your skin was warm—warmer than he’d anticipated, warmed than seemed physically reasonable. It occurred to him then, that for all the brave face you were putting on, you were just as nervous and excited as he was. He felt the architecture of your cheekbone beneath his palm, the subtle give of flesh over bone. You leaned into his touch, and his breath caught in his throat.
“Your skin,” he murmured, half to himself, “is warmer than I thought.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.” His thumb moved of its own accord, brushing along the apple of your cheek. The texture was impossibly smooth, like touching silk or water or some other substance that defied adequate description. “The texts describe tactile sensation as pleasurable, but they fail to account for—” He paused, struggling. “For specificity. The exact texture. The variation in temperature.”
“Anaxa,” you said, and there was something gentle in your voice.
“Yes?”
“You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“Narrating.”
Heat flooded his face. “I’m processing,” he said, defensive.
“Process quieter,” you suggested, and then you reached up and covered his hand with yours, pressing it more firmly against your cheek.
Something broke loose in his chest; some carefully maintained barrier between thought and action, between theory and practice. His other hand came up without conscious decision, framing your face between his palms. He stared at you—at the rise and fall of your breathing, at the faint flutter of your pulse visible at your throat, at your mouth—
“I’ve read,” he said roughly, “that kissing is an exchange of bacteria. Approximately eighty million microorganisms per ten-second kiss.”
“That’s disgusting,” you said.
“Yes.” His eyes flicked back to yours. “I’m going to do it anyway.”
He leaned in, and the world narrowed to the microscopic distance between his mouth and yours. He had read extensively about kissing. He understood the mechanics: the orbicularis oris muscle, the sensory nerve endings in the lips, the release of dopamine and oxytocin. He knew, in theory, exactly how it should proceed.
Theory, he discovered in the half-second before his lips met yours, was utterly worthless.
He kissed you carefully, lips pressed to yours in what he hoped was the correct configuration. But you didn’t respond the way his books had suggested. You didn’t remain passive. Instead, you made a soft sound and tilted your head, parting your lips, and then your tongue was sliding against his, and—
Oh.
Oh.
His grip on your face tightened involuntarily as sensation cascaded through him. The books and texts hadn’t mentioned this—the way heat would pool in his abdomen, the way his pulse would spike until it drowned out thought, the way every nerve ending would suddenly orient itself towards the point of contact between your mouth and his.
You licked into his mouth, and he responded on instinct, kissing you back with a desperation that appalled his rational mind even as his body surged forward. His hands slid from your face into your hair—soft, softer than he’d imagined, though he hadn’t allowed himself to imagine it—and he pulled you closer, as though proximity could somehow ease the ache building in his chest.
When you finally broke apart, he was breathing hard, his carefully controlled composure shattered like glass.
“That,” he managed, voice hoarse, “was significantly more affecting than I thought.”
“Good,” you said, and kissed him again.
This time he was prepared. Or he thought he was. But preparation meant nothing when your hands found his waist, when your body pressed against his, when the heat of you seeped through his shirt and set every rational thought to flight. His hands moved on their own, sliding down your sides, learning the dip of your waist, the curve of your hips.
When his fingers found the hem of your shirt, he froze.
This was a threshold. A point of no return. He pulled back just enough to meet your eyes, his own probably wild, pupils blown.
“May I?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He lifted your shirt slowly, his hands shaking slightly—shameful, but unavoidable. The fabric slid up, revealing skin inch by inch, and when it cleared your head, he let it fall to the floor and simply looked.
The human body, Anaxagoras had always maintained, was simply an arrangement of biological systems. Muscle and bone and connective tissue organised by evolutionary happenstance. There was nothing mystical about it, nothing that justified the poetry people insisted on heaping upon it.
He had been wrong.
You were beautiful. The word rose unbidden, and he couldn’t dismiss it, couldn’t deconstruct it into component parts and file it away. You were beautiful in a way that circumvented logic entirely, that bypassed his prefrontal cortex and struck something deeper, more primitive.
“You’re cataloguing,” you said, shivering and a little bashful.
“I’m appreciating,” he corrected, his voice barely above a whisper. Then, quieter still, “You’re beautiful.”
The word felt strange in his mouth. Inadequate. But it was all he had.
“Your turn,” you said, and reached for the buttons of his shirt.
Panic spiked through him. His body—lean, pale, marked with the faint scars of childhood clumsiness—had never been something he considered with anything but clinical detachment. It was a vehicle for his mind, nothing more. The thought of you examining it, judging it, finding it wanting—
But you weren’t judging. Your fingers worked each button with steady patience, and when you pushed the fabric off his shoulders, you looked at him with something that might have been tenderness. You ran your hands over his chest, and he shivered despite himself.
“The books,” he said, grasping for academia even as his voice cracked, “recommend various techniques. Kissing the neck, for instance. The clavicle. The—”
You pressed your mouth to the hollow of his throat, and the words died.
Oh, God.
The sensation was—he had no framework for this. The warmth of your lips against his skin, the slight scrape of teeth, the way his pulse jumped and stuttered beneath your mouth like a panicked bird. His hands found your waist and gripped, hard, as though you were the only stable point in a tilting world.
“Like this?” you murmured against his skin.
“Yes,” he managed. “Exactly like that.”
You kissed your way along his collarbone, and he felt his knees weaken. Actual weakness, the kind he’d only read about in overwrought novels. When you scraped your teeth lightly over the junction of his neck and shoulder, he made a sound—high and desperate and mortifying.
“That’s not in anything I’ve read,” he gasped.
“Good,” you said, and did it again.
His control, already threadbare, snapped. His hands slid to your hips and pulled you flush against him, and then you were pressed together from chest to thigh and he could feel everything: the softness of your body against his, the heat radiating between you, the evidence of his own arousal, hard and insistent and impossible to ignore.
You rolled your hips experimentally, and white light burst behind his eyes.
“Wait,” he said, panic edging into his voice. “I need—I need to—”
“What?” you asked, breathless.
“I need to ensure this is equitable,” he said. “I need to—to reciprocate. They all emphasise mutual pleasure. If I’m not—”
You kissed him again, deep and languid, swallowing his protests. His mind went blank, every carefully constructed argument dissolving into sensation. When you pulled back, he could barely focus.
“Anaxa,” you said firmly. “Stop.”
He stared at you. At the patience in your eyes, the gentle command in your voice. And something shifted inside him—some rigid structure that had held him upright for all these years suddenly, quietly, gave way.
Fine. If he couldn’t think his way through this, then he would simply… stop thinking.
He kissed you again, and this time he let instinct lead. His hands moved across your body without the burden of analysis, learning empirically: this touch made you gasp, that pressure made you arch into him, this particular angle of his mouth against your neck drew out a moan that sent heat racing down his spine.
When his teeth grazed the sensitive skin below your ear, an action undertaken without premeditation, you made a sound that rewarded him more than any academic accolade ever had.
“There,” he mumbled against your skin, and satisfaction curled through him, warm and possessive. “That’s what I wanted.”
“What?”
“To hear you make that sound.” His lips brushed your ear. “Again.”
He wanted to carry you to the bedroom, but, weak as his knees were because of you, he knew such romantic gestures would only result in both of you falling to a heap on your living room floor, and as humorous as that would be, it would also royally bungle everything up. So he opted instead to place a hand on the small of your back and guide you to your bedroom, lips tingling and mind dazed.
Once there, you let go of his hand and sat down on the edge of your bed, looking up at him expectantly. Anaxagoras’ gaze, guiltily, wandered down to your breasts. “Can I?” he asked, kneeling on the floor in front of you.
“God, yes, Anaxa,” you said, and it was the pleading nature of your request that persuaded him to reach out and gently circle one of your hardened nipples with a finger. You gasped. He watched as your breast tightened further under his touch. It was a direct, irrefutable reaction. Stimulus and response, the most fundamental biological principle. And yet, the clinical observation was entirely subsumed by the dizzying reality of it.
His academic mind, his last bastion of control, offered a useless fact: the areola was rich in mechanoreceptors. The information was dry, useless dust in the face of the tremor that went through you when he circled his thumb over the hardened point.
Your hands came up to grip his shoulders. It was all the permission he needed. He leaned forward, replacing his finger with his mouth.
He suckled gently, and you arched your back with a cry, your fingers digging into his shoulders. The sound shot straight through him, bypassing all rational thought. He wanted to hear it again. He needed to.
His other hand slid from the soft curve of your stomach, trailing upwards. He felt the flutter of your muscles beneath his fingers. Every touch was a discovery, every reaction from you a revelation that spurred him on. When he moved to your other breast, laving it with his tongue, you moaned his name. He pulled back, needing to see your face. Your eyes were hazy, your lips parted, your breath coming in short pants. The sight was devastatingly beautiful.
“The release of oxytocin,” he breathed, “is said to promote bonding. I find the assertion substantially more credible now.”
You just shook your head, a small, dazed smile on your face, and reached for him, pulling him upwards for a kiss. His hands roamed your back, pressing your impossibly closer, wanting to erase the space between you entirely.
He broke the kiss only to push you gently back, so you were lying fully on the bed. He followed, half-covering your body with his, propped up on his elbows. Below, he could feel the hard ridge of his arousal straining against his pants, another undeniable fact in a world that had suddenly become wonderfully, terrifyingly subjective.
“I have no methodology left,” he confessed.
“Good,” you said, your legs tangling with his. “Now you’re getting it.”
“I’d like to learn more, though,” he whispered. “Show me. Show me how to make you feel good.”
Your answer wasn’t a set of instructions, but an action. Your hands, which had been resting on his shoulders, slid down his arms, your fingers tracing the lean muscle there until they reached his wrists. You guided his hands down your body, past the curve of your waist, over the swell of your hips, until his palms rested flat on the bare skin of your stomach.
“I don’t know,” you admitted. “Just—just don’t think, I guess. Feel what you like. And what I like.”
Anaxagoras nodded. He moved his hands slowly, a cautious, sweeping exploration. He’d read anatomical charts, of course. He knew the names of the muscles beneath his fingertips—the rectus abdominis, the external obliques. But the names were dry husks, meaningless; what mattered was the soft give of your skin, the way you shivered when his fingers brushed against the waistband of your pants.
Emboldened, you reached for the button on his trousers. The process was fumbling and graceless. His trousers, woven from a stiff, practical fabric, were more stubborn than yours. His fingers felt clumsy and oversized as he worked at the zipper, and you both had to shift and untangle yourselves from each other, a half-suppressed, nervous laugh escaping your lips. He scoffed, but soon enough, Anaxagoras laid you back down on your bed, both of you bare.
He had seen statues. He had studied diagrams of the human form, memorising the origins and insertions of muscles, the pathways of nerves. None of it had prepared him for this.
“You are,” he started, his voice thick, but he found he had no words. The adjective beautiful was a pale, inadequate shadow of the truth.
“So are you,” you breathed. You reached out, your fingers hesitating for a second before tracing the line of his hip.
“I’m… not used to being observed,” he admitted, the words feeling flimsy and insufficient.
“Me too,” you said with a small smile.
Anaxagoras shifted, moving fully onto the bed to lie beside you, the length of your bodies pressing together. Skin against skin. A thousand points of contact, each sending a cascade of new data to a brain that had finally, blessedly, given up on trying to file it all away.
His hand, acting on an instinct he didn’t know he possessed, slid down your side, over your hip and settled on your thigh. He felt the tremor that ran through you. “Is this alright?” he murmured into your hair.
“More than,” you gasped, turning your head to kiss him. His hand crept higher, fingers tracing the soft skin of your inner thigh. You moaned into his mouth; he followed that sound like a map, his fingers inching towards your folds.
When he finally touched you, you arched against his hand. You were wet, slick; no book, no matter how explicit, could have prepared him for this—this tangible, irrefutable proof of your desire. He explored gently. He found your clit, and brushed his thumb over the small, hard nub, once.
Your back bowed off the bed. “Anaxa, please.”
He didn’t know what you were asking for, but his own body was screaming a similar, incoherent demand. He shifted over you, his knee nudging your legs apart. He looked down at you, at your flushed face and half-closed eyes.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said.
“You won’t,” you said. You reached down, your hand closing around his erection. He gasped, his hips bucking involuntarily. Your touch was hesitant but firm, positioning him at your entrance.
The first push was awkward. He saw you wince, and immediately stilled. “Stop?” he asked.
You shook your head. “No. Just… give me a second.”
He waited, poised above you, and watched as you visibly focused, your body softening, relaxing beneath him. After a moment, you nodded, your hips tilting up in a silent, brave invitation. He pushed again, slower this time, pushing into you inch by inch, until he bottomed out. Your walls clenched around him, and both of you sighed and moaned and gasped out each other’s names.
“Okay?” he asked.
“Okay,” you said.
Anaxagoras began to move, tentatively at first. It was clumsy, a rhythm-less series of pushes and retreats as he tried to find something that worked. But then you met his thrusts, your body rising to meet his, your hands gripping his arms, and suddenly you were moving together. He forgot about methodology, about sequencing, about everything but you in his arms. He was driven by a single, overwhelming imperative: to get closer.
His thrusts became deeper, more urgent. You cried out, a sound of pure pleasure and surprise, and wrapped your legs around his waist, pulling him in impossibly deeper. He felt the tension in his own body building to an unbearable, excruciating point.
He saw the change in your face first—your eyes widening, your breath catching in your throat. You cried out his name, and he felt the answering clench of your muscles around him. With a groan, he pulled out, and spilled onto your quivering stomach.
“Fuck,” Anaxagoras swore, something he rarely ever did. You simply had such an effect on him, it seemed.
With whatever post-nut clarity Anaxagoras was able to recover, he remembered that the final step in the act of copulation was aftercare.
While you dozed peacefully beside him, he roused himself and went into your bathroom to draw you a bath.
Steam curled from the surface of the water. He had turned the handle carefully, testing the temperature with the back of his wrist. Too hot would scald; too cold would make you shiver. Lukewarm was useless. No—this had to be perfect.
The bath filled steadily. Anaxagoras sat back on his heels, studying it as if it were another experiment to be recorded: the dispersal of ripples, the way steam fogged the mirror, the faint perfume of the soap you’d left on the tiled shelf. Lavender, if he wasn’t mistaken. He uncorked the small bottle, sniffed, and confirmed. Lavender was meant to calm nerves and soothe muscles. Yes, this would do.
When the tub was sufficiently filled, he turned the handle off. He wiped his damp hand against his trousers—though they were crumpled now, hardly the dignified garments they had been when he’d first entered your home. He thought, absurdly, of Thales and his claim that water was the originating principle of all things, the archē from which everything emerged.
Was it not fitting, then, that after he slept with you, he should return here, to water?
Anyhow. Such philosophical matters were something he had no time for. The more pressing issue was waking you up and ensuring that you were well taken care of.
The Anaxagoras of a few weeks back might have thought it was tedious work, but the Anaxagoras of now thought that it was not tedious at all, not if it was you.
In mathematics, a Möbius strip is a surface that can be formed by attaching the ends of a strip of paper together with a half-twist. It made the surface seem, almost, endless, for if one were to trace along the circumference of the strip, they could do so without removing their finger.
It was also something Anaxagoras seemed to associate with you now.
He was proving his theory at this very moment, in the soft light of a Tuesday morning. His finger, light as a whisper, was tracing a path from the delicate hollow of your throat, down over your sternum, across the gentle curve of your stomach. He then moved over your hip, down the length of your thigh, looped around your ankle, and then began the slow, patient journey back up the inside of your leg.
Many years later, he would explain to his students thus:
“A Möbius strip is a non-orientable surface. It has only one side and one boundary. If you begin a path along its centre, you will return to your starting point having traversed the entire length of the strip, covering both the top and the bottom, so to speak, without ever crossing an edge.
“How would this explain some of the fallacies in Aristotle’s metaphysics? Well, Aristotle’s insistence on strict dualities—form and matter, potentiality and actuality—assumed that the surfaces of reality are orientable. That there exists a clear top and bottom, a beginning and an end, and that one may traverse existence without encountering contradictions along the way.
“Yet, if reality were more akin to a Möbius strip, then such dualities collapse. A single path, continuous yet non-orientable, would fold back upon itself. One could move along the apparent ‘top’ and, without ever leaving the path, find oneself at the ‘bottom’. Potentiality and actuality are not distinct; they are merely aspects of the same continuous process. Form and matter are not separate realms but points along an infinite, twisting continuum.”
A student would raise a tentative hand and ask, “Professor, are you saying that Aristotle’s categories are fundamentally flawed?”
Anaxagoras would tilt his head, considering. “Not flawed, per se. They are simplifications. But like a two-dimensional map of a three-dimensional Möbius strip, they inevitably obscure the continuity of reality. The boundaries we draw—between intellect and emotion, between observation and experience, even between you and the object of you… affection—are artificial constructs. Useful, yes, but incomplete.
“Consider intimacy. Suppose I describe it through my usual academic lens: a series of actions and responses. That is one ‘side’ of the experience. But if you trace it fully, if you allow for continuity without preconception, you find that the so-called boundaries—where thought ends and sensation begins—are an illusion. There’s no true separation. One returns to the starting point having covered the entire path, but it’s simultaneously top and bottom, beginning and end.”
“Is that…” Another student would venture to ask, “Is that personal experience informing the philosophy?”
“Perhaps.” Anaxagoras would allow himself a small smile. He would finally acknowledge to himself that there were truths that could only be apprehended by the delicate tracing of the path itself, one that looped infinitely, where intellect and feeling were inseparable.
He would continue, voice softened now, though none could tell: “And, of course… it is infinitely easier to appreciate such truths when the Möbius strip in question is worth tracing.”
Professor Anaxagoras then would straighten, chalk poised over the board, before assigning his students ten pages on Aristotle’s Nicomachean ethics, which had absolutely nothing to do with either metaphysics or Möbius strips, and declare the class dismissed.