18. Silas
Andreas has been staring at me like I’ve grown two heads while asking me the same question on a ten-minute loop without a break.
“So you, Silas Vaughn, almost kissed a student?”
My fist connects directly with his ribs, and I hear him swallow a sound of pure agony, but I have too much energy to burn off to care.
When he looks back up at me, I catch the triumphant grin. Because of course he’s going to say it a thousand more times just to get under my skin.
The next cross barely misses his right cheek, and with both hands raised in surrender, he steps out of the ring.
I came here immediately after the library incident, trying to clear my head, which had apparently gotten lost somewhere between those shelves.
“Almost,” I say through my teeth.
“That’s already more than you’ve managed in all your years as a professor. And not for lack of me trying to make you see reason, I want to point out. I’ve been telling you for years that your job could be better... utilized.” He says it with a laugh, and I roll my eyes.
Andreas has always made my career sound like paradise on earth, saying, and I’m quoting, “How many women love a hot nerd.” Yes, he said the word “hot.” Kill me now.
My best friend has zero discernment when it comes to the opposite sex.
His criteria are simple: don’t talk too much, and preferably bring no more than two connected neurons to the table.
Apparently, from three neurons upward they start to figure out that he doesn’t want anything beyond one night of tension relief before he sends them home.
I watch him wipe the sweat off with a towel and try to figure out what is wrong with me that I’ve lost the restraint I normally have without even noticing.
My career is at stake. My ethics are on the line because I have never been able to stomach the forbidden game between a professor and a student, and now I find myself standing right in the middle of it.
“Do it,” he says in a tone that doesn’t leave room for argument.
“Do what?”
“Go to her, kiss her, find the nearest empty desk, and get rid of the frustration that’s been rolling off you in waves. If it’s just a fluke, who’s going to care? If it’s something more, God help us, at least you’ll know.”
He’s right that this feeling of being one breath away from combustion around her isn’t going to disappear on its own. But what if it isn’t the first scenario Andreas described? Is there actually a fifty percent chance I’m falling in love with Amalia? Is this how Dean felt when he met Karina?
Andreas heads to the showers and I stay in the locker room, trying to pull my thoughts together.
I can recognize her breathing, her sighs, every small furrow of her brow, and the way she just barely sticks her tongue out when she’s deeply concentrating on cramming as much detail as possible onto the smallest available scrap of paper.
Because every moment I haven’t been teaching has been spent, subtly or otherwise, watching her.
The way her whole face lights up the first time she catches the scent of that hot chocolate, or the way she lines up all her colored markers before a lecture starts.
The way her eyes go slightly wide when she understands how an algorithm works, and the blush that spreads across her cheeks when Mr. Eleazar, the seventy-year-old campus doorman, picks a flower from the garden and gives it to her.
And as my mind moves through every detail that makes Amalia who she is, I realize that for the first time in my life, I’m still curious about a person even after learning this much about her.
My phone vibrates in my pocket. I look down and see a message from a client waiting on modified financial reports, and officially I need a few hours without her constant presence in my head.
Andreas offered to come with me to the poker night, and we haven’t even made it through the casino door before I spot Charly.
“Se?or Silas, cognac?”
“Thank you, Charly.”
If he decides to skim from my winnings again tonight, I’ll make sure Andreas holds him still while I rearrange his jaw.
I have too many nerves and too much frustration to be diplomatic tonight.
“I’m almost tempted to leave an empty seat between us,” my best friend tells me, visibly amused.
“Afraid I can smell your bullshit?” I ask, taking a sip from my glass of De Montal.
For a club in Ciudad de México, sourcing a fifteen-year-old cognac is genuinely impressive, even by my standards.
“Be serious, Si. As wound up as you are right now, I think you’re walking out of here poorer tonight. I’m here to make sure you don’t do something stupidly insane.”
Stupidly insane, meaning the time I bet two million dollars on a single hand. Except that wasn’t insanity. That was mathematics.
I’d tracked every hand played, accounted for every card in the deck, and read the tells of two out of three players at the table. My probability of winning was 65.25%.
That’s how I went home with four million that evening.
I scan the other players at the table and immediately clock one of them rotating the watch on his wrist, while another keeps checking his phone.
They’re either playing with someone else’s money or they’re simply inexperienced. Either way, it’s fine.
Andreas has spotted their nerves too, and as the game plays out, one of them folds and walks away thirteen thousand dollars down. We’re down to me, Andreas, and a man around fifty who goes by Sergio. Sergio is wearing a fake Patek Philippe Grandmaster on his wrist.
How do I know it’s fake? I have an original at home, and it’s precisely the way the second hand moves with a faint stutter rather than gliding smoothly that gives it away.
And what does that tell me? That he wants to project the image of serious money so that amateurs are intimidated by his wealth and fold decent hands.
Andreas only has to look at my face to know I’m not backing down. We call.
Full house for me.
Andreas shakes his head as he looks at his three of a kind, a perfectly solid hand if mine had been anything weaker.
Sergio looks like he’s about to pass out next to his flush, which, similarly, would have turned him a very nice profit tonight if my cards had been worse.
“You cheated,” Sergio spits at me through his teeth, and I ignore him.
He’s not the first to accuse me, but this time I genuinely played it straight. I didn’t count cards, I simply observed.
It’s not my fault it’s written all over them when they’re waiting for a specific card. It’s not my fault I have every possible combination and its probability memorized.
His hand lands on my shoulder, and in that moment I pray he does something stupid. I pray he gives me one more reason to be even more irritated, and the Universe obliges.
He spins me around, but before his fist can make contact with my face, I drop and make sure I get to his midsection first.
He doubles over, face going red, but I can’t stop myself and I land one more into his ribs.
“Come on, Si. I don’t want blood on these new shoes.”
I turn to my best friend, who looks mildly bored though I don’t miss the irritation that he lost that money.
“They’re black.”
“They’re Cucinelli.”
I don’t know who Cucinelli is, but given how offended Andreas looks, I let it go.
On my way out, Charly hands me a thick fold of bills. I count them with my eyes, slowly, then lift my gaze to his sweating face.
“Se?or Silas, it’s all in there. I swear.”
I pocket the cash without a word and head for the exit.
The cold air outside makes me pull my coat tighter around myself, trying to generate some warmth.
“What are you going to do about Amalia?” he asks once we’ve put a decent stretch of distance between ourselves and the club.
“I don’t know, but if tonight confirmed anything, it’s that neither punching things nor the concentration a poker game demands can get her out of my head. Do you think she put a hex on me?”
Andreas’s laugh fills the entire street in the middle of the night before he answers.
“Silas, it would take an entire coven to make your brain focus on one single thing at a time. Whatever she did, it’s something else entirely.”
“Is it reversible?”
“Falling in love? Who the hell knows, you haven’t exactly found the right person to ask. But the diagnosis is clear, my friend.” He holds up a finger for each letter, slow and deliberate, eyes on mine the whole time. “L. O. V. E.”
And I have a feeling I’m not going to find antibiotics strong enough to cure it.