Miss Arden {wlw-professorxstudent}

Chapter 4

KATHERINE'S POV:
My heart was still racing when I thought back to how Kalina Hughes's body falling against mine had felt. How the strong smell of hazelnut conditioner had clouded my mind.

I was settled against the soft cushion of my couch and kept checking the time.

I had nowhere to be. I just could not rid myself of the urge to not enjoy and relax on my free afternoon. That was getting increasingly hard when flashes of my student's clumsy introductions kept invading my train of thought.

She was ridiculously beautiful. I had to stop thinking about her. I had to stop thinking about the way her light brown hair and blonde strands fell over her shoulders in a satisfying swoop and the way she chewed on her lower lip and pulled at a strand of hair when she was embarrassed. I had to stop thinking about the way she looked at me.

I was attracted to beautiful women. That was natural. But my eyes falling again and again to her long legs was not. There was nothing particularly enticing or unusual about her but she was head-turning-ly gorgeous.

Most of the time, she had a lost look in her eyes but she always knew what she was talking about. Teaching her had been a pleasure for about a day. Until I became more and more aware of how much her jaw-dropping looks affected me.

Safe for the utter messiness she seemed to bring everywhere she went, she was exactly the kind of woman I would take home with me.

Which posed a problem. She was my student. She was 19 and my student. She was legal but she was my student. Though, despite her disheveled state most of the time, she certainly did not have the intellectual lack. She really was well spoken and polite, even if correlating with circumstances. She had legs with unflawed skin I would want to sink my teeth into, were she not my student.

This was awful. I could not let myself go there. I tried to distract myself with watching cooking shows but it made everything worse. It made me feel embarrassingly alone. Because in that stupid show every cook had their partnered up baker and I felt a clench of envy in my body as I desperately wanted someone to bake with me.

I could cook. Good damn, I could cook. My family and friends had always told me that they had been surprised I had not aspired to become a cook. They loved my food. But the thought of putting together a cake or even cookies alone had me and my kitchen ware trembling.

And now, there was annoyingly pretty Kalina making it ever harder trying not to fall into past patterns. Past mistakes. And it infuriated me to the bones, how someone could be that pretty and that smart. And it infuriated me even more that I could not stop thinking of her. I seriously need to take a step back.

I was not old enough to be a creep but this was starting to border on an attraction that would be quite misplaced in the stuffy room that was my lecture hall.

I liked order. My apartment was tidy and everything had a respective place. I was not boring, it was more of a precaution against all of the extraordinary. And especially over the past year I had learned that there was nothing quite as save as order and regularity. Order ruled in my mind but every time I was in Kalina's close proximity because of some stupid coincidence, I ended up going off track, losing some stability in the wall I had carefully constructed around my heart with the comfort of work.

Now, said work and the attached comfort were always just a tiny tilt of Kalina's head away from going off trail and that sure as hell was not comforting.

I wanted to eradicate all the sweet impressions she had left. It had been mere days and it was overwhelming how quickly she had captured my (inappropriate) attention.

What I had noticed, though, was that others had also taken note of the perfect curve of her waist. They had seen her body and when I stood in front of a class with Kalina at the very front or in second row, it became abundantly clear that she was on the receiving end of many inappropriate stares.

I got those stares too. I had always gotten them and my chest had always heaved in discomfort until you are conditioned to brush it off. But the stares following Kalina made my chest burn. I did not want to admit it to myself but I knew why.

Because I was aware that those inappropriate stares had a bigger chance at this than I would ever have. They were all at least five years younger and not her professor. But that was stupid, so, I brushed it off, like those stares, as an unimportant thing that needed no more attention than it already got, as it could very well spiral into a hyperfixation.

So, the burning in my chest was stamped aside and I called it 'an inconvenience'. Though, she was far from being an inconvenience. Inconveniences were not that pretty.

Did not matter. What mattered was freeing my mind from her grasp and getting my shit together. I was not going to think about my student. I was not going to think ab- Nope, I was not. After all, I really loved my job.

So, I gritted my teeth as I made my way over to my apartment door and grabbed my keys, deciding on visiting Julia, a friend, my best friend, a coworker if you will.

Julia was a professor in the medicine department for the students choosing to major in neuroscience. She was bloody funny. We had only known each other for about one and a half years but I had never been closer to anyone in my life. And she was the smartest person I knew.

She was going to be able to take my mind off of Kalina.

-

"So, basically you've gone insane? Fantastic", Julia rolled her eyes and huffed as she walked over to the kitchen counter of her little apartment to get us a third refill of the expensive champagne she had gotten from her aunt.

"Joe! You're not helping. Like at all", I groaned and crossed my arms over my stomach sinking into her couch.

"Katherine Arden! Are you listening to yourself? You're telling me that you're insanely in love with a student, a student, you met a week ago, and you believe that you're not bonkers?", she raised her eyebrow in an expectant manner.

"I'm not in love with her! I don't even know her", she briskly turned around, eyebrows rocketing.

"Oh, Joe! I don't know what to do. She's so beautiful! I can't stop thinking about her!", she mocked me.

"I do not sound like that, asshole. I do think she's pretty but that's that. For god's sake, I'm not in love with her", I rolled my eyes.

"Still, this is a pattern. And I know you see it too. You need to stop getting involved with your students! You know what happens!", she was raising her voice but I knew it was just to get the message across. And boy, did that get the message across.

"Don't you dare go there", she walked back over bringing me another glass of champagne. Champagne I hated, by the way. I gulped it down in two swigs.

"I wasn't going there. I was demonstrating where we would need to go, if you took this even just a step further", I shuddered and nodded but did not answer. I knew I should stop. I would. Just promising felt a bit too irrational. I mean I was sure it would not come to that. So, you know, why promise?

"Are you staying over?", Joe asked with an unfit cheerfulness in her voice.

"Yeah, there's nothing to do anyway. And driving home with four glasses of champagne intus does not sound safe", I sat the glass she had handed me down on the table and she grabbed it. She hummed and downed her glass, lightly swaying to her feet.

"My understanding of that is that you and I will keep drinking until we forget all about work and love and about not love and not work", she giggled and I tried to smile genuinely. Because that did sound like something I desperately wanted. But there was still this hint of someone with light brown hair and blonde strands dancing at the edge of my mind. Just a drink away from tipping off but still there.