Chapter Eight I Feel It In My Bones
chapter eight
I Feel It In My Bones
Kenny drove to work with a smile.
Not smug. But low and thudding. Satisfaction in the truest sense. Sitting deep in his chest and radiating outward.
Things were finally, finally falling into place.
He probably should’ve had that conversation with Aaron weeks ago.
Months ago, if he was honest. And maybe not in the car park of a residential home for the elderly, dropping him off to stew in the aftermath.
But Aaron wasn’t a child. He didn’t need soft landings.
He was sharp. Clever enough to know exactly what he’d agreed to.
Hell, he’d probably known for months what was building between them.
That quiet, rising pressure beneath their touches.
The charge in every silence. The heat curling and waiting.
He wasn’t innocent. Not naive. Aaron had lived.
Survived. Carried wounds that hadn’t just scarred but reshaped him, taught him how to bare his teeth when cornered.
But that didn’t erase the truth Kenny couldn’t ignore: the power imbalance was still there.
Subtle, shifting, but alive. Not in titles or age, but in experience—decades of it that Kenny had, and Aaron didn’t.
That disparity didn’t vanish because they were no longer student and professor.
Aaron was still young, and raw in ways he hadn’t yet learned to name.
Trauma didn’t dissolve in the warmth of love or the ease of desire.
It lingered, sharp-edged and reactive. It lived in his flinches, in the sudden heat of his anger, in the way he braced for loss even in the gentlest of moments.
His past was etched into his instincts. In how he pulled away, how he provoked, how he held on too tightly when he feared he’d be left behind.
Kenny understood that. He had to. Because loving Aaron meant more than patience.
It meant precision. A quiet discipline. He had to read beneath the surface, to listen with more than ears.
To know when to offer steadiness and when to let Aaron reach.
Lead without ever taking. To never blur the lines of consent, even when Aaron trembled with the ache of wanting to be led.
So Aaron had to choose this. Freely. Consciously. Not because he needed Kenny to hold him together, but because he trusted him enough to let go.
Their first year on the island had been about healing. Lazy mornings, burnt dinners, laughter between bruises. Sex that soothed. Silences that didn’t sting. They’d built something fragile and real from the wreckage. They’d made softness their survival.
But this second year had become something else entirely.
It was no longer about surviving. It was about becoming.
Reclaiming. Growing into the weight of what they were building.
Bit by bit, Kenny had started to test the edges.
Not to provoke, but to honour. Delaying release.
Withholding touch. Not as punishment, never as a game, but to go deeper.
To give Aaron room to discover how much he could hold.
How much he could choose to give. And when he did, when Aaron let go so completely, cracked open on nothing more than a whispered command, a breath against his neck, Kenny knew.
This wasn’t about sex. It wasn’t about control.
It was about trust. Sacred, deliberate, earned.
And this morning, Aaron had shown him. Not only that his body could bear it, but that his heart was willing. He wasn’t surrendering out of fear, or habit, or hunger. He was surrendering because he wanted to.
And that kind of trust?
Kenny would guard it with everything he had.
He pulled into the staff car park of Northbay College, cut the engine, and let himself sit in the hum a little longer.
The sky was a washed-out winter grey, sucking all the warmth out of the air, but he felt flushed anyway.
Hopeful. Settled. And when he climbed out, locked the car, and crossed the square of cracked tarmac towards the main building, his body bounced.
The college was a patchwork of red brick and desperate expansion. Portacabins doubling as classrooms, scaffold poles still up from roof repairs no one had touched in a year. Flyers for last week’s open day clinging to the windows, corners curled from the wind.
A far cry from the expanse of Ryston.
Inside, students shuffled through the corridors in packs, earphones in, laughter bouncing off the scuffed linoleum and Kenny navigated past a slow-moving group of Year 12s discussing who’d snogged who at the bus stop, then slipped into his classroom which was in a portacabin outside the main building, and closed the door with a sigh.
His first class was A-Level Psychology, Unit 3: Forensic Psychology & Offender Profiling.
He could teach it with his eyes closed. Sometimes half did.
But this morning he welcomed the structure.
The familiarity. Something to keep his mind off the fact that he’d left Aaron in the care of a place Kenny didn’t yet fully trust.
So he sent him a quick text before the class came in. Something direct. No jokes. To let Aaron know he was loved. No matter what.
Thank you. For trusting me. You’re beautiful. See you at 4 x
He then set out the handouts, flicked on the projector, and steadied himself.
Later today, he’d have a meeting with DS Parry. He’d see what she’d gathered, make a guess. Maybe that’s all he’d do. And after that… back to the house. To comfy jumpers and spiced candles and a boy who melted for him with a single whispered order.
He smiled again.
This was going to be a good Christmas.
He clicked the remote, and the projector whirred to life, casting the title slide onto the whiteboard: Forensic Psychology: Criminal Profiling & Offender Typologies as his class piled in. He heard a few groans. A few chairs scraped back.
“All right,” Kenny said, voice calm but carrying. “Today we’re talking about behavioural evidence, and how forensic psychology helps law enforcement narrow down unknown offenders using patterns, motivations, and environmental context.”
Blank stares. A few enthusiastic nods. Someone yawned behind a sleeve.
Kenny didn’t let it faze him. These weren’t his Ryston undergrads, sharpened on ambition and espresso. This was Northbay. Local. Messy. Brilliant in patches. Half-asleep in others. And no less deserving of the work.
He stepped around the desk, picking up the marker. “Let’s start with a basic distinction. Organised versus disorganised offenders. Who can tell me the difference?”
A girl near the front raised her hand, twisting a pen between her fingers.
“Organised is, like… someone who plans it out. Like they pick the victim on purpose and clean up after?”
“Good,” Kenny said. “Premeditation, control, deliberate staging. That’s organised. Disorganised, then?”
A boy in the back with his hood up and one AirPod in, grunted. “Loses it. Messy. Snaps.”
“Exactly. Impulsive. Leaves evidence behind. Often under the influence or emotionally driven.” He turned back to the board, drawing two quick columns.
“Now, most real offenders don’t fall cleanly into one or the other.
People are inconsistent. But profiling helps us build a psychological map.
A set of traits and patterns that narrow a search. ”
A hand shot up from the middle row. A girl with too much eyeliner and not nearly enough hesitation.
“Sir, did you hear about the boy they found in Ventnor?”
The atmosphere in the room shifted like a breeze through a cracked window. Whispers stalled. Pens froze mid-air. And every gaze turned forward.
Kenny hesitated long enough to make it deliberate. “Yes, I’ve heard. But that’s a live investigation. An active case. Let us stick to historical and theoretical.”
“My mum said they found him dressed up. Like… someone put stuff on him. Wasn’t that what you were on about? Deliberate staging?”
Kenny folded his arms, controlling the flicker of discomfort in his throat. “Let’s bring it back to theory. If a crime scene is deliberately arranged, beyond what’s necessary to commit the act, we’d consider that signature behaviour.”
A few students started scribbling. Others leaned forward, drawn in now.
“Signature is not the same as modus operandi,” he continued, walking to the whiteboard. “MO refers to the practical methods. How the offender carries out the crime and escapes detection. Signature is something else. Something psychological. It’s what they don’t need to do, but feel compelled to.”
He wrote the two terms cleanly across the board, underlining them with sharp, practiced strokes.
Another student called out, “So, like, dressing up their victim in a Santa suit? What’s that about?”
“Maybe he was on the naughty list,” someone muttered, chasing a cheap laugh.
Kenny turned. Aaron might get away with that sort of black humour with him, not only because he was in love with him but because with Aaron, it was a defence, not a dismissal. From anyone else, though, especially here, it hit wrong.
“I’ll gloss over the exceptionally poor taste, considering a young man not much older than you lost his life only days ago in this town, to address that as a theory and not the cheap, ill-timed joke you intended.”
He should have shut it down and moved on. Steered them away before it stuck. But the ripple of attention across the room was the same kind he used to get in lecture halls, when a case was fresh and the blood hadn’t dried. Alive cases always had an edge, and he hadn’t felt that pull since Ryston.
“That ‘naughty list’ logic?” Kenny snapped the lid on his pen.
“It’s not as ridiculous as it sounds. Some offenders build entire internal codes.
See themselves as enforcers of morality.
Judges. Saviours. We’ve seen it with religiously motivated killers, with ritual offenders, with those acting out delusions of moral authority.
They’re not just killing. They’re sentencing. ”
He paused, letting the words settle.