I Slept with My Sister's Best Friend, and She Turned Out to Be My College Professor

Xu Nuoyusheng was forty-five, divorced for ten years, and had raised his daughter on his own until she was grown. On the night of her twentieth birthday, the champagne tower toppled, and he drank until he passed out. The one who helped him upstairs was his daughter’s best friend, thirty-seven-year-old Xu Nuo, a professor of Western literature at a university. By morning, she had vanished, leaving only a pearl earring on the nightstand, a memory that would burn through the rest of his life. Three weeks later, he enrolled at an adult university. At the lectern stood Xu Nuo in a navy suit, her gaze sweeping over him without a flicker of emotion. When she reached his name on the roll, “Xu Nuoyusheng,” she paused for 0.7 seconds.

He said, “Professor Xu, ”

She replied, “Mr. Xu, outside class, call me Teacher.”

In class, she was the embodiment of authority, teaching Lolita with her gaze fixed on him. Out of class, she was his secret accomplice. Her apartment door was unlocked, and coffee was brewing. “That night, you called me by my name. Not Professor Xu, but Xu Nuo.”

His daughter’s suspicions, anonymous posts on the campus forum, pressure from the vice president, every passing second brought them closer to having their secret exposed, and every second was torture. At the airport security checkpoint, he shouted, “Xu Nuo!” She turned back, tears falling. The plane took off, but she never boarded.

Eight years later, at forty-three, she wore a white wedding dress, and at last he made her his bride. Their daughter wept below the stage. “I didn’t lose my dad. I got a mom, too.” She was his daughter’s best friend and his professor; he was her student and the shadow of patriarchy she could never escape. Forbidden love was a crack in the power structure, and light came in through it. From forty-five to eighty, from a pearl earring to a ring engraved with the university crest, from “Mr. Xu” to “husband,” they spent a lifetime turning forbidden love into legend.

“Xu Nuo.”

“Xu Nuoyusheng.”

“In this life,