Novel Full Chapter 373: The Bumpy Road
Chapter 373: The Bumpy Road
Howard’s fingers dug into the cold metal of the balcony railing. Below, the scene played out with a casual intimacy that felt like a personal insult.
He watched Tisha… the woman who had just treated him like a minor inconvenience… laughing at that bastard like he was the funniest man alive.
He had told himself he didn’t care about their relationship. He had dismissed the boy as a temporary distraction, a minor hurdle.
But seeing the dynamic live, amidst the heavy, expectant silence of the faculty lot, was a different reality entirely.
The way they stood. The way they argued over the keys with a casual, practiced intimacy. It wasn’t the stiff deference of a student and a professor. It was the friction of two people who knew the heat of each other’s skin.
A sharp, jagged jealousy stung him, deeper and more primitive than he expected.
He wanted to reach down and beat the shit out of that bastard… to erase that calm, arrogant smile from the boy’s face and remind him that he was nothing more than a footnote in this building.
But then his gaze shifted to Heena, and the anger turned into a white-hot roar of betrayal.
’How could she?’ She was standing there, nodding at his enemy, breathing the same air as the boy who had just humilated him.
To Howard, it was the ultimate insult. It was one thing for a wife to be boring; it was another for her to be incompetent enough to fraternize with the opposition.
In that moment, Howard didn’t see a wife. He saw a traitor. He saw a woman who had wandered out of her cage and into the arms of the one person who had managed to make Howard Sterling feel small.
“Howard?” Siobhan’s voice drifted from the office, small and seeking, but it was like a fly buzzing in his ear.
He didn’t turn. He couldn’t. He watched as the silver car’s engine turned over, the headlights cutting through the dark like a blade.
Heena was in the driver’s seat. She was driving another man’s car, leaving Howard standing on a balcony like a gargoyle, clutching a railing that was the only thing keeping him from falling apart.
He felt the sudden, desperate urge to run down there… to rip the door open and drag her out by her hair… but the car was already moving. It swept past his Audi, the taillights mocking him with their red glow before disappearing into the night.
He turned from the railing, his movements jagged with repressed vitriol.
Siobhan stood in the stairwell doorway, her briefcase clutched to her chest in a pose of tentative readiness.
She had prepared herself with the practiced efficiency of a woman who knew her role. Hair smoothed, lipstick fresh, her collar adjusted to the precise depth she knew he preferred. She was a finished product, waiting for his approval.
Sterling walked past her without slowing.
“Let’s go,” he said. The words came out clipped, stripped of the velvet warmth he’d been pouring over her ten minutes ago. He was already three strides ahead before she registered the shift.
Siobhan felt a cold prickle of unease.
This wasn’t the romantic, slow evening he had promised moments ago; the air around him had turned toxic, charged with a redirected rage she didn’t understand.
But the habit of obedience was too strong.
She adjusted her bag and followed behind him, her smaller steps echoing a frantic, uneven beat against his heavy, rhythmic footfalls as they descended toward the parking area.
***
The silver car glided through the twilight, the engine a refined hum that Heena could feel vibrating through the soles of her shoes.
Despite the smooth ride, she gripped the wheel with a white-knuckled intensity.
The air inside the cabin was thick, charged with a heavy, magnetic tension that seemed to radiate from the back seat.
Her eyes flickered to the rearview mirror.
Tisha and Alex were sitting together, their bodies pressed close in the confined space. Squeezed against one another, the boundary between them seemed to have dissolved.
Heena had known Tisha for years… not as a friend, perhaps, but as a colleague whose icy, untouchable professionalism was legendary.
This wasn’t how Tisha Wells behaved with men. The Ice Queen didn’t lean into people. She didn’t let them occupy her personal orbit.
And yet.
There she was. Shoulder to shoulder with a student half her age, her body oriented toward his like a compass needle finding north.
No tension or careful maintenance of professional distance. Just two people sharing warmth in the back seat of a car as if they’d done it a hundred times before.
’What if it’s true?’
The thought surfaced before Heena could stop it.
’What if they’re actually…’
She bit her lower lip hard.
Because the thought didn’t arrive with disgust or moral outrage or professional concern. It arrived with heat.
A slow, creeping warmth that started at the base of her neck and spread downward with a patience that felt deliberate, as if her body had been waiting for exactly this permission to feel something it had been denied for months.
She’d read about this. Novels she kept on the bottom shelf of her home study.
Stories about women like her, professional, composed, older, and the young men who dismantled them with patience and proximity and the simple, devastating act of paying attention.
She’d consumed them the way academics consumed everything… at arm’s length, with intellectual superiority, telling herself it was curiosity rather than hunger.
The forbidden thrill of a professor crossing a line she’d drawn herself. The slow erosion of propriety by desire. The moment the woman stopped saying I shouldn’t and started saying why not.
She’d judged those fictional women. Every single one.
And now she was gripping a steering wheel with white knuckles, stealing glances at a rearview mirror. Feeling goosebumps race up her forearms because a twenty-something was sitting behind her with his arm draped behind her colleague and she couldn’t stop imagining.
“Heena, take the next left onto Garrison.”
Tisha’s voice cut through the fog like cold water.
Heena blinked. The road snapped back into focus… lane markings, traffic lights, the mundane reality of asphalt and painted arrows.
“Right. Yes. Garrison,” she managed, her voice coming out steadier than it had any right to.
She shook her head slightly, a small, private gesture meant to dislodge whatever had just taken root in her imagination.
Fantasy was fantasy. Pages in a book. Safely contained between covers she could close whenever the heat became too much.
This was real life. She was a forty-seven-year-old professor driving two colleagues home. Nothing more.
She turned onto Garrison Avenue.
The first pothole hit within thirty metres… a deep, jarring crack that bounced the entire car and sent Tisha lurching sideways into Alex with a surprised yelp.
The second came five metres later. Then a third.
Heena’s hands tightened on the wheel as the car rattled over what felt less like a road and more like a battlefield.
She glanced at the mirror again… Tisha was bracing herself against Alex’s chest, laughing, her earlier composure abandoned entirely as the car bucked beneath them.
“Tisha,” Heena said, her voice flat. “This road is terrible.”
***
In the back seat, the complaint went unacknowledged. Tisha wasn’t looking at the back of Heena’s head, and she certainly wasn’t looking at the deteriorating pavement.
Her breath had hitched, caught in the back of her throat as the car jolted once more, lurching her body firmly against Alex’s.
She felt his hand. It was heavy, warm, and deliberate, resting high on her thigh.
As the car vibrated with the uneven road, his fingers began to move, a slow, predatory crawl that hitched the fabric of her silk skirt upward.
The friction of the car’s movement seemed to fuel his rhythm, his touch sliding higher, inching toward the sensitive heat of her inner thigh.
Tisha felt a wave of sheer, intoxicating electricity crash over her.
The risk was a stimulant she hadn’t anticipated… the fact that Heena was mere inches away, her eyes constantly flitting to the mirror, oblivious yet hovering on the edge of discovery. It made the air in the car feel pressurized, combustible.
Tisha looked up, her gaze locking onto Alex’s.
In the shadowed cabin, his eyes were abyssal, reflecting a hunger that mirrored her own.
The Ice Queen was melting, her professional armor stripped away by the rhythmic jolting of the car and the bold, hidden intrusion of his hand.
She leaned in, her lips brushing the shell of his ear, her voice a humid, broken thread of sound that barely rose above the hum of the tires.
“Alex…” she whispered, her breath hitching as his fingers found the lace of her stockings.
“I’m so horny right now. I can’t… I can’t think.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, her head falling back against the headrest.
Another pothole sent a shockwave through the seats, forcing her hips to grind upward against his palm. The sensation was a physical blow, a jagged peak of pleasure that made her want to scream and hide all at once.