The Professor She Was Forbidden to Want

Chapter 3

Maren's POV

Corinne didn't wait for me to get five steps down the hallway.

"So." She fell into step beside me, arms crossed, voice pitched somewhere between casual and accusing. "Forty minutes. That's a long time for a first meeting."

"We had a lot to cover."

"Sure." She said it like she didn't believe a word of it. "I asked him for fifteen minutes last semester to sit in on his seminar. Fifteen. He said no before I finished the sentence."

"I don't know what to tell you, Corinne."

"I'm not blaming you." Her tone said otherwise. "I'm just saying it's interesting, is all. Halstead goes on leave, and suddenly Marlowe's requesting files before it's even official. That's what I heard, anyway. Did he tell you that?"

I stopped walking. "How do you know that?"

"I have ears." She shrugged, but there was something sharp underneath it, something that wanted a reaction out of me. "People talk. Especially about him, since he never talks about himself."

"Well, I don't know why he asked for it. He didn't say."

"Huh." She studied me for a second too long, like she was deciding whether to believe me. "Guess you'll find out."

She peeled off toward the stairwell without saying goodbye, and I stood there in the hallway than I needed to, replaying the conversation and not liking how much of it had been about things I genuinely didn't have answers for.

Toby was already at our usual table when I got to the campus café, one earbud in, laptop open to something he clearly wasn't reading. He pulled the earbud out the second he saw my face.

"That bad?"

"It wasn't bad." I dropped into the chair across from him. "It was weird."

"Weird how?"

I told him everything,the forty minutes, the way Julian had actually engaged with my argument instead of just nodding along, the thing about requesting my file before Halstead even announced the leave. Toby's eyebrows went up somewhere around the file part and stayed there.

"Wait, he specifically asked for you? Like, by name, before it was even official?"

"That's what he said."

"Okay, that's not normal committee stuff, Maren. Professors don't do that. They get assigned whoever's next on the list and complain about it at faculty meetings." He leaned back, chewing on that for a second. "Did he say why?"

"He said it was a longer conversation than we had time for. Then Corinne showed up outside the door and he basically shut it down and told me we'd talk next week."

"Corinne was listening at the door?"

"Corinne is always listening at some door."

Toby laughed, short and a little disbelieving, then sobered up fast. "Okay, look, I probably shouldn't say this, but you should probably know it anyway."

"Know what?" I asked.

"The thing with Marlowe. Two years ago." He lowered his voice even though the café was half empty. "You know he almost didn't get tenure, right? Like, it was this whole thing."

"I heard bits. Nobody ever gives me the actual story, just… 'the thing with Marlowe,' like everyone's supposed to already know it." I said

"Because everyone kind of does, and nobody wants to be the one who says it out loud in case it gets back to him." Toby glanced around again, then continued. "A TA filed a complaint against him. Misconduct, I think, something serious enough that it went to a full review. The whole department was on lockdown about it for months. And then it turned out the complaint wasn't true, the TA admitted she'd made it up over a grade dispute but by then it had already gone through half the process. He got cleared completely, but I heard it almost tanked his tenure case, just from the review dragging on so long."

"Holy shit."

"Yeah." Toby nodded slowly. "So if he's being weirdly careful about how he handles a student now, that's probably why."

I sat with that for a second, turning it over. It didn't make him requesting my file make more sense. If anything, it made less sense because a man that was careful, that burned by something like that, choosing to go out of his way for a student he never even met.

"You okay?" Toby asked, watching me a little too closely.

"Yeah. Just thinking."

"About Marlowe."

"About the meeting," I said, which wasn't really an answer, and Toby's face said he knew it.

A week went by faster than it should have, which was its own kind of annoying, because I told myself I had time to figure out what to even ask him. I didn't. I was back at his door at 9:50 on the dot before I landed on a single question that didn't sound either too nosy or too much like I actually cared.

He was at his desk this time, not the bookshelf, and looked up the second I knocked.

"Ms. Ellison. Sit."

I sat. He didn't waste time on small talk again, just pulled up something on his screen and started talking through my next chapter deadline, timeline adjustments, the usual. It was almost disappointing how normal it was, right up until I couldn't stand it anymore.

"You said we'd talk about it," I said, cutting into a sentence about literature review revisions. "The file thing. Why did you ask for it?"

He stopped. Set his pen down slowly, like he was buying himself a second to decide something.

"Right." He exhaled through his nose. "I read your conference paper. Last spring, the one on turnout suppression models. I wasn't on the panel, I just…I was in the audience. And I remember thinking you'd caught something in the data that two more senior people on that panel completely missed and didn't even seem to notice they missed."

"That's it? You read a paper?"

"That's not really 'it,' though, is it." He said it quietly, almost to himself, and for a second something in his face shifted into something I didn't have a name for. "I've read a lot of papers. I don't request files."

The air in the room felt different all of a sudden, thinner somehow, and neither of us moved to fill the silence that came after it. I felt my pulse pick up in a way.

Then his phone buzzed on the desk, face-up, and what he saw on the screen made his entire posture change in half a second, jaw tight, shoulders squared, all the openness from a moment ago gone like it had never been there.

"I need you to go," he said, already standing, already reaching for his jacket off the back of his chair. "Now. We'll pick this up next."

"Julian, what…."

"Maren." His voice came out harder than I'd heard it yet, and he was already moving past me toward the door before I even got out of the chair. "Please. Now isn't a good time."

He was gone down the hallway before I could ask him anything else, phone still clutched in his hand, and I stood alone in his office with no idea what had just happened, or why the mention of his own name from my mouth was the thing that had finally cracked something in his voice.