“Oh, so we’re calling himboynow?” Gwen asked, laughing into her drink.
“I have range,” I said, deadpan.
Aster took a sip of her coffee, her voice smooth with amusement. “You should’ve brought him a present.”
“I did,” I said under my breath. “My eternal suffering.”
Gwen raised her glass, the spoon chiming against the rim. “To Edwina Carter,” she declared, “the reluctant birthday tribute Professor Stone never asked for.”
Their laughter filled the space around me, easy and careless, but my thoughts didn’t join them. Beneath the noise, I could still hear his voice, the low, measured cadence that turned my name into something else entirely. I rolled my eyes, forcing the motion to look casual, but my fingers still carried a trace of cold where his had almost touched mine. His scent lingered too, clean, sharp, a memory cut into the air, and I hated the way knowing it was his birthday made him feel closer, as if distance itself had thinned to let him through. Worse than that was the quiet treachery of wondering how he might be spending it.
“Do you think he celebrates?” Gwen asked, breaking through the noise in my head.
Aster arched a brow, resting her chin against her hand. “Professor Stone? He probably sits alone with a rare book and an overfilled espresso pot, pretending he’s immune to mortality.”
“I bet his cake is just black coffee and self-loathing,” I muttered, drawing a low laugh from Gwen.
“And the candles,” she added, “are lit by sheer judgment.”
Our laughter spilled over itself, easy and necessary, a survival instinct more than amusement. Because without humor, there was too much truth, too much of something we didn’t want to name. Even as I smiled, a coil of unease wound itself low in my stomach. It wasn’t the date that unsettled me, it was the inevitability that now I wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about it. About him.
Their laughter faded slowly, dissolving into the hum of the café, the clink of cups and low music bleeding through the air. Gwen and Aster were still joking, something about how Professor Stone probably catalogued birthday cards by year andcolor, but their voices had already blurred. My focus had drifted to a place neither of them could follow.
I kept thinking of him alone in that quiet apartment I’d built for him in my mind, the tall windows shut against the city, the immaculate desk, the amber glass of a half-finished drink reflecting light that never quite warmed the room. But then the image twisted. What if he wasn’t alone? What if there was someone waiting for him? Someone who belonged in his world, a woman who carried herself with the same measured calm, who spoke in clean lines and never lost her footing. Someone whose presence didn’t unravel under his silence but met it, matched it, maybe even enjoyed it.
The thought burned through me, unwanted but impossible to extinguish. It wasn’t jealousy in the usual sense, it was something rawer, meaner, a tightening in my chest that felt both foreign and familiar. I told myself it didn’t matter, that none of it was my concern. He was my professor, a man built from distance and restraint, who turned quiet into command and studied people as though they were problems to be solved. Whatever he did beyond that office, whoever waited for him, had nothing to do with me.
But my body didn’t believe me. My pulse betrayed me, marking every imagined detail of his evening in a rhythm I couldn’t control. I sipped my coffee, hoping the heat would dull the ache that had begun to spread beneath my ribs, but it only sharpened it, making it feel more real.
By the time we left the café, the light outside had shifted into that suspended hour between dusk and night, the sky washed in muted violet that refused to settle into darkness. The air pressed cold against my skin, crawling through my sleeves and biting at my knuckles until they stung. Gwen and Aster walked ahead, their laughter caught by the wind, distant and muffled.I followed behind, my thoughts a tangle of noise, my silence heavier than it had been when the day began.
When I reached my apartment, my hands ached from the cold, and the fatigue behind my eyes had deepened into something that felt less physical than mental. I hung my coat on the chair, dropped my bag by the door, and set the folder, the one with his handwriting, his scent, his weight, on the coffee table. It sat there, still and expectant, daring me to open it. I didn’t.
Instead, I turned on my laptop and opened a half-read article for class. The words blurred before I reached the end of the paragraph, each line slipping into the next until meaning scattered. I switched to music. Something quiet enough to think over but loud enough to hide behind.
I couldn’t focus. Not on the song humming low from the laptop speakers, not on the half-read article still glowing on the screen, not on anything that should have kept my mind anchored. My eyes betrayed me, drifting again and again toward the folder on the bed. Its manila edges caught the dim light, too sharp for something so still, too clean for what they carried. I told myself it was work, that I only needed to skim through his annotations, confirm details, make sense of whatever task he’d assigned. But even as I reached for it, I knew that wasn’t why.
The folder opened beneath my hands, the pages fanning out in perfect order. His handwriting filled the margins in tight, assertive lines, not neat in the conventional sense, but controlled, confident, each letter marked by a subtle arrogance. I traced one note with my eyes, watching the curve of his pen where it bent through every thought. His commentary wasn’t written to clarify. It was meant to provoke. To challenge. Toforce whoever read it to confront the limits of what they thought they knew. It was infuriating. And brilliant. And absolutely him.
The sound of the folder snapping shut cracked through the silence before I realized I’d done it. The pages rustled once, and then the room went still again. I tossed it aside, the weight of it hitting the blanket with a dull thud that somehow felt too soft.
“Prick,” I muttered into the quiet. Then, lower, because honesty always crawled in when no one could hear it, “Beautiful, infuriating, probably-has-a-gorgeous-girlfriend prick.”
The playlist shifted, one song fading into another, a slower rhythm taking its place. I let my head fall back against the pillow, staring up at the ceiling that looked too far away. I told myself not to think about him, not to picture his face, not to imagine his life outside those walls, but my mind betrayed me with ease. I kept seeing him in places he didn’t belong, his voice low and unhurried, his expression unreadable, his silence pressing into spaces it shouldn’t reach.
I imagined what it would feel like if the distance between us wasn’t a boundary. If his restraint cracked for a moment. If the air between us stopped pretending to be neutral. The thought came uninvited and left me burning. It wasn’t something I wanted to want, and yet I did.
The music blurred into nothing. My eyes stayed open long after the room had gone dark, and sleep hovered just close enough to taunt me before slipping away entirely. I turned over. Then again. The sheets twisted around my legs. The air felt wrong, too heavy, too aware, and every breath came too loud, too uneven.
Eventually, I stopped trying. I sat at the edge of the bed, elbows digging into my knees, my fingers pressed to my temples as if I could push the thoughts back into silence. But it wasn’t silence I was fighting. It was him. The echo of his voice. The memory of the way he looked at me in that office, not unkind,not soft, just knowing. As though he could already see what I didn’t want to admit existed.
I told myself I hated him for it. Hated the precision of his control, the way he occupied my mind without effort. But beneath that hate was something darker, something I couldn’t name without destroying the fragile order I lived in.
I didn’t hate him nearly enough.
And that truth was worse than the sleeplessness, worse than the guilt, worse than the thought that somewhere out there, he might have ended his birthday untouched, unbothered, perfectly content while I sat here unraveling over the memory of his hand barely brushing mine.
Pathetic or not, I needed to move. To do something. Anything. Because if I stayed still another second, I’d start imagining what it would feel like if he were here. And that was something I couldn’t afford to picture.
