He Knelt and Asked Me to Give My Heart to His Student Chapter 01 (Continue)
At a gathering with friends, my husband, Professor Adrian Carlisle, suddenly dropped to his knees in front of me and said with visible difficulty, “Chloe’s a match for you. The surgery can’t wait.”
For a moment, I was speechless, and yet I wasn’t surprised at all.
“But a person only has one heart.”
“I’ll get the best doctors in New York City to implant an artificial one for you.”
“I’m only three months away from my due date.”
“We can have another baby later. This one… we need to let go.”
While I was still frozen in place, a bright, ringing laugh cut through the room.
“Professor Carlisle, happy April Fools’ Day!”
“There wasn’t a match. I was just messing with you. I can’t believe you actually went to beg Natalie!”
The room instantly came alive again as our friends started joking around.
“That was way too cruel a prank. Either way, Adrian would’ve been choosing between two people he cares about.”
“If Chloe told me she was a match for me, Adrian probably would’ve had me strapped to the operating table already.”
Only I stayed quiet on the couch as I booked an appointment to terminate my pregnancy the next day.
***
Adrian had never once gotten angry at Chloe Frost.
When it came to that frail, sickly student of his, he always treated her like she was made of glass.
But this time, after getting to his feet, his expression darkened in a way I almost never saw.
The others seemed to realize it a beat late and fell silent.
After the room sat in tense stillness for a moment, someone quietly reminded Chloe, “You dragged Natalie into the joke. You just crossed the one line Professor Carlisle never lets anyone cross.”
“He was practically campus-famous at Columbia for doting on his wife. Back when he’d only just joined the faculty, a colleague made one casual joke about Natalie and Adrian beat him badly enough to land him in the hospital.”
Chloe froze when she heard that. A second later, tears were already clinging to her lashes. Carefully, she tugged at Adrian’s sleeve.
“I’m sorry, Professor Carlisle. It’s April Fools’ Day. I was only trying to make a joke.”
When he said nothing, she turned to me instead and sniffled. “Natalie, I didn’t mean it. If you’re mad, you can yell at me. I’ll take it.”
Our friends quickly tried to smooth things over.
“She’s the carefree, unfiltered type. She probably didn’t think it through before joking like that. You two shouldn’t take it to heart.”
“Come on, Adrian. She’s a student you’ve personally mentored for three years, and you even mentioned her in your acknowledgments not long ago. You can’t really start distancing yourself from her over an April Fools’ prank.”
At last, Adrian’s expression eased a little. He lifted a hand and wiped the tears from the corner of her eye.
“Don’t ever joke like that again.”
Chloe nodded over and over.
Then he looked at me, his tone tinged with apology. “I’m sorry, Natalie. I came to ask for your help before I even confirmed anything.”
He had reduced something as enormous as a heart transplant to something as simple as helping out.
It wasn’t the first time. Whenever Chloe was involved, Professor Carlisle, the man who was usually so rational and composed, turned strangely emotional and maddeningly vague.
On Christmas night, just because she told him she was having bad period cramps, he drove nearly eight hundred miles overnight to Charleston.
When people asked him about it, he only said with helpless concern, “She’s not in good health. I was worried something might happen to her.”
But when I was five months pregnant and spent the whole night waiting for him at home, he wasn’t worried.
When the baby moved so often it hurt so badly I couldn’t speak, he wasn’t worried.
When I was dealing with morning sickness, contractions, swelling, and hair loss, he wasn’t worried.
With me, he was always rational to the point of cruelty, like a machine. “Natalie, carrying a child is hard. Once the baby’s born, it’ll be fine.”
I grew irritable and short-tempered, and he dismissed it as hormones. He would offer a few perfunctory words of comfort, then head straight into his study.
Every time, I could only force myself to swallow the urge to interrupt his work.
And yet the research paper he had poured five years of his life into mentioned Chloe in the very first line of the acknowledgments.
She was an undergraduate who, truthfully, had almost no real academic ability.