Chapter 2

Evelyn's POV

A soft sound escaped my lips before I could stop it. I bit down hard and felt my knees go liquid beneath me.

The ache spread from the old injury site — that familiar sting — but the trembling wasn't about the cartilage or the scar tissue. It was about thirty-four years of wanting nothing, and then suddenly being wanted like this, pressed against like this, by someone who made no secret of it.

"Liam."

"I'm here." His voice had gone rough.

"Tell me to stop, Professor, and I step back."

He was at my ear, his breath warm against my skin, and still he didn't move any further. I said nothing. The intercom crackled overhead with the automated stop announcement — Faculty Housing.

Liam took a half-step back. The hard press of him left my body, and the inside of my thighs went cold.

"We're here, Professor." He said it the way you'd comment on the weather.

I kept my head down and walked off the shuttle fast — faster than walking, if I'm being honest — and pushed straight into the first-floor restroom of the faculty residence. When I pulled my underwear down, the fabric was soaked through, and clinging to the cotton was a smear of something slick and translucent that had transferred from him. I cleaned my thighs with paper towels and walked out without putting them back on.

The rest of the afternoon passed in a haze. Nina texted asking how the tutoring session had gone. I didn't answer.

Around dusk, I found a cardboard box sitting outside my apartment door with only my name written on it. I opened it.

Inside was a silicone vibrator — anatomically exact, flesh-toned, its surface textured with fine, realistic detail. Longer than I'd imagined by nearly two inches. Thicker, too. I stood there staring at it until my mouth went dry.

My phone rang. Liam's name on the screen.

"Did you get the gift, Professor?" The lazy, magnetic quality in his voice was very deliberate.

"You sent this?"

"When you were in the restroom, your screen was on. I saw your shopping cart. You've been watching that brand for a while — why have you never ordered it?"

Heat flooded my face. "You went through my phone?"

"The screen was already lit. I just looked. If that offended you, I'm genuinely sorry. But it's been sitting in your cart for months. You should trust what you want."

He had noticed even that.

"Liam, you can't just —"

"Professor." He cut me off. "On the shuttle today, I felt everything. You were already so wet. You could have taken one step forward. You didn't." A pause. "Do you know what that means?"

"What does it mean?"

"It means you want this. You're just not letting yourself have it."

My hand was trembling around the phone, but I didn't hang up.

"If it makes you uncomfortable, throw it away. But I don't think you will. When you're alone, haven't you ever wanted someone to touch you?"

He hadn't even finished the sentence. I was already sitting on the couch with the hem of my skirt pushed up, thighs parted, working the vibrator slowly into my body, my breath coming in short, shallow pulls. The silicone was cool at first and then the heat of me warmed it, and the texture was nothing like what I'd prepared myself for — more real, more insistent — and I was clenching around it, my fingers digging into the cushion, biting my lip to stay quiet.

A moan slipped out anyway.

I was close — right at the edge of it — when footsteps sounded in the hallway outside my door. I yanked the vibrator free, shoved it out of sight, changed my clothes with shaking hands, and answered the door.

Liam stood in the corridor in his practice jersey, the fabric hanging loose from his shoulders, his collarbone still wet from training. Sweat traced the lines of muscle down his chest. He had come straight from the rink without going home.

"I left something in your office this morning, Professor. I think you probably packed it up with your things."

He was already moving into the apartment as he said it, but his eyes tracked my face — the flush I hadn't finished hiding, the shallow, not-quite-steady rhythm of my breathing. He saw it. He let me see him see it.

"What did you leave? I'll get it for you."

"The white stockings."

He said it from the center of my living room, close enough that his breath grazed my neck. "Would you put them on for me, Professor? Right now?"

I stepped back. My shoulders hit the wall.

"Liam, don't —"

He looked down at me. He was tall enough to block most of the light from the ceiling fixture, and his hands stayed at his sides the entire time — he never touched me.

"Do you know why I specifically enrolled in your section?"

I shook my head.

He smiled, and there was something feral in it, and something else beneath that — something more complicated and harder to name.

"Because the first time I saw you, I could tell you were lonely." He raised one arm and planted his hand flat against the wall beside my head, caging me between his chest and the plaster, still not touching me. "I recognized it. Because I'm the same way."

His voice dropped. "I pulled your file last week. You were a figure skater."

My chest seized.

"You hurt your knee and you stopped skating. But you live in the building closest to the hockey rink, and you watch our practices." He held my gaze. Those blue eyes carried something I'd never seen before — cooler than desire, and more stubborn than either of us.

He pushed off the wall and walked to the door. He stopped with his hand on the frame.

"Professor," he said. "If you want, don't lock your door tonight."

Then he was gone.

I stood against the wall for a long time, shaking.

Nina called while I was still standing there.

"Liam asked me what unit you're in — said he had something to drop off. What did he bring you? He always goes sideways at things he actually cares about. How far along are you two, exactly?"

"Nina." My voice came out lower than I intended. "He said some very strange things to me."

A beat of silence. "He hasn't told you?"

"Told me what?"

"He's a serious writer. Was. Sophomore year he published a short essay about power and bullying on campus. Adam called him out by name — said he was targeting school leadership, said if Liam ever wrote anything like it again, he'd make sure that draft recommendation letter never got signed."

"Did he keep writing after that?"

"No. Nothing personal. Only assignments."

The call ended. I sat down on the floor with my back against the couch and my knees pulled to my chest.

He hadn't lied. He really was the same — a talent that had been entirely his own, and then a door that had closed on it. His was writing. Mine was skating. And by some irony I couldn't quite look at directly, I was now a literature professor, and he was a hockey player.

I sat in the dark for a long time. Then I got up, went to the bedroom, and did not lock the front door. I found the white stockings and put them on.

I told myself I didn't know what I was waiting for. That was a lie, and I knew it.

I lay in bed and let the events of the day replay themselves in slow, relentless detail. I knew this was wrong — all of it. But for the first time in thirty-four years, someone had wanted me this plainly, and with this much restraint. Every choice he had given me on the shuttle. Both hands on the wall and still not touching me.

The thought that surfaced was not a good one. I let it surface anyway.

Then the front door opened.

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