The Istanbul air was cut with nicotine and exhaust fumes, so entering a room to teach my first English class, anxious Marlboro Light in hand, felt in keeping with the city.
However, stubbing my cigarette out in the wastepaper basket was probably a mistake.
"Teacher! I am smelling fire!" cried a student, leaping to his feet. He was tall, lean and competent, striding manfully to the bin where a thin plume of smoke wriggled towards the ceiling. A smouldering tissue was to blame, and my firefighter crushed it to nothing while my seated students squealed with delight and coughed with comic excess.
Embarrassed, I thanked him.
With black, collar-length curls, deep-brown eyes and a faint, hippyish moustache, he looked like Che Guevara, albeit happier. When he grinned, I went weak at the knees, girlishly impressed by his classroom heroics, and imagined revolutionary fervour. I melted even further when I learnt his name was Metin, "Meaning strong," he declared proudly.
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Over the coming weeks, I flirted recklessly both in and out of class. Shamefully, I exploited Metin's minimal English by transforming him into a blank space onto which I could project my fantasies. He was a brave rebel, a romantic outsider, and even during pronunciation practice, when I gazed into his bitter-chocolate eyes and made him repeat "dip, deep, slip, sleep", my lust and admiration didn't dim. I merely added "abstract poet" to his list of renegade activities.
One tea break, Metin told me of the nearby Princes' Islands and, convinced my desire was reciprocated, I was bold enough to suggest he take me there. The power imbalance of our teacher-student relationship didn't bother me unduly. After all, we were practically the same age and equals out of school.
On the ferry, I swayed against Metin's hard, athletic body, and on dry land, I clasped his hot, gallant hand as we scrambled up paths winding across pine-covered slopes, narrow wooden summerhouses perched among the greenery. Cars were banned on the island and the bicycles and horse-drawn carriages contributed to my image of Metin as an admirably idealistic, other-worldly radical.
We found a secluded spot to picnic, on a tumble of rocks leading down to the sea. We ate a little, smoked a lot and drank cheap, sweet wine, until, ignoring a nagging doubt that I might have misread the situation, I reached to embrace him. Slipping my hand under his T-shirt, I caressed the broad slab of his back and pressed my lips to his, relishing the scratch of his socialist moustache as I pictured him aroused and naked.
Metin lurched away, eyes popping in shock. "This is wrong," he exclaimed. "You are my teacher!" Blushing furiously, I mumbled that it didn't matter, that we were friends and I wanted to know him as a person, not a student. But he was having none of it. Instead, he thumbed hurriedly through his bilingual dictionary, initially pointing me to the word "respect", then to "ethics, morals". Clearly, this man wasn't the nonconformist warrior of my dreams. I might have responded by directing him to the Turkish for "crazy with lust" and "sod it", but it was too late. Mortified by his rejection, I was already anticipating the end of term, when Metin would move to another class. As swiftly as the first time, he'd put out my fire - and what a fool I'd been to start it in the first place.