My Professor’s Dark Christmas Obsession

Chapter 2

By Friday she was getting to class early.

She told herself it was because she liked to get a coffee from the vending machine at the end of the hall before the session started, and it had nothing to do with the fact that Gabriel was usually already there when she arrived, standing at the window or writing something on the board, and that the ten minutes before class officially began had started to feel like the best part of her day.

She was an excellent liar when the only person she was lying to was herself.

By Wednesday of the second week, she had picked her outfits the night before, twice, and then told herself that was just because she was tired in the mornings and it saved time.

By Thursday she had stayed two hours after class ended because the conversation had drifted somewhere interesting and neither of them had moved to stop it. She drove home at seven in the evening with the radio loud and the heater full blast and the particular restless feeling of someone who was enjoying something they knew they probably shouldn't be.

On Friday Gabriel slid a card across the desk as she was packing up her things.

She looked at it before she touched it. The address was handwritten. It was a street she recognized, about fifteen minutes from campus. She looked up at him.

"My library has things the university doesn't carry," he said. "First editions, and some personal collections. For what we're doing in the next few weeks, they'd be worth looking at directly. Office hours here are limited and the material is dense." He paused. "Saturday at two, if you want."

She picked up the card. "I'll think about it," she said.

That night she texted him to confirm.

His house was a Victorian fifteen minutes from campus and when she pulled up in front of it she sat in her car for a moment with the engine running and her hands still on the wheel.

The place looked like something off a Christmas card. Tall windows with warm yellow light coming through. A wreath on the door. Smoke from the chimney. It was the kind of house that made you lower your guard without realizing it, the kind that said: nothing bad has ever happened here.

She should have paid attention to that feeling. The instinct that made her sit in the car for an extra thirty seconds. She thought it was nerves. But it wasn't.

Inside, it smelled like pine and old paper. There was something slow and savory on the stove. A fire was going. Music played somewhere quietly.

Gabriel made her tea without asking how she took it. She watched him do it from across the kitchen, measuring things, moving with the ease of someone who had done this exact sequence before, and when he set the mug in front of her it was exactly right; the temperature, strength, and the small spoonful of honey she hadn't mentioned.

"How did you know I take honey?" she said.

He looked faintly amused. "You mentioned it during our first session. You said your grandmother used to make tea with honey when you were sick."

She had said that. She had said it once, in passing, in the middle of a long discussion about something else entirely. She’d forgotten she said it. He hadn’t.

They worked for two hours. It was the best kind of work, the kind that made her feel very smart and capable, like her brain was running the way it was supposed to. But somewhere in the middle of it, without her noticing the exact moment it happened, the conversation shifted away from the text, toward her.

Her scholarship. The pressure of it, the constant low-level dread that one bad grade would unravel four years of work. The way she had grown up knowing that college was something other people's families had, not hers, not the household held together by her grandmother's careful hands and too-small budget.

Gabriel listened the way people never listened. He wasn’t waiting for his turn to talk. He didn’t tilt the conversation back toward himself when she got too personal. He didn’t offer reassurance that cost him nothing. He just listened and asked the next question, then listened again.

"You've never felt like you actually belong here, have you," he said. It wasn’t a question.

She opened her mouth to argue, then closed it. "No," she said. "Not once in four years."

"You will," he said, very quietly, and looked at her in a way that made the words feel true in a way she hadn't expected.

She didn't notice that he had never said anything personal back. Not once. Every time the conversation got too close to his own life he redirected it, gently, so naturally she didn't feel the turn. She was too busy feeling seen for the first time in longer than she could remember.

Then he reached across her to turn a page, and his hand brushed hers and stayed for a second. One second, maybe two. He didn't look at her when it happened. He just kept reading, like it was nothing, and they had done this a hundred times. When she finally looked up at his face there was nothing there to read at all.

She drove home with the radio too loud and her cheeks too warm and every nerve in her body talking all at once.

This is fine, she thought. He's my professor and this is fine and I’m a grown adult who’s handling this completely fine.

But Autumn wasn’t fine. She was exactly where he’d spent three years trying to put her.

She parked outside her building and sat in the dark for a minute, turning his card over in her fingers. Then she went upstairs and lay on her bed and stared at the ceiling, trying to figure out what exactly was happening to her, and whether it was a good thing or a bad thing, and what she was going to do about it.

She couldn't answer any of those questions. But she already knew she was going back.

In his house across town, Gabriel was at the kitchen sink washing the two mugs from their session, smiling. It was slow and private and satisfied, the way a man smiled when a plan that had taken a very long time was finally beginning to move forward.

On the counter beside him, half tucked under a dish towel, was a picture of a young woman with dark hair, pale skin, and sharp eyes, caught mid-laugh in someone's backyard a long time ago.

She looked exactly like Autumn. She wasn’t Autumn.

She had been dead for twenty years.