Chapter 9
THREE MONTHS LATER
The double glass doors swung shut behind Charlotte with a heavy, wheezing sigh, cutting off the dry heat of the afternoon. She let her shoulders sag for a fraction of a second in the cool shadow of the lobby.
The campus was draining fast. Everyone was more than ready to start their Labor Day weekend.
Charlotte had finished her last lecture an hour ago, but the knot between her shoulder blades refused to loosen.
It wasn’t just the sheer physical grind of Syllabus Week, though standing in front of eighty critical young eyes for hours at a time was brutal enough.
It was the stagnant weight she’d carried across her shoulders all summer, a residue that no amount of quiet reading or coastal air had managed to scrub out.
She crossed the lobby floor, her low heels making a sharp, lonely clap against the terrazzo.
Every time her mind quieted down, it wasn’t long before her thoughts went straight back to that night in June.
Back to the small beach town two hours west. Back to the early morning light filtering through the curtains while she crept around, trying to leave unnoticed.
She’d spent three full months hating herself for that morning.
Leaving Taylor like that—creeping out without so much as a note, leaving the borrowed yoga pants folded on the coffee table like a dry cleaner’s delivery—had been the coldest, most coward-like act of Charlotte’s life.
It was cruel. She’d known it then, and the sharp edge of that knowledge hadn’t dulled by a single degree since.
Taylor had given her everything that night. Taylor had looked at her with those warm hazel eyes, completely unshielded, and handed her an escape from the boring post divorce life she thought she was destined for. And Charlotte had run away because she was terrified of what it meant.
She reached the mid-floor landing and stopped.
The stairwell door stood two feet away, but her legs simply refused to lift for the next flight.
Charlotte leaned back, letting her shoulders hit the painted cinderblock wall.
The sudden, flat chill of the concrete bit through the thin silk of her blouse, a shock of cold that made the lingering heat behind her breastbone sting like spilled alcohol.
She closed her eyes and let her head tilt back against the wall.
That night still sat right behind her eyelids, so vivid it made her throat tighten.
It had started so terribly. She’d gone to that bar trying to follow Diane’s ironic advice to get out and remember how to be a person again, only to end up feeling obsolete and pathetic.
The woman who’d approached her there hadn’t been subtle, practically undressing her with her eyes.
Charlotte had fled to the beach, convinced that intimacy was something she’d never have again.
And then she’d heard the music.
She could still hear that rich, smoky voice floating over the sound of crashing surf before she even saw the bonfire.
When Taylor had walked away from the flames and sat down beside her on that cold rock, there hadn’t been a single calculated move.
No practiced seduction, just raw authenticity radiating from Taylor’s every gesture and word.
She sat beside her, grounded and completely self-assured, listening to Charlotte fumble through her story without pity or judgment.
Then came the walk along the damp sand. Charlotte could still feel the phantom drag of cold seawater around her ankles, the shock of losing her heels to the tide, and the way Taylor’s laugh had cracked the night wide open.
When Taylor had stepped close, cupping Charlotte’s face with warm, steady hands, Charlotte had felt her entire rigid world splinter.
Charlotte couldn’t think about the rest of that night without feeling a flutter in her belly.
She’dd let go completely. For hours, she had abandoned every rule, every carefully curated boundary she had spent decades building.
She had let Taylor take her apart on that couch, had given herself over to the slick, breathless friction of skin against skin until her lungs burned and her voice gave out.
And then she had turned around and undone Taylor in her bedroom, drinking in every ragged gasp until they were both spent and tangled in damp sheets.
It was, without a shadow of a doubt, the best night of her life.
Charlotte exhaled, a long, shaky breath in the empty stairwell.
She hadn’t uttered a word about it to a single soul. How could she?
How could Professor Charlotte Reid, senior faculty member and expert in interpersonal dynamics, explain to anyone that she had surrendered to a twenty-seven-year-old musician that she’d just met on a couch and then fled like a thief before sunrise?
It had been raw, unadulterated panic. Self-preservation.
At 5:00 AM, the twenty-year age gap had loomed over her like a sentence.
She had pictured the judgment, the sheer impossibility of trying to fit a woman in her late twenties into her structured, respectable world, and her nervous system had simply overridden her heart. She’d fled to protect herself.
Now, standing in a deserted stairwell three months later, the regret was a physical knot in her gut.
She didn’t regret the night. She regretted the cowardice.
She’d left Taylor with nothing—not a last name, not a phone number, no way to ever trace her.
She had stripped them both of whatever small, beautiful thing might have grown out of that night, leaving Taylor to wake up alone.
Charlotte opened her eyes. The yellow overhead light flickered slightly, buzzing against the quiet.
She couldn’t fix it. Taylor was likely back to her life, hopefully having forgotten her, because Charlotte had essentially used her for a night and vanished.
That wasn’t what Charlotte meant to have happen, and but she imagined that if Taylor ever told anyone about that night, that would be the kind of language she’d have to use, because what else could you call it?
She pushed herself off the wall, adjusted her briefcase, and took the remaining steps up to the next floor. Her chest felt hollow, but the routine was waiting for her. Her desk, her syllabus, her quiet house.
Charlotte reached the top landing, pressed her hand against the heavy crash bar of the fire door, and pushed it open into the polished corridor of the psychology department.
She turned down the hall, her briefcase swinging lightly against her leg. A student waited outside her office, seated in a chair she kept there for advising hours. Brown hair, black sleeveless top, gray jeans—just another undergrad with a question about the syllabus.
She adjusted her grip on the leather handle, already calculating how much time she had before her next meeting. The department head wanted to discuss the upcoming conference schedule, and Charlotte needed to review the draft of her presentation before—
The student shifted, the tousled fall of chestnut hair sliding over one shoulder in a way that made Charlotte’s fingers tighten around the briefcase.
Her steps faltered.
The hair. The casual slouch of her spine against the back of the chair. The way she held her phone in one hand, unimpressed with the world and everything in it.
Charlotte’s breath hitched, shallow against the back of her throat.
Fifteen feet. Ten. She couldn’t stop walking, couldn’t freeze in the middle of the hallway like a statue, but every nerve in her body screamed to turn and run before—
The girl looked up.
Her hazel eyes lifted from the screen as she glanced down the hall, probably hearing footsteps. The movement was effortless, the kind of unbothered glance someone gave when they expected no one in particular.
Then her gaze locked onto Charlotte’s.
Recognition detonated behind Charlotte’s ribs, a silent, violent crack that splintered through her chest. The air in the hallway turned to glass, sharp and impossible to breathe.
Taylor.
It was Taylor.
Taylor in a black top, gray jeans, sitting outside Charlotte’s office door like it was the most natural thing in the world. Not on a moonlit beach. Not in her apartment two hours away.
Here. In her psychology department. Waiting.
Charlotte’s pulse hammered against her skull. The briefcase slipped from her fingers, hitting the floor with a dull thud that sounded louder than it should have in the empty corridor.
Taylor’s lips parted. Her phone lowered, forgotten.
Neither of them moved. Neither of them looked away.
The distance between them stretched thin as a wire, humming with the same electric current that had arced between them the night they met.
The same current that had pulled Charlotte out of her careful, curated life for a few hours of reckless abandon.
The same current that had sent her fleeing at dawn.
Taylor’s eyebrows lifted, just slightly, the ghost of a challenge in the tilt of her head.
Charlotte’s lungs burned as she picked up her briefcase. She forced her legs to carry her forward, one step, then another. The closer she got, the sharper the details became—the faint freckle just below Taylor’s left collarbone, those warm hazel eyes, flecked with gold.
Five feet. Three.
What was she doing here? Was she outside the wrong door, and she was waiting for another professor?
Taylor couldn’t be a student here. That wasn’t possible. Surely, Charlotte would have known that. Would she have recognized her in June if she had been? Probably. But maybe not.
What if Charlotte had slept with her student?
No. No. That was so unlikely. This was all just a misunderstanding.
There had to be some mistake, some simple explanation that would unravel this knot of dread coiling in her stomach.
This was just a coincidence. It had to be.
Taylor could be here for any number of reasons. She could be visiting a relative that works in this department. Right? Something logical and harmless like that.
Taylor stood, slow and deliberate, her body unfolding from the chair with the same effortless grace she’d had on the beach.
The air thickened in Charlotte’s throat, Taylor’s scent wrapping around her—sun-warmed skin, the clean bite of detergent on her clothes.
It flooded her nostrils, her lungs, pulling her under like a riptide back to that night—the weight of Taylor’s hips against hers, the sharp gasp against her collarbone, the way her name had cracked in Taylor’s voice when—
“Please tell me you’re not Professor Reid.”