Count to three: My affair with my dynamics professor (teacher x student)

Chapter 80 - Three

Frida leaned back into her, smiling despite herself. The memory still clung to her, but Inés's presence in the present was heavier, steadier, pulling her into the now.
She let the silence hang a moment, savoring the warmth pressed against her back, before she spoke. Her voice was quiet, almost reverent.

"I was remembering how you asked me," she admitted. "By the lake. With the horses behind us." A small laugh slipped out of her, fragile as glass. "How you didn't make it feel like a question at all."

Inés hummed low in her throat, as though pleased with the thought. "That's because it wasn't," she murmured. Her lips brushed the edge of Frida's ear as she spoke. "You were already mine. I only asked to hear you say it."

Frida's breath caught, the words striking her the same way they had the first time — inevitable, irrevocable. She turned her head slightly, enough that her cheek met Inés's lips. Their mouths found each other in a sideways kiss, unhurried and lingering, the angle imperfect but intimate in its imperfection. Frida smaller and curled into Inés's taller frame, as if they had been carved for this shape alone.

When their mouths parted, Inés's hand slid lower, her palm resting over the gentle plane of Frida's stomach. The gesture was natural, protective, as though she had been holding her there forever. She stroked lightly, fingertips tracing idle circles, grounding Frida even as her own teasing smile returned.

"See?" Inés whispered, her voice half-serious, half-mischief. "Even now, I can still bring you out of your head. Drag you back from your daydreams." Her thumb brushed in a slow arc across Frida's midsection, not drawing attention to it, not naming it, but carrying the weight of something both of them felt.

Frida tilted her head back slightly against Inés's collarbone, her smile faint, her voice nearly a sigh. "And sometimes... you're the dream."

That earned her another kiss, softer this time, pressed to her temple. Inés's arms tightened around her, as if claiming her twice over — in memory, and in the present.

The moment between them lingered, warm and protective, until it softened like a lull. Frida closed her eyes, letting the weight of Inés's hand on her stomach anchor her... and without meaning to, her mind slid again, not so far back this time. Back to the night when everything shifted a little, when something unnamed began to take shape between them.

It had been only a month after the lakeside proposal, when Inés had spent the day with Heidi. Babysitting, though Frida knew Heidi had adored every second of it — being paraded around on Versailles's back, fed homemade chocolate biscuits in the kitchen, spoiled gently by this tall, elegant woman who seemed to know instinctively how to both indulge and steady a child.

That night, Heidi had been tucked safely into the guest room, finally asleep after insisting on one more story and a glass of water she didn't need. The apartment was quiet in that particular way it only ever was when a child was sleeping down the hall — peaceful but with a thread of responsibility tying them both to that small, dreaming presence.

Frida remembered lying on her stomach, scrolling absently on her phone, the bluish glow lighting her face. Inés beside her, propped against the headboard, a book in her hands. They were comfortable, lazy, both winding down. And then, Inés's voice — casual, almost offhand — broke the silence.

"She reminds me how much I miss this age," she said, not looking up from her page. "The way children still look at the world like everything is possible. And how easy it is to love them back."

Frida had paused mid-scroll, the words pricking her attention. She turned her head slowly, studying the lines of Inés's face lit in half-shadows. There had been something in her tone — not wistful exactly, but edged with possibility. With hunger.