Read Online The Professor by Charlotte Stein - Free Book Online Page A

book. He meant that I am his friend, even though he is scarcely capable of having them. That we have some sort of connection, bruised and forbidden but still stronger than anything I’ve ever known.
    So strong it makes me stop and turn even though I think I shouldn’t.
    So strong that his tone is
imploring
when he speaks again.
    Imploring, for God’s sake.
    ‘If you must insist on going around without a jacket on, at the very least let me drive you home. You have to let me drive you home, please.’
    I think the ‘please’ is the thing that hurts my heart.
    Well, that, and the look on his face.
    I see myself in his eyes, shivering wet, lost and adrift.
    ‘I never meant to do it. I never meant to do any of it.’
    ‘We can talk about that once you are safe and warm.’
    ‘I think we should talk about it now, before I get in.’
    ‘Will it really matter if we do? Will it change anything?’
    ‘No. Yes. I don’t know what there is to change, Professor.’
    ‘It sounds to me like you think I do. But I know my way through whatever maze we find ourselves in with no more clarity than you, and even fewer tools to navigate it.’
    ‘It never seems that way, Professor. You seem well equipped to me,’ I say, and know as soon as I do that he is going to respond with something shocking or stunning or not what I’m used to from someone like him. I feel it coming, like a storm hanging tense in the air long before it arrives.
    And then the thunder rolls and the lightning flashes, and still I am not prepared.
    He looks away at nothing for a second, then turns to me and tells me this:
    ‘Because you only see the walls around the city, and not the burning ruins within.’
    After which I completely fail to say anything in answer. I think I’m breathing too hard to. All I can manage is climbing into his car, then very little after that. Mostly I just sit in silence and let him do more things that plough a furrow through my feelings. He puts the heater on in the car, and touches each vent so they are all aimed at me – without having to be asked or prompted. He goes beyond anything I would have asked or prompted. My hair is wetter than it was after the last rainstorm I got caught in, and he hands me a clean white handkerchief to dry it with. I see the monogrammed initials and feel my eyes sting again.
    But bite it back when I think of how silly that is. To be tearful, because someone did the smallest kindness for me. Other people probably have friends handing handkerchiefs to them all the time. They might not be monogrammed, but I don’t know what being monogrammed matters.
    I only know that it does.
    That when he says, ‘Forgive me,’ the space where my heart is supposed to be fills up. Maybe not with love or affection or anything like that, but certainly with something. A sense that maybe, just once, something can turn out wonderful. That better world we spoke of is just a hair’s breadth away, and I can get to it if I hold my nerve. If I can just say the right thing in response.
    Only I don’t need to. By the time I think of it, the car has come to a stop – and not outside my flat.
    He has brought me to his home.
    He leads me up a thin and winding path to the only place for miles and miles around, dark and tiny and so oddly built I can only imagine it served some other purpose once. It was a lighthouse, surrounded by oceans made of grass. When people rode out across them it lit the way, to stop them falling off the edges of the earth.
    It certainly seems like you could, when you look out over it all. The only thing I see in the distance is an ancient tree from a horror movie, complete with branches that almost make an unearthly face. I look away as soon as it starts to appear, but doing so barely matters. I still have the house itself to cope with – and it does take some coping. The door is so little he has to bend almost double to get through it. Both of us have to turn sideways to make it through the hall and