Chapter 12 #3
“You’re quiet and perceptive and introspective and smart.
The more time I spend observing you in lab or in class, the more I wish I could go farther with you.
” His head tilted and his brows pulled together.
My heart squeezed. “Obviously, it will be a good thing when you’re no longer my student, since there will no longer be risk of expulsion, but I selfishly wish I could teach you forever.
I’m not sure I’ll be satisfied with one semester. ”
I didn’t even realize I was crying until Micah softly wiped away my tears with his thumbs, holding me like I was something precious.
His answer was so specific that I knew it was true.
Like always, he could see right through me, right to all the soft, needy parts I wanted to pretend didn’t exist. All the parts of me that wanted reassurance and praise and stability and someone to take care of me.
Someone to know how to take care of me in the way my brain needed.
“I don’t know what I expected you to say,” I whispered.
“I see you, Masters. I always have and I always will.”
“I know you do.” More tears tipped over my lashes, streaming down my cheeks. Micah’s thumbs swept underneath my eyes to catch them. “I’m trying to see you, too.”
He stiffened slightly.
“I’m sorry.” I lunged forward, burying my face back in his chest, my arms wrapping around his torso, hoping I didn’t mess up this conversation again. He seemed to feel better when I was quieter—not asking him questions or talking about him.
He only liked talking about me.
My phone buzzed loudly on the edge of the sink, startling me. I straightened up rapidly.
Micah’s eyes snapped to mine.
At the same time, we both reached for my phone, but he was faster.
With only the quickest flash of the screen, I knew it was Mason who texted me.
In the blink of an eye, Micah’s expression had shifted, his face becoming a mask again.
Like he was made of stone, like the man I’d just been speaking to had disappeared inside this other one.
My heart sank, dropped, like I’d just tripped off the edge of something tall.
“Sometimes I forget how two-faced you are.”
He left without another word.
I stood frozen, staring at the blank space he’d left behind, my face hot with a combination of anger and hatred and embarrassment and guilt.
And sometimes I forget what a fucking hypocrite you are.
After a minute, I managed to pick up my phone and see what the message was.
Mason : My bed still smells like you. Don’t sleep with him tonight. Let me pick you up
I gripped the device tightly, squeezing the sides with my fingers. It wasn’t worth me replying now, because I’d say something bitchy to piss him off, then go crawling right back to him tomorrow.
This pattern with me and Mason was so familiar it made me feel nauseous. I was deep in his ocean, being repetitively tossed between waves.
Seasick.
━━━━━
My third and final lab of the semester was fast-approaching.
I’d already done all my portions of the pre-lab work and had printed out the experiment procedure so it was ready for me to bring to the lab.
Now, all I had to do was prepare to survive those strange few hours where I was physically close to Micah but had to pretend like he was nothing more than my professor.
Lecture was easy—I sat in the back. And when it was just us in his own lab, I didn’t have to pretend anything.
But in these long lab periods with my group and a TA around, it was different.
By some stroke of luck, I’d not actually seen Nick again since seeing him in Micah’s office while my jeans were pulled down around my thighs.
He obviously didn’t know what’d happened because Micah had made me invisible at the time, but I couldn’t even fathom how I was supposed to act normally around him now.
I’d only vaguely known about Micah being capable of making things invisible before that moment, and we’d never talked much about it. I’d had no clue it was going to come with a full-body sensation of cold needles—or that it only worked if he was touching me.
Sometimes I wondered what it would feel like to be able to do all the shit he could do.
Insane, probably.
Micah’s words about how he wished he could be my professor for longer had etched themselves on the inside of my skull. I thought about them often, using the memory as a source of comfort, like tracing my fingers over engraved words on worn stone.
The only issue was I had to ignore the beginning and end of the full memory.
I had to pretend the parts of our conversation that were characterized by bitterness and disconnect didn’t exist. I had to cut and paste pieces of that night into a happier imitation of the real thing, a scrapbook page of nice words without the bad ones.
I wished I could say all of the bad came from Micah, but that was so far from true it was ridiculous to even think. Yeah, I’d pissed him off and now he was being cruel to me, but underneath that, I’d hurt him, even if he’d never admit it.
That was a much more difficult pill to swallow.