All Chapters of Torn Between My Boyfriend & the Professor: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Tyler's hand rests on my thigh as we drive, warm and heavy - a weight I've grown so used to that I barely register it anymore.I stare out the window instead.Palm trees blur past in the Florida heat, and I count them because counting things has somehow become a habit, a way of filling silences that used to make me anxious and now just make me tired.The minutes between Tyler saying something and expecting me to laugh.The seconds it takes him to notice I've gone quiet.The years.Five of them.Five years since anyone asked what I wanted for dinner and actually waited for my answer instead of already reaching for the takeout menu he'd already decided on."You're gonna love the buffet on this ship," Tyler says, keeping his eyes on the road. He's got that confident tone he uses for everything, like he's already decided how things are going to go. "My buddy Rick did this exact cruise last year. Said the omelet station alone is worth the price of the ticket.""Sounds great."I smile becau

Lena -Sophie's voice drops half an octave and goes gravelly and clipped.Suddenly, she's not Sophie anymore. She's Professor Donnelly, explaining thermodynamics like he's personally offended by the existence of entropy."The second law," she intones, adjusting an imaginary pair of glasses, "states that some of you did not do the reading."Priya shrieks and throws a throw pillow at her head.Ava is cross-legged on her bed, chemistry notes spread around her like a crime scene. She doesn't even look up, but I catch the corner of her mouth twitching, the smallest crack in her studious armor."Do the one where he loses his laser pointer," Priya begs. "Do it. Do it. Do it."Sophie stands on the bed, wobbling slightly, wine sloshing dangerously close to the rim of her plastic cup. Then she launches into an impression so specific and so painfully accurate that I can't breathe.My stomach hurts from laughing.Ava's laughing too now, silent, her shoulders shaking. That's how I know something i

Lena -His office door stands open when I arrive, propped with a rubber wedge that looks almost apologetic for the invasion it invites.I can see him through the gap before he notices me.Sleeves rolled to his elbows, forearms tense with the kind of stillness that means he's anything but relaxed. Red pen tapping against a stack of papers he clearly isn't reading. His eyes keep drifting toward the door, then away, like a man checking a clock he refuses to admit he's watching.He's pretending to work.So am I."You're early," he says without looking up."Five minutes.""I noticed."I sit in the chair across from his desk, my pulse doing something complicated and unhelpful.Four feet of laminate, office supplies, and professional boundaries separate us.It doesn't feel like enough.Then again, it doesn't feel like anything - just a formality we've both agreed to respect out loud while ignoring underneath, the way you might promise to avoid a bruise and then press on it anyway, just to se

Lena -At two in the morning, the blue light from my phone is the only thing awake in my dorm room.My hands shake as I stare at those three words.I saw that.I’ve read them so many times that the letters have stopped looking like words and started looking like accusations, like evidence in a trial I don’t remember agreeing to stand for.Saw what?The kiss?Julian’s hand against my jaw?The way my brain apparently stopped functioning the second his mouth touched mine?I don’t know.That’s the problem. The not knowing has become its own kind of torture, a blank space my mind keeps trying to fill with worse and worse possibilities.I don’t tell anyone.That might be what scares me most. How easily I’ve slipped into this. How natural it feels to carry the fear by myself, like I’ve been training for isolation my whole life without realizing it.I don’t tell Julian because what am I supposed to say? Someone’s watching us. I don’t know who. I don’t know how much they’ve seen. Saying it out

Lena -Tyler says my name into the pillow like he's saying it in his sleep, half-formed, more breath than word. It's not want. It's habit. Five years of saying my name without asking his brain for permission, the same way you might mutter the name of a childhood street you haven't lived on in decades.I'm already awake when his hand finds my hip.The ceiling fan turns above us, slow and steady, clicking faintly on every third rotation. I've heard that sound so many times I could conduct it, could hum along to the exact interval between clicks like a metronome keeping time for a song neither of us chose. His apartment always smells like fabric softener and the candle he never lights, the one he keeps on the dresser because I bought it for him. Vanilla, with something powdery underneath. I remember picking it out in a drugstore two Christmases ago, thinking it was the kind of small, thoughtful gift that might remind him I existed as someone with preferences, someone who noticed things.