The Forbidden Professor

Chapter 3

My new roommate came in twenty minutes later than I did with a bag over her shoulder and a coffee in each hand. Her hair silky black. Her eyes a stunning green.

She stopped dead when she saw me and then visibly relaxed.

"Thank god," she said, dropping her bag with a thud. Somehow spilling neither coffee. "You look completely normal."

I wasn't entirely sure how to respond to that.

She held out one of the coffees and I took one with a polite smile. "I had a roommate in boarding school," she said, perching on the edge of her bed and kicking off both shoes in quick succession, "who kept a dream journal."

"Okay," I said, not sure where she was going with this.

"She read it to me,” she paused. "Every morning." Another pause, longer this time. "Out loud." She looked at me almost crazed. "With voices. Different voices. For the different dream characters."

I felt something unexpected then small, like a door opening onto a room I'd forgotten was there.

I hadn't dreamed in almost two years.

Not since my father had disappeared and my sleeping brain had apparently decided to save me from the pain of dreaming of him. I hadn't thought to miss it until this exact moment.

"I don't keep a dream journal," I said.

She grinned. "We're going to be just fine then."

~0~

Her name was Lia.

She was the daughter of wealthy CEOs who owned companies she didn’t know a thing about, and who she barely saw and spoke to even less.

She was studying psychology, which she announced the first night lying flat on her back on top of her covers, arms folded behind her head, staring up at the ceiling.

"Celebrity psychology," she clarified.

I paused in the middle of unpacking books onto the shelf above my desk. "That's a thing?"

"It should be." She turned her head to look at me, completely serious. "Have you ever actually watched a former child star try to order at a coffee shop? The anxiety, Sienna. The complete inability to interact with a barista like a functioning member of society." She turned back to the ceiling. "There's so much going on there."

I gave her a look. "And you want to study it."

"I want to help those poor, deprived souls." She said it with complete sincerity.

I put the last book on the shelf and sat down on my bed.

Lia was already somewhere deep inside her own thoughts, comfortable with the silence she'd created, the fairy lights casting everything amber and warm.

And suddenly I felt more at peace being here than I did before.

~0~

Our mandatory Freshman events were made ten times better by Lia’s narration.

There was an orientation that ran forty minutes over and included a segment on campus recycling that Lia had annotated on the schedule, writing: is she okay?? this is about bins — and I had to look away to stop myself from actually bursting into laughter.

~0~

The welcome dinner was next. There were long tables filled with hundreds of freshmen and we were relieved when we found a spot to squeeze into.

After a moment, Lia looked around, and said "okay" under her breath like she was accepting a challenge.

Within twenty minutes she knew the names and hometowns of the people on both sides of us and had established that the boy across the table had once been an extra in a regional pharmaceutical commercial, which she treated as the most interesting thing she'd heard all week.

I laughed under my breath at all her comments and worked through my food, feeling like I could breathe easily for the first time in a while.

~0~

It was Lia who brought him up while we were stuck in another Freshman event. A candle lighting ceremony meant to officially welcome us to campus.

She titled her head at me.

"You have Professor Blackwell," she said.

I looked at her, my stomach tightening. "How do you know that?"

She had an expression I couldn't quite read. "What do you think of him?"

I tried to keep my face neutral. "He's…a good lecturer."

Lia stared at me for a long moment.

"Sienna."

"What."

"Everyone knows Professor Blackwell is hands down the hottest professor here.” She sighed. “I mean he makes you want to fail just so you can keep on being in his classes.” She practically giggled then.

I said nothing.

I kept my face completely still and said nothing. Tried to pay attention to the words being said about the best four years of our lives.

Lia watched me do all of this with the sharp, bright attention of someone who saw something obvious and wasn’t going to let it go.

"Every girl on this campus has thought about it," she said. "Nobody says it out loud." She paused. "But everybody has thought about it."

"Thought about what, exactly," I said.

My voice came out even.

Completely even.

Lia's mouth curved slow, knowing, the smile of someone who had just gotten exactly the confirmation she was looking for.

"You know what I’m talking about," she said. “But don’t do it.” She held up the student handbook we’d just been given and pointed to it. “You’ll get expelled and he’ll get fired. Not worth it, Sienna.”

I held her gaze and let out a small laugh. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

And I didn’t.

Just because I wanted to go to my professor’s office hours and hear him talk about the law some more, did not mean I wanted anything to happen between us.

That was crazy.

But for the rest of the evening I was aware of Lia watching me, in between everything else, with that small careful smile.

~0~

That night Lia fell asleep mid-sentence.

This was something I was already learning about her…she didn't wind down. She simply stopped. One moment fully there, hands moving, mid-thought, and then nothing.

Out completely.

Like someone had reached over and switched her off.

It was actually funny.

I sat at my desk in the amber glow of her fairy lights with my political theory reading open in front of me and didn't read it.

After a while I opened the desk drawer.

The photograph was at the back where I'd put it the day I arrived.

I looked at his face for a long time.

Then closed the drawer.

The sound was very soft.

Across the room, Lia stirred.

I went still.

She turned over slowly and in that moment her eyes opened…. barely, just for a second…and she looked at me. At my face. At the drawer.

She didn't say anything, falling back to sleep.

I sat in the quiet for a long time after.

Eventually, I decided to crawl into bed.

I tried hard not to think about anything else. Not about my other classes. Not about what had actually made me come here. And certainly not about a Law professor who had stared at me for one second and who I now couldn’t wait to see again.