The Professor She Was Forbidden to Want

Chapter 2

Maren's POV

I knocked on his office door at exactly 9:58, two minutes early, because showing up early was the only kind of control I had left over any of this.

"Come in."

The voice through the door was low and even, no rush to it at all, which somehow made me more nervous than if he'd sounded annoyed. I pushed the door open and there he was, standing at a bookshelf with his back to me, one hand pulling a journal off the shelf like I hadn't just interrupted anything.

"Professor Marlowe. I'm Maren Ellison."

"I know who you are." He slid the journal back into place and turned around. "Sit down."

He wasn't what I expected. I'd built him up in my head as some older, rumpled academic type from the way people talked about him, like he'd been chairing that department for twenty years instead of three. He looked closer to my age than I wanted to admit, dark hair pushed back like he ran a hand through it and forgot about it, glasses folded shut in his shirt pocket instead of on his face. He didn't smile when I sat down. He didn't do the small talk thing professors usually did either. How's your semester going, how's the research coming, he just pulled my file toward him and started flipping through it like I wasn't even in the room.

"Your last chapter draft," he said, without looking up. "The turnout model. You controlled for income but not for education level."

That wasn't a question. It also wasn't true, and my nerves burned off fast enough that I heard myself answer.

"I did control it. It's in the appendix, not the main table, because it wasn't statistically significant on its own."

He looked up at that. Just for a second, like he hadn't expected me to push back.

"Show me."

I pulled my laptop out of my bag faster than I meant to and turned it toward him, the appendix table opened, and he leaned forward to actually look at it instead of just glancing. He didn't say anything for a good ten seconds. I made myself sit still and not fill the silence, even though every part of me wanted to.

"Huh," he said finally. "You're right. That's a decent catch, actually,most people bury that in a footnote and hope nobody asks."

"I figured somebody would ask." I said

"Somebody did." A flicker of something crossed his face, not quite a smile but close to one. "Preston, I'm guessing, at your funding review."

"How'd you know that?"

"Because Preston asks the same three questions to every single student he's ever reviewed, and that's one of them." He closed my laptop gently and slid it back toward me. "You handled it fine, from what I heard."

"You heard about my funding review?"

"I chair the committee that approves the funding, Ms. Ellison. I heard about everyone's funding review."

Right. Obviously. I felt my face go warm and hated it.

"Anyway." He leaned back in his chair, arms crossed, studying me in a way that made me want to look at literally anything else in the room. "Halstead's notes on you were thin. Which either means he didn't think you needed much oversight, or he didn't think it through very carefully before he went on leave. I'm guessing it's the first one, based on the last twenty minutes."

"Is that a compliment?" I asked

"It's an observation." But there it was again, that almost-smile. "I don't hand out compliments in first meetings. Ask anyone."

"Noted." I said

We went through the rest of it after that,timeline, next chapter deadline, what he expected from committee meetings going forward and it was fine, it was normal, it was the kind of conversation I'd had with committee chairs before. Except it wasn't, really, because he kept circling back to my actual argument instead of just rubber-stamping it. He pushed on my second hypothesis hard that I had to defend it twice, and the second time I got a little sharp about it, more than I meant to, and instead of getting annoyed he just tilted his head like he was recalibrating something.

"You don't back down easily," he said.

"Is that a problem?"

"Didn't say it was a problem." He glanced at the clock on the wall, then back at me, and for a second his expression shifted into something almost like surprise. "You've been here forty minutes. This was supposed to be a twenty-minute meeting."

I hadn't noticed. That was the unsettling part, I genuinely hadn't noticed the time at all.

"Sorry, I can…."

"I didn't say stop." He said it fast, cutting me off, and then seemed to catch himself, like he heard how that sounded. He cleared his throat and looked back down at his notes. "I mean,we're covering ground. That's a good thing. Go on, finish the point about the education variable."

So I did. And somehow another ten minutes went by after that, and neither of us mentioned the clock again.

When I finally stood up to leave, my legs were stiff from sitting so long, and my brain felt like it had been through an actual workout instead of a check-in meeting. He walked me to the door, which felt strange,professors don't usually do that, and had his hand on the frame when he said the thing that stopped me cold.

"You should know something, since it's probably going to come up eventually."

"Okay."

"Halstead didn't just hand your file to whoever was next on the list when he went on leave." Julian's voice was even, careful, like he was choosing each word before it left his mouth. "I asked for it. Specifically. Before he even announced he was taking leave."

I stood there in the doorway, coat half on, not sure what to do with that.

"Why?"

He looked at me for a second too long before he answered.

"That's a longer conversation than we have time for right now." He glanced past me, down the hallway, and I followed his gaze,Corinne Vance was standing outside the office next door, very obviously not moving, very obviously listening. Julian's jaw tightened, just barely. "We'll talk about it next week."

"Professor…"

"Next week, Ms. Ellison." He was already stepping back, already reaching to close the door. "Same time."

The door clicked shut before I could get another word out, and I stood there in the hallway with Corinne staring at me like she was doing math in her head, and no idea at all what Julian Marlowe had just decided not to tell me.