The class started, and within the first few minutes, I understood why everyone had been talking about our new professor.
Professor Collins was good.
No. She was really good.
She broke down concepts that usually took me three tries and a YouTube video into something that just... made sense. First pass.
At first, I wasn’t sure how much of the class was actually listening. Most of the guys were too busy staring at her, and I couldn’t exactly blame them; she was easily the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.
Then she started teaching. And somehow that made things worse, because she wasn’t just beautiful. She knew her stuff. Every question got a precise answer. She moved through the material without hesitation, chalk never pausing, writing equations on the board and explaining exactly where each part came from like she’d built the formula herself and was just walking us through the blueprint.
By the middle of the lecture, even the guys who’d spent the opening ten minutes memorizing her outline instead of the syllabus were taking actual notes.
She turned from the board.
"Let’s see if you’re following."
She wrote a problem on the board.
"A few volunteers?"
Several hands went up. Mine stayed exactly where it was, on my desk, uninvolved, minding its own business.
She looked around the room. Her eyes landed on me.
"You."
I pointed at myself, the universal signal for ’surely not’.
"Me?"
She nodded.
I sighed quietly and stood.
"Okay."
She repeated the question. I worked through it, gave my answer, and she listened with the kind of stillness that made me second-guess every word even as I was saying it.
Then a small nod.
"Correct."
She wrote the answer on the board, then turned back to me.
"Your name?"
I stared at her for a second. She already knows my name. She’d said it herself in a car that smelled like wet groceries less than twenty-four hours ago.
I answered anyway, because apparently we were doing this.
"Nathan Reed."
She nodded once, turned back to the board, and picked the lecture up exactly where she’d left it, like she hadn’t just asked a question she already knew the answer to in front of twenty-nine witnesses.
By the time class ended, my notebook was full and I still had no idea what had just happened.
Professor Collins set the marker down.
"That will be all for today. Class dismissed."
Chairs scraped back immediately. Bags zipped. The usual stampede.
I closed my notebook and reached for my backpack—
"Mr. Reed."
I stopped.
She was looking directly at me.
"Do stay behind."
I glanced at Jackson, who was already halfway into his jacket.
"I’ll catch up with you."
He gave me a look — somewhere between ’what did you do’ and ’tell me everything later’ — then shrugged and left with the rest of the class like a man declining to get involved.
I slung my backpack over my shoulder and made my way down to the front of the lecture hall. By the time I reached the bottom, the room had mostly cleared. Professor Collins was arranging things in her bag, unhurried, apparently in no rush to explain herself.
The last two students filed out. One of them pulled the door shut behind him. Not that it needed to be.
She finished packing, closed her bag, and finally looked up, like she’d been waiting for the room to empty on purpose, which, I was beginning to suspect, she had.
I waited for an explanation. She walked past me instead, toward the front row, and I turned to keep facing her, already resigning myself to the fact that I was going to be the one doing the waiting in this conversation.
She sat on the edge of a desk. Leaned back a little.
Then, small smile.
"Hi."
I blinked. Okay. Not what I was expecting. "I thought you’d forgotten me already."
She tilted her head slightly.
"Why do you say that?"
"You asked for my name. I told you yesterday. In the car."
She held my gaze for a beat. "I didn’t forget. I needed a reason to ask you to stay behind without making it obvious we’d already met."
I blinked again, slower this time, as the sheer efficiency of that plan caught up with me.
"Oh."
I glanced at the door — closed, empty hallway on the other side of it, no witnesses — then back at her.
"So... why did you want me to stay behind?"
"Because I wanted to talk to you." She tilted her head the other way, entirely too pleased with herself. "Isn’t that obvious?"
"...Right."
A pause. Not an awkward one. She seemed completely fine with it. I was the one filling it, trying to figure out what came next.
"Can I have your number?"
I blinked. "...My number."
"Your phone number, yes."
I just stood there for a second, not saying anything. Because my brain was still back on the word number, turning it over, checking it for a second meaning I might’ve missed.
There wasn’t one.
She stared at me, waiting for a reply.
Okay. She’s serious. Wow.
I pulled out my phone, unlocked it, and handed it over without a word, because apparently that’s what my hands had decided to do while the rest of me was still catching up.
She took it, typed something in, and handed it back.
"There," she said. "Now you have mine too."
I looked down at my screen. A new contact, saved under the name Nicole, sitting right there like it belonged.
I looked back up at her.
She was already smiling like she knew exactly where my thoughts had just gone.
"I’ll text you," she said, genuinely happy, not performing it.
"Sure." My head was still somewhere back near she seriously gave me her number, so that was about all I had.
She grabbed her bag off the desk, gave me one last look that I decided not to examine too closely, and walked out, heels clicking down the empty hallway until even that faded.
I stood there a moment longer than necessary before remembering I had somewhere to be.
By the time the last class of the day let out, Jackson looked like a man who’d aged several years in three hours.
"Professor Thompson," he said, dragging the syllable out like it physically pained him, "is the worst human being currently employed by this university."
I just smirked, and he kept going, undeterred.
"He teaches like he wants us to fail. Like it’s a personal goal of his. Man assigned a problem set due tomorrow and then spent the last ten minutes just smiling. Smiling, Nathan."
"Yeah, I know. I was there."
"I mean genuinely smiling. Like it brought him joy. Like our suffering is his—"
"I think Professor Collins likes me."
Jackson stopped mid-sentence, mouth still open on whatever word he’d been about to use.
"I’m sorry. You think what?"
"She asked for my number."
"She asked for your—" He stared at me. Then, slowly, a grin started taking over his entire face. "Dude."
"Don’t."
"Dude."
"I’m serious, don’t."
"You have to ask her out."
"Jackson."
"No, listen." He held up both hands like he was about to lay out a business proposal. "This is not a hard decision. This is the easiest decision a man has ever had to make in the history of decisions."
"She’s my professor."
"She’s hot."
"She’s also six years older than me."
"She’s extremely hot."
"Jackson, I need you to generate a new word other than hot."
"I don’t have one. I’ve checked." He clapped a hand on my shoulder, entirely too pleased with the situation. "Nathan. My guy. A gorgeous, brilliant woman asked for your number less than twenty-four hours after meeting you, and your objection is paperwork?"
"It’s not paperwork, it’s—" I stopped, because I didn’t actually have the end of that sentence either.
Jackson just nodded, like he’d already won the argument.
"Yeah. Thought so."