Campus Tramp by Lawrence Block

office one afternoon, fairly confident that she would find him there. She was on the second floor of the Union building before she changed her mind. She couldn’t see him there, not with the chance of finding others around, not with the chance of somebody like Pete Chatterjee stepping in and blowing everything to hell.
    Instead she walked to his apartment. The front door was open and she walked up the stairway to Don’s apartment. He never locked his door; she went inside to wait for him.
    The apartment was a mess again—piles of debris all over the floor, the bed unmade and the room generally filthy. Without thinking she began to clean it up, to put the books where they belonged, to hang the clothing in the closet and stuff the dirty clothes in his laundry bag. She threw out the garbage, piled the scraps of paper neatly on his desk, made the bed and generally created order out of chaos. It gave her something to do, and at the same time it made her feel close to Don again the way she had felt when the two of them lived together and when cleaning the apartment was part of her daily routine.
    When she had finished, when the apartment was as clean as it had ever been, she sat down in a chair to wait for him.
    He came home an hour or so later. He walked into the apartment, not seeing her at first, not even seeming to notice that the room had been cleaned or anything. Then he looked over at her and a strange expression appeared on his face.
    “What the hell—”
    She saw at once that he had been drinking. His eyes were a little bit bloodshot and out of focus and his step wasn’t as sure as it normally was. He could walk and talk straight even after hitting the bottle hard for a long period of time, but she knew him well enough by this time to know that he was more than a little drunk.
    “I wanted to see you,” she said.
    He lit a cigarette, dragged on it and expelled the smoke from his lungs. Then he kicked off his shoes and sat down on the edge of the bed. He didn’t say anything to her.
    “I had to see you,” she went on. “I … I need you.”
    “Like you need a broken collarbone.”
    It wasn’t working at all. What did she have to do—get down on her knees and crawl to him?
    “Don—”
    She broke off after saying no more than his name. Now that she was here and he was with her she didn’t know what to say. She had an insane desire to run to him and throw herself into his arms, but she felt that if she did he would probably slap her face.
    “Linda, you shouldn’t have come here.”
    She looked at him but his eyes were turned downward as if he didn’t want to look her in the face.
    “There’s nothing left for us,” he said. “I’m sorry for any pain I’ve caused you, but the only thing you can do now is get along without me. If we go on it’ll just be that much worse for both of us.”
    She opened her mouth and closed it again without saying anything.
    “We just aren’t right for each other,” he said. “I’m too old for you and you’re too young for me. I should have left you alone to begin with but I wanted to let you make your own decisions. Maybe they were the wrong ones, I don’t know. But if we get involved again it’ll be that much worse.”
    “Don—”
    “Please,” he said, and he sounded very tired all of a sudden. “Please, Linda. I wish you’d go now. If we keep away from each other it’ll be better for both of us.”
    She took a deep breath and held it as long as she could while he sat silent upon the edge of the bed. Then she let the air out of her lungs, slowly, and began to speak.
    “Just one more time,” she said. “Just make love to me one more time even if it’s the last time. I want you, Don.”
    For a moment he didn’t say anything.
    “See how shameless I am?” she went on. “But I can’t help it, Don. I need you and even if all it is is one more night or one more hour I want to have you.”
    He looked up.
    “No,” he said.
    “I—”
    “Damn it, can’t