I inhaled sharply, jaw clenching. Christ. I needed to stop. I needed to fucking end this before it swallowed both of us whole.
But that was the problem. Every time I told myself to stop, I found another reason not to. Even now, surrounded by professors droning about symposium panels and seating charts, my mind was unraveling, falling apart in the same direction it always did. Toward her.
Her mouth. Her voice. That barely-there smile when she said,No promises.The words had coiled around me for days, lodged somewhere between temptation and threat.
Someone called my name. I gave an answer, automatic, detached, but my head wasn’t here. It was across the table, where Edwina Carter sat pretending to be composed. Pretending she didn’t care what I thought.
She did. I could feel it in the smallest shifts, the way she never looked too long, never too soon. The way her voice always caught a fraction when she had to address me directly. And maybe that was what fucked me up most, knowing that the more she tried to hide it, the more I wanted to strip her down to truth.
I wanted to test her.
Push her.
Find out how far I could go before she stopped pretending and begged for the thing she swore she didn’t want.
And I knew —I fucking knew— that if I kept this up, I’d reach a point I couldn’t crawl back from.
I looked at her again. Just once. But once was all it ever took.
Her eyes met mine across the room. No flinch. No blink. Just a silent acknowledgment that neither of us was fooling the other anymore.
The meeting bled to an end. Chairs scraped, papers shuffled, voices rose in a half-hearted exchange of goodbyes. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead, washing everything in dull clarity. I didn’t move. Not until everyone else had gone.
She stayed seated, deliberate in her slowness. Her hands smoothed the pages of her notebook, then lingered too long at the corner of the table. She knew I was watching. She always knew.
When she finally looked up, her voice came quiet, careful. “Professor.”
I nodded once, slow, the word settling somewhere dangerous in my chest. “Miss Carter.”
She hesitated, then added, “Good meeting.”
I let the corner of my mouth shift. “You did well.”
Her brows drew together slightly. “It was just a meeting.”
“Yes,” I said, my voice rougher than I intended. “But you listened. Closely.”
Her lips curved, barely. “Would you rather I doodled in the margins?”
My eyes dropped to the edge of her open notebook, a faint graphite curve, the ghost of a shape, a line that wasn’t academic at all. Before I could read more, she snapped it shut, the sound sharp in the silence.
A single heartbeat stretched between us. Then another.
“That depends,” I said, the syllables dragging out between us until the air turned heavy. “Were you drawing me?”
She froze, lashes lifting slowly, eyes cutting to mine with the kind of irritation that barely hid its tremor. Then she rolled them, sharp and deliberate. “Don’t flatter yourself.”
Too fucking late.
I moved around the table, unhurried, my steps measured but carrying a quiet threat. The distance between us thinned until we stood at the threshold, where the light met the shadow. Close, but never close enough. Her breath touched the air between us, and it felt charged, dangerous, waiting to break.
“You haven’t submitted your term project paper yet,” I said, letting the reminder come out softer than it should’ve, too intimate to pass for simple authority.
“I’ll send it tonight,” she said, lifting her chin. The movement was small, defiant, the kind that made me want to grip her jaw and tilt it higher.
“Make sure you do,” I murmured. “We wouldn’t want to confuse your competence with distraction.”
Her eyes flashed, the sharp edge of her voice returning. “I’m not the distracted one.”
