7. Conner
CONNER
“Take your seats. Phones away. Laptops out only if you are typing notes. If I see anyone texting under the desk, I will assume you are googling how to transfer to a different major.” I slide my briefcase on the desk, and listen to the ricochet of students running to their seats.
Every third semester, I teach two classes.
Forensic Biochemistry and this one: Crime Scene Reconstruction. Upper division electives. Packed with criminal justice majors, pre-med hopefuls, and the occasional misguided soul who thinks true crime podcasts are equivalent to academic rigor.
I wear a very clean, sharply tailored navy suit.
No patterns. No distractions. My shirt is always white, my tie is always dark, and my shoes are shined to a mirror gloss.
My thin-rimmed black square glasses are cleaned to a hospital grade, and I spend the first class going over the syllabus and thinning out the herd of students who think these classes will produce anything less than perfection.
Against my better judgement, and more of the recommendation of my psychiatrist I still mask the first day of class, as I do every day.
I smile when expected. Nod at the right moments. Laugh when the conversation dips and someone needs a cue to carry on. It's exhausting—keeping track of the expressions, the eye contact, the tone modulation. The pantomime of being normal .
I argue that I teach because it’s one of the only roles that allows me to not pretend.
I don't need to charm anyone. I don't need to make friends.
Students expect cold. They expect distance.
They expect answers delivered with authority, not warmth.
I give them exactly what they come for, but Dr.Lynn said the first day is introductory and that meant students expect to be welcomed.
As I walk across the front of the class I snort at the thought. I didn’t graduate from my undergrad at sixteen from being welcomed. I graduated summa cum laude by keeping my head in my books, and being correct --- every single time.
“This is Crime Scene Reconstruction. That means precision, deduction, and memory. If you cannot remember what you wore yesterday or where you parked your car, you do not belong in this class.” I bark.
In both of my classes the males are mostly underdeveloped pricks—swaggering in with oversized egos and no discipline, too used to being loud and unchallenged.
The females are more complex. Half of them blush when I call on them.
The other half wear short skirts and sit with their legs wide open, as if the power of suggestion might buy them a grade curve.
They normally develop inconvenient crushes.
It never amounts to anything. I grade cleanly.
I don’t touch. I don’t encourage. But I see it.
In the stares. The body language. The way their voices shift.
The infatuation always fades by midterms, when the curve kicks in and I start handing back D’s, and share that I don’t believe in extra credit.
And that’s fine. I don’t need admiration. I prefer to be ignored. I prefer silence. I prefer methodical practices, and those normally cannot include other people.
Except Landon.
He is the only chaos I can tolerate, though I do often wonder what it would feel like to hold his corpse.
Cold. Quiet. Still. Finally, he’d shut up. I smile as I turn back to the class.
“There are exactly sixty-three of you,” I begin, eyes sweeping the room without expression.
“By the end of this semester, fourteen of you will have dropped this class within the next two weeks. Three will become too overwhelmed to attend any longer. Twenty-one of you will get C’s and convince yourselves that C’s are perfectly fine.
Twelve will scrape a B minus. Eight will wait too long and get a W, which will require a fifteen-page paper on the logistics of failure. ”
I pause, as I swipe a stack of syllabuses out of my briefcase.
“Three of you will get a B plus. One of you will drop out of university and blame me for your failure in life. And only one of you—” I hold up the stack before dropping it on a student’s desks, “—will earn an A. Take one and pass it.”
A girl in the front row raises her hand, the type that already has hearts doodled in her planner. Jet black hair, a glittery barrette that reads Boss Bitch , and a skirt that looks like it was cut from a belt. She licks at a cherry-red lollipop, with a heated look in her eyes.
I sigh. “Yes?”
“How do you know only one of us will get an A?” she asks, breathy and sugary, like an off-brand Marilyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday to the president.
I chuckle to myself, in a way that elicits an entire row of girls to flush in different shades of pink. “Because only one of you is actually smart enough to be in this class.”
“If your success rate is only one out of sixty-three, doesn’t that prove you’re not as good of a professor as you claim to be?”
I don’t even look up from the syllabus. “Name.”
“Justin Davis.”
I glance at him. Letterman jacket, backward cap, arms crossed like he's auditioning for a frat house documentary. Muddy sneakers kicked up on the back of the chair in front of him. That puffed-up, performative smugness only testosterone and mediocrity can produce.
“Tell me, Mr. Davis,” I say, finally raising my eyes, “are you familiar with the Shepherd-Coleman case? The serial dismemberment murders in Manchester—cleanest crime scenes on record. Eight victims. Not a single viable DNA trace collected by the initial forensic team.”
He shifts in his seat. “No.”
I nod slowly. “Not surprised.”
I close the syllabus with a soft snap and lean back against the corner of my desk.
“Do you at least know what type of cleaner the killer used? The one that rendered every standard forensic method useless and forced the department to bring in a specialist?”
Davis straightens, and the embarrassment crawls up his “No.”
The door slams open—loud enough to slice through my sentence.
The class turns. I don’t.
Not at first.
Because I don’t reward disruptions.
But when I do glance up, she’s already halfway down the aisle.
Blonde hair streaked with red, soaked and clinging to her jawline. Half-shaved scalp exposed like a threat. A white t-shirt molded to her frame, red bra vivid beneath. Combat boots. Baggy jeans hanging low on her hips. A jacket limp over her arm.
“Here class, you have two examples of my non-A students.” I announce, as my heart ricochets irregularly in my chest. “An unintelligent jock, and a soaking wet late student on the first day of class.”
I watch the girl’s flushed strawberry cheeks as she ducks into a row three from the front. “Now, Miss…”
“Rivera.” She answers sharply, and my head shoots up with unnatural interest. So, this is the girl Landon asked me to watch. A flicker of static under my skin. Heat coils low in my spine. My hands still.
For a moment—just a second—I forget how to breathe. Then her eyes catch mine. And I know .
No one else in the room sees it—but she does. The real me. Not the person masking to be human, because I know the look she gives me. It feels like she knows the monster underneath, like she just stood in my abyss and screamed to be let out. The version no one should see before their last breath.
It’s a lightning strike—sudden, electric, dangerous.
My lungs tighten, chest burning like I’ve just come up from underwater.
Her gaze slices through me, clean and sharp.
My carefully crafted armor buckles without warning.
The fear rushes across her features, the soft part of her lips.
I want to consume her. I want to hunt her.
I force myself to look away. To move . To reset my tone.
“Miss Rivera, do you know the Shepard-Coleman case—” I don’t even finish the sentence before she cuts in, voice steady, clear, and maddeningly confident.
“The Manchester case,” she says. “You were brought in as a specialist.”
My brow lifts. Barely. But the smirk that tugs at the corner of my mouth betrays me. She’s a fan.
Most students Google me just enough to pad their opening emails with praise. They parrot articles, mention old cases like they’ve done more than skim headlines. But this was one of my earliest successes, not covered by the media and only known if you are a student of forensics.
I clear my throat and lean a hip against the desk.
“Correct,” I say. “Eight victims. No viable DNA. The local forensics unit botched the scene, mistook phosphate-free cleaning agents for common industrial bleach. They scrubbed the walls and lost everything.”
Jasmine crosses one leg over the other, unfazed. Her grey eyes meet mine like she’s waiting for me to go on.
“The room was sterile,” I continue, slow and deliberate. “Not an inch of DNA to be found, some would say an instant cold-case.”
“But you recovered a mitochondrial trace embedded in the grout. Non-nuclear. Contaminated. But usable. That was enough to rebuild the blood spatter trajectory and prove the killer's angle of entry.”
She hums the last part like it’s just another fact. Like I didn’t spend three weeks living inside that scene, sleeping four hours a night, methodically tearing through chemical residues and shadows.
“As I recall,” she adds, flipping her screen open with wet fingers, “they called the reconstruction an eighth wonder of the world.”
I smirk. Against my fucking will.
My eyes lock on hers, burning. Grey. Steady. Unapologetic. She’s a fucking know-it-all.
She says it all so casually, like she’s reading a list of ingredients off the back of a cereal box. And maybe that’s what throws me—this unsettling mix of competence and indifference. Like she’s not trying to impress me. Like she already knows I’m watching.
And I am. Too much. What the fuck is this feeling? This— Desire.