I made the mistake of telling Jackson about the phone call.
Not all of it. I left out the part where I’d apparently said something that made a twenty-eight-year-old woman stammer over the phone, because that felt like the kind of detail a man takes to his grave, not shares over vending machine coffee at lunch. But I told him about the calls. The messages. The general shape of it.
He set his coffee down very slowly, like it might spill from the sheer force of what he was about to say.
"Wait. She texted you seven times?"
"Yeah."
"And you didn’t reply?"
"I was working."
"So she called?"
"Jackson."
"Nathan, this woman is fighting for her life."
"She’s not fighting for her life. She’s my professor."
"She’s a woman who called a man three times in two hours after he ignored her texts. There is a word for that, Nathan, and the word is smitten."
"That’s not a word people use."
"It’s the correct word and I refuse to downgrade it for your comfort."
I took a sip of my own coffee, mostly to buy myself a second before responding, and found I didn’t actually have a comeback. Which was becoming a theme.
"Anyway," Jackson said, entirely too pleased with himself, "lunch. Sasha and Evelyn are coming."
"Don’t do that."
"Do what?"
"That thing where you say her name like it’s nothing, but it’s very clearly not nothing."
"I say her name completely normal, Nathan. You’re the one making it weird." He took a sip of his coffee, unbothered. "Sasha’s been into you since freshman year. This is not breaking news."
I didn’t answer, mostly because there wasn’t a version of that sentence I hadn’t already heard.
"Unless," Jackson said, drawing it out, clearly enjoying himself, "you’re already busy being into your professor."
I gave him a look that was supposed to end the conversation.
"There you are." Evelyn appeared out of nowhere, dropping into the seat beside Jackson and kissing him hello like the two of them hadn’t seen each other in a year instead of roughly twelve hours.
"Ew. Take that somewhere else.
Evelyn pulled back just far enough to grin at me over Jackson’s shoulder. "Missed you too, Nathan."
Jackson, entirely unrepentant, just shrugged. "Jealousy’s not a good look on you, bro."
"It’s not jealousy, it’s basic decency."
Sasha laughed. "He’s got a point, Jackson. Get a room, or at least a to-go box."
Evelyn glanced between the three of us, then at the empty table. "Wait. You guys haven’t ordered anything yet?"
"Nathan’s fault," Jackson said immediately.
"How is it my fault?"
"You showed up late."
"I showed up on time. You were the one attached to your girlfriend’s face."
Sasha snorted.
Evelyn shook her head. "This is exactly why men need women in their lives." She glanced at Sasha, a silent ’let’s go’, then turned back to Jackson. "What are you having?"
"Cheeseburger. Extra fries."
She turned to me next. "Nathan?"
"I’ll have—"
"—the grilled chicken wrap, no onions, extra sauce on the side," Sasha said, not even glancing at me to check if she’d gotten it right.
"Not bad," I said.
She grinned, then the two of them headed off toward the counter together.
The second they were out of earshot, Jackson turned to me slowly and gave me a look.
"What?" I said, already knowing exactly what.
Jackson just shook his head, saying nothing, because he didn’t need to. He knew I knew. I knew I knew. There was no version of that exchange where ’she memorized your order down to the sauce’ needed further explanation.
I picked up my water and drank it like a man very committed to not having that conversation.
Thermodynamics was my last class of the day, which meant I had roughly two hours between lunch and finding out whether I could still make eye contact with my professor like a normal human being.
I found out almost immediately. The answer was yes. Sort of. She walked in, set her things on the lectern, and started the lecture exactly like she had yesterday, like a woman who had not, twelve hours earlier, asked me a question over the phone that I was still turning over in the back of my head.
"Today we’re covering entropy," she said, picking up the marker, "which, appropriately, is the measure of how much a system spirals into disorder the moment nobody’s paying attention to it."
She didn’t look at me when she said it, so I decided not to read into it. I read into it about four seconds later.
The lecture went the way it had yesterday, clear, precise, no wasted motion. If last night had rattled her even slightly, there was no trace of it. I almost admired it. Almost.
By the time she wrapped up, my notebook was full and I was no closer to figuring out how a person could sound that composed after asking someone if they’d keep talking to her.
"That’s all for today. Class dismissed."
Chairs scraped back. Bags zipped. I packed up at a normal pace, waiting for what I wasn’t entirely sure. A ’stay behind?’ A look? Something?
It didn’t come.
She was gathering her things at the front, not glancing my way even once, and I told myself that was fine, that was completely fine, and then my phone buzzed in my pocket before I’d even made it to the stairs.
I looked down.
Nicole: Walk slower.
I looked up. She hadn’t moved from the lectern. Hadn’t looked up from her bag. But she also clearly hadn’t typed that to anyone else in the room.
Jackson turned back to face me. "Why are you walking so slow, man? Game starts in thirty minutes, we gotta go."
"I, uh... dropped something. Earlier. Still looking for it."
"You dropped something."
"Yeah."
"In the hallway."
"Could’ve rolled."
Jackson opened his mouth, clearly gearing up to point out how little sense that made, then stopped himself. His face shifted slowly into a grin that meant he’d figured out exactly what was actually happening.
"Right," he said, and turned to the guys ahead of us instead. "Hey, we’ll go ahead first. Nathan’s gotta find his, uh, thing. He’ll catch up."
One of them shrugged. "Whatever, man, just don’t take forever."
They filed out. Jackson gave me one last look — smug, delighted, entirely too pleased with himself — before following them out the door.
I wasn’t sure whether to thank him or throw something at him. Possibly both, possibly at the same time.
I turned back toward the front of the room, where the last student was gathering their bag, and made my way down the steps.
I stopped a few feet away from Nicole. Professor Collins?
This is getting confusing.
She turned before I’d even said anything, like she’d known exactly where I was standing without looking.
"Hi."
"...Hey." That was all I had.
"Walk with me?"
I blinked.
"Where to?"
"My office."
I made a face before I could stop myself. Not a bad one, just a ’should I be doing this’ one, the kind that apparently showed up on my face without my permission these days.
She caught it instantly. Of course she did.
"I just want to talk," she said. "If that’s okay with you."
There was something in how she said it — quieter than her usual register, none of the teasing underneath it — that made the face disappear a lot faster than it had shown up. Whatever answer I’d been about to give evaporated somewhere on the way to my mouth.
"Yeah. Okay."
She smiled, small, and led the way out of the lecture hall.
Her office was two floors up, tucked at the end of a hallway that had gone mostly quiet for the day. Most of the department had already cleared out, doors shut, lights off. She unlocked hers, pushed it open, and gestured me in ahead of her like this was a perfectly normal Tuesday and not the second time in twenty-four hours I’d been alone with her somewhere no one else could see.
I’d been in enough professors’ offices at this point — office hours, recommendation letters, the occasional ’can we talk about your midterm’ — to have a pretty solid baseline for what one was supposed to look like. Cramped desk. Towering stacks of paper that predated whatever printer they came out of. A chair that had given up structurally sometime in the last decade.
This was not that.
The desk was real wood, not the department-issued kind. The chair behind it looked like it cost more than my laptop. There was an actual couch against one wall. Not a repurposed waiting-room reject, an actual couch, the kind you’d find in someone’s living room, and a shelf that held fewer academic journals than I expected and considerably more framed photos, none of which I let myself look at too closely on the way in.
"Sit wherever," she said, closing the door behind us.
I sat on the edge of the couch, mostly because the alternative was standing there like an idiot, and looked around a little more openly now that she wasn’t watching my face for a reaction.
"Nice office," I said, in the tone of someone deliberately not asking the real question.
"Thank you."
"This isn’t standard-issue faculty furniture."
"Nope," she agreed, and didn’t elaborate.
She crossed the room and sat behind the desk instead of beside me on the couch, which felt like a deliberate choice, though I couldn’t have said what it was protecting, her or me.
She didn’t say anything right away. Just sat there for a second, hands folded on the desk, like she was deciding where to start.
I let the silence sit for a moment, then decided I’d rather fill it than wait for whatever she’d landed on.
"Don’t you think this is a little... I don’t know. Suspicious? Me being in here with you. Alone."
"You’ve been in nearly every professor’s office in this department, Nathan. Office hours. Recommendation letters. Twice for a midterm regrade last semester that you, for the record, won."
I blinked. "How do you know that?"
"I read your file."
"Right."
She exhaled, finally, like she’d been holding something in since she’d sat down.
"Can we at least be friends?"
I didn’t answer right away. Mostly because I hadn’t expected her to go there, and partly because some part of me already knew ’friends’ wasn’t the actual ask.
"It’s obvious I like you, Nathan." She said it plainly. "I’m not going to pretend otherwise anymore. But I also know what I am to you right now; a professor, someone you have to be careful around, and I’d rather have some version of you in my life than none at all."
I sat there, phone-call-quiet, the same way I had last night.
"So. Friends, huh?" she said again, like saying it twice might make it easier to agree to. "For now."
That last part, for now, was doing more work than the rest of the sentence combined, and I was fairly certain she knew it.