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When Kathy asked Will to join her panel for the Urban Archeology Association conference in Chicago, it was really just an excuse to reconnect with an old friend from grad school. Even though they shared the same field, their careers had taken dramatically different paths since they finished their PhDs at Columbia. Will had wound up with a job at a small, but well-respected liberal arts college. He had continued to do some research, but mostly summer digs on inconsequential sites?basically, field schools for undergraduate students to learn the ropes. Kathy had gotten a job at Princeton. Her larger than life personality and insane work ethic fueled a meteoric rise in the profession. She was the go-to expert for any archeological controversy, routinely serving as a talking head on CNN, Fox, PBS, BBC, etc.

When Will waltzed into the conference meeting room, Kathy saw that he hadn't changed much in the five years since she'd last seen him. He was still thin and muscular. His short brown hair was thinning a bit, but he hadn't foolishly tried to compensate with the stereotypical professor beard. At 6'4", he was one of the few academics, who stood legitimately taller than her 5'11" frame.

"Hey, Kathy. How are you doin'?" Will called. "You look great."

"Damn, right!" Kathy said, with a trademark laugh. Her cockiness was only half a joke. Kathy's size intimidated most men. She was tall and big-boned, with voluptuous breasts that she neither tried to hide nor flaunt. That autumn day, she wore a conservative grey sweater, black slacks, and mid-rise heels that accentuated her height. Her red curls bounced at her shoulders, perfectly framing her freckled face and sleek glasses. Kathy even flipped her hair a bit, a move that annoyed the feminist in her, but was nonetheless effective.

Will laughed appreciatively at Kathy's joke. They made small talk and introduced themselves to the other folks on the panel. Kathy was the chair, of course, and she would also comment on the papers. As the global expert, she rarely gave papers of her own at these conferences. In fact, her speaker fees ran into the thousands of dollars, and she was the president of the organization running the conference. Grad student acolytes and junior scholars buzzed around her like worker bees around their queen. Will busied himself prepping his presentation on his laptop, noticed by no one. Well, almost no one.

As the audience trickled into the meeting room, Will did a double-take. Was that Elaine, his former student, walking through the door? Will hadn't seen Elaine for about a year. A decade earlier, she had been his student, but after graduation, she had gotten an MA at NYU and then gone into archeological consulting. When she showed up at his office hours out of the blue, ostensibly to catch up, she had consummated an old professor crush and knocked his socks off. They had fucked like bunnies in his office that evening?the one and only time he had ever done this. Will hoped that more of the same would follow, but alas, Elaine had once again disappeared from his life. Until now.

Elaine smiled and winked at Will as their eyes met?sure that no one else in the room had noticed her. She remained the petite, curvy professional with the short, asymmetrical haircut (dyed blue today) that Will still occasionally dreamed about. But one other person had noticed Elaine. Kathy caught Will's double-take out of the corner of her eye as yet another a junior scholar tried desperately (and unsuccessfully) to impress her before the panel started. Then she followed Will's eyes to catch the end of Elaine's perky strut to a seat near the back of the room.

Kathy interrupted Will's reverie intentionally with a staged throat clearing loud enough to unsettle a flock of pigeons on the street outside the conference hotel. Everyone turned to her as she said, "Let's begin."

Will presented last, and Kathy couldn't help but notice that although he appeared attentive to the other scholars on the panel, Elaine's presence had distracted him. When Will spoke, he gave a lackluster talk about a summer field school in Richmond that had revealed nothing important. Yet Elaine smiled and nodded supportively throughout the talk, clearly loyal to her former mentor.

More annoyed than she realized, Kathy ditched her prepared remarks that had killed Will with kindness. Instead, she savaged him as if he were a rival out for the same endowed chair. Will was so easy-going that he let the critique roll off his back with a shrug of mild agreement. He knew that he was no superstar and that the panel was out of his league. He was beyond caring. This frustrated Kathy to no end, but what could she do? She needed to light a fire under his ass.

After a brief Q