All Chapters of Professor Grayson's Favorite sin : Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

156 Chapters

Chapter 70: I Really, Really Am.

Chapter 70The protests started small.A cluster of students outside the English building on Monday morning, handmade signs varying wildly in artistic quality. “PROTECT OUR PROFESSORS. ACADEMIC FREEDOM IS NOT A CRIME.” A few had printed the Graysler hashtag in block letters, which meant Scarlett's TikTok series had reached them, which at this point meant it had reached everyone.By Wednesday it had doubled. By Thursday there were counter-protesters, a word Lennon had not expected to apply to his own life, holding signs he did not read because Archer physically turned him in the opposite direction before he could."Do not look," Archer said. "I am serious. It will ruin your morning and your morning is already fragile.""I am going to have to walk past them every day.""You will walk past them next to me and I will talk very loudly about something completely unrelated, you will not hear anything they say." Archer steered him left around the side of the building. "I have been practicing

Chapter 71: He... what.

The news arrived in Lennon's phone at seven forty-two the next morning and by seven forty-five he had read the message four times and was still sitting on the kitchen counter staring at it.“He kissed me back Lennon. Roman Grayson kissed me back in a stairwell and then walked away like he was leaving a board meeting. I have not slept, i feel incredible and insane. I feel incredibly insane.”Lennon typed back: “I thought you kissed him first.”“The second half was mutual. Are you home? I need to talk about this in person.”“I have Damien's office hours in an hour.”“Perfect. I will come. He won't mind.”He would absolutely mind, Lennon thought. He typed “fine” anyway and put the phone in his pocket.Damien came into the kitchen already dressed, took one look at Lennon's face, and said: "What.""Archer kissed Roman."Damien poured his coffee. He said nothing for a moment, set the pot down and picked up the mug. "When.""Yesterday, at the east building stairwell apparently."A pause. "An

Chapter 72: I'm Fine.

The campus hold had been in effect for eleven minutes when Lennon decided he was not going to stay in the lecture hall.He had told himself he would. He had sat in the back row with his phone in his hand and the emergency alert still blinking on the screen. He listened to the professor at the front telling everyone to remain calm and stay seated, he had sat where for approximately four minutes before his brain caught up to the one specific detail that mattered.Damien's office was on the north side of the building.The security officer had said the incident was near the north path.Lennon was already standing before he had finished the thought. The student next to him looked up. He did not explain, he picked up his bag and walked out the side door into the corridor and then out the building's east exit into the afternoon and kept moving.He texted Damien while he walked. “Where are you.”No reply.He texted again. “Damien.”Still nothing.He walked faster.The English building was qu

Chapter 73: I Heard You

The graze was two inches long and not deep.Lennon found this out by pulling Damien's sleeve up with hands that were not entirely steady and looking at it himself because Damien had said “I'm fine’ in a tone that did not constitute medical information. The skin was torn and bleeding freely but the bone was intact, and the wound was clean at the edges. Lennon had taken a first aid course his sophomore year because Archer had dared him to and had promptly forgotten most of it, but he remembered enough to know that this was not the bad version of what a gunshot wound looked like.He pressed the folded sleeve of his own hoodie against it anyway and held it there."I said I'm fine," Damien said."I heard you." Lennon did not move his hand. "I am doing this anyway."They were in the small storage room adjacent to the office, door shut, the overhead light flickering slightly. Roman had put them here while his people swept the building. Lennon had not argued. He had needed somewhere that w

Chapter 74: Officially.

Richard Kessler walked into the English building at four-seventeen PM like he owned it.He had two aides with him and the particular bearing of a man who had never once in his adult life waited for anything to be offered before taking it. He spoke to the department secretary for approximately ninety seconds, during which time the secretary looked progressively less comfortable, and then he was in the hallway, moving toward the stairs, with campus security trailing behind him at a distance that suggested they were escorting him without having been entirely sure they could stop him.Lennon met him at the bottom of the second-floor landing.He had had seven minutes to prepare for this. He had spent four of them listening to Damien tell him what to say and three of them deciding which parts of that he could actually deliver with a straight face. His arm still had traces of Damien's blood on the inside of the sleeve where the fabric had pressed against the wound. He had turned the cuff ba

Chapter 75: Creative Interpretation

Archer had hacked the camera feed using a laptop, a coffee shop's open Wi-Fi, and what he described as “intuition and personal charisma,” which Lennon chose not to examine too closely.The footage was grainy and shot at an angle that caught the east service road from above the campus security system, which Archer had accessed through what he called a “creative interpretation” of publicly available network infrastructure. He had the relevant clip pulled up and paused on a still that showed the shooter's vehicle pulling away from the service road at speed.Roman took the laptop from him. He watched the clip twice. He set the laptop on the desk and looked at Archer with the expression he had been deploying on Archer recently, which was not quite assessment and not quite something else and occupied an uncomfortable middle ground that Archer appeared to find extremely encouraging."You accessed the campus security network," Roman said."I accessed a network that the campus security system

Chapter 76: No

The email had been sent at four fifty-three PM from an address that resolved to nothing, a string of randomized characters at a domain that Roman's people would take approximately forty minutes to trace back to a burner account purchased with cash at a store in New Jersey two weeks ago.Damien knew this because Roman told him twelve minutes after the email arrived, while Lennon was still sitting in the office chair reading the message for the third time.The photos referenced were not specified. That was deliberate, the ambiguity was the point, a way of making the recipient's imagination do the work. But Lennon could think of at least four separate moments over the last two months that, if captured, would be sufficient. The corridor outside the faculty lounge where Damien had pushed him against the wall one evening and kissed him. His father's PI had been on campus for weeks. The math was not complicated."We need to know what they actually have," Roman said, from the doorway. "Befor

Chapter 77: Saturday At 2.

Lennon texted Mia back on a Tuesday morning while Damien was in the shower.He had been holding the phone for six minutes before he did it. He had read her message twice the night before and once more when he woke up, and he had spent the space between readings doing the same calculation he always did when his father was a variable, which was to say, running the numbers on what visible normalcy was worth versus what it cost.His father had been quiet for four days since the campus visit. That was not reassurance, that was accumulation.He typed, “Hey. Sure, coffee sounds good. This week?”He read it once more. He sent it before he could change his mind and put the phone face-down on the nightstand.The shower was still running. He listened to it and felt the guilt settle in, specific and unpleasant, like a stone he had placed in his own pocket and was now deciding to carry. The water cut off, he heard Damien moving around in the bathroom, the particular domestic sounds of a man who mo

Chapter 78: Jealous.

Chapter 78Damien knew before Lennon left the building.He was grading papers at his desk when Lennon said he was heading out and named a reason that was technically a complete sentence and contained no verifiable falsehood and landed in the room with the specific weight of things that are carefully constructed. Damien looked up at him. Lennon met his eyes, the three seconds of that were not comfortable for either of them, though only one of them showed it."Okay," Damien said.Lennon left.He did not know the specifics, not the name, not the location, not the fact that it was coffee with the girl from the lit class who had already texted twice. He knew the shape of it. He had learned to read Lennon the way you learned to read weather, not by studying it consciously but by exposure, by repetition, by the accumulation of details too small to name individually but too consistent to ignore.Lennon's shoulders were a specific kind of tight. His responses in the session had been a specif

Chapter 80: Kept Going.

Chapter 80The essay was supposed to be one page.Lennon had been sitting at the kitchen island in Damien's penthouse for two hours, it was four pages and climbing.He had started with the actual question and had answered it in three paragraphs that were honest in a clinical sort of way, the way you were honest when you were writing toward something you did not want to look at yet. And then the writing had kept going, the way it sometimes did when he stopped managing it and let it move on its own, and by the second page it was not about Mia or his father or the optics of being seen with a girl in a coffee shop. It was about the version of himself that still reached for those solutions when he was scared. The version that had learned so early that visibility was danger and that you controlled what people saw and that the safest thing you could be was boring and legible and exactly what someone expected.He wrote that and then st

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