Free The Professor by Charlotte Stein Page B

more out of shock than hunger – it feels as solid as the side of a great beast. He doesn’t yield beneath my touch, no matter how much pressure I put on.
    Because I do put pressure on, after a second. I need something to steady myself, to hold on to – or so I tell myself. Certainly I think it starts out that way, with me simply clinging to whatever seems sturdiest. But then he keeps on with this, he keeps on with it and somehow I seem to be bunching his jacket into my fists. My mouth is crushed against his, but it isn’t him doing the crushing. It’s me, pressing and pressing as if I could somehow get beneath his skin if I only did it hard enough.
    At the very least I could burn the memory of this into me. I want to always know every inch of it, from the warm whiskey taste of him to the sense of being so completely surrounded by someone. The insides of his arms, the push of his chest, his great height curling over me…all of it, I need all of it. But only when he finally pulls away do I get why it was so important. I feel how he wrenches himself from me, and see his horrified expression, and I utterly understand what made me so desperate to feel all of this to the utmost.
    He is never, ever going to do it again.

Chapter Eight
    I tell myself that things will not turn out so badly. I mean, it isn’t as though he’s really going to leave Pembroke for ever because of a conversation and a kiss. That would be the height of absurdity. It would be so cruel even he could never contemplate it. And if by some chance he did, surely he would tell me first. I even imagine it: him standing beneath the arch between the buildings, waiting for me. His face closed and folded away, his big hand stopping halfway to the reassuring touch he wants to put on my shoulder.
    I have decided to take up a post in Scotland, he tells me, in my head. Then I can call him a fool and he can get angry and two steps later his mouth will be on mine again. Simple, I think, and I suppose it would have been. It could have been, if it were not for one slight problem: when I return to campus on Monday
he has already gone
. I have to hear it from a girl three rows down in his lecture hall, who whispers too loudly to the boy next to her that she heard he had to do a moonlight flit, that he was in trouble with the law, that he stole something valuable.
    And I think,
Yes, my heart
.
    Then wince, and want to take it back. He doesn’t have my heart. I’m stronger than that, and more sensible, and less silly. A softer sort might have fallen that hard for him, but not me. Though perhaps that would ring more true if I didn’t leave the lecture hall with my heart pounding in my teeth. If I went calmly home, instead of walking faster and faster in the direction of the Haverforth building. By the time I get to the bottom of the hill I’m almost running. I shove myself up it in great strides that I’m not really capable of, and have to stop at the top to take in great lungfuls of air.
    And to make myself presentable, because right now I think I might not be. My hands are shaking, despite my best efforts to keep them steady. Every bit of me feels in disarray, as though I slipped and fell into a hole without knowing it. A part of me got trapped somewhere inside, and now no matter how hard I claw I can never get back out again. I’m stuck, and I know it. Anything I do will only make it worse – like going up to his office. Oh, I should never have gone up to his office.
    Seeing it stripped back to the bone is just too much to take. 
    I open the door expecting the book labyrinth at least, and instead find blank white walls. Not even the shelves everything sat on; not even his big-backed chair and the kettle with the dent in the side. There is nothing, no sign of him, not even a hint he was ever here. He could have died and had a greedy relative come in and clear him out – that is how stark it looks in his office. And he did it, I think,
in one weekend
.
    Whatever