Page 1 of The Professor's Indecent Obsession

Chapter One

Roman

“And that’s where emotional truth outweighs technical perfection. A flat plot can still cut deep if the character’s desire is real enough.”

My voice is steady. Controlled. The kind of practiced cadence that tells a hundred hungover undergrads I know exactly what I’m talking about.

And I do. I have enough published novels under my belt that I could teach this kind of thing in my sleep.

But today, I’ve said this same line three times.

My hand gestures toward the bullet points on the slide behind me. Half the students are already packing up, fingers tapping their phones or closing laptops with one hand while yawning behind the other. A few are still scribbling notes. I think one is asleep in the second row.

And none of them notice that my eyes haven’t stopped drifting toward the corner of the desk since I started talking.

The notebook is still there. Same place I left it before the start of the lecture, like a quiet, innocuous little landmine. Wornedges. Spiral-bound. The kind you’d find in a discount bin at the campus bookstore.

It shouldn’t matter. Shouldn’t still be sitting in the back of my head like a pulse I can’t shake.

But it is.

And no matter how many times I loop back to this final point, I can’t stop thinking about the damn thing. The weight of it. The tension it’s been feeding me since the second I picked it up yesterday and realized what filled the pages.

I take a breath and force my focus forward.

“Okay. That’s it for today,” I say, a little sharper than intended. “Email your second draft by Friday. Peer reviews start next week, so don’t come in unprepared.”

A wave of movement rolls through the auditorium. I raise my voice just enough to carry over it.

“Oh, and Callie Dawson, can you stay behind for a moment?”

There’s a subtle shift in the air. A few students glance around curiously, but most are too busy packing up to care. The exodus begins, the low thrum of idle conversation echoing up toward the rafters as the students begin filing out.

I don’t look for her. Not yet.

Instead, I walk slowly back to my desk and sink into the chair behind it, the familiar creak of the worn leather grounding me.

I reach for the notebook, fingers brushing the curled corner of the front cover. Then I flip it open.

Again.

I’ve read every word already, twice. But it doesn’t matter. My hands move like they have a mind of their own, flipping slowly through the pages, as if I need to feel them again to believe any of it was real.

It was just a forgotten spiral notebook left behind on the back row yesterday after my last class. I only noticed it because Ialways scan the room before locking up. An empty coffee cup. A crumpled gum wrapper. And... this.

I’d tossed it into my bag without thinking. I wasn’t expecting gold. But I opened it before bed, anyway. Planning to skim it, and maybe return it if there was a name inside.

Instead, I barely slept.

I couldn’t stop turning the pages as I fell into her words. The innocent-looking notebook was filled with filthy, raw fantasies, detailed and visceral enough that I’d had to wrap my hand around my dick and jerk off while reading it. Three times.

But it wasn’t just the acts she described that made her words so addictive. It was the way she wrote it.

Emotion curling beneath every scene. Desire so potent it felt like a punch to the gut. There was longing in the lines. Worship. Obsession. Hunger.

And the kicker? Every single fantasy starred me.

Not just a vague professor. Me.

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