Page 13 of Say You Want Me
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 withthe 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.
