Got Your Number

face, his winning smile, and nostalgia warmed her limbs. Assuming the picture was current, he'd barely aged a day in the decade since she'd seen him. The fact that he was still single surprised her, since the man wasn't exactly short of admirers. If his classes were still eighty-percent female, he'd probably fetch a hefty sum at the auction.
    She'd counted herself among the smitten. Dr. Carl had held her spellbound from the first moment she'd walked into his freshman theology class. Handsome, thoughtful, articulate. In comparison, most of the college boys were hopelessly immature. She and Angora had attended his class together as freshmen and whiled away many pajama powwows spinning fantasies about the man.
    But because Angora had moved out of the dorm, she wasn't privy to the relationship that developed between Roxann and Dr. Carl during their senior year.
    "After you graduate," he'd murmured once in the library stacks, "we won't have to hide our feelings." The unrealized sexual energy between them had been palpable, and had left her damp and sleepless more nights in the dorm than she cared to recall.
    But mere days before graduation, Nell Oney had paid her a visit. Carl was being brought before the Board of Regents to defend allegations of impropriety with a student. He was, after all, a professor of theology, and a deacon of the university church. Knowing she herself was the student in question, Roxann agreed to leave until things settled down.
    At Nell's urging, she'd joined the Rescue program, and moved to Memphis, where a facilitator was needed, but remained poised to leave as soon as Carl called. Except when he'd called, it was to beg her understanding for choosing his job over her. If he were ruined, he'd told her in a tortured voice, he'd have nothing to offer her, and honor dictated that he stay. Of course she understood. She'd cried for a month, then thrown herself into her volunteer work, determined to prove something to Carl, even if he never knew.
    Seeing his picture brought all that pent-up longing flooding back to her. Everybody had one person in their past, one person who evoked questions of what might have been. Other men had come and gone, men who on the surface appeared to be concerned with the state of the world but, when it came right down to it, were unwilling to do more than write a letter or don a T-shirt for the cause.
    Her former lover Richard Funderburk fit that category—he made the bar circuit with his guitar and his backpack, singing about the indulgences of man, then took his pay in Canadian beer. She would lie in bed after cryptic sex and wonder if she would ever again meet someone who moved her as much as Carl had without even touching her.
    She closed the newsletter, then blinked her eyes wider at an old photo of herself on the back page under a caption that read "We Remember." In the dated photo, her mouth was open, delivering a yell, and she hefted an unreadable protest sign. In 1994 political-science student Roxann Beadleman led a protest against modesty discrimination in the art department that resulted in policy change.
    Roxann smiled wryly, remembering the rally. The art department had sponsored a show of nudes drawn from live models, but the drawings of the male models had featured little flaps of canvas over their privates that observers had to lift for a peek. The drawings of the female models, on the other hand, were free of the "modesty flaps." Roxann had been outraged at the discrepancy and led a march to have the flaps removed.
    When political cartoons in national papers began to parody the issue, school officials caved. But her newly won notoriety made it difficult to see Carl on the sly. Then the allegations against him had ensued and she'd left South Bend to embark on what now seemed a fairly aimless path.
    Roxann drove toward her apartment wrapped in a swirl of bittersweet memories, trying to ignore the clench of yearning in her stomach. The road not taken taunted her—marriage, family, a permanent address, Sunday pot roast. Maybe she hadn't fought hard enough for Carl. She'd told him countless times that she didn't believe in marriage. No wonder he hadn't put his career and church appointment on the line...
    She hadn't given him reason to believe she was commitment material.
    And how could she be? Then or now. Between her parents' fiasco of a marriage and her exposure to the underbelly of relationships through Rescue, she was much more familiar, perhaps even more