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Day one of the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies conference had, so far, yielded: two pens that almost worked, a portfolio, a name tag, and a profound sense of gratitude that there was coffee waiting in the lobby.
Oh, and the handouts.
Despite having missed the first two sessions, Arthur had collected more handouts and flyers by the afternoon coffee break than he had throughout the first few months of the semester. About half were covered with notes, the margins and spaces between quotes filled with his penmanship, cross-referenced with arrows and phrases written aslant next to the passages on the handout. Those he would keep. The rest would languish in a file folder on his desk until enough time had passed that Arthur couldn't remember the presentations that had accompanied them, at which point they'd join his pile of English department flyers in the recycling bin.
So, yes, he was quite grateful for the coffee. Last night had been… good. Very good. But, also, very late, and a dull headache and the tendency to let his mind drift to thoughts of the night before both let Arthur know that he'd need a decent amount of caffeine to get through the rest of the day's sessions.
Arthur paused on the way to the lobby outside the room where the first session for the Burney Society had taken place. There, he watched as Morgana participated in a very enthusiastic discussion with somebody whom Arthur hoped wasn't a hapless graduate student who'd encountered Morgana on that panel.
Arthur's first memory of Morgana was of her standing in the doorway to his freshman dorm room, wearing cut-offs, a green tee shirt, and a particularly vicious expression. After introducing herself as his neighbor, she'd announced it was fine if he wanted to fail out his first semester, but there was no need for him to make a public nuisance of himself and could he not be a dickhead and turn down the music please.
Then she'd slammed his door in his face and refused to talk to him for three weeks.
His second was of him apologizing to her the next month in their intro to lit studies seminar by way of calling her seriously intense, something she accepted as more fact than opinion. They got on quite well afterward, really.
The next few years were a blur of late nights in the study lounge, a lot of cheap alcohol, and more mediocre poetry readings than Arthur could stand to recall. Arthur had spent the second half of his winter break freshman year sleeping on Morgana's floor after he'd come out to his father along with telling him that he wasn't going to pledge the fraternity that most of the men in their family had. One summer Arthur and Morgana had taken a road trip to Virginia and had had a spectacular fight in the Best Western parking lot. Morgana, who took it upon herself to drive them home the next day, had spent most of the ride reassuring Arthur he was still a dickhead. The following summer, when her father passed away and her girlfriend remembered she was actually straight now that they'd graduated, Arthur had spent a lot of time telling Morgana she was still the most intense, strongest person he'd ever met.
"Who was that? Did you just frighten yet another graduate student away from doing a phd?" Arthur didn't look up from his conference program, though he smiled to feel Morgana's hand rest on his shoulder for a moment.
Morgana put a cup of coffee down next to Arthur's and slid into the seat by his at the table. She looked impeccable, dressed in a dark suit and her hair done up in a complicated twist. The conversation she'd just finished had left her eyes with that urgent gleam that Arthur usually associated with her more desperate moments of engagement in scholarship. "That was just a friend of Dr. Brett."
"Does your dissertation director often send her friends to get harrowed by you?"
"Oh, stop being tiresome. You're presenting tomorrow?" Morgana stole Arthur's conference program away from him, flipped to the back to find his name in the index of presenters, and found his panel. "'But since he is a king, methinks he has assumed another figure: Performing Nobility in Dryden's Marriage à la Mode?' Doesn't that sound-"
"Brilliant?"
"Pretentious. Do you think you'll have time to join the rest of us plebeians for a roundtable on teaching the long eighteenth century? Of course you will." Next, Morgana took Arthur's pen and circled the panel she wanted him to attend, then finally reached for her own coffee cup.
"Ah, yes, with my vast experience teaching in my field this semester. Let's see, how can I work pre-writing techniques in with that fleeting glance we gave the eighteenth century with the Lyrical Ballads?"
"I can tell your semester of doom hasn't been as doom-filled as you want me to believe. You're smiling."
"I'm definitely not."
"You are. And it's creepy, so please do stop that, too, Arthur."
Of course, Arthur couldn't really deny it, because he was. Smiling. Morgana was right about that, at least. He was pretty certain he didn't look creepy doing it.
"Fair enough; the semester hasn't turned out quite as horrible I thought it would."
"All right. But nobody teaches that many sections of first-year writing and smiles that much. Except Gwen, but I'm starting to suspect she's not normal."
"Is she still eating your cooking?"
"Of course she is."
"There you go, then. Completely abnormal."
"I'm a wonderful cook. And you're just jealous that… Oh. Perhaps not." Morgana leaned in to give Arthur a curious smile and the urgency lit up in her eyes once more. "You're seeing somebody. No wonder your semester's going well."
"I'm not. Really, I'm not." Arthur glanced away from Morgana, took another drink of his coffee, and ducked his head away from her to disguise the fact that he was still smiling. "Not seeing someone."
Not yet, anyway. Though, he'd be a fool to not realize the semester hadn't spiraled into a disaster of Romanticism and first year expository writing at least in part because of Merlin. Arthur could still feel his lips tingle a little when he remembered how it had felt to kiss him, to feel his mouth move under Arthur's with a needy, quiet gasp just after they kissed. He could still remember what Merlin's fingers had looked like, tangled up with his own, before they said good-night, and could picture what they looked like as they paged through Merlin's battered, heavily annotated and pencil-marked copy of Wordsworth and Coleridge's poetry.
"We'll talk about it later. Over dinner and drinks. It's good to see you smiling."
"And it's good to see you less manic." Arthur took his conference program back. Morgana had mapped out the rest of his weekend for him and had put a star next to the panel at which he was presenting. "Well. Slightly."
"Ah, that's a façade, dear. Gwen had to pack my suitcase while listening to me read my paper."
"How many times?"
"Three… maybe four. She knows more than any other writing center director does about Fanny Burney's Evelina, though."
"What did I say? Completely abnormal."