Page 20 of Marrying My Professor

ELARA

Run, he says, and my body obeys before my mind catches up.

I walk until my legs burn, until the campus gives way to streets I recognize, until my apartment building is in front of me and I can’t pretend I’m not shaking anymore. Inside, the lobby hums softly, warm and ordinary, detergent and burnt coffee lingering in the air. I ride the elevator beside a girl in leggings scrolling her phone, completely unaware of anything except whatever song is playing in her ears.

I stare at the numbers climbing and feel absurdly jealous of her normalcy.

When I reach my door, my hands fumble with the lock. The door opens easily, and the familiar scent of vanilla and something buttery greets me, grounding and domestic and jarringly out of place with the way my pulse is still racing.

I step inside and close the door behind me, pressing my back to it.

He’s my professor.

The thought lands hard now that there’s distance, now that the adrenaline has nowhere to go. It should cool everything. It should make my stomach turn, but it only makes everything a thousand times hotter.

“Elara?” Georgia yells, and I kick off my shoes as I make my way deeper into the house.

“Yup!” I call back as I enter our living room.

She’s already on the couch and I drop my bag next to it. Bare feet tucked under her, a throw blanket patterned with faded magnolias draped over her lap, she looks like the cover of a lifestyle magazine dreamed up by a sorority house. Honey-blonde hair in soft waves, pinned back on one side with a pearl clip. Cat-eye liner neat enough to slice a line through fog. A pale pink satin sleep set under an oversized Belgrave University sweatshirt, sleeves swallowing her hands. Gold hoops, glossy mouth, a monogrammed tumbler sweating sweet tea on a coaster that says Bless Your Heart in looping script.

“Sugar,” she drawls, eyes flicking up from the remote to my face. Her accent is sunlight and porch swings, butter on hot toast. “You are supposed to have classes until three! What if I had a gentleman caller?”

I swallow the answer I can’t give. My throat feels paper-dry. “Rough class,” I say, which is the truth wearing a plain dress. “But if you have a gentleman caller over, your daddy would get here faster than me and he lives in Tennessee."

“Well, there is no stronger cock block,” she murmurs, wiggling her toes. “Come on, you can watch a couple of episodes of my favorite show before I need to get to my acting class.”

Georgia has been my constant since middle school, back when we were pen pals who wrote too much and knew too much about each other before we ever met in person. When I told her I was transferring to Belgrave, she didn’t hesitate—just told me I had a room, free of charge, like it was nothing. Her dad owns something obscene, like forty percent of the Southeast, but she’s never acted like money was the point. Comfort is. People are.

She’s bubbly in a way that feels genuine, sweet without being naïve, addicted to anything with vampires and tortured immortals, and she treats popcorn like it’s a necessary food group. She’s also the closest thing I’ve ever had to a best friend, the kind of person who shows up without keeping score.

The closest thing I have to family, now that Brandon’s dead.

I sink down beside her, the couch sagging at the center like it always does. She tucks the blanket around me without asking, instinctive, practiced, and I slide my cold feet against her warm ones until the chill bleeds out of me.

“What are we watching?” I ask, voice tired, forcing Alexander’s steel eyes out of my head as I focus on the screen instead—the old-timey accent, the familiar brown-eyed intensity filling the room. “And who is that?”

“The Originals,” she says, shifting closer.

I sigh and reach for a shortbread cookie on the coffee table. “Again?”

“Always,” she sings, just as Klaus’s voice drifts in like smoke. “It’s my comfort show.”

We fall quiet after that, the world shrinking down to banter and betrayal and a violin that insists on feeling everything at once. I let it. I’m grateful for the noise, for the distraction, for something dramatic that isn’t mine. At some point a bowl of popcorn appears—Georgia has popcorn the way some people have spare change, always within reach—and she presses it into my hands before leaning her head against my shoulder.

Two episodes down and we have switched positions with the warm weight of her head against my collarbone, the familiar cadence of a story we’ve watched a dozen times.

“The closest thing we have to Klaus on this campus is Wesley,” she remarks dreamily, staring at a fully blood-soaked Klaus Mikaelson standing in a field of wolves.

“One, batting your eyelashes at a man covered in blood is alarming, and two—” I choke on a kernel. “I met him this morning.”

Her head lifts so fast the pearl clip wobbles. “I beg your entire pardon?”

“In Professor Draven’s class this morning. Forbidden Ethics.” I keep it bare-bones. I don’t tell her that the closest thing she’s getting to her favorite wet dream just dropped a note into my shirt that I still haven’t pulled out and am ninety-nine percent sure is his number. “We chatted. Kind of flirted. It was whatever.”

“Whatever? No. That is totally not whatever.” Georgia’s eyebrows climb halfway up her forehead as she pauses the show and stares at me. “Wesley Carter does not just talk to anyone.”

“What does he… do?” I ask, already aware of how naïve it sounds.