Lahat ng Kabanata ng Craving My Alpha Professor: Kabanata 31 - Kabanata 40

Emberlyn:My phone was ringing in my dream before I understood it was real.I surfaced slowly feeling drowsy, the room too warm, pillow too good. The sleep was so good that the unconsciousness was like one that comes from a body that had been running on fumes for a week and had finally found somewhere safe enough to fully stop. I reached for the phone without opening my eyes and read the screen by feel.Mom. Ten missed calls. Currently calling again.Fuck! She would have been worried sick.I sat up."Hello, ""Emberlyn Rose Vale." Not a greeting. A full name, delivered at a volume that suggested it had been building since the first missed call. "Where in God’s name are you? You didn't come home last night and I've been,""Mom. I am so sorry." I pushed my hair back and found my voice. "I'm at Kim's. We were doing coursework and it got late and we just, we didn't realise the time." I closed my eyes while I said it, which didn't help with the guilt but was a reflex I couldn't stop. "

Emberlyn:I should have just said yes.No, I shouldn't, why should I say yes?The word sat at the front of my brain like something that had been waiting for permission to exist. It had been there since the green, since his thumb at my jaw and his voice saying say yes like it was the simplest direction in the world.It was still there now, standing just behind my teeth while I turned the golf club in my hands and watched him walk away across the course with his phone to his ear.I should not say yes.I turned that one over too. Applied it against the first one, checked the fit. The contract on my laptop, unsigned. The pendant I couldn't remove. The man who was my professor four days a week and everything else on the other three.Yes was not a simple word. Not with him. Nothing with him was simple.I was standing on the green of a golf club that was really expensive to join and I had just gotten the ball in the hole for the second time. The feeling in my chest was not the feeling of so

Emberlyn:The front door opened without sound, which was the goal.I stood in the hallway and listened. The apartment had that feel it had when my mother was home, a presence to the air, the low sounds of movement from the kitchen or the television running at her preferred volume, which was always slightly too quiet to hear from the other room.I listened for all of it.Nothing.Good!I exhaled and slipped my shoes off at the door and made it to my room in twelve steps that I'd had memorised since I was sixteen.The room closed around me and I leaned against the door and looked at my ceiling, replaying the last four hours in the specific way your brain replays things it hasn't finished processing.The green. His hand at my jaw. Say yes.The car. His hands. Fuck his dick, fucking me!My own voice in his ear, close enough to feel him react before I pulled back.Yes.The word that had been sitting at the front of my brain since morning, finally given its exit.And then the pavement. The

Emberlyn:I'd spent all of Sunday pretending.Pretending to watch the film my mother had put on after dinner. Pretending to listen when Mila talked about going back to school next week, her voice sounded excited as she was excited to be back on her feet after being stationary too long and was ready to be in motion again. Pretending that the news notification on Kimberly's phone hadn't reordered something fundamental in my understanding of the man whose number was in my phone and whose yes I'd left in his ear on a Saturday on my pavement.Intensive care.I'd googled it Sunday morning while my mother was making breakfast. The article had grown overnight with a follow-up, in more detail, a quote from someone at the club about the manager being well-liked; the police appealing for information. Nothing about a suspect. Nothing about a motive. Just Della Jameson, in a hospital bed, and a large gap where an explanation should have been.I closed the tab, helped set the table and talked abo

Emberlyn:The desk was clear. The tie was back where it belonged. The office looked exactly as it had before I walked in, which felt like its own kind of statement.I buttoned my top in the mirror of his darkened phone screen and didn't look at him directly, which was a self-preservation decision rather than an emotional one. Or I told myself that."Why handle it this way?" I said. To the wall, mostly. To the air between us that still had too much in it. "You could've threatened her. Paid her off again. Made the records disappear. There were a hundred ways to handle it that didn't end with her in a hospital.""Yes," he said.I turned. "That's not an answer.""She deserved it." He said. He just placed it in the room like a fact that had been checked and confirmed and no longer required debate.I looked at him for a moment, at the composed face and the straightened jacket. This was the same man who had just taken me apart on his own desk and was now discussing the woman he'd sent to