Chapter 11
The entire month of September had felt like slow torture, but stepping out of the psychology building into the cool Friday evening air brought a sudden, welcome looseness to Charlotte’s shoulders.
October had arrived with a sharp drop in temperature, smelling faintly of eucalyptus and damp cedar.
Her briefcase felt heavy, loaded with unread essays she had no intention of touching until Sunday afternoon.
Surviving the last four weeks had required an embarrassing amount of planning.
Teaching Psychology of Interpersonal Relationships three times a week while Taylor sat somewhere towards the back of the lecture hall wasn’t something any textbook had prepared her for.
Standing at the podium, moving through slides on attachment theory and relational boundaries, Charlotte had lost her train of thought more times in the last month than in her previous twenty years of teaching combined.
Every time her eyes accidentally caught Taylor’s gaze, the exact wording of her lecture vanished from her short-term memory, leaving her staring blankly at the bright projection screen while her pulse hit her throat.
She always managed to recover or at least that’s what she thought.
She doubt any of the students noticed. But she did.
She had ended up training herself to look exclusively at the emergency exit sign above the back door or the bright yellow hoodie of a junior in the front row just to keep her voice steady.
Charlotte hated how persistently her mind kept returning to Taylor.
It didn’t make a bit of sense. Taylor was twenty-seven, a few years older than the rest of the undergraduates, but age alone didn’t explain the pull.
It was the absolute lack of pretense. Taylor didn’t squirm under scrutiny or try to prove herself during class discussions.
She possessed a quiet certainty that Charlotte hadn’t felt in her own skin since before her divorce, the same unbothered presence that had drawn Charlotte in on the beach four months ago.
Charlotte cut across the brick courtyard toward the faculty parking lot, her heels clicking a rhythmic beat on the pavement.
“Charlotte!”
Sam Harte stood beside her dark blue sedan, leaving her purse and laptop bag on the passenger seat. Her raven-black hair glinted in the golden light, her silver hoop earrings catching the sunset glow.
Charlotte shifted her briefcase to her other hand and angled her path across the asphalt. “I thought you went home an hour ago.”
“Got held up by a second-year trying to negotiate a new deadline,” Sam said, closing the door. She leaned back against her car, folding her arms over a rich burgundy blazer. “You look like you just survived a marathon.”
“It was a long week,” Charlotte said. The muscles at the back of her neck were tight, but the crisp October breeze felt good against her skin.
“Then you’re going to say yes to what I’m about to propose,” Sam said. “Let’s go to The Blackwood for a few drinks. Around seven?”
The offer hit Charlotte right in the center of her chest, an immediate, physical relief. “God, yes. I need a drink.”
“Great,” Sam said, unbuttoning her blazer as she moved around to the driver’s door. “I’ll see you in a few hours then.”
“See you later.”
Sam flashed a brief grin, slid into her car, and pulled out toward the street.
Charlotte walked the remaining twenty feet to her own Volvo.
She really did need that drink after the month she’d had.
She had convinced herself that once she got over the initial shock of seeing Taylor in her lecture hall, the attraction would fade into the background.
Professional boundaries would take over and that would be that.
Instead, the distance only made her hyper-aware of everything. She couldn’t deny that she was still intensely attracted to her.
The denial had become impossible, a laughable exercise in willpower that Charlotte, with her decades studying human behavior, knew better than to entertain.
This wasn’t some passing attraction she could rationalize away—it pulsed through her like a low current, disrupting her thoughts at the least convenient moments.
The memory of Taylor’s hands had taken up residence in her nerve endings, surfacing when her guard was down: Taylor’s fingers tracing the curve of her hip, the warm press of her mouth along Charlotte’s collarbone when she should have been grading papers.
At night, those memories burned brighter, making her skin feel tight and restless beneath the sheets.
What cut deeper than the attraction was the guilt that gnawed at her whenever she saw Taylor.
It lodged under her ribs like something sharp, flaring every time she caught sight of Taylor’s bowed head taking notes, or the way Taylor would absently tuck a strand of hair behind her ear.
The memory of that beach town apartment—sunlight spilling across rumpled sheets as she’d gathered her clothes with shaking hands—was seared into her with horrifying clarity.
She’d been a coward, slipping out before dawn like she’d committed some unforgivable crime rather than shared a night with a woman who’d looked at her like she was something extraordinary.
The apology in her office had been necessary, excruciating, and Taylor had accepted it with that quiet grace that seemed to come so naturally to her.
But the acceptance didn’t settle the restless ache in Charlotte’s chest, nor did it stop the way her pulse would spike whenever their eyes met across the room.
This was the part where she was supposed to move on. To let professionalism override the reckless pull she felt every time Taylor’s eyes met her own.
But it was proving much more difficult than that.
The only thing that Charlotte knew was that this was going to be the longest academic year of her life.