Free The Professor by Charlotte Stein

really shouldn’t,’ he says.
    He even has the audacity to wave his hand, magnanimously.
    ‘I really should, if you honestly think I would just believe such a bald-faced lie. In fact, that lie is so bald-faced I feel no fear whatsoever in poking fun at it. Honestly, I’ve never heard anything like it in all my days, and my father once stole my shoes to sell for booze money then told me fairies did it. Could you not at least have gone with “your name suited a completely random character”?’
    He tries to smother it, but I see his reaction to that plain enough:
    Panic, that I know his game. More than panic, really.
    It looks more like I stabbed him in the stomach, and now he has to worm his way out of dying.
    ‘Right now I wish I had. Perhaps then you would not persist in thinking I have formed some sort of attachment to you. I mean, really, The very idea is absurd beyond belief.’
    ‘That story didn’t seem to suggest it was absurd.’
    ‘That story was a mistake. An accident. Something I should never have written. I should never have done any of this at all – I could see where it was headed yet told myself you were not so silly as to think it could ever come to anything.’
    He even manages a sneer at the end of that.
    One good enough to make me answer more angrily than I intend.
    ‘So that’s what I am now, silly?’
    ‘No, not entirely not precisely –’
    ‘Just a little lovesick idiot.’
    ‘I would never do you the discourtesy.’
    ‘So weak I can barely –’
    ‘
Hetty.
’
    He says the word in a fury, half-insensible of it. But then he seems to realise – he seems to hear it the way I just heard it – and his whole face changes. It sags right through the middle as if all the muscle behind suddenly dissolved. His lips part around the ghosts of words I’m sure he would have loved to say, if he hadn’t made that one mistake.
    Only he did make it, and now can never take it back.
    He called me the thing he claimed was for someone else, and with all the conviction of someone who has long wanted to. All the time he was calling me Miss Hayridge, and this was most likely in the back of his mind. This little name that you would call a friend, a beloved friend, a person you cared for deeply.
    Good God, he cares for me deeply.
    And looks as stunned as I feel to realise it. The idea might as well have socked him in the gut. He doesn’t speak for a full minute, and in the minute he can hardly seem to breathe. His gaze seems to plead with me, but I hardly understand what it pleads with me for. He has to know I can never let him out of this now. I am bound so tightly to it I could use a chainsaw and not get free. My heart is galloping in my chest, and all in anticipation of what he might say now. More lies, I think.
    But I’m wrong, oh, I’m wrong.
    ‘I…I have no more idea than you do. If I did, if I had, if I suspected for one moment that I was failing so terribly in my duty I should never have let myself entertain it. I could not have borne it. I, a man ten years your senior? Not only so separate from you in age but in station – I am meant to be your guide, your mentor, and instead I take advantage of you in the most grievous way possible.’
    ‘Oh, yes, calling me your beloved friend is grievous indeed.’
    ‘You need not be so generous with me, Hetty. I know full well that you are sensible of everything this means. It puts into question every single thing I have done since I first sat down with you in my office. It says plainly that I should have stopped the moment I realised what you had written, yet I did not. I thought myself so above any feeling towards you that I could withstand anything, any temptation, any conversation about such things, but I was wrong. Do you not see that I was wrong? They had me all this while,
you
had me all this while, and I simply fooled myself into believing otherwise. I have fooled myself into crossing every boundary and breaking every rule, and the worst part