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Chapter Two
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2025-11-19 19:06:32Adrian Hale had always believed discipline solved everything—grading schedules, research deadlines, sleep routines, even the raw edges of emotion he refused to indulge. Structure was his armor, his salvation, the quiet rhythm that made him untouchable.
But nothing in his carefully curated life had prepared him for the way Eden Marlowe lingered in his thoughts long after the classroom door had closed behind her. The night before their scheduled meeting, he sat in his study with a stack of papers in front of him. By all accounts, he should have finished grading within an hour—two at most. He’d done this a hundred times. Instead, he read the same paragraph three times and couldn’t recall a single sentence of it. He leaned back in his chair, rubbing the bridge of his nose beneath his glasses. This is ridiculous, he told himself. She is simply a student. An adult, yes, but still—your student. But his mind didn’t obey logic. It drifted back to the way she had looked at him earlier, unafraid, utterly present, like she saw something beneath the surface he’d kept hidden from the world for years. He pushed the papers away. Maybe a walk would clear his head. He stepped outside into the cool night air, hands shoved into his coat pockets as he made his way down the quiet street. The city hummed around him, distant and indifferent, but it only made her presence in his thoughts feel sharper. He remembered the little things. The tilt of her head when he challenged the class. The way her pen twirled between her fingers when she was thinking. The intensity of her eyes—dark, aware, unflinching. It wasn’t attraction in the simplistic sense. It was recognition, unsettling and magnetic, the kind that cracked old walls without permission. He walked for an hour. He returned home feeling no lighter. Sleep eluded him. He tossed, turned, stared at the ceiling until the pale light of dawn seeped through the curtains. He still felt her under his skin. This is nothing, he insisted to himself. Just a momentary lapse. You’ll be fine once the meeting is over. But morning didn’t bring clarity. If anything, the heaviness grew—an awareness coiled low in his chest, warm and restless. He tried to bury himself in work. He answered emails, drafted lecture notes, reorganized an already-organized bookshelf. None of it helped. Every time his thoughts drifted—every time his breath caught for just a moment—her face appeared behind his eyes. By noon, he found himself checking the time too often. By one, he started pacing his office. By two, he tried to sit and failed, rising again after barely ten seconds. By two-forty-five, he was certain he was losing his composure entirely. He didn’t want her to know. He didn’t want anyone to know. He also knew—painfully, undeniably—that she would notice the moment she walked in. Eden saw things others missed. She read between the lines, listened beneath the words. She would feel the tension the moment the door clicked shut behind her. Adrian stood at the window, hands braced on the sill, watching students cross the courtyard below. None of them were her. He exhaled slowly, eyes closing as the truth settled over him like a whisper he shouldn’t hear: He wanted three o’clock to come faster. And worse—far worse— He wanted her to walk in wanting him just as much.
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Unprofessional - I shouldn't want my own student Chapter Twentyeight
The night before he flew home, Adrian didn’t even pretend to work.The conference was technically still going—panels he should attend, dinners he should make an appearance at, conversations he should be part of—but he’d slipped away early with the easy excuse of “jet lag” and “early flight.”No one argued.Everyone understood fatigue.No one knew what kind he meant.Back in the flat, he dropped his keys on the table and stood in the doorway for a long moment, just listening to the radiator tick and the muted city noise beyond the glass.He felt… wrong.Not sick.Not tired.Not restless exactly.Just misaligned, like his body was here but some essential part of him was still in a rain-wet office thousands of miles away.He hung his coat over the back of the chair. The armchair in the corner caught his eye.For one unguarded heartbeat, he saw her there again—knees parted, hand between her thighs, eyes locked on his as she whispered come for me—He shut his eyes, jaw tightening.Not now.
Unprofessional - I shouldn't want my own student Chapter Twentyseven
Prague was supposed to distract him.That was the lie he kept repeating as he walked through the narrow streets the next afternoon, collar turned up against the cold wind sweeping off the river. His conference badge hung uselessly from his coat pocket—he’d slipped out early, claiming fatigue, even though the truth was simpler:He couldn’t focus.Every hallway looked like it might contain a glimpse of her.Every stray laugh, every shadow, every passing perfume note made something inside him twist.Distance wasn’t diluting her.It was sharpening her into something he couldn’t escape.He crossed a small stone bridge near the Old Town, boots scuffing the damp cobblestone. Tourists moved around him in slow clusters, cameras raised, chatter rising like a soft mist.He forced himself to look outward.At the river.At the swans.At the tiny boats drifting beneath the arches.He needed grounding, not memory.But memory arrived anyway.Her sitting in the front row, twirling her pen, watching hi
Unprofessional - I shouldn't want my own student Chapter Twentysix
Prague didn’t care that he was unraveling.The next day passed in a blur of polite conversations, academic posturing, and forced composure. Adrian nodded through lectures he couldn’t absorb, pretended to take notes he never intended to reread, and accepted compliments from colleagues who saw only the professional veneer he’d spent years perfecting.None of them could see the exhaustion threaded beneath his skin.None of them knew he’d woken with the remnants of a dream he couldn’t fully banish.None of them would have believed how badly he wanted to check his email every twenty minutes.He didn’t.He didn’t dare.When the last conference event ended, he walked through the cold Prague evening with his hands in his coat pockets, collar turned up against the wind. The city was beautiful in the way old cities always were—cobblestone slick with recent rain, street lamps giving everything a soft amber glow, foreign voices rising and falling around him like a language he only half understood
Unprofessional - I shouldn't want my own student Chapter Twentyfive
In the dream, there was no plane.No conference.No distance.He was in his office.Of course he was. The lamp on his desk glowed warm. Rain streaked down the window in slow, steady trails, blurring the world outside into an impressionist smear.He knew it was a dream in the way dreams sometimes announced themselves: the air too thick, the silence too loud, the edges of objects too sharp and too soft at the same time.He was standing behind his desk when the door opened without a knock.Eden stepped inside.Not soaked, not shivering. Just… there. Calm. Certain. Wearing the simple black dress he’d never actually seen her in but had imagined once, shamefully, half-awake in the dark.It clung to her waist, skimmed mid-thigh, left her collarbones bare. Her hair was slightly damp, like she’d rushed here through the rain anyway.“Professor,” she said softly.His pulse kicked.“Eden,” he answered before he could correct himself.No Miss Marlowe. No syllabus. No rules.Her lips curved, slow a
Unprofessional - I shouldn't want my own student Chapter Twentyfour
Prague was supposed to be loud enough to drown her out.That had been the logic. New city. New schedule. New faces. A different rhythm of days that would smooth over the edges she’d left in him.Instead, the city only made the silence around her name feel louder.Adrian sat at the narrow desk in his rented flat, the kind of temporary space that felt more like a waiting room than a life. There was a single lamp casting a yellow pool of light over his laptop, a half-unpacked suitcase in the corner, and the distant sound of the tram rattling past three floors below.He should have been working.There were conference papers to review, a draft to edit, an email chain from a colleague about a panel he had no energy to care about.Instead, he stared at his inbox.One new message.From: Eden Marlowe.His pulse stumbled.He shouldn’t open it. Or he should at least wait. Give himself the appearance of distance, of indifference, of something besides the aching, pathetic truth that his entire day
Unprofessional - I shouldn't want my own student Chapter Twentythree
Prague greeted him with cold air and old stone — a city that felt older than sin, carved out of shadow and silence. It pressed against him the moment he arrived, heavy, ancient, indifferent.Fitting, he thought.He’d run halfway across the world to escape something simple and devastating:her breath against his lips.The taxi dropped him at the university-owned apartment, a narrow building with iron balconies and peeling paint that felt appropriately worn. He dragged his suitcase inside, shut the door, and leaned his back against it, exhaling a breath he’d been holding since the plane landed.Three weeks.Twenty-one days.He thought the numbers like they were a mantra capable of saving him.He pushed off the door and walked further in —small kitchenette, a desk by the window, a narrow bed that looked unforgiving.Everything smelled faintly of cleaning products and old books.Academic housing was supposed to feel neutral.Instead it felt like exile.He placed his suitcase beside the w
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