The Forbidden Professor

Chapter 9

As I sat in my seat in the front row, I knew what I was walking into now.

The first week had the feeling of anticipation and uncertainty. The feeling of moving toward something you didn’t know a thing about.

This was different.

I sat down.

Opened my notebook.

Wrote the date.

Nolan dropped in beside me a minute later, coffee in hand, and greeted me the way he always did. We sat in comfortable silence and I looked at the front of the hall and waited.

~0~

He arrived and the room did what it always did.

I had stopped being surprised by it.

The way the air changed, the way the noise dropped, the way two hundred people simultaneously stopped speaking.

I had stopped being surprised by any of it, except the part that happened inside my own chest when it happened, which I had made no progress on whatsoever.

He set his briefcase down.

Rolled his cuffs.

Looked up.

His gaze moved across the hall — back, middle, front — but when he reached me, he stopped.

I held his gaze, something pulling low inside me.

Then he spoke, his voice filling the room. And class began.

~0~

The lecture was on constitutional amendments.

The mechanics of change built into a document designed to endure. The tension between permanence and adaptability. The specific genius and arrogance of men who wrote rules for a world they couldn't fully imagine.

He was good at this.

I knew that.

I had known it from the first day.

But there was still something about watching him do it. The entire precision of it, the way the conclusion arrived that felt both inevitable and surprising at the same time.

At the forty-five minute mark, he said something that made me write even more.

Something about the nature of rights, about the difference between rights granted and rights recognized, about what it meant when a right existed before the document had even named it….

I thought about that and stopped writing.

I looked up at him.

He didn’t look at me.

Something like disappointment moved through me.

I pushed the feeling down and kept writing.

~0~

As class ended, the hall emptied.

The rush of it, bags zipping, the accumulated release of two hundred people who had been still for fifty minutes, and then the noise of it fading as they filed out through the back.

I was putting my notebook into my bag when I heard it.

"Ms.Beaumont."

I looked up.

He was at the front, still at the board. His arms crossed.

"Stay," he said.

It wasn't a question.

Nolan was still beside me, bag already on his shoulder, and I felt him look at me.Then he said quietly, "See you in the dining hall," and was gone.

I was watching the last few students file out through the back doors. Then the hall was empty.

And it was just the two of us.

I stood in the front row with my bag over my shoulder with the empty hall stretching behind me and looked at him, swallowing hard.

"The amendment process," he said.

I blinked.

"You wrote something in your notes about it." His voice was low. "What was it?"

I held his gaze for a moment.

I opened my bag and pulled out my notebook and found the page… the place where my pen had gone still. When I’d stopped writing and had looked at him.

He’d noticed that. Even when I’d thought he hadn’t.

I looked at what I'd written before and after the gap.

"That rights aren't created by the documents that name them," I said. "That many times they exist in the gap between what the law says and what people already know to be true. The amendment process is just the law catching up."

Silence.

He was looking at me in a way that had no softness in it, just an absolute focus.

"You’re paying attention," he said.

I held his gaze. “I always pay attention to you.”

Something moved through his expression, barely readable. He didn’t say anything more.

The hall was completely silent around us.

The sound of my heart beating the only thing I heard.

I stared at him. His arms crossed, his dark eyes, his gaze that made something tighten in me.

And before I knew it, my feet had started moving.

Slowly, at first, like I was giving myself time to stop, like some part of me was waiting for the rational part to intervene.

It didn't, and I kept walking.

I saw the slight shift in his jaw, the way his eyes tracked me coming, the way he didn't move even an inch.

I didn’t stop until I was right in front of him.

Close enough that I had to tip my chin up to look at him. Close enough that the air between us had been reduced to almost nothing.

His eyes held mine.

Dark. Still. Waiting.

I knew exactly what I was doing.

My hand came up to his chest… just resting there, feeling the fabric of his shirt and underneath it, the solid reality of him.

And then I lifted onto my toes and pressed my mouth to his.

For one second nothing happened.

He remained still, unmoved. And a sense of having made a mistake spiraled through me.

Then his hand came to my jaw.

His grip certain and deliberate, and his mouth came down harder on mine — warm and demanding and nothing like the soft thing I'd started. My hands gripped his shirt. And for that moment there was nothing else, nothing at all. Just him.

He pulled back.

An inch.

His hand still on my jaw. His eyes on mine.

"My office," he said. “One hour."