Chapter 21
With Tessahere to take care of Emma, I only had to cancel half a day of lectures. I spend the afternoon at the university trying desperately not to wonder how Emma is feeling and obsessively checking my phone for an update from either her or Tessa.
On my way home, I pick up a to-go order of minestrina soup from my favorite quick-service place and message Tessa on my way up the stairs.
She greets me at Emma’s open apartment door. “Emma’s asleep on the couch,” she whispers.
“I brought soup,” I whisper back and hold up the bag. Tessa waves me in and puts the soup in the fridge for later.
The apartment is very tidy—Emma’s bed has new sheets, and it smells like cleaning supplies and fresh air.
On the couch, Emma sits slumped over, mouth ajar, and the sound of heavy breathing reverberates in the space. A laptop sits on the low table, and a show is paused on screen.
I take a few steps over to the couch and carefully sweep a lock of gray hair out of Emma’s face and let the back of my fingers graze her forehead. She feels a lot cooler now, and she’s not huddled under a blanket anymore.
I remember Tessa is here, too, and stand, looking away from Emma. “Do you need anything?” I ask, straightening my jacket.
“I appreciate the soup. Emma’s kitchen is…” We both glance at the tiny space. “A tragedy,” she finally finishes. “But I suppose one dines out a lot when one is in Italy.”
“You are welcome to use my kitchen if you wish. I will bring a key by tomorrow morning before I go back to the university. Just mind my cat. She is…well, Emma can tell you about Zola.”
“I might take you up on that. Emma might like some homemade American comfort food when she gets hungrier.”
I nod and walk toward the door, letting Emma get on with her sleep and Tessa get on with her caretaking. Tessa follows a few steps behind.
“Santo?” she calls just before I close the door behind me.
I glance back. Her arms are crossed, and she’s watching me carefully. “If you think—” She cuts herself off as Emma shifts on the couch, and we both wait until she gets settled again and her breath evens out. Tessa takes two steps toward me. “I don’t know you, and some men like to take advantage of their position of power over women. If you hurt her, I will fly down here and meet with the dean myself, even if Emma won’t. And then, Jade will come, and my destruction of your career was mere child’s play compared to how well she will eviscerate you.”
Tessa might barely come up to my shoulder and has impeccable makeup, a cute upturned nose, and generous curves that I’m sure many men appreciate, but the fire in her gaze and the glint in her eyes tell me she might enjoy my destruction too.
“However,” she sniffs and tilts her chin up, looking down her nose at me. “If you realize how truly amazing my friend is, you’ll treat her right and give her exactly all the time, attention, and orgasms she deserves after a schmuck like Bruce.” She narrows her eyes. “Lots of orgasms.”
And with that last word echoing down the hallway, Tessa closes the door on my face.
Emma isout for two more days. On Thursday, she’s back at the university and looking like her normal self again. Though she does occasionally become the source of an inordinate amount of crinkling as she pops cough drops like candy.
After the lecture ends, she approaches the front, notebook and pen at the ready. “Professor Offredi? Can we talk about the makeup work I need to do?”
Together, we review the assignments she missed. Emma jots down notes and bites her lip once I’ve caught up to today. “When do you need me to have this done by?”
“Next Monday?” I suggest.
The skin under her incisor turns white from the pressure before Emma releases it and smiles. “Sure!”
I groan internally. Emma is lying. I frown and rub my forehead, thinking. This is why you don’t get too close to students. Hell, I haven’t even slept with her, and I am tempted to give her leniency on her assignments.
Or am I overcorrecting? I’m not a harsh professor, and I like to think of myself as fair.
Except for propositioning Emma.
Enough time has passed that either she isn’t interested—totally fair but extremely disappointing—or she is either so secure in her decision not to go back to Bruce that she doesn’t need convincing or she’s so secure in her decision to go back to him she doesn’t need convincing.
I’ll show you exactly how good it can be myself.
With Emma having been sick, my brain had gotten a reprieve from repeating those words over and over again, but now that she stands before me hale and healthy, my mind can’t leave it alone again. What exactly had I been thinking? I was possessive just because the woman told me how disappointing her sex life had been in the past.
And now I can’t decide if I am showing favoritism or overcorrecting and being too harsh.
This is yet another reason why professors and students together is an all-around bad idea.
Emma is gnawing on that lip of hers again, and I realize I am flat out glaring. I gentle my gaze. “When do your other professors have you handing in your make-up work?”
“One of my professors gave me until Friday, the rest next Monday. And, um, you know I’m flying back home for Christmas, so…”
So, she’s trying to spend time with her family, and we’ve all given her enough to do that she’ll be working full-time over the holidays.
But then she’ll just be back in the third term. It was a hell of a lot of work to catch up on. I suppose if push came to shove, I could argue that she’d received an extension for all her courses, and what’s the harm in an extra week?
“How about the Friday after that, then? Do you have colleagues who can help you?”
She nodded. “Shonda and I study together. She said she would help me catch up.”
“All right.” I realize, after all of this debating with myself, that I probably need to apologize to Emma about the proposition. But there’s a knock on the door, and one of the faculty pokes their head in.
“We are on schedule for the OUT meeting in here, yes?” Professor Wang surveys the empty room and raises an eyebrow.
That’s fine. An empty room at the university wasn’t an appropriate place for me to apologize for propositioning her, anyway.
I apologize to Professor Wang and follow Emma out of the room.
“Anything else, Professor Offredi?” she asks once we are in the hall.
“No. Please contact me if you have questions.”
Emma waves and walks off, and I’m left alone in the hallway, still berating myself.
When I get home,I change clothes, sit on the couch, and spend a fruitless few minutes trying to get Zola to curl up onto my chest like she always does. She refuses because I reek of procrastination and desperation, so instead I go knock on Emma’s door.
“Professor,” she greets me in surprise. She’s changed for the night, wearing cozy pajamas and her hair up in a bun.
“May I come in?”
“Sure.” She steps back, letting me into her little apartment, then folds her arms over her chest, right under her breasts, and leans her hip against the couch. Her place still smells vaguely like cleaning supplies, and there are books and coursework scattered over the kitchen table. “Is there a problem with the make-up assignments?”
“No, this is a personal visit. I wanted to apologize for my proposition to you the other week. It was out of line, and I want you to know that nothing will come of you saying no. I won’t behave improperly around you at the university, and I will do my best to treat you like any other student.”
Emma’s gaze drifts over my shoulder, a small frown on her face as she thinks. “Did I say no?”
That’s not what I expected, and I clear my throat. “Technically, no.”
“What exactly did your proposition mean, anyway? ‘I’ll show you exactly how good it can be myself.’ What does that entail?”
I pinch the bridge of my nose, having some choice words with myself in my head. Well, I guess I have, technically, licked her pussy. “One night. I would make you come any way you’d like. Finish what we had started.”
“One night,” she repeats. “And all you want is to, um, go down on me?”
“Yes.”
“You would do that, even after last weekend?”
“Last weekend?” I am confused again. This has gone pretty far off from the straightforward apology and dismissal that I was expecting.
“Let’s not pretend I was sexy at all while I was sick. I’m not sure why you’d still be interested after all that…” She trails off, casts about for a word, and then settles on “phlegm.”
To be honest, I didn’t notice anything unsexy about last weekend. It’s not like I got hard listening to her coughing in her sleep or monitoring her fever, but it didn’t change the way I think about Emma—this sexy woman who needs desperately, in my opinion, to ride my tongue.
I corral my thoughts back to the question at hand. “Yes, I would still be interested in that. I still find you unbelievably sexy.”
Emma’s cheeks go pink, but she looks at me skeptically. “Does that mean your offer still stands?”
This time, I rub my jaw, my beard rasping over my palm while I think about it. “Yes, I’m not rescinding it.”
My heart, which realizes our conversation is getting somewhere interesting, is beating faster.
Emma studies me for a moment. “We have, I suppose, already technically done that before.”
There’s a glint in Emma’s eyes that I haven’t seen since the night we first met. I think she’s flirting with me. Longing blooms in my chest. I liked the way we were together that night, without the professional relationship between us.
“Yes, we have.” I shift on my feet and bring myself a few centimeters closer to her. Emma looks at me, her eyes wide and cheeks flushed. She licks her lips, and my gaze drops to her mouth. The scent of eucalyptus washes over me.
And somewhere, an alarm goes off.
Emma and I both flinch apart. She spins and digs her phone out from beneath a stack of papers on the table. “Sorry. I set a timer to try the Pomodoro technique to see if it would help me focus on my classwork. But, uh, you distracted me.”
I look over the papers again, the textbooks, the open laptop. There’s a small pile of cough drops and a slightly larger pile of empty cough drop wrappers next to it.
“You still aren’t feeling well.”
“I’m fine, really,” she protests. “I feel a lot be—” She’s interrupted by a wracking cough. She covers her mouth with her hand and the other falls to her abdomen, while she nearly doubles over from the force of the cough.
There is a glass of water on the counter, and I hand it to her. By the time she calms down enough to breathe and to drink, her eyes have watered, and her cheeks are flushed—not from arousal or embarrassment this time.
“I swear, I really am a lot better,” she insists between gulps of water. “It’s just this lingering cough that I can’t kick.”
I bite my tongue.
Once she’s caught her breath, drunk the whole glass of water, and I’ve refilled it for her, I make a suggestion. “You’re still”—I can see the protest forming on her lips already—“recovering and you’ve got a lot of work. We’re not in a rush.”
Finally, she nods.
“We’ll talk after the holidays,” I suggest. “Get your work done so we can enjoy ourselves.”
I leave Emma’s feeling like I’ve just given myself and Emma a reward for good behavior that I have to wait weeks to claim.