Chapter 17
“If only you knew how wrong you were,” Charlotte said.
The words left her mouth before she could stop them. They hung in the space between her and Taylor.
Charlotte kept her eyes fixed on the blank wall across the room. A sudden rush of adrenaline hit her scalp. Her body felt torn. Her nervous system demanded she run away, while her heart demanded she stay. The silk of her blouse clung to her collarbone, feeling too heavy against her skin.
She was tipsy. The wine she drank downstairs lingered on her tongue. She might not be sober, but she knew exactly what she’d just confessed. She couldn’t believe she spoke the sentence out loud.
Taylor stopped moving. The silence in the loft stretched.
Did she want something to happen?
She swallowed. Her throat felt tight and dry.
She chose to walk up the stairs.
She chose to step inside this apartment.
The room surrounded her with Taylor’s guitars and books, a life that felt solid and separate from everything Charlotte knew.
The university felt miles away. Up here, Charlotte wasn’t a professor giving a lecture or attending faculty meetings.
She didn’t have assignments to grade or colleagues to impress.
Up here, she was just a woman fighting a physical hunger that refused to diminish.
Seeing Taylor on that stage tonight broke her remaining resolve.
She’d stared at the low scooped neckline of Taylor’s black top.
She’d watched the way Taylor’s fingers pressed into the guitar strings.
Hearing that voice again brought back the beach memory with sharp clarity. And then what came after.
She remembered the taste of Taylor’s skin. She remembered the pressure of Taylor’s body pushing her down into the cushions. She remembered the specific sound Taylor made when she came.
The attraction wasn’t fading. It was growing into a constant ache that ruined her focus every time Taylor walked into her lecture hall.
Charlotte had accepted the invitation to stay here. She didn’t have to do that. She could have stood on the curb for while she waited for her Uber. Instead, she sat on this leather couch beside Taylor. She sat two feet away from the one person she couldn’t touch.
“Charlotte,” Taylor said.
The sound of her first name scraped against her nerve endings.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” Charlotte said.
Taylor leaned forward, shrinking the space between them by an inch. “Then why did you?”
Charlotte looked at Taylor.
“I’ve had a lot of wine,” Charlotte said.
“You’re not drunk.”
“No. I’m not.”
Charlotte wanted to close the gap herself, or maybe she just wanted Taylor to do it for her.
The realization was a cold knot in her stomach that somehow made the tightness in her chest sharper.
She’d built this life brick by careful brick over two decades, the tenure, the respect, the fragile, hard-won stability after everything with Diane, and here she was, ready to knock it all over for a beautiful woman who unfortunately was also her student.
Charlotte knew the consequences, could list them like lecture points: professional ruin, a scandal that would follow her out of academia, the quiet, judgmental pity from her colleagues.
Tallying up every professional ethics violation and every hard-won year of her career couldn’t dull the physical reality sitting right in front of her. It didn’t alter the sudden heat humming beneath her blouse or quiet the thrumming pulse at the base of her throat.
If anything, lining up those terrifying potential futures only brought the edge into sharp, undeniable focus, sending a wave of dizzying vertigo straight through her stomach. The sheer risk of it didn’t function as a deterrent at all.
Instead, it stripped away her carefully rehearsed defenses, making the air between them feel dense and electric, charged with the dangerous truth that she was already leaning over the side.
“I don’t think a day has gone by where I haven’t thought of you,” Taylor said.
The confession hit Charlotte straight in the center of her chest. Her breath stalled in her throat. Her hands twitched against the fabric of her slacks. A sharp prickle crept along the back of her neck, spreading a cold, static friction across her collarbone while her stomach dropped.
“Over the summer, I tried not to,” Taylor said, her voice dropping into a quiet, unhurried rhythm.
“Because why should I want a woman who would sneak out of my bed with no explanation, knowing that I had no way to find her? And I think I was just about getting over you when I saw you walking toward your office.”
Taylor ran a hand through her hair, lifting the chestnut waves off her neck before turning on the couch to face Charlotte completely.
“I had every intention of putting that night behind us then, when I knew you were my professor,” Taylor said.
Her hazel eyes darkened, heavy with an open, unshielded heat.
“But I’ve somehow fallen even harder for you.
It’s like I’ve gotten to see another side of you.
You’re so different when you’re lecturing.
You’re in control. You’re in your element. ”
Taylor’s gaze dipped to Charlotte’s lips, lingering there before lifting back to her eyes. “You’re so fucking sexy up there.”
Charlotte felt the thud of her heartbeat in her ears, thick and loud.
“I’m so glad that I know who you are and that we’ve met again,” Taylor said, a wistful edge softening her jawline. “But I don’t know how I’m going to last the rest of the year. It’s only October, and I already feel like I’m a lost cause.”
The physical impact of Taylor’s confession hit Charlotte straight in the jaw.
Taylor wasn’t just entertaining a passing infatuation.
The realization flooded Charlotte’s nervous system. Taylor was just as consumed.
Charlotte spent the last four months telling herself the attraction existed only in her own isolated mind. She convinced herself the intense heat of that beach night faded for Taylor the moment the sun came up. Hearing the raw truth vocalized destroyed the safety of that assumption.
Taylor wanted her. She sat in the sloped lecture hall every week and fought the exact same physical demand that kept Charlotte awake at night.
The validation terrified her. It stripped away her primary excuse. She wasn’t harboring a one-sided, inappropriate obsession. She sat directly at the center of Taylor’s focus.
A vicious pull of desire pushed through Charlotte’s veins, before she came to her senses.
“You don’t know what you’re saying,” Charlotte said.
“I know exactly what I’m saying.”
Charlotte dragged her gaze away from Taylor’s mouth. The fabric of her slacks rubbed a harsh friction against her knees as she shifted her weight. She needed to stand up, walk down the rear stairs, and wait outside. Doing anything else meant dismantling the foundation of her entire life.
She participated in the committee that drafted the department ethics policy on student relationships. She sat in the sterile conference room and argued for strict professional boundaries.
The power dynamic demanded absolute separation.
Taylor sat in her classroom. Taylor needed her objective evaluation for a final grade.
“Taylor,” Charlotte said. Her voice scraped against the dry back of her throat.
“Don’t tell me you don’t feel it.”
Taylor leaned closer.
“I feel it,” Charlotte said. “But I’m your professor.”
“You weren’t my professor at the beach.”
“That doesn’t matter now.” Charlotte gripped her own thighs. She dug her manicured nails into the wool trousers to keep her hands anchored. “We can’t do this. I can’t do this with you.”
Charlotte looked down. Her fingers trembled against her legs. The visible lack of control exposed every lie she tried to force out of her mouth. The nervous energy humming in her muscles demanded she lean forward. Closing the remaining inches required only a slight shift of her torso.
“You have to let this go,” Charlotte said.