The words struck sharper than he probably intended, his tone casual, teasing, but edged with that arrogance that always cut. My stomach tightened, my hands clutching the book tighter against me.
I lifted my head slowly, meeting his eyes at last, my voice cool but trembling with restrained anger. “Don’t belittle what I love.” For a heartbeat, the air between us shifted, charged and dangerous again, though not with the same hunger as before.
His fingers traced lazy circles across my scalp, tugging gently at strands of hair as his gaze lingered on me, sharper than the words that slipped from his mouth. “So you love dark romance books?” he asked, voice laced with a curiosity that felt closer to provocation.
“Tell me, is it the plot that keeps you up at night… or the things those male characters do to the women?”
Heat crawled up my neck, flooding my cheeks before I could will it back. My lips parted, words caught on the edge of a breath I couldn’t control. And the book in my hands suddenlyfelt heavier, as though it betrayed me by revealing everything I wanted to hide. Hayden’s laugh rumbled deep in his chest, vibrating beneath me, unrestrained and amused. He tilted his head, his eyes drinking me in with that infuriating, devastating calm.
“You are so fucking adorable when you blush.”
His hand slipped lower, fingers brushing the curve of my jaw before sliding back into my hair, tugging just enough to make me gasp. “But if you want…” His lips ghosted over the shell of my ear, his voice a whisper that seared straight through me. “…we can try the things you’re reading in those books. In real life.”
My pulse leapt, ragged, and I pressed the book tighter to my chest, trying to use it as a shield, though it felt useless against the weight of him, the raw presence of his body beneath mine. He shifted slightly, just enough for my gaze to falter, drawn downward against my will. His chest was bare, golden under the faint lamplight, muscles taut and relaxed all at once. The ridges of his abdomen rose and fell with each subtle rhythm of his breathing, distracting in their perfection, and lower still, fine dark hairs trailed from the hollow of his navel, disappearing beneath the low waistband of his pants.
My throat went dry, my eyes betraying me even as I tried to drag them back to the page. Concentration was impossible, composure unraveling, because every line I read blurred into nothing when he was here, shirtless and unrepentant, looking at me as though he already knew every secret I was trying to keep.
His teasing words lingered in the air, thick and dangerous, and I could feel my composure unravel thread by thread. The book slipped from my hands, falling forgotten onto the floor, and my fingers tightened against the hard lines of his chest as though I could anchor myself to him. He smirked up at me, eyes glinting, infuriatingly sure of himself.
“Go on, Little Flare,” he murmured, his thumb brushing slow circles against my hip. “Tell me which of those filthy fantasies you want me to make real.”
Something broke loose inside me then, a force that had nothing to do with anger or shame, but with the wild, ungoverned need that had been waiting beneath my skin, aching to be seen, aching to be set free. My pulse thundered in my throat as I leaned down, closing the distance, crushing my mouth against his with a force that startled even me.
The kiss was messy, desperate, unpracticed in its urgency, but it was mine. My lips moved against his, hungry, claiming him off guard. My hands framed his jaw, fingers threading into his hair, holding him to me as if I’d drown if I let go. Between ragged breaths, between the heat of his lips and the scrape of his teeth, the words tore out of me before I could stop them.
“I love you,” I whispered against his mouth, the confession breaking in shards of glass, raw and irretrievable.
He stilled beneath me.
The world seemed to tilt, silence filling the space between us until it felt alive. His body went rigid, his hands still at my waist, and when his eyes met mine, something shifted deep within them. Shock came first, then fear and disbelief, and beneath it all, a faint tremor of longing he couldn’t hide. For a single moment, the man who always carried control, who spoke and moved with certainty, stood before me stripped of it. He was no longer the professor, no longer the force I had spent weeks trying to resist, only Hayden, caught off guard by three words that had undone us both.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Edwina
Dayshadpassedsincethat afternoon in the classroom, yet the memory refused to fade. It clung to me, alive in its own right, a second skin I couldn’t tear away no matter how hard I tried. The storm outside had long broken, leaving behind skies pale with reluctant warmth, streets glistening with puddles that caught fragments of a shy sun. Spring was beginning to breathe through the city. The air no longer bit with winter’s sharpness; it carried something gentler, the ghost of blossoms not yet in bloom. It should have been a comfort, that slow unfurling of light. Students laughed louder now, lingered longer on the steps between classes, coats unbuttoned, faces lifted to the fragile warmth. The world was softening.
But inside me, everything stayed cold.
I had told him. Or maybe the words had told themselves, torn free by something I couldn’t control, something wild and desperate. I love you. Three words that had fallen out of me like a wound opening, impossible to close, impossible to forget. I could still feel the shape of them in my throat, still see the way they had hollowed his expression, freezing him in place. It was as if I had reached inside him and touched something he didn’t want touched, something fragile and forbidden. And now, he was distant.
He stood at the front of the lecture hall as he always had, every movement controlled, every glance a quiet reminder of how far away he really was. His voice carried across the room, calm and precise, his gestures the same as ever. But I saw it in the small things, the way his eyes avoided mine, how they skimmed past me as though I were a stranger, as though my name had never passed his lips in a whisper, as though his hands had never claimed me in the dark.
It was unbearable, that silence dressed as civility. Every lecture stretched on as a punishment, every minute another reminder of what I had broken.
Had I ruined us?
The question spun through me, circling without mercy. Was it the words that frightened him, or was it me, the girl who felt too much, who reached too far, who mistook desire for devotion and warmth for something that could last?Maybe I had. Maybe I never stood a chance against the kind of man he was. Hayden was older, shaped by years that had already tested him. Ten years separated us, but it wasn’t just time, it was experience, understanding, the quiet confidence of someone who had already learned what love could destroy. He moved through the world with a composure I mistook for certainty, and I had stepped into it believing I could belong there.
Maybe to him, I was only a moment. A brief escape from the loneliness he wore so well. The nights that left me trembling, the confessions whispered into the dark, they might have been nothing more than fragments he never meant to keep. It hurt to admit it, but truth often did. Perhaps he had never seen me as something lasting, only as something fleeting, a soft distraction from the shadows he refused to face. And if that was what I had been to him, then I was the one who confused being wanted with being loved.
By the third night of silence, I couldn’t pretend anymore. I sat curled on my bed, knees drawn to my chest, the glow of my phone staining the room in pale blue light. My fingers hovered over the keyboard, the blank message box staring back at me as if it were an open wound. I typed hi, then deleted it. Typed can we talk, erased that too. My chest ached with the weight of what I wasn’t saying.
“What if he never answers?” I whispered into the quiet, my voice barely more than breath. “And what if he does… and I can’t stand what he says?”
The fear gnawed at me, sharp and restless. But beneath it was something even crueler: the ache of not knowing. That ache won. It always did. My fingers moved before I could stop them, my breath trembling as the first words appeared on the screen.
Edwina:
