Page 22 of The Naughty Professor
“I—ah,” I stammered, retreating a step.“I should get back to my office.Papers to grade.”
Felix blinked, confused, still clutching a broken shard in one hand.“Oh.Right.Yes.Of course.”
Joan’s eyes flickered with amusement.I forced a polite nod to Felix, turned on my heel, and strode toward the door.
“Thorne,” Joan called, her heels clicking as she hurried after me.“Are you free this evening?Dinner, perhaps?I’m dying for some Greek food.We could go to Stella’s, perhaps?”
Guilt stabbed me.Joan had been a good friend.She’d fed me when I couldn’t eat, listened when no one else would.So why did her voice now sound like chains I couldn’t shake off?
I stopped in the hall, turned back just enough to meet her eyes.I shrugged, forcing something like a smile.“Sure.Dinner sounds fine.”
Her face lit, triumphant.She slid her hand onto my arm as we walked together down the corridor and began gossiping about one of her students.
But all I could think of was Felix Sterling.
ChapterEight
Felix
The moment Professor Carr left—with Joan Stanwyk’s perfume still lingering in the air like a curse—I wanted to slam my head into the lab table.
Why did I always do this?Why did I always reduce myself to a bumbling idiot in front of him?I’d dropped glassware, babbled about bleeding in the lab, and nearly set myself on fire with nerves.He must have thought I was insane.No—worse than insane.Incompetent and pathetic.
And why had he even been here?Carr never came down to the chemistry wing.Philosophy lived upstairs in its ivory tower, all chalk dust and moral hypotheticals.Why would the golden boy of the faculty wander into my disaster of a lab?
I couldn’t let myself believe it was to see me.That was laughable.No one like Thorne Carr—handsome, brilliant, composed—would ever come here just to talk to Felix Sterling, the man who once wore anal beads as a bracelet.
Still, the thought wormed in.What if?What if he had?
I shoved it away before it could take root.It didn’t matter.I’d blown whatever chance I might have had.I always did.
My hands shook as I gathered the shards of the broken beaker, dropping them into the disposal bin.The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, drilling into my skull.The echo of Joan’s heels was gone, but the shame she left behind clung to me like static.
I hated myself.Hated that around Carr I turned into a malfunctioning wind-up toy—arms flailing, words collapsing into gibberish.I could recite the periodic table backwards, but when it came to speaking to a man I wanted… nothing.
Unless.
My gaze slid to the bottles I’d lined up earlier, the notes scattered across the table, equations scrawled in multicolored ink.The beginnings of a miracle—or a disaster.
The serum.I needed this serum now.
I shoved my glasses up my nose and pulled the stool closer to the bench.“All right,” I muttered, my voice shaking.“Let’s make history.”
I set out the components like a religious ritual: cobalt chloride, acetylsalicylic acid, lithium carbonate, a telomerase inhibitor I’d smuggled from the medical lab upstairs.Each chemical was dangerous in its own right.Together, they could be catastrophic—or transcendent.
I began with the stabilizer, a pale blue powder that clung to the spoon as though reluctant to let go.I tipped it into the beaker, watching it dissolve into the clear solution with a hiss.My pen scratched furiously across the page beside me—measurements, reactions, little arrows pointing to half-formed ideas.
Next, the dopamine agonist.A clear liquid that shimmered faintly under the lights.My pulse quickened as I drew it into the pipette, each drop falling like molten silver.I imagined it coursing through my veins, switching on confidence like a lightbulb, burning away the hesitation that had ruled me my entire life.
“Confident,” I whispered, almost to the beaker itself.“Smooth.I will be the kind of man who never has to beg to be noticed.”
I added the halogenated chain, a thin crystal lattice that fizzed violently the moment it touched the solution.Smoke curled upward, acrid and sweet.My heart leapt, half with fear, half with exhilaration.
This was it.This was me tearing down the walls of my own prison.
In my mind’s eye I saw the man I’d become: Felix, but taller somehow, straighter, his jaw defined instead of hidden by nervous stubble.Felix, walking into Badlands not as a shadow but as fire.Men turning and staring, wanting him.
No—not Felix.Jax.The name came to me unbidden, sleek and dangerous sounding.
