Chapter 5 #2
Unlike her good friend Sylvia, Yasmine prided herself on being aware of her speaking volume. But apparently nothing about Yasmine was operating correctly this morning. Her eyes anxiously slid towards the stage, and found exactly what she feared—Bella Dragomir had stopped sorting her notes.
One arm balancing casually on the podium, her finger tapping her maroon-painted lips, she was staring straight at Yasmine. As was every other head in the audience.
“Huh. It seems we have a guest.”
Dear God, smite me now.
Yasmine gave her, and every watching student, a tight-lipped smile.
“I apologize for my volume. I was just discussing something with a student. Dr. Dragomir, please. Go ahead.”
She gave her a hand gesture that she hoped signified, Get on with it and stop attracting attention to the fact that I can’t stop thinking about you to the point where I’m now forgoing my life’s work to stand in the corner of a packed lecture hall and watch you talk about mold.
It was a silly, fleeting infatuation, that was all it was. Yasmine had endured a handful of them in a thousand years. It just simply wasn’t every day she ran into a human that was both objectively, nauseatingly beautiful and also mildly (perhaps even moderately) intelligent.
She’d get over it in a few days and kick the girl out of her house. Politely, of course. With enough money in Bella’s bank account to make up for any hurt feelings.
That’s all she was. A blip. It would peter out into nothing soon enough.
“Why don’t you come up to the podium, Professor,” said the blip. “It’s not every day I have a living legend in my class.”
Oh, for the love of God.
“No, no. I’m good,” Yasmine said. “This is your class. The living legend will leave.”
Bella crossed her arms across her chest and laughed.
“Nonsense. Do we want Professor Sokolov to leave?”
It was a testament to Bella’s future as a cult leader that the entire class immediately said No we don’t in a perfectly synchronous chorus.
To make matters worse, Bella looked her straight in the eye and mouthed Come here, bending her finger beckoningly. There would be no escaping.
Resigning herself to her fate, Yasmine rolled her eyes and tried to make it look like it was completely her choice when she jogged down the amphitheater steps towards the stage.
Bella offered her a hand to help her up, and even though Yasmine didn’t need the help, she took it anyway, ignoring the jolt of electricity she felt in the brief moment of contact.
“Thanks,” Yasmine muttered.
Bella hummed, then leaned her back against the podium so that she was just facing Yasmine, out of view of the students. And since there were no cameras recording the session, Yasmine knew it really was just them when the blonde gave her a small, almost sheepish smile and said, quietly, “Hi.”
Yasmine felt her throat swell up.
“Hi,” she whispered back.
“You actually came to watch me talk.”
“I… did. I mean, you invited me.”
“That’s true. I just wasn’t expecting you to take me up on it… twelve hours later.”
Yasmine pinched the bridge of her nose. It had been hasty, hadn’t it? She’d been so wrapped up in that dream, she’d forgotten her social graces. Not that she had any.
“My apologies, I’ll leave right now—”
“No, no. Please don’t.” Bella caught her wrist. “I’m just a bit nervous about starting now. My lecture, I mean.”
Yasmine blinked, completely thrown off. She looked back at the students. They were talking a bit amongst themselves, but the great majority of the class was still just sitting, staring, waiting. It was like they were under some kind of spell.
This kind of behavior from a group of undergraduates was unheard of. If this was her classroom, they’d already be loudly watching TikToks.
“You have no reason to be nervous,” Yasmine scoffed. “You’ve booked a full house to talk about…” Her eyes flitted to the screen above them. “Fungal Enzymes That Interrupt Cellular Breakdown. Do you know how rare this level of attendance is?”
“I’m not nervous about the students,” Bella said. “I’m nervous because of you.”
Yasmine froze. She felt her lungs constrict slightly. Bella said it so off-hand.
But then again, it made sense. Yasmine was a Distinguished Professor, high-ranking in the department faculty.
If she wanted, she could pull ropes to get Bella a position after her post-doc period ended.
How naive she’d been to forget that. She’d been so fixated on how she saw Bella, she’d forgotten how Bella probably saw her.
“Oh,” Yasmine said, dusting off her sleeves just to give her anxious hands something to do.
“That’s even sillier, then. I’m not worth getting nervous over.
I’ll happily recommend you to join the permanent teaching staff if they ask me.
It would surely increase the mean IQ score of the professors in this department. "
A beat passed where Yasmine just stared at her hands, writhing in the silence. Then Bella did something which was becoming all too common between them—and laughed in her face.
“Yasmine, I don’t care about your recommendation.”
Yasmine’s head snapped up.
“What?” she said. “You don’t?”
“No,” Bella said, then she took a step closer, so Yasmine’s world narrowed just to the two of them, and the faint glow of the projector behind Bella’s head, which gave her a false halo.
“I don’t care about getting a teaching position here.
I’m nervous because I want you to think I’m a decent enough scientist to join your lab. ”
Yasmine blinked, stunned.
“My lab?” she repeated, making sure she’d heard that correctly. But Bella just nodded. “I hate to break it to you, but I don’t study mold. I study…”
“Theoretical biological immortality. I know,” Bella said, with a teasing, playful edge to it, as if Yasmine was stating the glaringly obvious.
“But you possess a frankly mind boggling amount of funding, way too much for a single researcher to work with in a human lifetime, and I have none. No one really cares about funding mycology. So I figure, I rub your back, you rub mine…”
Okay—that drew a sharp and frankly delighted laugh out of Yasmine. No one in academia had ever been this upfront with her about wanting a dose of departmental nepotism. Usually they just gossiped jealously behind her back.
“So, if it’s okay,” Bella said, taking Yasmine’s wrist gingerly. “I need you to sit there in the front row,”—she motioned toward a seat—“watch what I hope will be a tantalizing lecture, and then after that, we can chat about working together, okay?”
Yasmine knew somewhere in the back of her head that there were two hundred adolescent faces staring at them right now. She could acknowledge that logically, but no part of her could register it anymore.
Not when Bella’s thumb was rubbing a circle on her wrist. If Yasmine didn’t know better, she would have thought this girl was Suggesting her. But her eyes weren’t red in the slightest. Just a gentle and deceptive blue.
“Bella, I don’t want to give you the wrong impression of me,” she finally choked out. “I know it might seem strange from the woman who invited you to sleep at her house last night, but I don’t really work well with others. I conduct all of my research alone.”
“I’m well aware. But I think we’d make a good team.”
“Yes, well, I’m sure you would make a great teammate to any normal person. But what I’m saying is that I do not work well with people, at large, as a group—”
"I'm very familiar with how little you think of the general public," Bella said, the smallest smirk forming on her face. “I am not the general public.”
Yasmine blinked. She couldn't find this blind, ridiculous confidence more attractive if she tried. But she did still have some dignity she intended to preserve.
“We’ll see,” she replied quietly, reaching up to Bella’s blouse, and adjusting the V slightly, under the guise of professionalism. The other woman’s lips parted in surprise. “We can talk about it at my house. After the workday. Over some coffee.”
Bella's face fell. She opened her mouth to say something more, but before she had a chance, someone in the audience cleared their throat.
“Dr. Dragomir. Professor Sokolov. I apologize for interrupting, but we’re cutting into class time.”
Containing the rabid beating in her chest, Yasmine released Bella’s blouse, and turned to the student, a tight, impervious smile on her face.
“My apologies,” she said.
She climbed off the stage, made an effort to at least look towards the exit, but, of course, she ended up sitting in the front row.