Chapter 5 Rhys
Rhys
His name is Jude Park.
I know because I pulled up my class roster after he ran out of my section and there it was. Park, Jude. Junior. Media Studies. Headshot from his student ID: the same jaw, the same mouth, the same look in his eyes like he's daring the camera to keep up with him.
Jude. My mate's name is Jude. I've been saying it in my head on a loop like a crazy person. Jude while I brush my teeth. Jude while I grade papers. Jude while I stare at the ceiling at three a.m. in sheets that don't smell like anything.
He hasn't answered a single message. I sent one more after class. I know it's you. Please don't run. Read. No reply. Eight messages now, sitting in a chat with a faceless profile. All read. All ignored.
I should be grading. I'm in my office, which is generous language for a room the size of a closet with a desk, a bookshelf, and a window that doesn't open.
Office hours are from two to four on Wednesdays and nobody ever comes because this is a Gen Ed class and nobody cares about environmental policy except me and the three students who are actually in the program.
I should be grading the response papers I handed back.
I should be prepping Thursday's discussion questions.
I should be doing literally anything other than sitting here refreshing KnotMe and smelling my own shirt to see if any trace of him is left.
There isn't. There hasn't been since the hotel. The sheets there smelled like him for hours after he left and I lay in them like a pathetic idiot until checkout and even tipped extra because I felt guilty about how wrecked the bed was.
My phone is open to his student profile.
I've looked at it a lot today. I'm aware this is not healthy.
I'm aware that I am a teaching assistant with a professional obligation to not obsess over a student's ID photo, and I'm doing it anyway because that student has my claiming bite on his neck and I can still taste his skin when I close my eyes.
One of the other grad students in my seminar texted me this morning.
You sounded weird earlier. Are you sick?
I told him I was fine. I'm not fine. I haven't been fine since a stranger walked into a hotel room and turned out to be the rest of my life and then walked out again before I could learn his name.
Jude. His name is Jude and he sits in the third row and he has a septum ring and copper in his hair and he ran from me twice and I don't know how to make him stop.
Someone knocks on my door.
I look up. It's 2:47. Nobody comes to office hours.
I open the door.
He's standing in the hallway with his hands shoved in his jacket pockets and an expression on his face like he lost a fight with himself and he's furious about it.
No scarf today. The bite is visible above the collar of his hoodie, dark and healed and mine, and the sight of it hits me somewhere below my ribs.
"I'm not here because I want to be," he says.
"Okay."
"I'm here because I haven't slept in two days and my omega won't shut up and apparently you broke something in my brain and the only way to fix it is to be in the same room as you, which is really annoying, so."
"Okay."
"Stop saying okay."
"What would you like me to say?"
"I don't know. Something that makes this less weird."
He's staring at me like I'm a problem he can't solve. His jaw is tight and his eyes are red-rimmed like he actually hasn't slept. Underneath the defensiveness he looks exhausted. My alpha wants to pull him inside and feed him and wrap him in a blanket and growl at anyone who comes near this door.
"Come in," I say.
He hesitates. Just for a second. Then he walks past me into the office and I close the door behind him.
The room is small. I knew it was small. It's always been small.
But with both of us in here, with his scent filling every corner in about three seconds flat, it shrinks to nothing.
Honey and citrus and that sweet green undertone that made me lose my mind in the hotel.
It's stronger now than it was in the classroom.
Concentrated. No thirty other students to dilute it.
Just him, three feet away, in a room barely bigger than a bathroom.
He looks at my desk. Looks at the papers stacked on it. Looks at the bookshelf, the window, the sad little plant my mom gave me when I started the program. He's looking at everything except me.
"So," he says. "You're Rhys Calder. My TA."
"And you're Jude Park. My student."
"Your student who you knotted in a hotel room and bit without asking."
"My student who matched with me on a hookup app and told me to, and I quote, 'show me what those hands can do.'"
His mouth twitches. Almost a smile. He kills it fast. "That was before I knew you grade my papers."
"For what it's worth, your last response paper was genuinely good."
"Oh my god, don't grade-flirt with me."
"I'm not grade-flirting. It was good. Your argument about carbon pricing was—"
"Rhys." He says my name for the first time and my whole body lights up. "If you start talking about my thesis statement I'm leaving again."
"Please don't leave again."
It comes out quieter than I meant it to. Too honest. Too much. His expression shifts, the sarcasm cracking just enough to show something raw underneath. He looks at me and I look at him. The room is so small and he smells so good. I can see the bite on his neck pulsing with his heartbeat.
"I didn't plan this," I say. "I didn't know you were in my section. I didn't know you were— I just matched with someone on a stupid app and then you were there and you smelled like—"
"Like what?"
"Like everything."
He swallows hard. His pupils are blown wide, the brown nearly gone. He's gripping the strap of his backpack with white knuckles.
"This is such a bad idea," he says.
"I know."
"You're my TA."
"I know."
"There are rules."
"I know."
"So we should probably not—"
I don't know who moves first. Maybe him. Maybe me. Maybe the three feet of air between us just gives up.
His backpack hits the floor. His hands are in my hair and my hands are on his waist. His mouth is on mine and the relief almost takes me out at the knees.
He tastes like coffee and chapstick and under that he tastes like mate and mine.
I've been starving for this for a week without knowing what hunger was.
He makes that sound again. That little hitch of breath from the hotel. I swallow it. Push him backward until his hips hit my desk and he hops up onto it, scattering papers, and wraps his legs around me and pulls me in tight.
"This is so stupid," he says against my mouth.
"Incredibly stupid."
"Your door doesn't even lock."
"I know." I kiss his neck, right next to the bite, and he gasps and his whole body arches into me. "We should stop."
"We're not stopping."
"We're definitely not stopping."
His shirt comes off. Then my button-down and the t-shirt underneath, and his eyes catch on the tattoos again, his fingers tracing the geometric lines across my ribs while I mouth at his throat.
"I keep thinking about these," he mutters.
"In class. When you roll your sleeves up and I can see the edge of the ink. It's very distracting."
"Sorry."
"No you're not."
"No I'm not."
I pull his jeans open. He lifts his hips so I can drag them down and he's already hard, his cock straining against his briefs, a wet patch spreading at the tip. I mouth at him through the fabric and he groans, his hand fisting in my hair, his heel digging into my back.
"Off," he says. "Now."
I pull them off. Take his cock in my hand and stroke him slow, rubbing my thumb through the slick leaking from the head.
He's thick and hot in my fist and the sounds he makes when I twist my wrist are the best thing I've ever heard in this office.
The best thing I've ever heard in any office. I drop to my knees.
"Oh fuck," he whispers. "In your office. You're going to blow me in your office."
"I'm going to do more than that."
I push his thighs apart and lick a stripe up his cock, base to tip, and he slaps a hand over his mouth.
I take him in, sucking the head while my hand works the shaft, and his hips buck off the desk.
He's trying to be quiet because the walls are thin and there are other offices on this floor.
Anyone could walk by, but the noises leaking through his fingers are obscene and desperate. I want more of them.
I pull off his cock and push his thighs wider.
He gets it immediately, bracing his hands behind him on the desk and tilting his hips up.
He's soaking. Slick dripping down his thighs, pooling on the papers underneath him, and the smell of it, sweet and musky and purely him, makes my alpha snarl.
I press my face between his cheeks and lick him open.
He bites down on his own fist to keep from screaming.
"Fuck, Rhys, your mouth, god, right there, don't stop—"
I eat him out until he's trembling, tongue-fucking him, sucking at his slick, my hands gripping his thighs hard enough to bruise.
He's leaking all over my desk and I don't care.
I'll buy a new desk. I'll burn this one.
Nothing in this office matters except the sounds he's making and the taste of him on my tongue.
"I need you to fuck me," he pants. "Right now. I need your cock inside me right now or I'm going to lose my mind."
I stand up. Undo my belt. Shove my jeans and briefs down far enough and push into him and his mouth falls open in a silent moan, his eyes rolling back, his legs wrapping around my hips. He's so wet I slide in to the hilt in one stroke and the clench of his body around my cock makes my vision blur.
"Move," he says. "Hard. I want to feel it."
I fuck him hard. The desk creaks under us.
Papers scatter to the floor. His hand is over his mouth again but it's not doing much because with every thrust he's making these sharp, choked-off sounds that go straight to my cock.
I grip his hip with one hand and brace the other on the desk and pound into him, watching his cock bounce against his stomach with every stroke.
Watching his face, the flushed cheeks and glassy eyes and bitten lip.
I can feel my knot starting. That hot, heavy swell at the base building with every thrust. In the hotel I gave it to him. Here I can't. We're in my office with an unlocked door and no way to explain a 30-minute knot to anyone who walks in.
I pull out.
The sound Jude makes is furious. "What the fuck—"
"I can't knot you here."
"The hell you can't."
"Jude, the door doesn't lock and my advisor's office is twelve feet away."
"I don't care."
"You'll care when Dr. Albright finds us tied together on my desk."
He makes a frustrated, desperate noise that's half growl and half whine.
I wrap my hand around both of us, his cock and mine, slick and precome making everything wet and hot and slippery, and I stroke us together.
Fast and tight. He grabs my shoulders and buries his face in my neck and breathes me in, right at the scent gland.
The rush of heat through the bond is so intense I almost come on the spot.
"Hate you," he pants against my skin. "Hate you for being responsible."
"I know."
He comes first. Hot and pulsing between us, coating my hand and his stomach, his teeth sinking into my shoulder hard enough that I'll have a bruise tomorrow. I follow him seconds later, groaning into his hair, my hand still working us through it.
We stay like that. Pressed together, panting, sticky and wrecked in my ruined office. His forehead is against my collarbone and his breathing is slowing down. I've got one hand in his hair and the other braced on the desk. Neither of us moves.
"Rhys," he says eventually. Quietly.
"Yeah."
"What are we going to do?"
I don't have an answer. He's my student.
I'm his TA. There's a claiming bite on his neck that I put there and a bond between us that gets louder every time we're in the same room.
The university has rules about this. My program has rules about this.
My own moral code has rules about this, or it did, before he walked through my door smelling like everything I've ever wanted.
"I don't know," I say. "But I don't want you to run again."
He pulls back. Looks at me. His eyes are still a little glassy, his hair is a disaster, and there's a hickey forming on his collarbone that I don't remember making. He looks wrecked and beautiful and tired.
"I'm not running," he says. "I'm here. I showed up. That's all I've got right now."
"That's enough."
He holds my gaze for a long moment. Then he nods, once, and hops off the desk and starts looking for his clothes. I hand him his briefs. He pulls them on, finds his jeans in a heap by the bookshelf, grimaces at the state of my desk.
"You have slick on your response papers," he says.
I look. I do. "I'll reprint them."
"This is the most unprofessional thing that has ever happened in academia."
"Probably not."
"Definitely top five." He pulls his shirt over his head and picks up his backpack. Stands by the door. Looks back at me. For the first time since the hotel, the wall behind his eyes isn't all the way up. It's cracked. Just a little. Just enough.
"Same time Thursday?" he says. It's a joke but it isn't.
"Office hours are two to four."
"I'll pencil you in." He opens the door, glances both ways down the hall like he's checking for witnesses, and slips out.
The door closes. My office smells like him. Like us. Like sex and honey and cedar and the start of something I'm not smart enough to name but too far gone to stop.
I sit down in my chair. It's the only surface that doesn't have slick on it.
My phone buzzes. KnotMe. I open it without thinking.
A message from his profile. The first reply he's ever sent me.
You owe me a new shirt. This one smells like you now and I can't wear it in public without getting hard.
I stare at the screen. Read it twice. Three times.
Then I type: Keep it. I'll give you more.
The typing indicator appears immediately. Then:
Don't make promises you can't keep, TA boy.
I'm smiling. Sitting in my wrecked, slick-stained office with beard burn on my neck and his taste still in my mouth, I'm smiling so hard my face hurts.
I keep all my promises. You know that.
He sends back a single emoji. The little fire one. And then, a minute later:
Thursday. 2pm. Don't be late for your own office hours.
I lock my phone and lean back in my chair and let his scent soak into me. The bond hums in my chest, warm and steady and, for the first time since the hotel, answered.