Chapter Eight #2
Then, after a beat that lingered too long to be accidental, his mouth curved slightly. “I wouldn’t want my assistant catching cold before the conference. It would be a shame if my most competent presenter couldn’t stand beside me.”
The warmth beneath his tone was a quiet provocation, a thread of amusement woven through the authority, and it slipped under my skin before I could guard against it. My pulse answered, sharp and traitorous, as though it recognized something my mind refused to name.
I forced a careful breath and shaped my response with the same restraint he had perfected.
“Understood,” I said, though the word trembled faintly against my lips, more confession than acknowledgment.
He didn’t move, didn’t retreat to his desk.
The room seemed to wait with him, suspended in the faint scent of ink and something darker, clean and winter-sharp.
For a moment, it felt as though he might reach out, touch the folder, my wrist, anything, but he didn’t.
He simply watched, silent, until the quiet began to press against my pulse.
I rose, collecting the papers. “I’ll have the draft to you by Wednesday,” I said, more for my own steadiness than his approval.
“See that you do,” he answered, every syllable unflawed.
I turned and crossed the room, each footstep sounding too loud in the stillness. My hand
closed around the door handle, but before I could leave—
“Miss Carter.”
I stopped. His voice carried just enough restraint to make the command sound personal. I looked back, and his gaze held mine, unwavering, impossible to escape. “Silence,” he said, his tone calm but edged, “is only useful when you’re the one controlling it. Remember that.”
The words sank deep, colder than the air between us. I didn’t trust myself to answer, so I nodded once and stepped into the corridor.
The chilled air hit hard against my face, a sharp relief that still wasn’t enough.
My heartbeat pounded against the folder pressed to my chest, the echo of his last words drumming in merciless rhythm.
Control the silence. As if it were that simple, when the man who’d spoken them had already learned how to use mine as a weapon.
By the time I reached the end of the hallway, my lungs ached from holding my breath. The walls felt too close, the light too pale, the stillness too aware. I needed air, something unshaped by him, something untouched.
I pulled out my phone and texted Gwen.
Edwina:
Coffee? Before I turn into a thesis ghost.
Her reply came almost before the message finished sending.
Gwen:
Aster’s already at Grove. I’m stealing your muffin. Hurry.
So I went.
The Grove Café sat a few blocks off campus, its windows fogged from the morning chill, the scent of cinnamon and steam leaking through the cracks in the door.
Inside, Gwen was easy to spot, waving from the back corner, already halfway through a drink that could’ve drowned a mortal man.
Aster sat beside her, a pencil stabbed through her bun, notebook open and filled with those elegant, confident sketches that always made my handwriting look feral by comparison.
“Tell me he wasn’t awful,” Gwen said before I even sat down.
I dropped the folder beside the coffee waiting for me, the steam curling toward my face. “Define awful.”
Aster lifted her mug, studying me over the rim. “Did he breathe dramatically again?”
“He weaponized silence,” I said. “Expertly.”
“That’s his entire brand,” Gwen replied. “Silence, sharp tailoring, and the slow dismantling of joy.”
I snorted, letting the warmth of the cup settle against my palms. “He said I need discernment. And precision. As if I’m a dull blade in need of sharpening.”
“Well,” Aster drawled, “you did spill coffee on him. Maybe this is divine retribution.”
“Or,” Gwen added, unwrapping a muffin with slow, deliberate patience, “it’s the beginning of a dark academic romance. Morally gray. Forbidden tension. Brooding professor.”
I pressed a hand over my face. “Stop before I choke on my drink.”
That was when Aster’s phone lit up on the table. She glanced down, and a grin spread slowly across her face before she looked at me with too much satisfaction.
“Oh no,” she said.
“What?” I asked, halfway to a sip.
Aster tilted the screen toward me, her eyes bright with mischief. “It’s February second.”
Gwen blinked. “And?”
“It’s his birthday.”
The words landed before I could react. I stared. “Whose birthday?”
“Professor Glare himself,” Aster said, entirely too pleased. “Zayn found it buried somewhere in his file. No family listed. No close connections. Just… that.”
“Creepy,” Gwen muttered, tearing into the muffin wrapper as though it had wronged her.
I leaned back, groaning. “Wonderful. I got to be psychologically dissected by the birthday boy.”
“Oh, so we’re calling him boy now?” Gwen asked, laughing into her drink.
“I have range,” I said, deadpan.
Aster took a sip of her coffee, her voice smooth with amusement. “You should’ve brought him a present.”
“I did,” I said under my breath. “My eternal suffering.”
Gwen raised her glass, the spoon chiming against the rim. “To Edwina Carter,” she declared, “the reluctant birthday tribute Professor Stone never asked for.”
Their laughter filled the space around me, easy and careless, but my thoughts didn’t join them.
Beneath the noise, I could still hear his voice, the low, measured cadence that turned my name into something else entirely.
I rolled my eyes, forcing the motion to look casual, but my fingers still carried a trace of cold where his had almost touched mine.
His scent lingered too, clean, sharp, a memory cut into the air, and I hated the way knowing it was his birthday made him feel closer, as if distance itself had thinned to let him through.
Worse than that was the quiet treachery of wondering how he might be spending it.
“Do you think he celebrates?” Gwen asked, breaking through the noise in my head.
Aster arched a brow, resting her chin against her hand. “Professor Stone? He probably sits alone with a rare book and an overfilled espresso pot, pretending he’s immune to mortality.”
“I bet his cake is just black coffee and self-loathing,” I muttered, drawing a low laugh from Gwen.
“And the candles,” she added, “are lit by sheer judgment.”
Our laughter spilled over itself, easy and necessary, a survival instinct more than amusement.
Because without humor, there was too much truth, too much of something we didn’t want to name.
Even as I smiled, a coil of unease wound itself low in my stomach.
It wasn’t the date that unsettled me, it was the inevitability that now I wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about it. About him.
Their laughter faded slowly, dissolving into the hum of the café, the clink of cups and low music bleeding through the air.
Gwen and Aster were still joking, something about how Professor Stone probably catalogued birthday cards by year and color, but their voices had already blurred.
My focus had drifted to a place neither of them could follow.
I kept thinking of him alone in that quiet apartment I’d built for him in my mind, the tall windows shut against the city, the immaculate desk, the amber glass of a half-finished drink reflecting light that never quite warmed the room.
But then the image twisted. What if he wasn’t alone?
What if there was someone waiting for him?
Someone who belonged in his world, a woman who carried herself with the same measured calm, who spoke in clean lines and never lost her footing.
Someone whose presence didn’t unravel under his silence but met it, matched it, maybe even enjoyed it.
The thought burned through me, unwanted but impossible to extinguish.
It wasn’t jealousy in the usual sense, it was something rawer, meaner, a tightening in my chest that felt both foreign and familiar.
I told myself it didn’t matter, that none of it was my concern.
He was my professor, a man built from distance and restraint, who turned quiet into command and studied people as though they were problems to be solved.
Whatever he did beyond that office, whoever waited for him, had nothing to do with me.
But my body didn’t believe me. My pulse betrayed me, marking every imagined detail of his evening in a rhythm I couldn’t control. I sipped my coffee, hoping the heat would dull the ache that had begun to spread beneath my ribs, but it only sharpened it, making it feel more real.
By the time we left the café, the light outside had shifted into that suspended hour between dusk and night, the sky washed in muted violet that refused to settle into darkness.
The air pressed cold against my skin, crawling through my sleeves and biting at my knuckles until they stung.
Gwen and Aster walked ahead, their laughter caught by the wind, distant and muffled.
I followed behind, my thoughts a tangle of noise, my silence heavier than it had been when the day began.
When I reached my apartment, my hands ached from the cold, and the fatigue behind my eyes had deepened into something that felt less physical than mental.
I hung my coat on the chair, dropped my bag by the door, and set the folder, the one with his handwriting, his scent, his weight, on the coffee table.
It sat there, still and expectant, daring me to open it. I didn’t.
Instead, I turned on my laptop and opened a half-read article for class. The words blurred before I reached the end of the paragraph, each line slipping into the next until meaning scattered. I switched to music. Something quiet enough to think over but loud enough to hide behind.