Harder!..Professor ... Craving my Best Friend’s Father

Chapter 2: The Very First time I met Him

Sophia’s POV

The Toronto winter didn’t just bite; it owned you.

Five years before the humid, whiskey-soaked air of Dubai, there was the glass. Sterling’s house in Rosedale was a masterpiece of floor-to-ceiling windows and exposed concrete—a structure that seemed designed to invite the cold in just so he could prove he was strong enough to keep it out.

I was thirteen when my mother, Elena, dragged me and two suitcases up that heated driveway. She was Sterling’s "associate," a term I later realized meant she was the brilliant woman who did the work he was too famous to be bothered with. But to me, she was just the woman who couldn't keep a husband or a house, and Sterling Allen was the man who was going to save us from our own instability.

"Don't touch anything, Soph," my mother hissed, adjusting her coat. "The man lives in a museum. Treat it like one."

The door hadn't even finished swinging open when a blur of messy blonde hair and oversized flannel tackled the silence of the foyer.

"You’re here! Finally!"

That was Mavin. He was thirteen, same as me, but he felt a decade younger and a hundred times louder. He didn't care about the museum. He skidded across the polished limestone floors in his socks, nearly colliding with a minimalist sculpture that probably cost more than my mother’s car.

"I'm Mavin," he beamed, his face a map of freckles and genuine, uncurated joy. "My dad said you were coming. I moved all my LEGOs to the basement so you could have the sunroom as a studio. Do you like drawing? I like drawing, but Dad says my perspective is 'expressionistic,' which is just his way of saying my lines aren't straight."

He didn't wait for an answer. He grabbed my hand—his palm was warm, slightly sticky from orange juice—and pulled me into the heart of the house.

For the first month, Mavin was my entire world. He was the anchor in a house that felt like it was made of ice. We became a singular unit: *Mavin-and-Sophia*. We spent our evenings huddled under a singular duvet in the media room, watching old horror movies and eating cereal straight from the box.

"When we’re older," Mavin whispered one night, the blue light of the TV dancing in his eyes, "we’re going to build our own house. Not like this one. A house with carpets and messy walls. A house where you can jump on the furniture."

"Your dad would hate that," I said, hugging my knees to my chest.

"My dad hates everything that isn't symmetrical," Mavin laughed, tossing a handful of Cheerios into his mouth. "But he likes you. He told Mrs. Gable that you have a 'composed mind.' That’s like a five-star review from him."

I felt a strange, sharp pride at that. *Composed.*

While Mavin was the sun—bright, erratic, and easy to look at—Sterling was the moon. He was a presence you felt even when he wasn't in the room. He was the heavy silence in the hallways and the scent of expensive tobacco that lingered in the library.

The shift happened on a Tuesday in February. Mavin and I were supposed to be doing our geometry homework at the massive oak table in the dining room. Mavin was struggling, his tongue poked out in concentration as he tried to calculate the volume of a cylinder, his sketches of spaceships bleeding into the margins of his notebook.

"I can't do it, Soph," he groaned, dropping his pencil. "Who cares how much space is inside a tube? Let's go outside and see if the pond is frozen enough to slide on."

"I'll be out in a minute," I lied. "I just want to finish this one page."

Mavin drifted away, a whirlwind of energy heading for the mudroom. I stayed. I wasn't looking at the geometry. I was looking at the door to the west wing—the office.

The door was ajar.

I stood up, my movements quiet, practiced. I crept toward the sliver of light. Inside, the room was bathed in a soft, amber glow. There were no LEGOs here. No messy flannel. Just the rhythmic tink-tink-tink of a drafting pencil against a metal ruler.

Sterling was hunched over a light table, his white shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows, revealing forearms that looked like they were carved from the same stone as the house. He looked up, his grey eyes catching mine. He didn't look annoyed. He looked... curious.

"Mavin went outside," he said, his voice a low vibration that seemed to hum in the floorboards. "Why are you still here, Sophia?"

"The geometry," I whispered, stepping into the room. "The cylinders. I wanted to understand the displacement."

He leaned back, the leather of his chair creaking. He beckoned me over with a single, elegant motion of his hand. I walked to the light table. On it was a blueprint for a museum in Tokyo. It was beautiful—a chaotic tangle of lines that somehow, under his hand, made perfect sense.

"Most people see a building as a shell," Sterling said, handing me his drafting pencil. The metal was warm from his grip. "They see the walls. But the secret is the void. The space between the walls is where the life happens. If you control the void, you control the person inside it."

He placed his hand over mine to guide the pencil. His skin was rough, calloused, and utterly steady. I could feel the heat of him through my thin sweater.

"Draw the line, Sophia," he murmured near my ear. "Don't be afraid of the pressure. The paper can take it. Can you?"

I drew the line. It was perfectly straight.

In that moment, Mavin’s laughter echoed from the backyard, muffled by the triple-paned glass. He was outside, falling in the snow, messy and happy and simple. But I was inside, in the dark, with the man who understood the void.

Mavin was my best friend. He was the brother I never had, the boy who promised me a house with messy walls. But as Sterling’s hand stayed on mine just a second too long—a silent, architectural adjustment—I realized I didn't want a house where I could jump on the furniture.

I wanted to be the void that Sterling Allen couldn't control.