“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
I pushed inside and closed the door behind me, then rounded on him. “It was you. Admit it.”
His eyes widened in shock. Eyes that were impossibly green, just like Alex Holland, the boy I first fell for a decade ago.
“Am I in trouble?” he asked.
“I haven’t decided yet,” I replied.
So itwashim. That was the confirmation I needed.
He swallowed, eyes scanning my face with that earnestness that had always been his charm. Cam wasn’t like Jace or Brock. He wasn’t brooding, or intense, or simmering. He was bright, wide-open, almost too sincere for his own good.
And right now, he looked like someone who had been holding back a storm.
He sat on the edge of his bed. A ridiculous little twin mattress, navy sheets balled up at the end, posters peeling from the walls behind him. “I had to do it.”
“Start from the beginning,” I said. I wanted to know everything, to hear his specific thought process. Thewhyandhowmattered as much to me as thewhat. “Walk me through it.”
“There have always been rumors about his being a creep,” Cam explained. “And then I heard about it from someone who was on the basketball team. Apparently, he bragged about it to his teammates. But none of them would turn him in. Bros before hoes and all that bullshit.”
“Right,” I said, sitting on the bed next to him. “Go on.”
“So I started digging. He lives over in the Whitestone Dorms, and his computer is on the Wi-Fi there. It was easy to find. But he was smart. He never stored anything locally. He kept it all on a secure cloud drive. For a while, it was like banging up against a brick wall. I couldn’t get anything.”
Cam brushed some hair away from his face and flashed a smile. “But then I remembered he spent a lot of time over at the frat house. The one half the team is on. Their network is unprotected, because they have so many parties and everyone asks for the Wi-Fi. I had to wait a few weeks for him to get lazy, but he took his laptop over there to study one day. And connected to his cloud drive. Since he was on an unprotected network, I was able to see all the traffic unencrypted. After that, it was easy to download copies of everything. I removed the blurring from him and added it to the women. I sent all the evidence to the campus police, anonymously of course, and then posted some still images online.”
“And the campus-wide emergency text? What about that?”
Cam blushed, smiling over at me in the most beautiful way. “Well, I wanted to add a little flair to it. To make sure the University couldn’t bury the story.”
His knee brushed mine. It was barely anything, but it felt like a slap of heat aimed right between my thighs. The tiny contact shot straight through me, and I briefly stopped thinking about the Davenport scandal. I felt him watching my mouth, theweight of it sinking into my skin, and my lips parted before I could think better of it.
His gaze flickered down, and he let out a shaky breath.
“You’re staring,” I said.
He looked back up at me with a boyish grin, caught out. “You make it impossible not to. Professor.”
The word felt like a title and a challenge all at once.
We continued staring at each other. Neither of us moved.
A burst of shouting echoed from the hallway, someone arguing about who stole whose leftover pizza. A buzz of panic and anticipation coursed through me. My stomach fluttered… half dread, half wanting him to close the space between us.
I knew I was sitting in a dorm room next to one of my students. But after everything I had done, it didn’t feel like the taboo boundary that it was.
Cam leaned in just a fraction. The space between us felt charged, my breath tightening when his fingers grazed my thigh like he was testing how close he could get before I broke.
“You have no idea what you do to me,” he whispered.
Heat pooled low, a delicious ache that made it hard for me to think, hard to remember all the reasons I should have gotten the hell out of his dorm without looking back. Deep down, I wanted this. I’d been wanting it for a while, unable to admit it to myself. The realization was shocking and freeing at the same time.
“Professor…” he breathed.
I bit my lip and gazed over at him. I didn’t think I could be the one to make the first move, but if I gave him all the signals…
And then his self-control snapped.
