Chapter 2: The Professor

## Emily

September 1st, 2021

Calloway University looked like a postcard designed by someone who'd never experienced actual human suffering.

Manicured lawns. Brick buildings covered in ivy that had been strategically cultivated to look wild. A clock tower that chimed every hour as if reminding you that time was passing, which was either poetic or sadistic depending on your relationship with mortality. Students in groups of three and four, carrying coffee cups and textbooks and the unshakable belief that these four years mattered.

I was late.

Not fashionably late. Not "I lost track of time" late. I-almost-didn't-come-at-all late, because Jordan had thrown a bottle at my head at 7 AM and the cleanup had taken forty minutes and the concealer had taken twenty more and by the time I'd gotten on the bus my hands were still shaking so badly that I'd dropped my phone twice.

Ash was waiting outside the humanities building with her arms crossed and her eyebrows doing that thing they did when she was two seconds from murdering someone.

"You look like shit."

"Thank you. I dressed up."

She fell into step beside me, her boots thudding against the sidewalk. Ash Redding was five-foot-six of compressed fury — tawny skin, hair that was auburn at the roots and blonde at the tips and occasionally red depending on what mood she was in, dimple piercings, tattoos climbing up both arms, and an energy that suggested she had been a Valkyrie in a past life and was still pissed about the demotion.

She'd been my best friend since second grade, when she'd punched Tyler Brennan in the nose for stealing my lunch and declared, "You're mine now." I hadn't argued. Some relationships are forged in fire. Ours was forged in a seven-year-old's blood.

"You're twenty minutes late," she said. "Creative Writing started at nine."

"I'm aware."

"Professor Holliday resigned. They've got some new guy. Apparently he's hot."

"I don't care if he looks like Henry Cavill. I'm here for the credit."

"He doesn't look like Henry Cavill. Remi says he looks like 'if a knife were a person,' which is specific and also concerning."

Remi. I pressed my lips together. Remi Harris had been hovering around our circle since freshman year with the persistence of a housefly and the subtlety of a car alarm. She was pretty in a calculated way — blonde, sharp-featured, always dressed like she was about to walk into a board meeting at a company that sold essential oils and lies. She had a habit of befriending people who were useful to her and discarding them when they stopped being so.

I didn't trust her. Ash didn't trust her either, but Ash tolerated her because Remi was in three of Syn's classes and Syn — Ash's girlfriend, a woman made entirely of patience and warm light — had asked nicely.

"Where's Syn?"

"Bio lab." Ash held the door open. "She says hi and that you need to eat more."

"I ate."

"A gummy worm doesn't count."

"Three gummy worms."

We climbed the stairs to the second floor. Room 214. The door was already closed, which meant the new professor had started, which meant I was about to walk in twenty minutes late on the first day, which was exactly the kind of impression that would guarantee I spent the rest of the semester invisible.

Good.

Invisible was my default setting. Invisible meant nobody asked questions. Nobody noticed the bruise on my collarbone. Nobody wondered why I flinched when someone raised their hand too fast.

Ash pushed the door open without knocking because Ash had never knocked on a door in her entire life.

The room was a standard lecture hall — tiered seating, whiteboard at the front, that specific academic smell of old carpet and new anxiety. Twenty-odd students scattered across the rows, mostly looking at their phones. Remi was in the front row, which was on brand. Cam and Katelyn were a few rows back, whispering.

And at the front of the room, leaning against the desk with his arms crossed and his sleeves rolled to his elbows, was him.

I stopped walking.

My lungs stopped working.

My brain did that thing it does when reality and memory collide — a full-system crash, blue screen, every cognitive process grinding to a halt as the universe rearranged itself around a single, impossible fact.

The man from the gas station was standing at the front of my classroom.

He was wearing a dark gray suit — no tie, top button undone, the kind of deliberate casualness that cost more than it looked. Same dark hair pushed back. Same sharp jaw. Same tattoos climbing up his forearms, visible below the rolled cuffs of his shirt. Same scar through his left eyebrow.

Same hazel eyes.

Those eyes found mine the moment I walked through the door, and something passed between us — a current, a pulse, a recognition that hit me in the sternum and radiated outward until my fingertips buzzed.

He didn't smile.

He didn't flinch.

He looked at me the way you look at a equation you've been trying to solve for months, and the answer just walked through the door wearing a Tardis t-shirt and yesterday's jeans.

"Nice of you to join us," he said. His voice. That voice. Low, quiet, the kind of voice that made you lean forward without realizing you were doing it. "Take a seat."

I took a seat. Back row. Corner. As far from the front as I could get without climbing out the window.

Ash dropped down next to me, completely oblivious. "See? Remi was right. Knife-person energy."

I couldn't speak.

My hands were shaking, so I shoved them under my thighs and stared at the desk and tried to breathe like a normal person while the man I'd given my three-years-of-nothing speech to — the man who'd given me a paper rose and called me Snowflake and asked me about faith like it was the most important question in the world — introduced himself to the class.

"My name is Professor Navarro. I'll be teaching Creative Writing 301 this semester. I don't do safe spaces. I don't do trigger warnings. I don't do extensions unless someone is actively dying, and even then, we'll negotiate."

A nervous laugh rippled through the room. He didn't join it.

"Writing is not therapy," he continued, pushing off the desk to pace the front of the room with that same fluid predator-walk I remembered from the gas station. "It's not journaling. It's not an exercise in making yourself feel better about your damage. Writing is the act of opening a vein and bleeding onto the page, and if you're not willing to bleed, you're in the wrong room."

He stopped pacing and his eyes swept the class. They landed on me for half a second — maybe less — and in that half-second, something in his expression softened by a degree so small that nobody else would have noticed it.

But I noticed it.

Because I'd spent three years studying faces for threats, and this wasn't a threat. This was something else entirely.

"Your first assignment," he said, turning to the whiteboard, "is to write about the thing you're most afraid of. Not the surface fear. Not spiders. Not heights. The real one. The one you don't talk about. The one that lives in the part of your mind you pretend doesn't exist." He uncapped a marker and wrote in sharp, angular letters:

WHAT IS THE THING THAT KEEPS YOU AWAKE?

"Two thousand words. Due Thursday. If I catch anyone writing about public speaking, I'll fail you on the spot."

More laughter. Still no smile from him.

He recapped the marker and turned back to face the room. "Any questions?"

Remi's hand shot up. She was leaning forward in her seat with that expression she used when she wanted something — a specific intensity in her eyes that had nothing to do with academics and everything to do with the fact that Professor Navarro looked the way he looked and she was Remi.

"What if the thing we're most afraid of is something we can't put into words?"

He looked at her. Through her, more accurately — past the blonde hair and the strategic smile and the carefully constructed facade, the way you look through a window without noticing the glass.

"Then you haven't tried hard enough," he said.

I sank lower in my seat and pulled my sleeves down further.

---

After class, I practically sprinted for the door.

Ash caught my arm in the hallway. "Hey, are you okay? You look like you've seen a ghost."

"I'm fine."

"You're doing that thing where you say you're fine and your left eye twitches."

"My eye is not twitching."

"It's a little twitchy."

I pulled my arm free, gently, because Ash meant well and it wasn't her fault that my entire nervous system had just been set on fire. "I need to go to the library. I'll text you."

"Emily—"

"I'm fine, Ash. I promise."

She studied me the way she always studied me — with the forensic attention of someone who had spent years learning to read between my lines. Ash knew about the depression. She knew about the medication. She suspected about the cutting but hadn't confirmed it, and I intended to keep it that way.

She did not, however, know about the man behind the gas station. The paper rose. The Snowflake.

"Lunch?" she asked.

"Yeah. Noon."

"If you're not in the cafeteria by 12:05, I'm coming to find you."

"I know you will."

She squeezed my hand once — warm, firm, alive — and headed down the hallway toward the science building where Syn had her next class.

I stood there for a moment, breathing, waiting for the hallway to empty, waiting for the earthquake in my chest to settle into something manageable. Then I turned around and walked back toward Room 214.

The door was open.

He was sitting at the desk now, reading something on his laptop, a pen between his teeth. The room was empty. Just him and the whiteboard and the faint smell of dry-erase marker and whatever cologne he wore — something dark and warm with an undertone of smoke that I'd recognize in a room of a thousand people.

I knocked on the doorframe.

He looked up. The pen dropped from his mouth. His expression was careful — controlled, measured, the face of a man who had spent a lifetime managing what the world was allowed to see.

"Miss Glass," he said. He knew my name. Of course he knew my name — he had the roster.

I stepped inside. Closed the door behind me. My heart was doing something medically inadvisable.

"You're the man from the gas station."

He leaned back in his chair. Studied me. The seconds stretched. "Yes," he said.

"You're my professor."

"Yes."

"You called me Snowflake."

Something flickered behind his eyes — the same thing that had flickered at the gas station, that recognition, that pull. He pressed his lips together and nodded once. "I did."

"Did you know?" I asked. "When you saw me that night — did you know you'd be teaching here?"

He was quiet for a moment. Long enough that I could hear the clock tower chime through the window, marking 10 AM with the same tone it had used for a hundred years. "No," he said. "I didn't."

I believed him. I don't know why. Every rational part of my brain — the part that had been trained by Jordan's lies and my father's silence and three years of learning that people will always disappoint you — told me not to. But his eyes were steady. Honest in a way that felt costly, like honesty was something he rationed carefully and had just spent more than he intended.

"This doesn't change anything," he said. His voice was different now. Softer. Not the professor voice — the gas station voice. The one that had asked about faith. "I'm your professor. You're my student. Whatever happened that night—"

"Nothing happened."

"—was a conversation between strangers," he finished. "This is a different context."

"I know."

"Good."

I should have left. The conversation was over. Boundaries had been established. The universe had played its joke and we were both going to pretend we were mature enough to handle the punchline.

Instead, I said: "The paper rose. I still have it."

His expression didn't change. Not outwardly. But something behind his eyes — something deep and quiet and possibly broken — shifted. Like a gear catching after years of rust.

"I'm glad," he said.

I turned to leave.

"Miss Glass."

I stopped at the door.

"The assignment. Write the truth. Not what you think I want to hear. Not what your therapist has heard a hundred times. The truth."

I looked back at him over my shoulder. He was watching me with that same excavating focus — not looking at me but into me, past the concealer and the long sleeves and the careful performance of alive, into the place where the wire had snapped.

"What if the truth is ugly?" I asked.

"The truth is always ugly," he said. "That's how you know it's real."

I left.

I walked to the bathroom at the end of the hall and locked myself in a stall and pressed my forehead against the cold metal door and breathed until my hands stopped shaking.

The paper rose was in my bag. I'd been carrying it every day since July 7th, tucked between the pages of my notebook, flattened but intact. A flower made of nothing but patience and paper and the hands of a man who made weapons out of words and somehow, inexplicably, also made roses.

I pulled out my phone.

Ash: you okay?

I stared at the screen for a long time.

Emily: the new professor is the guy from the gas station

Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.

Ash: WHAT

Ash: THE HOT ONE???

Ash: EMILY BELLE GLASS

Ash: ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME

I almost smiled. Almost.

Emily: tell me I'm an idiot

Ash: you're an idiot

Ash: but also the universe is clearly trying to tell you something

Emily: the universe can mind its own business

Ash: it literally cannot. that's the whole point of the universe

I locked my phone and leaned my head against the stall door.

Outside, the clock tower chimed again.

And somewhere in Room 214, a man who smelled like smoke and made paper roses was reading the roster and learning the name of the girl who'd eaten gummy worms behind a gas station at midnight and told him she had no faith.

Emily Belle Glass.

I wondered if he said it out loud.

I wondered if it sounded different in his mouth than it did in mine.

I wondered a lot of things.

Then I pulled my sleeves down, shouldered my bag, and walked to the library, because I had an assignment about fear to write and the thing I was most afraid of had just given it to me himself.