She’s not my most conventionally attractive student. She’s not charismatic in the traditional sense of the word, but she is the most interesting presence on the entire campus, and that is officially a problem.
I can’t stop watching her, which is how I ended up at the back of the operating systems lecture hall. When I saw Javier touching her hair and pulling out her clips, I saw red, and I shouldn’t have. All I know is that if I find out he so much as glanced in her direction again, he’ll be missing his entire hand before the semester’s out.
Violence isn’t my thing. That’s Andreas’s department. But years of tracking a monster have made me want to hold my own in a real fight. Blood and danger aren’t foreign to me, not given the organizations I work for.
But when I watched the fire in her eyes go out the moment he threatened her final grade, for a fraction of a second — an important fraction — I forgot that protecting her is not my role. Stepping in is not my role.
Especially since the professor-student cliché is not something I do. She’s not mine. But I can’t deny the way my blood runs hot at the memory of her in that dingy club, pressed close to another one of my students.
Another mistake.
I’d been waiting on some spreadsheets from one of the organizations I work for, and I decided to get a drink at one of the clubs near campus.
I always find a corner where you can’t make out my face unless you’re standing right in front of me, but I felt her presence the moment she walked through the door.
She polluted the room with that floral scent and that goddamn energy she carries around, the kind that makes you want to stare whether you have a reason to or not.
When she started dancing to NSYNC, I couldn’t have looked away if I’d tried.
She’s so colorful and yet so shy all at once. She has that bun that makes me wonder what it would feel like to thread my fingers through her hair. She has a full, round mouth with lips that are just slightly fuller than they should be, and they pull my eyes toward them every single time.
And what’s worst of all is the impulsiveness I can’t control when she’s around.
I always calculate my words and my actions. Always. I have never once broken that rule, but with her, there are already multiple instances where I’ve slipped.
When Gabriel moved in toward her with every intention of finding out what her lips taste like, my hand went straight to the fire alarm on its own.
All I know is that my mind stopped functioning, and I wanted to punish her for letting someone else get that close to her skin. For letting someone else breathe the air within her radius.
Two instances, Silas.Two instances where reason didn’t speak loudly enough.
I go through her exam and stop with my pen suspended in the air when I find nothing to correct.
What the hell?
I frown at the pages in front of me, and if I could breathe fire right now, I would.
Nobody gets everything right on my exams. Nobody.
Everyone misses a theorem, a problem, a formula, but of fucking course not her.
My hand has a faint tremor when I write the perfect score. Without meaning to, a smile spreads across my face when I think about her Cantor and Euclid remark.
Right. I’m sure they’d both be rolling in their graves if they knew what’s going through my head right now because of a girl with deer-in-the-headlights eyes and blouses in colors that are objectively too loud for my taste.
And yet the thought of seeing her in something black, something plain, makes me frown all over again.
What is wrong with me?
My interest in women is purely physiological, no relationships, no complications. And yet my mind is occupied by her to a degree that is becoming genuinely concerning.
After finishing the last of the grading, I decide to turn my attention to one of the projects that actually generates real money.
Inferno is a nightclub in Seattle that specializes in underground poker nights and a range of extracurricular services involving every woman who dances there each evening.
The volume of money being laundered through that club would make even a billionaire raise an eyebrow. I genuinely find it fascinating that some people will throw a hundred thousand dollars at a night with a particular woman, or buy into a poker game with a quarter million as the entry fee.
The last part I can almost understand. Having grown up without money, the idea of throwing it away on a single hand seems absurd to me even though, at this point, the way I count cards, I could walk out of one night with millions.
