His honesty hits me like a physical force. The world narrows to the space between us—his breath against my mouth, his hands around mine, the trembling sincerity in his voice.
A bright, overwhelming rush floods through me… and then my brain catches up.
Wait.
The word echoes through my mind with devastating clarity, cutting through the haze of want like a blade.
I freeze, pulling back just slightly. Not far, but far enough that I can think. Enough that the intoxicating nearness of him doesn’t completely overwhelm my ability to reason. My body screams in protest. Every cell wants to close that distance again, to press my mouth to his, to find out what he tastes like, to feel those strong hands slide into my hair.
But I can’t.
He’s my research subject.
The thought lands like ice water. I’m documenting his life, his experiences, his trauma. Power comes with that. Control over how his story gets told. I control the narrative. I have institutional backing, academic credentials, and professional authority that he doesn’t have in this world.
And he’s sitting here, vulnerable, telling me he dreams about me.
If I kiss him right now—if we cross this line while I’m still interviewing him, still extracting information from him, still in a position of power over him—I become everything I’ve spent my career arguing against. I become the researcher who exploits her subject. The academic who uses intimacy to get better access.
Even if that’s not my intention, that’s what it would look like. That’s what it couldbe,even subconsciously.
My brain fires through the implications in rapid succession:
Power differential. Check.
Vulnerable population. Check.
Potential for coercion, even unintentional. Check.
Compromised consent because of institutional authority. Check.
All my ethics training is screaming at me.
But underneath the panic, there’s something else. A solution. Clear and simple and obvious.
This is fixable. I could restructure. I could change how we work together.
And then…
I could kiss him with a clear conscience. Let my hands slide up his chest the way they’re aching to do right now. Lean into him without guilt. Taste his mouth. Find out whether the roughstubble along his jaw feels as good against my palm as I’ve been imagining.
Let him pull me close and discover what it feels like to be held by someone who makes my entire nervous system light up like a circuit board.
Then.
Not now.
The entire thought process takes maybe five seconds. Five seconds where I go from desperate desire to ethical panic to clarity while my traitorous body keeps cataloguing every detail of him—the tiny gold flecks in his green eyes, the way his pulse beats at his throat, the slight parting of his lips as he watches me.
If I don’t fix this now, I won’t just be a bad academic; I’ll be another person in a long line of people using him for what he can produce.
I pull back, and I see confusion flicker across his face, followed by hurt he tries to hide.
“Sophia?” His voice is rough, uncertain. The vulnerability in it nearly undoes me.
“I want to,” I say quickly, urgently, before he can think for one second that I’m rejecting him. “God, Flavius, I want to kiss you so much I can barely think straight. But I can’t. Not yet. Not like this.”
My hands are still in his, and it’s taking every ounce of willpower I possess not to just say screw the ethics and close the distance between us. His thumb is still resting against my wrist, right over my racing pulse, and I know he can feel exactly how affected I am.
