Sweet Romance10 min read
My Professor Next Door
ButterPicks12 views
June had the sticky heat that hangs like a blanket over everything. I sat at the very back of the lecture hall and tried to focus on the tall man at the podium.
"That student in the pink dress at the back," he said, scanning the room. "Do you have any questions about today's talk?"
My stomach flipped. I stood up before I thought, opened my mouth, and closed it again. "No—" I sat down hard.
He smiled at the class and said, "We have time for questions. Ask freely if I can answer."
Someone shouted, "Professor Baumann, do you have a girlfriend? What’s your type?"
A ripple of chuckles moved through the students. I peered from behind my notebook. He was everything they said—tall, lean, a face that looked like it belonged on a magazine. He answered simply, "Not right now. If you meet someone you truly like, 'type' doesn't matter."
His voice struck a chord in me, oddly familiar, and for the rest of the lecture I kept trying to place it.
After class my roommate burst into our dorm room, breathless. "Hayley, you’re coming home this term or what? I'm bored here without you."
"I'll be studying at home more," I said. "I need to review for finals."
She kissed my cheek and ran off. I packed my case slowly. Taxis were delayed that afternoon, and while I waited on the curb, a white SUV pulled up.
"Do you need a lift?" the driver asked.
It was him—the professor from the lecture. He eased down out of the driver's seat and smiled as if meeting an old friend.
"No, thanks. I called a ride," I said, flustered.
He looked startled to be called "Professor" and then smiled. "Be careful," he said. "Good luck with your studies."
I watched him drive away and felt a childish thrill. "If he were my teacher," I muttered, "my grades would be perfect."
In the doorway of my family home my mother wrapped me up in her arms. "My girl," she said. "You promised to spend this term at home. Don't let your studies slip."
We cooked and talked. Mid-meal, my mother said, "Do you remember our old neighbors, the Baumanns? Lu Aunt, she and her son came back last week. Her son is teaching at your university—Nehemias, I think he said."
My head snapped up. The name hit something inside me. Pieces of a childhood memory slid into place—playing with a boy who used to stay over and be tucked in at night. I had been small then; memory blurred. He had been called "Nehemias" sometimes, I remembered. "Nehemias," I whispered.
That weekend I went to help with the move next door. I opened the neighbor’s door and froze—there he was in a white T-shirt and jeans, hair messy enough to look lived-in rather than styled. He didn't look like a professor walking out of a textbook. He looked human.
"Sorry to bother you," he said. "My mother and yours are out buying furniture. You didn't have to come alone."
"It’s nothing," I said. "My mom said she'd be glad to have you nearby. My mom said you could—maybe—drive me to class when it's convenient."
"Of course," he said with a small smile. "It's on the way."
We scrubbed and moved boxes. He made me sit when my knees trembled. "Sit on the couch," he said. "I'll sort the heavy stuff."
We ended up in the kitchen. "Do you like tomato and egg noodles?" he asked.
"Yes," I said, surprised. "You cook?"
"In college abroad, I learned to fend for myself," he said, tossing eggs in a pan like he'd done it all his life. "My parents lived separately for work. I rented near school."
I watched him with a new, quiet curiosity. He moved easily, without ceremony. By the time his mother and my mother returned, my hands ached from cleaning, but I felt oddly warm inside.
That evening in my room I unzipped my bag and found a small, shivering kitten curled in an empty milk carton. He had been under the SUV when we left. "Will you keep him?" I messaged Nehemias.
He suggested a name. "Milk," he said. "Because of the box."
"Perfect," I replied. "He's staying on my lap now."
We started to build a routine. He drove me to lectures, left breakfasts at my door, and picked up the groceries I forgot. When I fell ill from something I shouldn't have eaten—a cold soda with takeout—he was the one who carried me to the hospital, palms shaking with the strain of moving quickly, the way his brow tightened at my paleness.
"You rest," he said softly, voice steady. "I'll stay."
When the doctor told me it was an acute stomach infection from cold food and sugary drinks, he breathed out, "You should let me cook for you. No more ice-cold sodas."
I stayed overnight. He held my hand and treated the nurse's instructions as if they were commandments. "Don't eat cold food," he told me like a small parent. "You hear me?"
I sounded childish, but I felt cared for in the most basic way and it made my throat ache with gratitude.
Once home, we slipped into the domestic rhythm. He drove me, cooked steady meals, scolded me kindly for too-processed snacks. He was my neighbor and my guardian and, in a soft, steady way, the person I wanted near me.
One afternoon at the gate, a man stood where he shouldn't: an older, rough-looking stranger who stared straight at me. My limbs went cold. "Do you know him?" I whispered.
Nehemias frowned. "No. Get into the car." He called the security and had the man escorted out. I hurt in a way I hadn't known I could. The face haunt of a past I couldn't remember had arrived back into my life.
At night my mother told me things I had been shielded from: a man named Buck Contreras—my father—had been in and out of our lives, sometimes violent, sometimes capable of remorse long enough to beg forgiveness and then do it again. I had a headful of foggy blanks. Suddenly a box arrived on our doorstep—photos, old family pictures sent by someone with bad intentions. My heart dropped, everything tilted, and I passed out.
When I opened my eyes in the hospital, Nehemias was there, looking as if he'd been punched by worry. "Hayley," he said, voice thin. "You woke up."
"What happened?" I asked.
"You saw photos," my mother said. "Buck sent them. He demanded money and threatened to show up."
"Why now?" I whispered. The memories began to surface in troubling, jagged images—yelling, a small figure protecting her mother, a man who drank and who hit.
I felt betrayed by time. I had loved the blank more than the messy truth. "I don't want him near us," I told Nehemias.
"Then he won't be," he said.
He made it his business. He tracked him down. He offered money if he would leave us alone, he arranged to meet him, and when Buck saw the cash he thought he had the upper hand. He reached for what he believed was his escape, and he was arrested—caught in the act of taking money he had no right to and with evidence that connected him to theft and worse.
The trial that followed was public. I had imagined such moments as quick and clinical. What happened instead pulled me through every emotion I had held in reserve.
It was a long morning in the courthouse. The gallery filled with neighbors, students, and strangers. "This is the man who frightened you," the prosecutor said as he pointed at Buck. His voice echoed in the tall courtroom.
Buck stood, face raw from the strain of his life choices. He leaned forward at the table and sneered. "You can't pin this on me. I took what's mine. I deserve what I took."
"Did you threaten my client?" the prosecutor asked. "Did you demand money, and did you break into property to take U.S. legal evidence, confidential items you had no right to possess?"
"I—" Buck's bravado cracked. For a flinch of a second he was the small, mean thing I'd once known. Then he raised his voice. "If you want money—give me money and I'll leave her alone."
"You extorted her family," the district attorney said. "You broke into a private office. You had surveillance captured. You are charged with theft, trespass, and possessing sensitive materials belonging to a research team. What do you say to that?"
I watched the people in the courtroom. My mother gripped my hand. Nehemias stood behind us, hands behind his back like a soldier ready to take on a storm. People whispered and turned their heads. A neighbor I hadn't met before, who had once tutored me in algebra, met my eyes and mouthed, "I'm so sorry."
Buck's voice shifted from the bluster of an abuser to something brittle as glass. "I didn't have a job. I needed money."
"You had a pattern," the prosecutor said. "A string of complaints. You have harassed your wife and daughter. You have threatened them. You broke the law."
The judge asked for statements. My mother stood and told the small version of our long story, the one that condensed years into aching minutes. Her voice shook. "He hurt us. He used to beat us. He sold our things. He left us with nothing."
A woman who worked in the neighborhood rose and said: "I saw him outside their house in the mornings. He looked dangerous. I kept my kids away."
Then the courtroom turned to Buck. His face had become a theater of every emotion—initial arrogance, then fury, then denial, and finally a hollow panic. He started to shout, then quieted himself. "I didn't mean to do all this," he said. "I wanted help."
A man in the gallery who had been a former colleague of Buck's leaned forward. "We heard from others," he said. "There were complaints. He never asked for help in the right way. He broke the law."
Evidence was played—videos of him in the university hallway; recorded messages where he demanded money; the items he took from the office. The court heard the tear when he opened the safe. You could see it on the screen when he smeared his fingerprints across the bags he walked away with.
At one point Buck changed tactics. His voice softened into a pleading that was meant to show remorse. "I was weak. I had no options," he said. "Please, I want to be with my family."
There were mothers in the gallery who folded their arms. "Not every apology means you are forgiven," one whispered to a companion.
The judge listened. Then he announced the sentence. It was stiff, exacting. "For theft, extortion, and possession of restricted materials," he said, "I sentence you to thirty years."
The words landed like a heavy bell. The courtroom erupted into a series of audible reactions—gasps, some soft sobs, others a relieved whistle. Buck's face drained of color. He reached for the table, then grasped his counsel's sleeve. "Thirty years?" he breathed. "You can't—this is ridiculous."
He tried to argue, then to bargain. "Give me a lighter sentence," he begged. "Please, I'll do anything."
"Too late," the prosecutor said quietly. "You've lost your chance."
It was not a cinematic collapse. It was smaller, rawer. Buck's face went through a sequence—anger, denial, bargaining, then an almost animal panic. He screamed for our forgiveness, for our pity, for a chance. People in the gallery muttered. Some snapped photos with quiet, annoyingly ordinary phones. A woman near the back clapped once, slowly, like the closing of a curtain. Others watched in stunned silence.
What struck me most was how ordinary it was: his ego shredded in public, his threats turned into pleas that no one answered. He had tried to trade his sins for money and had been exposed. The people who had once turned away now stared, some with hard eyes, others with a pity he had never shown us.
"The law will take its course," Nehemias said later, voice tight. "You don't have to watch him anymore."
Outside, friends and neighbors told me how they had seen him loitering, how neighbors had felt uncomfortable, how someone had finally had the courage to speak up. They hugged me like they were rescuers from a small war.
I thought about forgiveness, about whether it was mine to give. I knew how easily abuse could become a rhythm, how people like Buck could ask for mercy and then, given the chance, go back to their ways. It was a relief that the court had made a choice: to remove him from being an immediate danger.
In the weeks after the sentence, the university published a statement: no tolerance for harassment. The online chatter that had spread rumors was replaced with a single, glaring narrative: justice, at last. Some called the outcome extreme; others cheered it. People recorded the courtroom testimony, and Nehemias and I found ourselves the subject of whispered admiration and protective innocence. I didn't like being a cause célèbre, but I couldn't deny the muscle of safety it gave.
Andre Wagner—the young man who had stalked me at school and gotten violent, the one who insisted I owed him attention—faced a different kind of reckoning. His punishment was administrative: public censure, a campus-wide announcement, the withdrawal of his enrollment, and the social ostracism that followed. The dean called a meeting and read the complaints out loud. He had tried to corner me in the quad and had been recorded by students who had the courage to step in. The security footage was clear. He lost his place at the university that week. People avoided him: some spat on his name on social media, others simply closed doors.
Those punishments were not identical. Buck received the legal finality of incarceration. Andre received social isolation and the life-altering consequence of losing a place to study. Each punishment fit the pattern of their wrongs and the public’s need to see justice done.
Life after the courtroom settled into a new normal. I learned to live with partial memories that arrived like flashes. I learned that the man who had once abandoned me to a difficult childhood had been the boy who fought for me once upon a time. That realization made me forgive him a little in my heart for leaving, but not for the harm he had caused. I didn't want him back in my life as anything other than a memory.
Weekdays were full: classes, study groups, the office where Nehemias worked. Nights were quieter, filled with bowls of his tomato and egg noodles and Milk purring on my lap. We learned each other's habits—how I liked my tea, that I hated bitter coffee, that he preferred silence in the mornings. He taught me how to make better presentations, how to stand straight and speak calmly. I taught him how to be silly again.
One evening, in a small park lit by warm lamps, he took my hand.
"Hayley," he said. "I have a confession."
"What is it?" I asked, the streetlights painting gold on his face.
"I've liked you for years," he said simply. "I knew you when you were small. Time made me an adult, but I never stopped remembering you."
My throat tightened. "You left," I said.
"I left to fix a life I thought I couldn't provide here," he said. "But I always came back in pieces. I wanted to protect you, even if I didn't know how to stay."
I looked at him and felt the kind of trust that builds slowly, brick by patient brick. "I like you," I said. "I have liked you since I first met you, but I didn't know it then."
He smiled, that small, private smile that had first made me notice him in the lecture hall. "Then let me be the one who stays."
We kissed under the lamplight, simple and true. People walked by and glanced, but we existed in our small, private glow. Milk purred when we returned, as if he had always known how this story would end.
I still remember the worst and the best days. The men who hurt me were punished. The people who loved me stayed. And the professor next door became the man who held my hand when everything else seemed shaky. Life kept moving, warm and ordinary and precious.
The End
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