Page 17 of Marrying My Professor

She does, folding herself neatly into it, hands resting in her lap, gaze level.

I close the door behind me and take the long way around the desk, putting the solid slab of wood between us like it might save me from picking her up and spreading her across my desk. Shit, now I can’t get that image out of my head. It doesn’t. Nothing does. Not the degrees on the wall. Not the books. Not this table in between us. She is under my fucking skin, and why is she wearing this short fucking skirt as if it is not snowing outside. Jesus Christ. Is she not freezing?

“This,” I begin, then stop, jaw tightening. I drag a hand down my face and try again. “You cannot be in my class.”

“I didn’t know,” she says, voice quiet but steady. We skip greetings and start where the fire is. “I swear I didn’t, Alexander. I—I mean, Professor Draven.”

I close my eyes for a beat, because my name in her mouth is a match. “I didn’t either,” I say. My jaw works. “But that doesn’t matter now.”

She tugs her bag strap higher. “It matters a little.”

“It doesn’t.” I pull out the student handbook, and place it on my desk. “Read page 47, article B.”

“Why do you know that by heart?” She quirks an eyebrow, but I just lean back, staring at her pursed lips.

“Read it.”

She exhales through her nose, steps closer, and flips the book open. The sound of pages turning is absurdly loud in the quiet. I watch her eyes move, left to right, line by line. I know exactly where she is without looking. I could recite it. Faculty–student relationships. Conflicts of interest. Mandatory disclosure. Removal from course. Review by board.

Her shoulders stiffen.

“That’s… procedural,” she says. “It doesn’t say anything about intent.”

“It doesn’t have to.”

She looks up at me then, really looks at me, and there it is again—that same unguarded intensity that wrecked me two weeks ago, that made me forget my own rules and my own damn name.

“So you’re going to report it,” she says. Not a question.

“Yes.”

“And that’s it?” Her voice tightens. “You don’t even want to talk about it?”

I stand before I decide to. The chair legs scrape softly against the floor. I move around the desk because staying behind it feels like a lie. Each step toward her pulls memory along with it—her back against my hands, the weight of her trust, the way she said my name like it wasn’t borrowed time.

“What is there to talk about?” I deadpan, walking over to my bookshelf, and sighing. “It is a conflict of interest.”

The office is all dark wood and clean lines and the discipline of a man who’s built a life on compartmentalization. I open the blinds an inch, need the thin bruise of daylight to cut through this. I need anything that makes me behave.

She stands up and meets me at the bookshelf with her back to the spines, as she leans against it looking up at me.

“I’m filing a conflict of interest,” I say, and the words come out flat, practiced, like I rehearsed them on my way up here which I should’ve.. “You can’t be in my class.”

Her chin lifts. “Because we—because of consensual sex between two adults two weeks ago?”

No, because if I see you every Tuesday and Thursday of the week, I cannot promise to not fuck you again.

“Because I am your professor, and you are my student,” I say. “Because this university—and my ethics—don’t bend around coincidence.”

“We didn’t do anything wrong.” She steps forward on the sentence. She believes it. I hate that a piece of me wants to agree just so I can have what I want. “I didn’t know you were a professor. You didn’t know I was a student. We met off campus. We were two adults. There wasn’t—” She falters. “You know there wasn’t any manipulation.”

I run a hand over the back of my neck. “It’s not about intent,” I say. “It’s about proximity and power. It’s about what it looks like. It’s about what it could do to your reputation and mine and the students who trust me to keep a boundary.”

Her expression softens, then hardens again. The pivot is quick, like she only lets softness have a second before sense takes it back. “We won’t do it again.”

I huff out a laugh that has no humor. “That’s precisely the problem.”

I run my tongue across the bottom row of my teeth, as I pull the glasses off my face and try not to breathe her in deeply. She watches me, unblinking.