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Newton, objectively, is attractive.
Not conventionally attractive, perhaps, but he has a great many pleasing physical traits that Hermann knows he cannot be alone in appreciating. Newton’s eyes, for example, (though hidden behind glasses most of the time) are a very nice shade of hazel that Hermann likes to look at. Newton’s smile, especially when accompanied with a laugh, makes Hermann's heart skip a beat when he's caught unawares by it. Newton's cheeks have a roundness to them that’s appealing and they’re dotted with little freckles that grow darker in the summer months. He’s short, yes, and a little flabby in the stomach, but his arms are strong and toned (all the more noticeable when he wears short-sleeves) and his softness becomes him. He’s only grown more attractive with age: grey streaks at his temples and in his scruff he’s long since grown out, square glasses swapped for a more rounded pair (like an amalgamation of both his and Hermann's), small wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. His corduroys are as tight as ever, of course, his tattoos as vibrant as they've always been, and he's started wearing earrings once more (studs and dangling things he hasn't worn in decades, since his band broke up).
Hermann can barely keep his hands off of Newton half the time—one moment they’re kissing good morning chastely, the next, they’re late for their morning classes because Hermann shoved his hands up Newton’s shirt or down the back of his pants or pulled him back down onto the bed to run his fingers through that graying hair or over those toned arms. And Newton is certainly still hit on enough in bars when they go out together, still slipped phone numbers on napkins or winks on crowded metro trains, even if his hopeful suitors do back off the moment he points to his wedding ring and, perhaps obnoxiously (though Hermann hardly minds), pulls Hermann into a kiss.
So Hermann knows that Newton is attractive, and he knows he should not be surprised that other people find Newton attractive, too.
This does not stop him from nearly walking straight into a wall when he overhears a handful of his Physics 101 students call Dr. Geiszler a 'DILF' in the hallway. He avoids the wall, but only because he manages to catch himself with his cane in time.
“My friend has him for bio,” one of the students is saying. “I’m so fucking jealous.”
“I almost took him,” another one says, wistfully, “but my English class conflicted with it.”
“Wish he wasn’t married.”
“He’s married?”
Hermann takes this as his cue to turn the corner and duck out of sight.
The conversation sticks with him all throughout the rest of the day, all the way through the metro ride home (with Newton), to dinner (with Newton), to doing the dishes (with Newton) to when he gets into bed (with Newton) and Newton starts getting handsy hardly three seconds after they shut off the light, and then impatient when Hermann doesn't reciprocate hardly three seconds after that. “Something on your mind, hot stuff?” Newton murmurs in his ear, and he rubs over Hermann’s abdomen with his wonderfully strong fingers, his chest solid and warm against Hermann’s back.
Hermann stares at the wall. “My students,” he says. “They think you’re—well.”
“What?” Newton nips at his earlobe and rubs his hand over Hermann's ribs. “Super cool?”
“A ‘dilf’,” Hermann says.
Newton lets out a loud burst of laughter; Hermann winces. Newton kisses his neck in apology. “Sorry,” he giggles, significantly quieter. “Hearing you say dilf is just fucking weird, dude.” He rolls onto his back, and Hermann rolls over to face him. Newton's still giggling. “You know,” Newton says, and winks, “I do have a chili pepper on rate my professors.”
“Chili pepper?” Hermann furrows his brow.
“It means the youths think I’m hot,” Newton says. “Hot, smart, and famous. I don't know if you know this, but you landed yourself the total package, honey.”
“Modest, too,” Hermann says, with a snort.
“Mm, you know it,” Newton says, cupping the back of Hermann's neck, and then they get distracted by more pressing matters.
It must be the beard, Hermann reasons, combined with the grey hair and earrings, that’s brought on this sudden influx of crushes some five years after they started their jobs here. The grey is not new, but the beard certainly is, and Hermann loves the beard, even though it irritates his skin and leaves him red with they kiss or indulge in more intimate affairs. It makes Newton look...handsome. Like the man of forty-five he is, rather than someone still desperately clinging to his twenties. (He's stopped wearing skinny ties, thank heavens, though his gaudy science-fiction and amphibian themed ones are hardly better.)
On registration day, Newton’s classes for the next semester—gen eds and major-specific upper levels alike—fill up within the first hour and a half. His class participation is at an all-time high. (“These are the highest averages I’ve ever seen,” Newton says happily one evening as they grade papers together on the couch. “They’re actually paying attention!”) His office hours become unusually popular, so popular that Hermann can’t even take lunch with his husband anymore; Newton has one student in particular (a junior-year biochemistry major with purple glasses and a jean jacket full of patches) who comes in for an hour every Tuesday to talk about nothing pertaining to Newton’s class whatsoever. One very persistent student begins regularly baking batches of cookies for Newton and leaving them in tins in his department mailbox, which Hermann also gets to reap the benefits of when Newton brings them home.
Newton’s past as a kaiju war hero—and, subsequently, Hermann’s—is dug up and whispered about among their students like it hasn’t been since the late 2020s. (Can you believe Dr. Geiszler helped save the world? and He drifted with a kaiju brain! and Dr. G is so brave.) They both start getting awed looks in the hallways once more, and a never-ending stream of questions about what it was like fighting the war (most of them were no older than eleven when the Breach closed), and what it was like working with each other for so long.
“Were you really drift partners with him?” someone asks Hermann at the beginning of class one day, his eyes wide.
Hermann does his very best to keep a straight face. He forgets, sometimes, that new students are not always aware that stuffy and strict Dr. Gottlieb is married to loud and eccentric Dr. Geiszler. His Physics 101 course has certainly not gotten the memo. “I was,” he says, and he derives a little surge of pleasure from the amount of wide eyes he gets in return, which is why he adds, “Lab partners, as well.”
“What was it like?” someone asks.
“Is he as cool in person as everyone says he is?”
“Isn’t he hot?”
This gets a round of nervous laughter, and the student who asked—a girl, and doing quite well in Hermann’s class—looks mortified. “God,” she says quickly, “sorry, I didn’t—”
“I happen to think he’s very attractive, actually,” Hermann says, his lip twitching up at the new round of shocked looks and whispers this earns him (He thinks Dr. Geiszler is hot! and Does he know Dr. Geiszler is married?), and then he turns back to the whiteboard. Damned modernness of everything. Hermann had to fight the department head to get these over those headache-inducing holodisplays, and chalkboards were entirely out of the question. Hermann misses chalkboards.
“Now please,” Hermann says, and uncaps a dry-erase marker to finish writing out the problem sets they were meant to have started on ten minutes ago, “hold all discussion of Dr. Geiszler until after class.”
“My students have been asking about you,” Newton tells him at the dinner table later. “Some of them have your nine AM. Apparently you said some interesting things.”
“Did I?” Hermann says, and takes a sip of water.
Newton grins. “You really think I’m attractive, Hermann?”
“Unfathomable, isn’t it? I hear you’re married, though.” He shakes his head. “What a pity. I’d never have a chance.”
Newton pushes his chair out from the dining table and, after some maneuvering and pushing aside dinner dishes (dinner Hermann was very much still eating), wriggles right into Hermann’s lap. “Happily married, too,” he says, “with a really smoking hot husband.” He drapes his arms across Hermann’s shoulders and presses his face to Hermann's neck; Hermann pokes his back.
“Leg, my love,” he says, and Newton shifts his weight to the opposite knee. “Better. Thank you. Come here.”
“Listen to this,” Newton calls. Hermann spits out a mouthful of toothpaste and pokes his head outside of the bathroom; Newton’s sitting on their bed in pajamas, laptop open and perched on his knees. He clears his throat. “I got some new reviews. ‘Dr. Geiszler has a nice ass, even if he sounds like the human equivalent of a kazoo.’ Did you write that one? Oh, shit— ‘Dr. Geiszler is the DILF of the biology department.’ Ha!”
Hermann rinses his toothbrush off under the faucet, making a face. “I feel as if I should defend your honor,” he calls back. “Stake my claim, so to speak.”
“Oh, baby, it’s so sexy when you get possessive,” Newton says. He taps a little more on his laptop. “Hey, this dude switched to a biology major just because he thought I was hot. My hot ass is molding some potential brilliant young scientists out here, Hermann!”
Hermann rolls his eyes and turns the tap off.
They kiss for a bit when Hermann gets into bed. It’s nice, as kissing Newton always is, so things easily progress. Hermann’s just pulling open the drawstring on Newton’s baggy old sweatpants when Newton suddenly waggles his eyebrows and says “Bet my students are totally jealous of you right now for bagging me.”
Mood effectively ruined, Hermann makes another face and pulls his hand away.
“Wait!”
Hermann ends up regretting his remark about Newton’s attractiveness as he knew he likely would, because at the start of the next class, that’s all anyone wants to talk about. And how they’re pretty sure Dr. G (the new nickname is jarring, but nevertheless a step above what Newton's students usually call him, which is Newt) thinks he’s cute, too, even if he is married to someone else. Hermann admires their determination to distract him out of assigning them additional homework.
“You’d have me break up a marriage?” Hermann says. “I have it on good authority it’s a very happy one, you know.”
“Yeah, but, he never talks about his wife—or husband—or anything,” a student whom Hermann knows to be in Newton’s 101 class as well says. “Only you.”
It won’t do to have rumors spread that Newton’s unfaithful, and Hermann really does enjoy telling people that he and Newton are married, so he smiles thinly. “That’s probably because I’m his husband,” he says, and then slips back into his regular professionalism. “Now. About the homework—”
“You’re his husband?” someone says, and someone else says “I knew it!”
Hermann ends up regretting this, too; rather than putting an end to his students’ curiosity about his personal life, or their desire to be involved in it, it increases it by about tenfold. When Newton shows up to campus in an outfit deemed particularly attractive (a tight floral button-down that shows off his tattoos and a single earring), everyone wants Hermann's opinion on it. The ones with crushes on Newton start attempting to commiserate with Hermann over the shade Newton’s eyes, or Newton’s wavy hair, or Newton’s terribly handsome, and now full, beard. They even—to Hermann’s sheer embarrassment—send him and invite to join their private Facebook (which Hermann is shocked to see is still around) group of Dr. G Memes, which mostly consists of awkward candids of Newton with phrases like Imagine Dr. Newt seeing you pass by but because he’s with friends he can’t get caught gazing at you or Imagine Dr. Geiszler leaving his husband for you written across in different fonts.
“Dude,” Newton says, when Hermann expresses his bewilderment over it all and his not-so-insignificant fear that he’s unknowingly being teased somehow, “it’s because they like you. Have you read a single course evaluation? Or looked at your rate my professors page?”
“Newton,” Hermann says, “for the last time, I have no bloody idea what that is. And I do read my evaluations, thank you, but those are meant to be about my effectiveness as an instructor, not my...likability.”
Newton shakes his head, then pulls his phone from his pocket, taps on it for a few moments, and hands it over to Hermann. “Look,” he says, and points at the screen, at Hermann's apparent Rate My Professors page, “you have a chili pepper, too.”
Hermann scrolls down the page, mildly stunned. He doesn’t have many reviews, but they're all positive and wildly enthusiastic. (He even gets a DILF comment of his own, just like Newton, and the little chili pepper as Newton said.) “See?” Newton says, smiling. “People are always asking me questions about you, and when they found out you’re my husband I talk about all the time—they think we’re both hot shit, Hermann. We’re a power couple.”
“Oh,” Hermann says, and hands the phone over to Newton, mollified (and a little pink in the face).
Newton laughs, and pecks him on the cheek. “You're definitely more of a GILF, though,” he says. “You know. Grandpa I'd—”
“Newton.”
The craze eventually settles down into manageable levels of infatuation once Newton shaves his beard off into its usual stubble, much to the disappointment of everyone but Hermann; the scratching and beard burn became a bit too much to handle, and it made covert make-out sessions on Hermann's desk entirely less covert when Hermann had to walk around with a red neck and cheeks for half an hour afterwards.
(Hermann does not leave the Facebook group.)