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It felt like… maybe I was finally ready to accept love in my life again. I felt that in my soul. Was I in the position to let my heart get broken again? Absolutely not. I’d protect my own heart no matter what. But to give and receive love—wasn’t that one of life’s biggest miracles?
I took another bite of my cinnamon roll, pondering all of that when I felt Charlotte’s eyes on me again. She leaned in close, whispering in my ear, “So how’s it going with Professor Hottie?”
“Char.” I groaned. “It’s Professor Harper, and don’t call him that.” Was my face red? Was I flushing, just over a simple question about him? No. Fuck.
“So what do you call him?” Charlotte smirked.
“Matthew,” I mumbled.
“Matthew?” Gabbi raised an eyebrow. Fuck, we hadn’t kept our voices low enough.
“Oh, uh, yeah. He asked me to call him by his first name. That’s not that weird, I’ve had professors in tons of classes tell us to do that.”
“Is this the same professor that took you home from the bar that night?” Angelina gave me a look, which I promptly shot back with my best shut-up-now face. But they didn’t. Of course, they didn’t.
“Are you the only one who he lets call Matthew, Noelle?”
I wracked my brain. Really pondered it. Tried to remember if I had heard any of the students, undergraduate or grad level, call him by his first name. When we were at the zoo… those girls had called him Professor Harper, hadn’t they? I wondered if he instructed his classes to call him by his first name, or if it was only me. But I couldn’t think of a single moment where anyone had called him anything but Professor Harper or Dr. Harper, so I had to concede that yes, I may have been the only one calling him Matthew. Because all along, he had asked me to.
Because he had never wanted that kind of relationship with me. The professor/student relationship. That wasn’t who I was to him, and it wasn’t who he was to me. I was lying to myself if I pretended it was anything else. And I knew I was the only one. The only one who had kissed him outside of a restaurant after dinner. The only one who he had packed a Valentine’s Day picnic for. Certainly the only one he was showing up to the campus coffee shop every day just to see.
And, well… I couldn’t deny it to myself anymore. It was one hundred percent, way more than just friends.
“I—”
“Oh my gosh,” Gabbi’s eyes lit up. “You’re absolutely smitten with him, aren’t you?”
“Smitten?” I said, raising my voice as I started to protest. “I’m not smitten with him! I don’t even have a little teeny-tiny crush on him or anything. Nope.”
“So if I told you that he was standing in line at the counter, you wouldn’t turn around as fast as possible to see him?”
I shook my head. “No, of course not.” Was my voice a little too high and breathy.
“You’re the worst,” Angelina sang, and the other girls joined in laughing.
Maybe I was just in denial. Because… If he had been here, at my favorite coffee shop with my best friends, I would have turned around. And after our Valentine’s dinner… What would I do if he was? I felt like my feelings were all tangled up inside, and I didn’t even know what I wanted. There were still so many unknowns between the two of us.
And would I tell him I’d been thinking about him every minute of every day since he had kissed me the first time? Ask him if it meant for him what it meant for me? No—I couldn’t do that. Because I wasn’t ready for the inevitable heartbreak when he told me that I wasn’t enough for him. That I didn’t mean enough to him.
Because I was easy to leave. Because I wasn’t noteworthy enough for someone to stay.
And dammit, I wanted him to stay.
~ ~ ~
The next week passed like usual—coffee shop dates, lingering glances, the brush of our hands when we saw each other. But we didn’t kiss again. We hadn’t even held hands again since Valentine’s Day. And if I was being honest, I didn’t know what to do with myself.
Didn’t know how to be around him without asking him what we were anymore.
It was all I could do to chip away at the word document on my computer to distract myself. I surprised myself by typing another ten thousand words here and there over the week
My phone buzzed, and I unlocked it to find a text from Matthew. I couldn’t help the racing of my heart when I saw his name on the screen—especially not after everything that had happened between us.
Matthew: Hey, are you free tonight?
I chuckled at my phone. He knew that I was. I wasn’t on duty tonight as Hall Director, had pretty much got everything done in preparation for spring break in two weeks, and was currently just sitting on my couch, scrolling through my computer.
Pretending like I was going to type on my book document, but this sounded much more promising.
