Eight weeks, three days, and about three hours and twenty minutes later, I’d made an art out of avoidance. It wasn’t like pre-med was a cakewalk. I’d had plenty to keep me distracted—study groups, MCAT guides, and to-do lists. The girls recognized that bringing him up was taboo. Cassie even stopped teasing me about all the embarrassment I’d endured in Mexico. But all the careful scheduling, planning, and care-taking couldn’t account for the one thing I couldn’t control: geography.

Particularly my friends’ geography. I couldn’t control where Jillian and Cassie went in Olympic Falls, what buildings they had classes in, or when they had to be in the communications department. Still, when Cassie arrived in my apartment and announced she’d run into Roman, it felt like a punch in the stomach. It sucked the air from me, but I tried to hide it. I failed.

Cassie’s eyebrow arched up as she took in my shock. Tossing her purse on my couch, she asked, “Do you want to know what he said?”

I nodded. Then shook my head. Then nodded again.

“You look like a fucking bobble head,” she told me, dropping onto a barstool.

I nodded once more.

“You have chosen…wisely,” she said, playing with a crocheted potholder. “He asked how you were.”

I waited, but she didn’t continue. “And?”

“And what?” she asked. “He asked about you.”

“That’s hardly noteworthy.” I fought against a surge if disappointment. What had I expected him to ask her? In my fantasies, I imagined running into him myself. I imagined him showing up on my doorstep. I imagined I hadn’t gotten on that plane. I imagined a lot of things when it came to Roman.

“Well, that’s all he said. How he looked was a different story.”

I threw my hands up in frustration. Getting the whole story out of Cassie was about as easy as catching a greased pig. “Are you enjoying this?”

“I am. Thank you for asking.” She shot me a coy smile.

“Spill.”

“He looked hopeful and sad, and then he started to say something else, but he hesitated.”

“That’s it?”

“I know what he was going to say,” she said with a shrug.

“Oh, you’re psychic now. We’ll have to set up a hotline. How’s your Jamaican accent?” I crossed my arms over my chest. Then uncrossed them and dug a to-do list out of a stack on the coffee table.

“Chill, ‘mon,” she said in the worst fake accent of all time. “You’re deflecting.”

“Did you learn that in freshman psych?”

“I am a psych minor,” she reminded me. “He misses you. He was going to say he missed you.”

“Okay.” I pretended to study the list, but I couldn’t quite ignore the way my heart leapt when she said those words. Suddenly Olympic Falls didn’t seem so big or safe or far from the one thing I had to stay away from. Roman missed me, and I missed him.

I wasn’t sure how I ended up standing in the hall of the communications building the next day. I’d been on my way to the union to grab lunch. Now I was hungry, nervous, and in the wrong place. Staring at the gleaming tile floors, it hit me. Roman was here. He was in this building. The thought left me torn between happiness and fear. Happiness that I might actually run into him. Fear that I would run into him. Happiness that he was so close. Fear that I’d crossed the line into stalker territory.

If I walked down the hall and turned left, I would be standing in front of his office.

I didn’t do that.

Mostly to prove to myself that I wasn’t a stalker.

Also because I was chicken shit.

I needed to go—to get out before I got caught. What did I think would happen? I’d go to his office and he’d sweep me into his arms? So, he had asked Cassie about me. That was called being polite. It was definitely an unwritten rule of etiquette that you pretend to care about how someone you slept with was doing. If I ran into Brett’s friends I’d ask about him. That was expected. Yesterday had meant nothing.

“Jess?” A familiar voice asked behind me, raising goose bumps on my skin.

I turned slowly to face him, but when I did, my breath caught in my throat. I’d expected I’d find a clean-shaven, sweater vest clad Roman, but he was anything but. His sharp jawline sported a five o-clock shadow that I could almost feel scratching against my thighs. Usually he gelled his hair back when he taught, but today it fell across his forehead and over his eyes. He had on a black button-down shirt that was tailored to skim his muscular upper body and a pair of jeans that hung off his hips in a suggestive way. At least it was suggestive to me—but who was I kidding, everything about him was suggestive to me.

“Hi,” I breathed, unable to come up with anything interesting or profound—or coherent.

“Every day I spot a blonde in the hall, I hold my breath, hoping it’s you,” he confessed. “It never is.”

The confession emboldened me, shooting fire through my veins and awakening part of me that I thought I’d left in Mexico. “I hope you don’t call my name out every time. That could be embarrassing.”

“I never do,” he said. “I always know deep down that it’s not.”

“And today?” So much hinged on his answer. I could feel it. The tension between us was palpable in the air. I could drag my finger through it. It made it hard to breathe.

“Today I knew,” he answered simply. He waved me along to his office and I followed him, ignoring the tiny voice in my head that said it was a bad idea. That was Jess, and right now I needed to be Jessica. His Jessica.

“How have you been?” I asked, feeling suddenly awkward as he shut the office door behind us. This man had seen me naked, so why did I feel like a giddy teenager trying to talk to a boy for the first time? I ordered myself to stop. I was a grown woman. Someday I would be a doctor. I just had to survive the next five minutes.

“Busy,” he admitted, running his fingers through his dark locks.

The simple gesture sent a jolt of desire burning through me. For a split second I imagined pulling him in for a kiss and tangling my hands through his hair. I missed the feel of it against my palm.

I forced myself to say something—to say anything. “Students are a handful?”

I was trying too hard. I sounded like I thought we were colleagues, but we weren’t and that was the problem.

“Always, but actually I’ve been busy wrapping up my dissertation. I defend it near the end of the semester.”

“That’s awesome. You’ll be a professor then.” This brought a genuine smile to my lips, and he returned it with one that lit up his whole face—and broke my heart.

“I’ll have to start looking for jobs.”

“You won’t stay here?” I asked too quickly. Tamp it down, girl.

“Probably not. That’s the problem with becoming a professor. You have to go where the jobs are.” The happiness that had warmed his face a moment before had vanished.

“Oh.” It was all I could manage to say as a lump formed in my throat. I’d spent the last two months avoiding him at all cost, but I’d known he was here. There had been something comforting about that. The idea that he would be gone in a few months, moving on with his life, had stolen my ability to speak. Hadn’t I planned to move on, too? Would I have thought of him as I considered where to go to med school or do my residency? But wasn’t the sheer act of going through the motions and checking off my to-do lists proof that I was always thinking of him? I felt hollow, as though a breeze could blow me over.

It was then that I realized I had never really accepted that Roman was gone from my life forever. If I had, this revelation wouldn’t be killing me now. And then he locked the office door. My heart skipped with the sound of the click.

“Jessica.” He turned to me, my name a question on his lips, and the longing I’d been holding at bay shattered.

I nodded once, giving him the answer he was waiting for. The answer that would change everything between us again. His hand slid around my waist with slow purpose as my entire body ached for contact with him. I missed him. I needed him. Now. We’d said we wouldn’t do this, but that was before.

Before we’d tried to live without each other.

Roman drew me to him and my eyes closed, savoring the delicious agony of the moment before his lips closed over mine. His mouth moved softly, parting my lips and then stroking his tongue across my own. And in his kiss I felt the pain of our separation, the desperate need, the inevitability of this moment.

“I don’t want to stay away from you any longer,” he whispered against my lips.

“Don’t.” I ran a finger down the scruff on his jaw. “I need to feel you.”

“We shouldn’t,” he breathed, and a vice grip twisted my heart when he released me and took a step back. “Not here.”

I shook my head, and unfastened my jeans. “I have spent the last eight weeks going through the motions, because I couldn’t feel anything. Seeing you proved to me that I don’t want to live like that.”

I slid my jeans off and tugged my sweater over my head, ignoring the tremble of my hands. I wasn’t scared of getting caught. I was only scared that he’d make me wait longer. I continued to strip until I stood naked before him. He didn’t try to stop me, and when I stepped forward and began to unbutton his shirt, his eyes closed. Running my hands over his chest, my touch lingered over his heart. When his eyes opened, they blazed with a hunger that sent a shiver of anticipation running through my body.

Then he scooped me off my feet, cupping my ass as I wrapped my legs around his waist. His lips were on mine, on my jaw, my neck, nipping at my ear. I was lost to his touch, unraveling around him, as we kissed recklessly. I found his pants and fumbled with the button. Roman’s fingers shoved mine aside and he undid them with one swift motion. I pushed them past his hips with my heels and he slid into me, drawing a gasp from my lips. I clung to him, bracing myself as he thrust inside me. He whispered poetry in my ear. I didn’t understand the words, but their meaning unfurled in my soul.

I pulled away and met his eyes as we continued to move together in a tireless pace. “I don’t want to lose you.”

Roman groaned at the words and for a moment I thought he had finished, but a second later, he had turned me around and spread me across his desk, shoving aside papers and sending books crashing to the ground. His momentum never faltered, but he slowed, pushing inside me with languid strokes. “You wouldn’t let me say that before.”

“I know,” I moaned. “I thought…”

“You think too much, mi bella.” He thrust into me harder as if to drive the point home.

Leaning over me, he trailed his lips up my neck and over my lips, gripping my hips as he circled against me. “I won’t ever let you go again.”

The promise washed over me, my limbs tightening and releasing in a wave of pleasure. Roman’s hands slid under my shoulders, bracketing me to him.

“This isn’t going to be easy,” I whispered.

He drew back and shook his head as if I was missing something obvious. “I don’t want easy. I want you.”

He didn’t warn me again.

But a half-hour later as I gathered my panties off his desk, my eyes fell on an essay next to them on the ground. I recognized the name—a girl in one of my science classes. Roman was an instructor. I was a student. There was a reason I’d been avoiding him since Puerto Vallarta. Being together was a risk, and we were making stupid decisions. What would the faculty say if they knew an instructor was screwing an undergrad, one of his former students, in his office? He’d be fired. Maybe even expelled from his graduate program. I could ruin him.

His eyes followed mine to the essay and his jaw twitched. He scooped the paper off the floor as I stood up and scrambled to get dressed.

“I’m s-s-sorry,” I stammered as I tugged my sweater back on. “This was a mistake. We shouldn’t be doing this.”

“Jess—” he began, hurt shining in his brown eyes, but I held up a hand to stop him.

“Don’t,” I pled. “Don’t make it harder.”

I backed up until my fingers unlocked the door. Roman didn’t say anything when I opened it. Instead he bent over his desk, muscles tensing across his chest and arms, and watched me walk away.

Again.