All Chapters of Craving My Alpha Professor: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

Jaxon: I was awake before the city was fully light. The apartment was quiet around me and Emberlyn was still asleep, her hair spread across the pillow, her breathing slow and even. I lay still for a moment longer than I should have and looked at the ceiling and had a straightforward conversation with myself about what I was doing. I stayed the night. That had not been the plan. The plan had been to come over, spend some time, and leave at a reasonable hour like a man who understood the terms of his own arrangement. Instead I had fallen asleep on her couch during a romcom and woken up in her bed and it was now early morning and my wolf was settled in a way he had absolutely no business being settled. His wolf had been like this since the apartment. Since I watched her move through the space I had put together for her and fit into it like it had always been hers. It had gone quiet in a way that wasn't absence but contentment and I liked it considerably less than its usual restlessne

Emberlyn: The date was good. That was the honest answer and I kept arriving at it no matter how many times I tried to qualify it. The food was excellent, the conversation was easy, and Elias was exactly what he appeared to be, attentive and genuine and entirely without agenda. By any reasonable measure it had been a good evening. I had thought about Jaxon for most of it. It started early in the evening, sometime between the appetizers and the main course, when Elias said something funny and I had my first thought to put it in my head and tell Jaxon later. At that moment, I realized that I was in trouble. The fact that my first thought after something good happened was about a man I wasn't supposed to have feelings for was information I was not prepared to sit with over an expensive dinner so I had put it in the same mental box as everything else and closed the lid and smiled at Elias across the table. Not constantly. Not in a way that was obvious or that Elias would have noticed.

Emberlyn: A week. Seven days of showing up to prep class and sitting at the back and taking notes and leaving before anyone could stop me. Seven days of his voice carrying across the room and landing on me the same way it always did and me pretending otherwise. I had developed a system. Arrive exactly on time so there was no awkward pre-class period where eye contact was possible. Sit at the back. Write everything down so there was always a reason to look at the page instead of the front of the room. Leave the moment class ended with my bag already packed and my jacket already on. It was a very efficient system and it was also exhausting in the specific way that maintaining careful distance from someone you were actively trying not to think about was exhausting. Seven days of my phone sitting quiet between us like something neither of us was willing to pick up first. I had gotten very good at being busy. Kim had texted three times and I had answered all of them with the kind of

Jaxon:I had not called her.That had been a deliberate decision made on the first day of silence and renewed every morning since. Distance was the right thing. I had been clear about that with myself and I had maintained it and the fact that maintaining it had required considerably more effort than I was comfortable admitting was not something I was examining closely.I missed her.I sat with that for exactly as long as it took to straighten my jacket in the mirror and then I put it away and went downstairs to the car.Jessica Ferdinand's estate was forty minutes outside the city, the kind of property that announced its own importance before you reached the gate. I had been here once before, briefly, for a meeting with her father three years ago. Alpha Ferdinand was one of the most influential figures in the northeastern wolf community and his approval carried weight that extended well beyond his own territory.That was why I was here. That was the only reason.I had been telling mys

Emberlyn:The smell reached me before I was fully awake.I lay still for a moment with my eyes open and the ceiling above me and tried to take inventory of my body the way you did after something had happened to it. My head ached in a dull persistent way that was different from a normal headache, deeper somehow, like it was coming from somewhere behind my eyes rather than on the surface. My throat was slightly sore. My hands felt strange, a faint residual warmth in my palms that I turned over and looked at without knowing what I was looking for.Something warm and savory drifting from the kitchen, familiar enough to be comforting and unexpected enough to make me lie still for a moment trying to place it. My head felt heavy and the light coming through the curtains told me it was later than I usually slept and there was a tenderness at my throat that I touched carefully with two fingers before I remembered.I sat up slowly.The events of the previous night came back in pieces, the dizz