Chapter Text
Cassie Crane groans miserably into her pillow as her alarm goes off, warning that her zoom class starts in five minutes. She hates getting up at 8:00 am every Monday and Wednesday for History, even though Mr. Gadling's history class is her favorite. It's really just the time of day more than anything.
Anyways, Mr. Robert Gadling was an odd dude. He talked about history with such passion it was as if he'd lived there, which made his class fun, he would rant about how bad slavery was for hours, and his hatred for shakespeare was biblical. It was as if Shakespeare had personally slighted him.
He'd once called shakespeare a, and this was a direct quote, "conniving boyfriend stealing worm".
(He had said quite a few things over the three months since class started, and there was a file on google docs. titled reasons Mr. Gadling is immortal. Cassie had been the one to add the boyfriend stealing comment, but the file was meant to be a joke. Somehow it was 10,000 words long, and Cassie didn't know what to think. It wasn't quite a joke anymore)
Anyways, potential immortality aside, Professor Gadling was pretty cool. He was friendly, didn't seem to possess a mean bone in his body, perpetually cheerful, and he was kind of handsome... For an older man.
Alright, so Cassie had a stupid crush the first two months of class, but then the pandemic pushed them into zoom classes...
Seeing her teacher stumble blindly into a small kitchen at 8:13 am for coffee, late to class, in the same clothing he'd taught in for three days in a row (literally just a black t-shirt and pj pants with rubber ducks), and watching him stare despondently at the floor for seven minutes after accidentally breaking a cat shaped pink coffee mug had kind of killed it. His new mug was the same, but black now.
But that was neither here nor there.
Anyways, 8:00 am was a terrible time for class, and Professor Gadling was always 5-15 minutes so it was genuinely surprised when she entered the class zoom call at 8:03 am, and Mr. Gadling was already on.
Mind you he wasn't even looking at the screen, and he was speaking to someone off screen. Cassie only caught the tail end before he'd wandered off the screen, which was him telling whoever it was that he had time because his computer took forever to load. He sounded positively chipper for once. He usually looked like a zombie.
The group chat was filled with silent laughter.
Only they wouldn't be laughing for long because two seconds later, Mr Gadling was walking hand and hand with probably the most beautiful goth guy she had ever seen. Seriously, he was so gorgeous it was a hate crime. She was personally victimized.
He was wearing a all black; a long coat, shirt and jeans, doc martens; and his hair was messy in that artful kind of way, and his skin was like marble. He could be a model.
And as if the universe was purposely made to torture her in specific, Professor Gadling called him dream, which was a cute fucking petname, and smiled the softest most smile she had ever seen.
He smiled a lot, at everything, but never so radiantly adoring, like the guy hung the universe. And the goth just kisses her professor, all soft and sweet, and walks off the screen. Professor Gadling stands for a moment looking dazed, then stalks off screen to get his coffee, still unaware of the chatroom going absolutely crazy.
Like wow! Good job Professor Gadling!
But also, how in the fuck did a guy who occasionally wore pajamas to work, and drank coffee with too much creamer out of a black cat shaped mug, score a dish like the goth model he was apparently dating.
Unfair.
She logged off and went back to bed. It was too early for this.