Monday came fast, the way weekends that end well always seem to.
And no, I did not tell Jackson about the Bentley. That was a can of worms I wasn’t remotely ready to open before I’d even finished processing it myself, and Jackson, brilliant as he was at reading a situation, did not need to know his best friend’s professor drove something that cost more than the building we were sitting in.
We settled into our usual seats for Thermo, Jackson beside me, still riding some low hum of weekend satisfaction from whatever he and Evelyn had gotten up to that he’d mercifully spared me the details of.
Nicole walked in exactly on time, set her things down at the lectern, and got straight into it, same composed rhythm as always, nothing in her posture giving away a single thing about the weekend.
"Before we move on, I’m assigning a project. Individual, not group work. I want to see what each of you can actually do without three other people carrying you."
A groan rippled through the room. Somewhere near the front, one of the guys raised his hand halfway, not even bothering to wait to be called on.
"How about two to a team?" someone else called out.
"Individual," she said, without missing a beat.
Another student groaned out: "This is gonna be brutal."
She smiled. "It is. That’s the point."
The room groaned collectively, and even I cracked a smile, mostly at how unbothered she seemed by the pushback.
Her eyes drifted toward me for half a second in the middle of it, there and gone so fast that if I hadn’t already known her, I might not have caught it at all.
She moved into the lecture proper after that, working through the material with the same precision she always brought, clean explanations, no wasted motion, the kind of teaching that made even a subject like thermodynamics feel almost manageable for the length of the class.
Near the end, she set the marker down.
"The project’s due next week. I know that sounds like a lot, but you’re capable of more than you think you are."
A fresh wave of groaning went up around the room. She laughed, just a little, at the sheer predictability of it.
I felt it too, honestly, the very specific dread of ’this is going to be brutal’ settling in somewhere behind my ribs, even though the project details were still forming in my head.
Jackson leaned in beside me. "You know, when she does that laugh thing, it doesn’t even feel like evil professor energy."
Someone in the row behind us leaned forward to add, entirely unprompted, "That’s because she’s hot."
Right before she headed out, Nicole glanced back toward the room, eyes landing briefly on me, and smiled before disappearing through the door.
The guy behind us practically lit up. "Did you see that? She just smiled at me."
Jackson snorted, glancing sideways at me with the specific look of a man having far too much fun. "Yeah. Definitely you."
I grabbed my bag, saying nothing, which apparently was answer enough for him. Jackson fell into step beside me as we headed out, still grinning.
I was barely out the door of the lecture hall when my phone buzzed.
Nicole: Lunch? I know a place 🍜 😋
I stared at it for a second before typing back: I’ve got class after lunch.
Nicole: Not until 2. I checked.
I paused, phone in hand. Of course she checked.
I typed back: You checked my schedule.
Nicole: I have access to it. It would be strange not to use that occasionally 😁🙃
I snorted a short laugh despite myself.
Jackson leaned in immediately, trying to catch a glimpse of the screen. "What’d she say?"
I angled the phone away before he could get anywhere near it.
"Nothing."
"That was not a ’nothing’ laugh."
I ignored him and typed back: See you at 2.
I got the address a few minutes after the text exchange ended and drove over, pulling into a small lot outside a cafe tucked between two other storefronts, unassuming enough that I never would’ve clocked it walking past on my own.
I walked in, and she was already there, tucked into a corner table, waving the second the door chimed behind me.
I crossed the room and sat down across from her.
"Hi." Her whole face lit up saying it, like she’d genuinely been waiting for that exact moment since the text went out.
I stared a beat longer than I probably should have. In my defense, she was still just objectively, distractingly pretty, and I was still, on some fundamental level, a guy with a pulse.
She caught the stare, and instead of calling it out directly, just smiled wider, clearly pleased, and gestured at the menu. "Order something before you forget how words work."
I picked up the menu, scanned it for exactly as long as it took to find the thing I always ended up ordering anyway.
"Grilled chicken wrap. No onions. Extra sauce on the side."
Nicole placed her own order; something with more vegetables in it than I’d ever willingly choose on purpose, then handed both menus back to the waiter.
We ate in comfortable quiet for a bit, and I caught her stealing glances at me every so often, not even bothering to fully hide it.
"You must really like that wrap," she said eventually, nodding toward it. "You ordered it without even looking at the rest of the menu."
"It’s my favorite. Have been ordering it for months now."
She nodded, filing that away the way she seemed to file everything away about him.
A pause.
"The project I assigned," she said, tilting her head slightly. "Too evil?"
"Yes. Genuinely evil."
"Good." She smiled, entirely unbothered by the accusation. "I like a little suffering. Builds character."
We went back to eating for a bit before I finally asked.
"How many marks is the project worth?"
"Twenty."
I nodded, then hesitated before asking the other thing I actually wanted to know.
"How much does it contribute to the semester’s total?"
She opened her mouth to answer, then paused, tilting her head slightly, something amused settling into her expression instead.
"That sounded like I was asking for an unfair advantage, didn’t it?" I said, already backpedaling. "I— Sorry."
Silence. Then: "Oh, I can tell you if you want to know."
I blinked. "You mean that?"
She nodded, taking another bite like she hadn’t just said something enormous. "If you were my boyfriend, that is."
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out for a second.
"...Come again?"
"You heard me." Then she gestured toward my plate with her fork, entirely unbothered. "Eat your food."
I just stared at her for a second, still catching up, while she went right on eating like the last thirty seconds hadn’t happened at all.
I forced myself to go back to eating, mostly on autopilot, still turning the whole exchange over in my head.
"I wasn’t joking," she added quietly, not looking up from her plate. "In case that wasn’t clear."
I didn’t have anything ready to say to that. Not yet.
We finished lunch mostly in comfortable silence after that, and by the time I dropped her back off and made it to my two o’clock, I still hadn’t landed on a single coherent thought about any of it.