We texted back and forth for most of the evening, the usual rhythm, until around eight, when she sent one more message and then, unexpectedly, stopped.
Nicole: Go start your project. The earlier you start, the earlier you finish. 🥺
I stared at that particular emoji for a second, the same woman who’d once said ’yes, sir’ without blinking now apparently a little sad about ending a conversation she’d started herself. I didn’t reply, mostly because there wasn’t a version of that reply that wouldn’t have undone the whole point of her sending it.
I did start the project, and ’evil’ barely began to cover it. An hour in I’d already restructured my approach twice, and by the time I finally gave up for the night, I had more respect for her than I had actual progress. Whatever else she was, brilliant wasn’t a stretch. The project wasn’t just hard, it was precisely, deliberately hard, built by someone who knew exactly which gaps in a third-year’s understanding to aim at.
At exactly midnight, a single text came through.
Nicole: Goodnight, Nathan. I didn’t want to interrupt while you were studying, so I waited until now.
I stared at the timestamp for a second, genuinely a little floored that she’d sat there, watching the clock, deliberately holding off just to not disturb something she wasn’t even part of.
I must have fallen asleep somewhere in the middle of trying, project still barely started, phone slipping out of my hand at some point in the night.
A buzz against the mattress woke me before my alarm even had the chance to.
I patted around blindly until I found the phone, half-tangled in the sheets a few inches from where I’d apparently dropped it.
Nicole: Good morning 😊
I sat there for a minute before getting up, scrolling back through the last few days of messages without really meaning to. The pattern was obvious once I actually looked at it laid out like that, three, four texts from her in a row, then one short reply from me, then another cluster from her, patient, unbothered, never once demanding more than I gave.
Even Sasha, who’d liked me since freshman year and had absolutely no shortage of confidence, dialed it back the second I started replying in short, clipped bursts. That was just how it worked, usually. Pride kicked in somewhere. Attractive people, especially the ones who knew it, didn’t keep reaching after being met halfway at best.
Nicole didn’t do that. Not once. Didn’t slow down, didn’t get short with me, didn’t make me work to earn the next message. She just kept showing up, fully, every single time, completely unbothered by the math of it.
I sat with that for a second, actually taking it in for what it was, rather than just another thing she did that I’d catalogued and moved past.
I did like her. That wasn’t even a real question at this point, not after everything, her face, her whole presence really. Paired with everything underneath it; the sharpness, the humor, the way she cared without making it feel like a transaction. Any reasonably functioning man would.
But.
I groaned, dropped the phone onto the mattress, and forced myself out of bed anyway.
Jackson and Evelyn were being disgusting by the time I got to the usual spot outside the lecture hall, the kind of disgusting that involved whispered nonsense and matching smiles for no visible reason.
"Do you two need a room," I said, dropping my bag.
"We have several," Jackson said, entirely unbothered. "We’re just choosing not to use them right now."
Evelyn laughed, leaning further into him, and I made a face that communicated exactly how I felt about witnessing any of it over lunch.
Sasha, seated beside me the whole time, kept glancing over every so often in that particular way she thought was subtle and wasn’t, not really.
My phone buzzed. I checked it without thinking.
"See you in class. Try not to fall asleep on me. 😏"
I felt my mouth twitch before I could stop it, and when I looked up, Sasha’s eyes had already dropped from my face to the screen and back up again, quick, but not quick enough.
"Who’s she?"
Straight to it, no preamble, just a flat, direct question that made it clear she’d already drawn some conclusions of her own.
"A friend."
Sasha nodded slowly, the way you nod at something you don’t fully believe but aren’t going to push on. I took a sip of my drink, mostly to have somewhere to put my attention that wasn’t her face.
Thermo, same as always, opened with the actual lecture, Nicole moving through the material with her usual precision, and by the halfway point she set the marker down and looked out over the room.
"Let’s talk about the project. Questions. Go."
Hands went up almost immediately, a small flood of the same kind of panic I’d been sitting in myself the night before. She worked through them methodically, never handing anyone a straight answer, just enough of a nudge in the right direction that you left the exchange with more clarity than you’d started with and still had to do the actual thinking yourself.
I kept my hand down the entire time, even with a solid three or four things I genuinely wanted to ask her. It felt like exactly the kind of thing that would look different coming from me than it would from anyone else in the room, and I wasn’t in the mood to find out whether that instinct was right.
She noticed. Of course she noticed. Her eyes found mine somewhere around the fifth question, brief, unreadable, and then moved on to the next raised hand like she hadn’t clocked anything at all.
The rest of the period passed the same way, question after question, until she finally checked the clock and wrapped things up.
"That’s all for today. And remember... the project’s due next Tuesday, no extensions."
Chairs scraped back, the usual scramble to pack up and get out. I was halfway to the door when her voice cut through the noise.
"Mr. Reed. A word, please."
Every head that hadn’t already left turned briefly toward me, and I felt a few pairs of eyes linger a second too long before losing interest and moving on.
I walked down toward the front, and she stayed quiet, gathering her things with deliberate slowness until the last few stragglers had actually cleared the room.
Once the door shut behind the final one, she looked up at me, all the composed professor energy dropping out of her voice.
"How are you doing? With the project. Genuinely."
I thought about lying for a second, giving her some version of "fine, no problem," and decided almost immediately it wasn’t worth the effort.
"Honestly? Not great. I got further than nothing, but I’m nowhere close to where I need to be."
"Why didn’t you ask anything, then?"
I hesitated. "Didn’t feel right. Asking you questions, in front of the whole class, when—" I gestured vaguely, not quite finishing it. "It felt like it’d look like something it wasn’t."
She stared at me for a moment, something close to genuine upset flickering across her face.
"Let’s go," she said, already reaching for her bag.
"...Where to?"
"To study."
I didn’t argue, mostly because the look she’d given me right before saying it bordered on an actual glare, and I wasn’t interested in testing what came after that.
We took my car. She gave me the address of a small café a few streets off campus, tucked between a bookstore and something that looked like a tailor’s shop, the kind of place with exactly enough regulars that the barista recognized her the second we walked in.
"The usual?" the girl behind the counter asked, already reaching for a cup before Nicole had even finished nodding.
"Two, actually," Nicole said, glancing at me. "He’ll have the same."
We found a table near the back, facing each other, and she settled in with the same unhurried confidence she brought to everything.
She stared at me. I stared back.
"Well?" she asked.
I pulled my textbook out, then my notebook, then a pen, setting them all down slowly, like the act of arranging them might buy me a few more seconds to figure out how to say what I actually wanted to say.
"This feels a little like cheating."
"I’m your friend." She said it plainly, like the rest followed obviously from that. "Friends help each other out. I just also happen to be an engineering professor. That’s not a conflict, that’s just... a very convenient coincidence."
I stared at her for a second, already knowing there wasn’t a version of this where I walked out without actually doing the work. I knew her well enough by now, and I’d known it this morning too, scrolling through a week’s worth of texts that only ever went one direction. She wasn’t doing this because she had time to kill or because it looked good. She was doing it because she cared, plainly, consistently, in a way I’d stopped being able to argue myself out of before eight this morning.
"Fine. Fuck it. Let’s do this."
She blinked, then laughed, caught off guard in a way she rarely was. I laughed too, mostly at how ridiculous the whole exchange had been.
She reached over and pulled the textbook toward her.
I just sat there for a second, watching her flip through the pages, quick and focused, completely absorbed in something she didn’t have to be doing at all.
And smiled.