Page 11 of The Naughty Professor
What if I could transform myself?
The words settled into me like a weight.Leon—the perfect father I’d never known.Carrie—the brilliant mother who’d been halfway through medical school before her life was cut short.And me, stuck in the middle, a pale imitation, a man who mowed lawns in a dust mask and had never been on a single date in his life.
I scanned the byline: Dr.Adrian Hargreaves, Easton University.He had an email address listed at the end of the piece.I could reach out tonight, see if he’d share more.
“Felix!”
I jerked my head up.Grandma was staring at me, her lips pressed thin.
“I’ve been talking about Mrs.Richardson’s garden for the last five minutes and you haven’t heard a word,” she said.“You sit there, lost in your scribbles, and forget there’s a whole world outside those numbers.”
“Sorry, Grandma,” I murmured, though my eyes dropped back to the page.
She shook her head, muttering under her breath, and carried the casserole dish back to the counter.The kitchen was filled with the sound of her clattering plates, but I hardly noticed.
If this compound could turn a mute survivor of war into someone vibrant and whole—even for a short time—what could it do for me?
ChapterFour
Felix
When I opened the front door to my place in Oregon Hill, the smell of old wood and paper wrapped around me like a second skin.My townhouse was no prize—built in the 1920s, with sagging floorboards and radiators that clanked like ghosts in the night—but it was mine.Bookshelves lined every wall and sagged under the weight of my chemistry journals, history texts, and battered novels, which had traveled with me since childhood.
And the basement—my sanctuary—wasn’t a wine cellar or a rec room like the neighbors had.It was a laboratory.Cramped, cobbled together with secondhand equipment and university cast-offs, but functional.It gave me the illusion that I was more than just another lonely professor nobody noticed.
I carried the Tupperware Grandma had foisted on me into the kitchen and shoved it into the fridge.The kitchen itself was tiny, a narrow galley with cabinets painted mint green before I was born, a single window that let in the last weak light of evening.
But I didn’t linger.I took the stairs two at a time.My spare bedroom was no longer a guest room—it had been converted into my office.A simple desk with a desktop computer and a corkboard on the wall crowded with notes and formulas.
I flipped on the desk lamp, sat down, and woke the computer from its slumber.The magazine article was still fresh in my mind, every formula sketched there burned into me.I looked up the article online, and moments later it filled the screen.At the bottom of the page, I found what I was looking for.
Dr.Adrian Hargreaves.Easton University.His contact info was right there in the byline.
I hovered over the keyboard, fingers itching to type out an email.That would be the sensible thing—polished, professional, polite.But sense had abandoned me.My pulse wouldn’t let me sit still, wouldn’t let me be rational.If I wrote an email, it might be days before he responded.Or never.
I picked up the phone.
My fingertips were slick on the buttons as I dialed.I told myself I’d just leave a voicemail, something short and respectful.Maybe he’d hear the urgency in my voice and call me back sooner.
On the third ring, he answered.
“Hargreaves.”
My throat closed.It was the man himself.
“Dr.—uh—Dr.Hargreaves?”I stammered.“This is Felix Sterling.I’m a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University.I—I just read your article in Chemical Horizons about the experimental treatment, and I was hoping we could—well, I wanted to discuss it with you.”
There was a pause at the other end, then a sigh, heavy and resigned.“It’s probably best left alone, Dr.Sterling.”
The words deflated me, but I clung to them, pushing.“But your work was incredible.If it weren’t for you, that woman would never have spoken again.You gave her something she’d lost forever.You gave her the best six months of her life.”
The line went quiet, and then, to my shock, I heard him weep.Soft at first, then a broken sound, raw and unguarded.
“You don’t understand,” he said finally, his voice cracking.“I didn’t give her life.I took it away.She’s twenty-eight years old, Dr.Sterling.Twenty-eight.And she lives in a nursing facility now, unable to walk, unable to talk, unable to feed herself.She stares at the wall all day because I thought I could play God.And every time I close my eyes, I see her face.”
I pressed the phone tighter against my ear.My heart ached with the weight of it, but I couldn’t let go of my hope.“But still—you found something.You proved it was possible.If you would share the details with me, maybe I could refine the formula.Maybe—”
“God help me,” Hargreaves whispered.And then, in a tone both weary and reluctant, he told me everything.
