Page 131 of Legacy Elite

"You've got the teacher voice." I stand up. "It's the one you use in the lecture hall when somebody interrupts with a statement and not a question, and I have been listening to it for a year and a half and I know what it fucking sounds like."

"Miss Miller—"

"Don't Miss Miller me."

"I am your professor."

"Yes. That's the fucking problem, Jon, and you keep saying it like it's an answer."

The room is very quiet.

“I can't be alone in a room with you and pretend I don't want you. How the fuck do you do it?”

He looks up.

“What do you want me to say?” Jon asks.

He closes his eyes and breathes out.

"Tell me one true thing," I say. "Something you actually did, about us, me . . .”

Jon looks at the chronology for a while.

Then he says, "I stood outside your work before I left and watched you for almost an entire shift."

"What?"

"In England." He still isn't looking at me. "After I talked to you in the shop. I came back to your work. I stood outside deciding whether I could walk away from you."

"You never came back in."

"No."

"I called you."

"You called me." He turns the pen over. "And we had coffee, and that was that."

I laugh. It comes out wrong.

"Why did you stop yourself?"

"Because I knew what it would cost you. Wolves. A new school. A new identity." He does look up then. "And apparently a fated mate almost exactly twice your age."

"That's a lot."

"Yes."

"What else?"

He puts the pen down flat and squares it with the edge of the table, which is a thing he does, and which I now understand is what he does instead of moving.

"I went to Falken twice," he says. "November of your first year, and again in March. I asked to be taken off anything to do with assessing you. Marking, evaluations, recommendations. All of it."

"You—"

"He said no. Correctly." He finally looks at me properly. "I was the person who'd found you and the person who knew your file. A professor with no history of asking for anything walks in and asks to be removed from one specific student, twice, and won't say why."

"You never told me."