I Kissed a Stranger to Spite My Cheating Boyfriend, and Monday He Was the Professor With a Rule Against Me novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Sixty Phones

The video reaches every phone on the island, the dean summons Liv, and Elias stops her in the corridor and says the rule aloud.

He taught the whole hour without once looking at me again.

I noticed, because I couldn't look anywhere else.

He talked about the tidal exchange in the Narrows, the way the channel drains and fills twice a day, and he wrote the lunar numbers on the board in a square, fast hand.

His sleeves were pushed to the elbow.

He had strong forearms, dusted with dark hair, and a pale scar across one wrist.

I wrote down every number he said and not one of them stayed in my head.

At the end he said, "Reading for Thursday is on the portal."

Then he said, "Miss Gundersen, a moment."

Two hundred people stopped packing their bags.

I stayed in my seat.

"In the corridor," he said, "with the door open."

I followed him out.

The corridor outside Rathbone's lecture hall is long and stone-floored, with tall windows down one side, and students flowed past us in both directions with their phones out.

He stopped at the window and turned to face me, with his back to the glass.

I could see my own face reflected beside his shoulder, pale and set.

"I'm not going to pretend it didn't happen," he said.

"Good," I said.

"I'm also not going to discuss it in a hallway."

"Then why are we in a hallway?"

"Because the rule is that I don't close a door with a student," he said.

"I wrote it."

I stared at him.

"You wrote it."

"Three years ago, for the council, when I was on the mainland.

"It says no instructor may touch a student.

"I came home three weeks ago to take my brother's chair, and last night I broke it in front of eleven phones."

His voice stayed level.

A muscle moved in his jaw.

"You kissed me," I said.

"I kissed you back."

I felt my face go hot.

"I'm sorry," I said, because it was true and because I was cornered, and I hated that I said it.

"Don't be," he said.

"You owe me nothing."

"I'm not sorry about the kiss," I said.

"I'm sorry it's your problem."

Something moved across his face, quick, and was gone.

"The video is mine to answer for as much as yours," he said.

"Nobody has posted my name under it.

"They've posted yours."

That landed, and he saw it land.

"I know," I said.

I had looked at my phone for ten minutes that morning in the shower.

Someone had cut the video to my face and the line "Never put out? Tell that to the professor," with a laughing emoji.

Eighty thousand views on a private campus feed, and my name was in every tag.

"The dean has asked to see you at eleven," he said.

"I'll be there," I said.

"I'll be there too," he said.

"You don't have to."

"I do."

His answer left me nothing to say, so I turned to leave.

A boy on the other side of the corridor held his phone up at us, and I stepped out into the stream of people.

His hand closed around my chin.

It was gentle, and it was a surprise.

He turned my face back to him with two fingers and his thumb, and held it there in front of the whole corridor.

My heart went up.

"Look at me," he said, very low.

"They are filming this too."

"I know," I said.

"Then watch what I do."

He let go of my chin.

He stepped back, turned to the boy with the phone, and said in the same even voice, "Delete that, or I take it to the dean with your name on it."

The boy lowered the phone.

Elias said nothing else, and nobody else filmed anything.

I stood there with my chin still warm where his fingers had been.

He looked at me one more moment.

"Eleven o'clock," he said.

"Don't be early.

"Let her wait."

He walked away down the stone corridor with his field bag on his shoulder.

I put two fingers against my own chin and found it burning.

That was the second time he had touched me in the one day I'd known him, and he had broken his own rule both times.

Freya caught up to me on the quad with a coffee in each hand.

"I'm going with you," she said.

"You're a first-year rescue major," I said.

"I'm a second-year, and I'm loud."

She pushed a coffee at me.

"What did Professor Hot Tide say?"

"That he wrote a rule and I'm the first person to make him break it," I said.

Freya's eyebrows went up.

"He said that?"

"No."

I took the coffee.

"But he thinks it."

The dean's office was on the top floor of the administration building, with a view of the whole tidal channel and the seawall.

A secretary told us to wait.

We waited exactly as long as he had said.

When the inner door opened, a woman in a navy wool suit stood in it with her hands folded.

She was sixty-three, with steel-gray hair in a low knot, and a ring of black stone on her right hand.

Ragnhild Aasen had been the dean of Kestrel Narrows for thirty years.

Elias stood behind her at the window with his arms folded.

"Miss Gundersen," she said.

"Come in.

"Alone, please."

Freya hissed through her teeth, and I squeezed her arm and went in.

The dean sat behind a desk the size of a dory and folded her hands on the blotter.

"I will review the matter," she said.

"Dr. Reinholt will attend every meeting."

"Why?"

She smiled, a thin and courteous smile.

"Because it concerns his chair," she said.

"And his late brother's, which was mine to appoint."

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