Filed to story: Shhh Professor! Please Don’t Tell! Novel Free
And then I woke up. Sweating, my heart pounding, and my whole body tingling. I wanted to keep dreaming. I didn’t want to go back to the reality where none of those things could ever happen.
He’s been staring at me. Mid-concert when my eyes were closed and he’d thought I wouldn’t know. How long had he been staring at me?
Did he have feelings for me?
I rolled over, turning away from the patch of moonlight that was covering my pillow. I could hear the trees rustling outside. It sounded as if a storm was brewing.
I shut my eyes tightly, hoping to slip back into the dream. Instead, I found that I was wide awake, imagining the things I had woken up from.
Halfway through October, on a Monday morning, Annie slid into her desk next to mine at our first class. She placed her phone onto my desk.
“Good morning,” I said, laughing at her gleeful energy. She had an impish grin on her face. “What’s this?”
I looked down at her phone screen. It showed a photograph of a piece of paper. I couldn’t quite read all of it, but I saw the words “Halloween Party.”
“You want to go to this?” I asked. A Halloween party sounded fun. Annie and I could go full nerd and dress as some obscure historical figures. Give those Civil War reenactors something to talk about.
“Did you see this yet?” she asked me.
“Well, I can’t really read it,” I said, using two fingers to zoom in on the picture.
My heart started to beat faster. “Where did you find this, Annie?”
“Outside the cafeteria,” she said. “On the business school bulletin board. Are you going to go?”
Professor Steele was hosting a Halloween party for all the business students. At his mansion.
“You’re going to go, right?” Annie asked again. “That sounds like a blast. I’ve heard his mansion is three stories high and has an indoor pool.”
I handed her her phone back.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You don’t know?” she practically squealed.
Our history professor, stepping through the door at that moment, looked at her reproachfully.
“Okay,” I laughed. “I’ll probably go. I’m really curious to see his house.”
I’d been dreaming about having sex with him in it almost every other night for a month.
“I just don’t like the idea of going to a party with a whole bunch of people I don’t know,” I said.
I hadn’t really made any friends in the business school. I was only taking the one business class this semester. I’d been too nervous to talk to anyone there. I was still worried about what they thought of me. It might have been my imagination, but sometimes I noticed people glancing in my direction and whispering. If there was gossip floating around campus about me and Professor Steele, none if it had reached me or my friends yet, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t out there.
“Hey, me and Cynthia and Jasmin would be more than happy to tag along,” she said. “It says you can bring a date. Just bring all three of us as your date. We’ll dress as a three-headed dragon.”
I laughed loudly, earning myself another “It’s too early for that much noise” stare from our old, soft-spoken professor.
“I’ll keep thinking about it,” I said.
“Well, think fast,” she said. “If I need to concoct a three-headed dragon costume by Halloween, I need some advance notice.”
At the end of Professor Steele’ class that day, he made an announcement about his Halloween party.
“I wish I could invite the whole school,” he said, smiling boyishly, “but you wouldn’t all fit inside my house.”
A ripple of laughter passed through the room. Our class laughed a lot now. We’d gotten used to it. He kept us amused effortlessly, it seemed.
“I hear your house is pretty big,” called out one of the sophomore boys.
“It’s not too shabby,” Professor Steele said, grinning. “But it wouldn’t fit the entire campus.” He winked. “I do need RSVPs,” he said. “I will have some bouncers at the door. Considering what happened with the first day of this class, I didn’t want to post an invitation to a party in public and then just wait for chaos to arrive.”
He smiled. “So please RSVP by the end of next week. RSVP through the barcode link attached to the posters, and you’ll get a ticket in your inbox. Sound good?”
Murmurs of appreciation passed through the room.
“What are you going to go as?” a girl called out, teasing him.
He thought for a second. “Maybe Pip from
Great Expectations
, by Dickens,” he said.
“I know that book,” the same girl who’d asked him about his costume said. “Is it because you’re so rich? You actually have great expectations?”
“Maybe,” he said, smiling. His eyes flickered over to me. He looked sad.
I knew that book too. Pip spent years pining over Estella, the love of his life. He wanted her but he couldn’t have her. My stomach twisted.
“You’d look hot in a top hat, Professor Steele,” shouted one of the guys. A frat boy. Baseball cap on backwards and everything.
Yes. Yes, he would.
“I’m too old to look hot,” Professor Steele said, and if he’d been fishing for contradictions, he got them. A whole bunch of other students called out to him that he wasn’t old. And he was hot.
I didn’t say anything. But I saw one girl turn around and look at me, to see how I was responding. I swallowed. My stomach lurched.
“Thank you for complimenting me, but you don’t need to flatter me to come to my party, you’re all already invited. You can bring a date,” he added. He looked right at me when he said it. He looked sad again. “Just make sure you add them to your RSVP.”