Chapter 2
HENRY
I’d managed for years without a TA. I preferred it that way. Fewer moving pieces meant fewer eyes on my work. Control wasn’t just a preference. It was how I kept my life from becoming public property. How I made sure no one saw a fragment of my past before I decided whether or not to bury it.
No assistants. No witnesses. No bright, eager little liabilities touching things they didn’t understand.
I’d made that clear.
Repeatedly.
Sometime between last semester and this one, Wexley decided to treat my refusals as suggestions, and now I had twelve applications for an assistant I didn’t fucking want.
Predictable.
It never took long for a simple decision to stop being yours the moment an institution got its hands on it.
My memoir had been out long enough for the public to stop acting like my survival was breaking news. The interviews had faded. The interest moved on to the next tragedy.
Wexley never did.
Of course not.
To them, my past was a credential they could point to and claim. The fact that there was another book coming only made it worse. The damn thing wasn’t even written yet—not even close—but that fact hadn’t stopped anyone from talking about it as if it already existed.
It wasn’t a book. It was research—raw data, sleepless nights, and endless transcripts.
The ink on my publishing deal had barely dried before Dean Randolph started parading the idea of it around campus.
He pitched the position like he was doing me a favor, like the institution cared about my workload or my sanity.
Bullshit.
I agreed to it, anyway, because part of my job at Wexley was learning how to smile through performances I could dismantle in half a second
This assistantship wasn’t about me. It had never been.
Wexley liked to call it opportunity, but it was simpler than that—make something coveted and let students bleed for it.
A teaching assistantship under Henry Rothwell wasn’t help. Fuck no. It was a trophy, and trophies always came with strings.
The applications proved it.
Some of them were impressive. Most of them were eager. All of them knew exactly how to write the kind of sentences that sounded good on paper—trauma-informed, research-driven, and intellectually curious.
I wasn’t looking for worship or someone who wanted to orbit my name. I needed someone who could handle the work—someone who didn’t flinch at the ugly parts and understood that trauma wasn’t poetic. It was procedural.
I’d sat through eleven goddamn interviews, politely placating students who wanted to impress me.
By the time the last chair scraped back and the door closed behind it, my jaw ached from holding the same expression for too long.
I’d heard the same answers delivered in different voices, the same reverence dressed up as ambition, and the same careful language polished until it reflected exactly what they thought I wanted to see.
I was fucking bored.
But that had been the point.
Those first eleven interviews had been a courtesy—a concession to Randolph and the fiction of fair competition. I’d let them in, listened, nodded, and watched them exhaust themselves trying to earn something that was never really on the table.
The outlier had been obvious from the start.
Archibald Quinn.
I recognized him from my larger undergraduate lectures—wire frames, observant eyes, always sitting far enough back to disappear if he wanted to.
I’d saved him for last on purpose. His application hadn’t fit with the others.
There was no reverent framing or worship disguised as research.
Archibald submitted a clean, precise writing sample that didn’t try too hard to ingratiate itself with my work or soften the edges of what it was describing.
He wasn’t auditioning. He was reporting.
Archibald came into my office quietly, filling the space in a way that immediately disrupted my expectations. My attention caught before I could stop it, tracking the way he crossed the room and took the chair across from my desk as if I put it there just for him.
His stare unsettled me—not because of its intensity, but because I fucking liked it.
Gray eyes met mine through the round frames sitting low on his nose. He didn’t touch them or correct their awkward angle, as if he were accustomed to seeing the world slightly askew and had learned to compensate.
His eyes dropped briefly, lashes brushing his cheeks as he took in the space between us.
His throat moved when he swallowed, the line of it exposed and unprotected for a fraction of a second before his gaze returned to mine. The moment settled between us, heavier than it had any right to be.
Fuck.
He’d barely spoken, and I was already paying closer attention than I meant to.
“I’ve read your work,” he blurted, then paused, the smallest stumble breaking the rhythm of his voice before he recovered. A faint flush climbed his cheekbones, and his fingers tightened together once in his lap before easing again.
“Not just the memoir. The academic journals, too. The early publications.”
I didn’t respond right away.
Every applicant who had sat in that chair had arrived armed with my citations. They praised the work, praised the survival, and layered on politeness so thick, I nearly choked on it.
“It’s so nice to meet you.”
“Your work changed my life.”
“You are so brave.”
It was all over-rehearsed bullshit.
“Everyone who applied for this position has read those journals, Mr. Quinn.”
His surname tasted too clean in my mouth. I used it anyway.
Distance had its uses.
Archibald absorbed my dismissal without interrupting, but his jaw set just enough to register, like he was biting back a reflex.
“I didn’t mean it as a credential.”
I let the silence stretch.
His knee drew inward beneath the chair.
My mouth twitched before I could stop it.
He was a contradiction in wire frames and flushed skin—nervous enough to blush, sharp enough to cut me for noticing.
I wanted the cut.
“I read them because they made sense of things I couldn’t organize on my own,” he said. “Not because they were impressive. Because they were precise.”
Interesting.
“Precise how?”
A faint line appeared between his brows as he thought. “Most people want trauma to mean something redemptive. Your work doesn’t promise that. It just explains the cost.”
“And you’re comfortable with that cost?”
“I’m… familiar with it. I’m not sure comfort is really the right word.”
“And you think that qualifies you to work here?”
“No.” He exhaled through his nose. “But I don’t think qualification is the point.”
His fingers brushed his sleeve, thumb worrying the fabric once before he stilled, then nudged his glasses higher with a knuckle.
“I’m not here to feel smart about trauma. I like your work because you leave the damage intact. You don’t try to make it inspirational. You let it stay complicated.”
“You assume a lot, Mr. Quinn.”
“I do.” Color climbed his cheekbones. “But I also think assumption is unavoidable in this field. The difference is whether you’re honest about it.”
He paused there, breath measured, like he was deciding whether to stop or press further.
“What do you think this job actually requires, Mr. Quinn?” I leaned forward just enough to shift the balance between us. “And don’t give me an academic answer.”
For the first time, he looked away from me.
My body reacted before my mind could, jaw tightening and hands twitching. Every ugly instinct in me rose at once.
Look at me.
His gaze slid to the edge of my desk, to the legal pad and the uncapped pen, as if orienting himself to something concrete before answering.
When he finally looked up again, the focus in his eyes had sharpened, the softness replaced by something steadier, more deliberate.
“It requires restraint,” he said. “Not the performative kind. The kind that knows when to step back and when not to.”
Restraint.
Of course he would use that word while sitting in my office looking like something restraint had personally failed.
“And discretion,” he blurted. “Because the work doesn’t belong to the person doing it. It belongs to the people who trusted you with something they didn’t survive unscathed.”
“Most people say they can handle the uglier parts,” I challenged. “Very few of them understand what that actually costs.”
“You’ll have to excuse my bluntness, Professor, but life is fucking ugly. We don’t have to paint over the complicated parts with flowers and sunshine to try to make it something the world can stomach. It can just be ugly.”
I watched him for a moment, long enough for the room to stretch tight around the edges.
“And what happens,” I asked, “when the work starts to change you?”
His shoulders eased by a fraction, breath releasing through his nose as the tension bled out of him. The corner of his mouth lifted, just barely, and something unfamiliar tugged at my chest.
I wanted it back.
The thought came uninvited, and I shut it down as quickly as it surfaced, though the impulse lingered, irritating in its persistence.
He ducked his head for a moment, lashes lowering as he adjusted the angle of his glasses.
The movement was so instinctive, so faintly defensive, that my mind supplied a name before I could stop it.
Rabbit.
It wasn’t appropriate, wasn’t professional, and it sure as shit wasn’t anything I had any business thinking about a student.
And yet it fit in a way that had nothing to do with fragility and everything to do with alertness—with the way he seemed perpetually poised to bolt or listen, depending on which proved safer.
He lifted his head again, and met my eyes as if daring himself not to look away this time.
“I don’t think the goal is to come out unchanged. I think the goal is to notice when you’re changing and decide what you’re willing to let it take.”
I studied him without bothering to disguise it anymore, aware of the way the air between us had tightened. My hands stayed flat against the desk, spine straight and posture disciplined.
If Archibald Quinn had understood what it meant to be held in that kind of attention, he might have faltered.
Or maybe not.
His lips parted, breath catching shallow as if his body had registered the shift before his mind could catch up.
He didn’t look away.
The silence stretched, heavy and unbroken, and in it I understood—with a clarity that settled cold and precise in my chest—that whatever I’d been pretending this interview was, it wasn’t that anymore.
I’d crossed the threshold.
And I wasn’t stepping back.