The Professor She Was Forbidden to Want

Chapter 5

Maren's POV

I didn't sleep much over the weekend. Every time I closed my eyes I kept hearing him say it ‘careful about who I'm seen with, how things look’ and turning it over from every angle, trying to figure out what exactly he meant by it, and hating how much time I was spending on a sentence a professor said to me across a library table.

By Sunday night I decided it was nothing. A formality. Some leftover bureaucratic paranoia from whatever happened two years ago, nothing that actually involved me.

Monday morning proved me wrong before I even made it to my office.

"There she is." Corinne walked beside me in the hallway, coffee in hand, smiling a little too wide for eight-forty in the morning. "How was your weekend?"

"Fine. Yours?"

"Productive." She took a sip, watching me over the rim of the cup. "I spent some of it talking to people, actually. You'd be surprised how much you learn when you just ask around."

"I'm sure."

"Did you know Marlowe sat on the review board that cleared him? No, wait, that's not right, he recused himself, obviously, he'd have to. But you know who was on it instead? Dean Hale. Same dean who handles committee assignments." She said it lightly, like she was making conversation about the weather. "Small world, huh."

"Corinne, is there a point to this?"

"No point. Just find it interesting, that's all." She stopped outside her office door, and her smile shifted into something sharper. "I just think it's funny how a guy who spent two years making sure nobody could say a word about him suddenly requests a specific student's file out of nowhere. Don't strike me as being careful. Strikes me as somebody who thinks he's already survived the worst that can happen to him, so what's a little more risk."

My stomach turned, but I kept my face flat. "You should probably be careful throwing around theories like that."

"I'm not throwing around anything. I'm just saying what everyone's already thinking." She pushed her door open, then paused, half in, half out. "For what it's worth, I actually don't care what you two do. I just don't want to be standing next to you when it blows up."

She shut the door before I could answer, and I stood in the hallway, heart going harder than it had any right to over a conversation that technically hadn't said anything at all.

I didn't see Julian that day. I told myself that was fine, that I didn't need to see him, that I had actual work to do that had nothing to do with him. I got through two hours of coding interview transcripts before I gave up pretending any of it was sticking.

Toby caught the mood the second I sat down across from him at lunch.

"You look like someone stole your car."

"Corinne cornered me this morning."

"Oh, great, love that for you." He set his sandwich down. "What'd she say?"

I gave him the short version,the review board, the recusal, the "small world" comment about Dean Hale and watched his face go from mildly concerned to actually concerned somewhere in the middle of it.

"Okay, that's…. that's not nothing," he said. "That's her building a case."

"A case for what? Nothing's even happened."

"Doesn't matter if something's happened. People like Corinne don't need something to happen, they just need it to look like something could." He rubbed his forehead. "Maren, I say this because I love you, but you've gotta be careful. Not because you're doing anything wrong. Because it doesn't matter if you're doing anything wrong, once somebody decides there's a story to tell."

"I know."

"Do you? Because you've got this look on your face right now that I don't love."

"What look?"

"The look you get right before you do something you already know is a bad idea." He pointed his sandwich at me like evidence. "I've known you for three years, Maren. I know that look."

I didn't answer that, because he wasn't wrong, and I didn't have a good defense ready.

My phone buzzed halfway through the afternoon, an email notification, and I almost didn't check it because I was elbow-deep in transcript coding and didn't want the interruption. Something made me check it anyway.

The sender line stopped me cold.

‘Office of the Dean, Graduate College’

My hands went cold before I even opened it. I clicked it anyway, because not knowing was worse than whatever was actually inside.

‘Dear Ms. Ellison,’

‘Dean Hale would like to schedule a brief meeting with you this week to discuss a matter related to your dissertation committee. Please reply with your availability at your earliest convenience.’

That was it. Just ‘a matter related to your dissertation committee’, which could have meant absolutely anything, except my whole body already knew it didn't mean anything good.

I read it three times, the same way I read the reassignment email two weeks ago, like the words might shift into something less alarming if I just looked hard enough.

They didn't.

I thought about calling Toby. I thought about calling Julian, actually reaching for my phone before I remembered I didn't even have his number, not really, only his office extension. I thought about Corinne's face that morning, the way she'd said ‘small world’ like she already knew exactly what was coming.

Whatever this was, it was moving faster than either Julian or I had planned for.

My phone buzzed again in my hand, still holding the dean's email open, and for a second I thought it was a reply already, somehow, impossibly fast. It wasn't the dean.

It was Julian.

‘We need to talk. Tonight. Not my office.’

I stared at the message for a long moment, my heart doing something complicated in my chest, the dean's email still glowing on the other half of my screen like it hadn't just changed everything.

What this was, it had officially stopped being something we could keep pretending wasn't happening.