Filed to story: Shhh Professor! Please Don’t Tell! Novel Free
I knew she meant Ellie. Ellie wasn’t looking at me. They kept walking up the sidewalk. I walked back to my car and sat inside it with my head in my hands.
I walked down the sidewalk with my friends, not hearing a single thing they were saying.
Two women in one night?
Two women
in one night?God, I’d been so stupid. Thinking he might have feelings for me. Thinking he’d tried to kiss me because…
Stupid.
Obviously, the man just had a strong interest in women in general. He’d probably been doing stuff like this every night since the semester started. And I’d thought I was special.
“That was so awkward,” Annie said after a lull in the conversation, glancing at me. She’d noticed how quiet I’d been. I knew that she suspected my actual feelings for Professor Steele. Cynthia and Jasmin just thought it was all a fun joke. Or a real but very casual crush.
“Honestly, the most awkward,” said Cynthia. “But did you see the way he was staring at Ellie like a fish out of water? How cute was that that he didn’t want her to know he was hooking up with someone else?”
Cute? That wasn’t cute; it was sleezy.
“Someone else?” I protested, my voice louder than I’d meant for it to be. “He’s never hooked up with me.”
“Hey, don’t get mad,” Jasmin said soothingly. Cynthia and she exchanged a glance. I was accidentally confessing my real feelings for him by getting so upset. I could tell that they were surprised.
I just felt so helpless. Like, I couldn’t be with him. And now I had to literally watch him get involved with other people. What if he started flirting with one of my classmates? What if she let it happen, and I watched him develop some romance with someone else?
I felt hot all over. I told myself to stay calm, stay level-headed, but it was like my body was reacting on its own, prickling with disgust and disappointment and anxiety and…grief. I was going to lose him. I’d never really processed it until now. I’d never had him, but I hadn’t fully realized until now that I would have to watch him move on with someone else.
The thought of him having sex with other women before he met me didn’t matter to me. The thought of him having sex with other women now made me want to throw something.
You could say yes to him, a small voice in my head whispered.
That could have been you with her arm in his, walking back to his car.
Until he moved on to his next conquest?
That’s all I was, a conquest. He was just after pleasure. Not love.
My emotions spiraled, and my thoughts spiraled with them. It didn’t help that we’d been drinking my nerves were thin and my senses swirling.
My friends walked along the sidewalk next to me, in silence. No one said anything, but I could tell that they were aware of how my insides were churning with feelings. Cynthia and Jasmin seemed at a loss for words. I felt embarrassment on top of all my other emotions. Just the fact that he would lie about it. It had been so unthinking hoping we were stupid enough to believe him. Not thinking at all about the feelings of the woman he was planning on having sex with. How disrespectful was that?
The more I thought, the angrier I became. The alcohol muddied my anger, churning it into something thicker and more repulsed than sober Ellie ever would have felt.
We got back to Annie’s car since she was eighteen and didn’t drink, she was our designated driver and she drove us back to campus. I walked back to my dorm. I was relieved to see that my roommate wasn’t there. I didn’t want to talk to anybody. I took a shower, drank loads of water, and crawled into bed.
“He’s a jerk,” I told myself, curled up with my covers pulled up over my head. “He’s just a jerk. I won’t be interested after this. He can do what he wants. I have no interest in someone who treats women like that.”
The sensible part of my mind had been turned off. I didn’t question the accuracy of my new assumptions, I just felt them. Something in me had snapped, like a branch that had become too heavy with a weight of ice, and when I woke up in the morning, my love for Jackson Steele was gone.
On Monday, I went to his class. I sat down in my desk. I took notes. I looked at him sometimes, but usually kept my eyes on my notebook page or on the whiteboard. I didn’t smile at his jokes. I didn’t make eye contact.
I didn’t feel angry anymore, just flat. Numb. Like the part of me that had been alive to him before was dead. A switch had been turned off.
Professor Steele noticed. I caught him staring at me like a puppy sometimes when he wasn’t lecturing.
I felt bad for him, but there was nothing I could do about it. The sooner he decided to stop being interested in me the better.
“I thought you were a different person,” I thought, after noticing him staring at me and glancing away again quickly. “I’m too naïve. I should have known better.”
Hoping to distract myself, I signed up for Conservation Club. We created an electronics recycling bin and placed it outside the library, hung up posters around campus, and had a table that could be set up along the campus sidewalk, where one of us would sit in the afternoon and answer people’s questions about conservation.
We modeled our set up after Lucy’s “Psychiatric Help” booth from Peanuts.
It was more of a publicity stunt than anything, but it was fun. I had a lot of interesting conversations that way. It helped distract me from thinking about Professor Steele better than my textbooks did. There were too many people named Thomas in history, and too many important rivers.
Cynthia and Jasmin stopped teasing me about him. Annie never mentioned him. I almost wished they would; I felt more uncomfortable knowing that they guessed how I felt and didn’t know what to say to me.
But what was there to say?
“Sorry, Ellie, it sucks that hopeless crush you were having turned out to be on a jerk.”
They didn’t really think of him as a jerk, though. Just a regular man out having a casual hookup, like a lot of people did sometimes. They didn’t see him having dinner with that gorgeous woman earlier that night. I hadn’t told any of them about it. That was why I felt he couldn’t be trusted. What if someday I went out to dinner with him, thinking we were building a romance together, and he took some stranger home with him later that night?
Anyway, it didn’t matter. I didn’t think about it. I didn’t let myself argue his side of the story. I couldn’t be with him anyway. I latched onto a reason to think badly of him and clung to it, hoping it would eventually cure me of the way my heart was aching.
Ellie was upset with me. I could tell. It was as if a veil of ice had passed between us. When she looked at me now, it was as if she couldn’t really see me. Like I was a movie she was watching, no longer someone to interact with. Her posture was stiff, and she kept her eyes on her notebook or the whiteboard.
I missed the warmth she had brought with her into the room every day.
In some ways, her unfriendliness encouraged me. She’d clearly been upset that I had been planning on taking Janet home.
Poor Janet. I felt like such an idiot, calling her my cousin. Shame on me. I left my number for her at the bar later that night, asking the bartender to give it to her if she ever came back. She called me a few days later. I knew she was hoping to act on what we’d started that night, but all I did was apologize for what had happened. She didn’t seem to feel much better after that, but I did.
I shouldn’t have done it. I get so focused on one thing most men do that I stop being able to see other things clearly. Women always see everything at once. It’s why we’ll never understand each other fully. I didn’t stop to think about how Janet would feel, or how Ellie would feel if she found out. I was just trying to stop thinking about Veronica. And Ellie.
Now I was thinking about Ellie more than ever. She was the first thing I thought about when I woke up in the morning and the last thing I thought about before I fell asleep at night. I kept remembering her being in my house. It was like she was haunting me: the memory of her in that white dress roamed through the rooms in my imagination. I remembered the sound of her laugh in my kitchen. I remembered the sight of her gazing out of the sitting room windows. I remembered the sound of her shuddering inhale at the end of my upstairs hallway.
I longed for Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I kept hoping things would be different. That she would come to class and have gotten over whatever was upsetting her. Surely she wasn’t that unforgiving. I’d messed up with Janet, definitely. I shouldn’t have called her my cousin. But Ellie must know that sometimes people sought comfort in the arms of strangers even when they were in love with someone else.
But her demeanor became more and more distant. I ached. I didn’t know what had happened. Something had gone wrong. I needed to talk to her.