THE STORY: A traveling teacher up for reappointment becomes obsessed by a student’s “glistening brown lip-gloss” and, for the first time in his marriage and career, contemplates giving into temptation. She invites herself up to his hotel room, ostensibly in need of special instruction, and brings along her laptop. He presses her cursor. Together they scroll through her incendiary new story as the flirtation of earlier office-hour banter gives way to sobering reality when the student becomes the bearer of some most destabilizing news. She leaves. He knows he has a crisis to report home to his wife.
