My Professor’s Dark Christmas Obsession

Chapter 3

It happened the way slow things always happened. All at once, and then you realized it had been happening for a long time.

By the third week of December, Autumn's life had gotten very small without her noticing. The apartment was quiet because Maya had taken a job offer in another city, which was just bad timing. Jess was distant because they were both busy with school, which was normal.

The group of friends that used to fill her weekends had kind of dissolved, which happened in senior year when everyone was scrambling to figure out what came next.

None of it felt connected. None of it felt like anything other than ordinary life being a little lonelier than usual lately. She stopped asking herself why Gabriel felt like the most solid thing in her world. She just let it be true.

She was at his house four nights a week now. She texted him about things she found funny and he always responded, never too fast, never too slow, always like the message had been worth his time to read.

He knew how she took her coffee by the second week. He knew which topics made her go quiet and which ones made her argumentative, and he seemed to enjoy both equally, which no one had ever done before, not once in twenty-two years of Autumn being exactly the kind of person who was too much for some people and not enough for others.

What she couldn't see, because you can't see the walls while you're still inside them, was that her world hadn't gotten smaller on its own. Someone had been making it smaller. Carefully and patiently. One piece at a time.

Derek had been her boyfriend in her sophomore year. He was gone eighteen months ago, expelled for academic dishonesty that no one who knew him could quite believe. The charges had been real enough on paper. The evidence had been clear and placed exactly right.

Unknown to Autumn, Gabriel Moreau had made one phone call to the right person at the right time, and Derek had been gone in three weeks. Autumn had grieved the relationship and moved on, never connecting it to anything else, because why would she?

The rumors that had gone through her friend group last spring had been vague. Little things.

“Autumn has been acting weird lately.” “I heard she said something to Maya.” “I don't know, she's just been off.”

Anonymous messages had been sent to the right people, worded carefully enough to plant doubt without ever being traceable. Jess had pushed back on them, fiercely at first, and then less fiercely, and then the doubt had just settled in like weather, changing the temperature of things without anyone being able to point to the exact moment it happened.

Maya's job offer had come in November. It was real on paper. It had come with a salary, and a relocation package. It was also exactly the kind of offer that didn't come out of nowhere to someone at Maya's experience level, and if Maya had asked anyone to verify the recruiter, she would have found a phone number that led to a voicemail box that existed only for this purpose. But Maya hadn't checked. Maya had just been thrilled and grateful and gone.

One stone was being turned at a time with no drama. There was no single moment Autumn could point to and say: “There, that's when it changed.”

On a Wednesday night three weeks in, Autumn was sitting on the floor of Gabriel's library with a book open in her lap while he marked something at his desk, and she realized she had stopped thinking of this as unusual. She just lived here sometimes now. That was just how things were.

"You're doing that thing again," he said without looking up.

"What thing?"

"Where you go quiet and your face does about nine different things and you think I can't tell."

She laughed, a real laugh, the kind that surprised her. "I was just thinking that I used to be someone who had plans on Wednesday nights."

"And now?" He looked up then. The lamp on his desk cast the room in warm gold light and he was watching her the way he always watched her, like she was the most interesting thing in whatever room they were in.

"Now I'm on your floor," she said. "Which is honestly not a complaint."

Something moved across his face. Quick, there and gone. "Good," he said, and went back to marking.

She didn't sleep when she got home that night. She sat on the edge of her bed and opened her contacts and scrolled to the bottom. It was some restless middle-of-the-night impulse, the kind she got when something was wrong but she couldn’t say what.

She got to the bottom of the list and just sat there. There was no one she could call. Not one person who would actually pick up. The contacts list was full of names she hadn't spoken to in weeks or months, names that had gone cold in ways she hadn't noticed until just now, staring at all of them at midnight.

The silence in her chest was cold, and just then she realized she understood something she couldn’t immediately un-understand.

She was alone. She had been made to be alone, and she hadn't even felt it happening.

Suddenly, her phone buzzed.

Gabriel had sent a voice message. She pressed play before she’d thought about it, and his voice came through sounding low and unhurried, reading a passage from a book she hadn't heard of. It was something about the way winter changes a person, about how the cold strips everything back and what's left is either something true or nothing at all.

His voice was steady and warm and by the time it ended the cold thing in her chest had loosened just a little, but it was enough. She lay back and stared at the ceiling and thought: he knew. He knew exactly what she needed at exactly this moment. He always knew.

She didn’t ask herself how. She didn’t think about the fact that it was past midnight, that she had said nothing to him, and he’d sent the voice message without any text before it. No checking in, no “are you awake” text, just the voice message landing right on time like something that had been scheduled.

She didn't ask herself any of the right questions. She curled onto her side and closed her eyes and let the warmth of his voice sit in the room with her. She felt grateful in a way that should have scared her because it felt a little too much like need.

But she didn't feel scared. She felt safe.

And that was the most dangerous part of it all.