Chapter 14 The Crack in the Wall

CLAUDIA

The second hand on Mercedes’s mahogany desk clock doesn't just tick. It drips, slow as acid, eating away at my patience.

Outside, the Madrid afternoon has turned a heavy, leaden blue, and a fine rain sheets against San Griselmo’s high windows. Inside, the air is so thick I could swear Mercedes’s cold orange blossom perfume has turned solid, hovering between us like an invisible fog.

On the desk, the galley proofs for the Salamanca conference article sit in two perfect columns. We’ve spent two hours editing in a dead silence, broken only by the occasional scratch of her pen and the sound of our own breathing.

We keep our distance. Scrupulously.

Her chair is exactly three feet from mine.

Neither of us crosses the imaginary line we drew under the protection of her twisted theology.

Our "pact of mystical purity." A spiritual marriage.

A magnificent, arrogant lie we invented just to stay in the same room without letting the world know we're burning alive.

"On page twelve, Professor," I say. My own voice sounds strange to me, rough from hours of disuse. "I think there’s a typo in the Latin translation of Saint Bernard. It says amor where it should say caritas."

Mercedes doesn’t move right away. I watch her shoulders tense beneath her dark gray wool blazer.

She removes her reading glasses slowly, using those long, aristocratic fingers I’ve imagined against the back of my neck a thousand times, and looks up.

Her gray eyes are ringed with faint shadows. She isn't sleeping either.

"Saint Bernard used both terms interchangeably in that treatise, Claudia." Her voice is a perfectly modulated murmur, but I can hear the exhaustion vibrating beneath it. "It’s not a typo. It’s a deliberate choice by the author to force a conceptual tension."

"Tension?" I ask, holding her gaze. It’s the only thing our pact allows—looking at each other until the air hurts. "Using amor in the middle of a treatise on spiritual asceticism feels... dangerous. It distracts the reader."

Mercedes swallows. I catch the subtle movement of her throat, right where her gold cross disappears beneath the high collar of her white silk blouse.

"An intelligent reader knows that danger is part of the ascent," she replies. For a single, breathless second, her eyes drop to my mouth before snapping back to mine. "Pass me the bibliography sheet, please."

I lean forward to grab the paper. She does the same.

It takes a single second. A miscalculation. A temporary glitch in gravity inside an office we thought was ruled entirely by intellect.

As I reach for the page, my fingertips brush the back of her bare hand. It isn't a hard collision. It’s barely a breath of skin against skin, lasting less than a heartbeat.

An electric shock hits me so hard I gasp.

Mercedes freezes, her hand paralyzed over the paper.

For three endless seconds, neither of us pulls away.

My pulse thumps wildly against my temples—loud, rhythmic, untamed.

Her skin is burning hot against the chill bleeding in from the window.

The thin facade of our pact shatters completely with a single touch.

Mercedes yanks her hand back as if my fingers were hot coals. She stands up so abruptly the heavy desk rattles.

"That's... that's enough for today," she says, her back to me now. She grips the edge of the antique bookshelf like a drowning woman. "I have to get to the dean's library. Pack your things, Claudia."

I look at her. Her knuckles are white from the force of her grip. Her breathing is fast, shallow. This rule against touching is a thousand times more agonizingly erotic than giving in would ever be, and we both know it.

"As you wish, Professor," I murmur, my heart in my throat, gathering my papers with trembling hands.

The metro ride home is a blur of passing lights and exhausted faces. I can't think. I can only feel the ghost of her skin on mine, like a brand that won't cool down.

When I unlock the door to the apartment, the smell of tomato sauce and the blast of the radiator hit me. It's the mundane comfort of my life with Javi. A flat, safe, easy world. A world that feels more foreign to me with each passing day, like a suit that no longer fits.

Javi is on the couch, his laptop balanced on his knees. When he looks up, he doesn't give me his usual bright, easy smile. His face is tight, shadowed by a seriousness I’ve never seen on him before.

"Hey," I murmur, dropping my leather bag in the hallway and unwinding my green scarf.

"Hey," he replies. He doesn't get up to kiss me. He just nods toward the dining table. "You left your little notebook open on the kitchen counter this morning."

My blood runs cold. The heated air in the apartment suddenly feels suffocating.

"Oh, did I?" I try for a casual tone, but my voice wavers. "I'm losing my mind. Must have been some thesis notes..."

"They aren't thesis notes, Claudia," Javi cuts in, setting his laptop aside and standing up. He walks toward me slowly, his eyes glassy with a mix of hurt, confusion, and quiet fury. "I read it. I read the last three pages."

I freeze in the middle of the hallway. My mind races back to what I wrote at three in the morning, sitting alone in the dark kitchen while he slept. Disconnected sentences. Fragments of thoughts I didn't even want to admit to myself.

The line of her jaw under the lecture hall lights... The way her gold cross catches the light against her chest... I'm drowning in her silence... I don't know what happens to me when she looks at me... Mercedes...

"Javi, I—" The words die in my throat.

"What is this, Clau?" his voice breaks, gesturing toward the notebook on the table.

"You haven't been here for a month. You don't look at me when I talk to you, you're always somewhere else, and kissing you feels like you're checking off a chore.

And now I find this. 'Mercedes.' She's your department chair, for Christ's sake. She's forty. She's a woman."

I press a hand over my mouth, tears finally blurring my vision.

The sheer panic of having my obsession exposed—of Javi putting words to a chaos I don't even understand—crushes my chest. I don't know what's happening to me with Mercedes.

I don't know why her touch sets me on fire, why I can't breathe when she leaves the room, or why my boyfriend suddenly feels like a stranger.

"It's just theory, Javi. It's an analysis of the tension in mystical texts. I swear to you," I lie.

Javi looks at me with a heartbreaking pity that tears me apart inside.

"Don't lie to me, Claudia," he says, taking a step back. "Not to me. You're in love with her. Or you're obsessed in a way that scares me. And the worst part is... I think she looks at you the exact same way."

He turns on his heel and marches into the bedroom, slamming the door hard enough to rattle the glass panes in the hallway.

I sink to the cold hardwood floor of the entryway, pulling my knees to my chest as the rain continues to beat against the windows of Madrid.

I'm shaking. I'm terrified of Javi, of the department, but mostly of myself.

Because now I know, with absolute certainty, that the crack in my wall is already too wide to ever close again.