Six
1621 Words
Wright:
I make it around the corner before I let myself breathe.
Not a real breath.Not one that reaches my lungs.Just a quick, shallow drag of air like someone surfacing from underwater for a single second before going under again.
I stop beside the vending machine, brace a hand against it, and drop my head.
“Jesus Christ.”
My pulse is a hammer in my throat.
I shouldn’t have said her name. I shouldn’t have looked at her. I sure as hell shouldn’t have said Miss Hart, like it didn’t cost me anything to put that wall back between us.
But what was I supposed to do? Stand there while administration gave their friendly reminder that professors shouldn’t get “overly informal,” with you—Emma—standing right in front of me with flushed cheeks and eyes that looked like you’d just run from me or toward me. I couldn’t decide which.
I press both hands to my face, palms dragging down slowly.
She saw it.The administrator.Saw the way I stiffened when she said “boundaries.”Saw the way Emma’s breath hitched.Saw all the things she wasn’t supposed to see if I were the kind of responsible, unshakeable academic the university thinks they hired.
My reflection stares back at me from the vending machine’s plexiglass—jaw tight, eyes darker than they should be, tie slightly askew.
I look like a man trying very hard not to think about a student, and failing.
A door closes down the hall, footsteps receding. I straighten and tug my tie into place.
Get it together.
I try to walk toward my office. I make it ten steps before the memory of her expression knocks the breath out of me:
That flicker of jealousy when she saw me speaking to another woman.Sharp. Barely-there.But real.
Fuck.
I shouldn’t want that.I shouldn’t love that.
I open my office door, slip inside, lock it, and lean back against the wood with a quiet thud.
The room is dim, lit only by the thin slice of late-afternoon light coming through the blinds. Dust floats in slow spirals. My desk is a mountain of submissions I should be grading.
Should be.
I sit in my chair instead and scrub both hands through my hair.
She ran into me today. Literally, warm hands. A small gasp. The kind that went straight down my spine like a fist around my nerves.
And then she looked up at me—eyes wide, breath unsteady—and for three seconds I forgot where we were, who I was supposed to be, and what a colossal disaster this already is.
Her name in my mouth felt like a confession.
I close my eyes.
If administration is tightening rules, if they’re watching, if someone saw us—if anyone so much as whispers—
I could lose everything.
And yet…
Yet I still asked her to look at me before she left. I still let myself linger on the shape of her panic-flushed mouth.I still wanted—
No.
I stand abruptly, needing movement, needing something to do that isn’t imagining her in the front row tomorrow, trying to look anywhere but at me. Or worse—looking only at me.
Her voice echoes in my head:
“I didn’t hear anything. I am basically deaf.”
A laugh tries to escape my chest—a broken one.
She always does that, somehow—disarms the panic clawing up my ribs with some ridiculous line that shouldn’t affect me at all.
I pace.
I shouldn’t care this much. I shouldn’t feel this much.
But she looked hurt when I called her Miss Hart.
I saw it.
I felt it.
And now there’s a knot in my chest I can’t untangle.
I stop pacing, brace my hands on the back of the sofa, and bow my head.
“Emma,” I whisper, like saying her name to an empty room is somehow safer.
It isn’t.
Nothing about this is safe.
I should treat her like every other student. I should ignore the way she looked at me today. I should pretend my skin doesn’t still remember the shape of her waist beneath my hands.
But tomorrow…
Tomorrow she’ll sit in my classroom. Tomorrow she’ll look at me. Tomorrow I’ll be expected to pretend none of this is happening.
I exhale slowly, a sound full of restraint and something darker.
I am not going to survive tomorrow either.
And for the first time, I admit it—not out loud, not entirely, but enough that the room seems to pulse with the truth:
I don’t want distance.
I want her.
Badly enough that it terrifies me.
Badly enough that calling her Miss Hart felt like swallowing glass.
Badly enough that I’m already imagining her walking into my classroom, trying not to meet my eyes—and failing.
I drag a hand over my mouth.
This is going to burn everything down.
And God help me—
A part of me is already on fire.
I get to my classroom early because I can’t pace in my office anymore without wearing a groove into the floor.
I’m mid–internal meltdown when the door opens and Alex strolls in like an agent of chaos.
Of course.
He takes one look at me and actually winces. “Jesus. Did you sleep in a dumpster? Or just think about your life choices until dawn?”
“I’m fine.”
“Yeah, you look fine. You look like a Victorian poet who coughed blood into a handkerchief and whispered someone’s name dramatically.”
“Alex.”
He drags a desk chair backward and sits in it like he’s staging an intervention. “Start talking.”
“I don’t want to—”
“You do,” he says, sipping his coffee. “Because your left eye is twitching, and that only happens when you’re repressing enough emotion to drown a mid-size city.”
I clench my jaw.
He waits.
And waits.
And unfortunately, I broke.
“It’s a student.”
Alex goes still. Slowly lowers his coffee.
“Oh,” he says, voice bright with sick fascination. “Oh, this is gonna be good. Continue.”
I stare at the wall as if it might swallow me. “Her name is Emma. She’s in my intro section. And I—”
“What?” he prompts. “Find her distracting? Charming? Hot enough to make you forget MLA format exists?”
I shut my eyes.
“I slept with her.”
Alex’s inhale is so sharp I’m amazed he doesn’t choke.
“You WHAT?”
“It was before the semester started,” I rush out. “I didn’t know. She didn’t know. It was one night. I thought—” I scrub a hand over my face. “I thought I’d never see her again.”
Alex sets his coffee down like he’s holding a bomb.
“You had a one-night stand,” he recaps slowly, “with a gorgeously chaotic twenty-year-old—”
“I didn’t say she was—”
“—you had a one-night stand,” he repeats louder, “with a gorgeously chaotic twenty-year-old who then waltzed into your classroom like the opening credits of every bad life decision you’ve ever made—”
“Alex.”
He stands. Paces. Laughs once—too loud.
“Oh my GOD,” he says, pointing at me. “You’re living a CW plotline. You’re a walking teaser trailer. This is incredible.”
“This is a disaster.”
He waves a hand. “How was it?”
“Alex.”
“Fine, fine.” He sits back down, eyes gleaming. “So now you’re… what? Tortured? Brooding? Fantasizing?”
“No.”
“Yes.”
He catches the tiny freeze in my expression and groans dramatically. “You absolute MENACE.”
I drag both hands through my hair. “I’m trying to keep distance.”
“How is that going?”
“I called her Miss Hart.”
Alex gasps. “You used her GOVERNMENT NAME? Oh, you’re done. That’s the academic equivalent of throwing yourself down the stairs.”
I glare.
He leans forward, elbows on knees. “Okay. Serious hat on.”
It doesn’t look serious. It looks like a raccoon wearing a crown.
“You slept with her before you knew. Completely allowed. Not illegal. Not unethical. Just inconvenient as hell. Now, is she into you?”
My pulse jumps.
Alex sees it instantly and groans again. “You’re both so stupidly gone for each other you might as well tattoo ‘liability’ on your foreheads.”
“This could cost me my job.”
“It won’t,” he says simply. “Not if you’re careful. Not if you wait until she’s out of your class. Not if you stop making it worse by pretending you don’t want her.”
I stare at him.
He smirks.
“And not if you stop calling her Miss anything like you’re a Regency-era duke who can’t admit he’s in love with the governess.”
“I’m not in love.”
“Sure,” he says. “And I’m Beyoncé.”
The door creaks—students starting to trickle in.
Alex stands, clapping a hand onto my shoulder with mock sympathy.
“Good luck, Professor. Try not to combust when she walks in.”
He heads toward the door, then pauses, grinning devilishly over his shoulder.
“Oh—and for the love of academia? Next time, maybe check your one-night stand isn’t enrolled.”
And he leaves.
I sit there, pulse pounding, knowing he’s right about only one thing:
I am absolutely, irreversibly f****d.
- Writer
