Chapter Seven
Hayden
Nights fucked with me more than anything else.
The silence was never peace, it was a pressure that crawled beneath the skin and pressed against the ribs until breathing felt forced, until every exhale carried the weight of something I didn’t want to name.
In that absence of sound, everything I’d buried had room to crawl back to the surface.
Memory rose first, sharp and uninvited. Regret followed, slow and suffocating.
Then came hunger, the kind that didn’t fade no matter how many times I tried to drown it in work, in whiskey, in the illusion of discipline.
I sat by the window with a glass of whiskey in my hand, condensation dripping down my fingers, the city stretching beyond the glass in fractured light.
The skyline bled through the haze, faint and unreachable, a distant ache painted in steel and smoke.
The drink burned down my throat, rough and punishing, a reminder that I was still breathing, still trapped in the body of a man who felt too much and pretended otherwise.
There was nothing merciful about nights like this.
They stripped you bare without asking for permission, tore through the lies you told yourself during the day, left you staring at the version of yourself you didn’t want anyone else to see.
She existed in that same truth. Edwina. A beauty that wasn’t meant to soothe or comfort, but to ruin.
A presence that didn’t ask to be admired but demanded to be survived.
I didn’t want her gently, didn’t want the polite distance or the academic restraint that made everything safe.
I wanted her undone beneath my hands, her breath catching against my skin, her control shattered until nothing existed between us except the sound of what we couldn’t say out loud.
I wanted her stripped of the composure she hid behind, wanted to drag honesty from her with my mouth, my hands, my voice until she couldn’t keep pretending she was untouchable.
The thought of it made my chest tighten, made my pulse roughen, made every muscle in my body remember the violence of wanting something you have no right to touch.
And I hated that. I hated her for being the first person in years who made me feel something I couldn’t control.
She didn’t belong to me. She wasn’t supposed to.
Every thought of her tore through the order I had spent years constructing, the clean, safe, anonymous fucking life I built from the wreckage of everything I destroyed.
And she was the first crack in it. The first temptation I didn’t want to silence.
There were others I could have chosen. Dozens of students who smiled too much, who spoke too softly, who existed without consequence.
But I called her name. I said it out loud, calmly, professionally, as though the sound of it didn’t already sit on my tongue too easily.
I told myself it was logic, that she was capable, focused, efficient.
That she would make sense for the role. But the truth had nothing to do with reason.
It was instinct, raw and filthy and human.
It was weakness wearing the mask of control.
I remembered the morning she collided with me, the sharp movement, the heat of her body against mine for that one second, the scent of coffee and skin, the muted surprise in her voice when she cursed under her breath.
She hadn’t even seen me that night—hadn’t recognized me then, and didn’t recognize me now—but I saw her, and I knew.
I remembered everything with a clarity so cruel it felt carved into bone.
The twisted metal collapsing in on itself, the smell of gasoline and blood thick in the cold air, the sound of breath turning into silence, and the weight of her body in my arms when I dragged her out of the wreck, praying she would move, praying she would breathe.
Now she sat in my classroom, pen poised, posture perfect, pretending she wasn’t a ghost that had already been in my arms once before.
I watched her more than I should have. Always did.
And it had nothing to do with control. It was hunger pretending to be restraint, the kind that doesn’t fade no matter how many times you tell yourself it should.
She moved with the quiet certainty of someone who needed no approval, every gesture careful, measured, intentional.
Her voice carried precision, her tone low, her words deliberate, but her silence screamed through every inch of the space she occupied.
When she raised her eyes to mine, something inside me burned clean through reason.
Her beauty wasn’t soft, wasn’t the kind that invited you in, it was dangerous, cold-edged, the kind that made you want to ruin it just to see if it could break.
There were nights I lay awake, jaw clenched, fists pressed against the mattress, her name lodged in my throat as though saying it would damn me completely.
Edwina Carter.
Even the thought of her felt like a sin I was already too far gone to confess.
And I had wanted to touch her in every fucking way a man shouldn’t have wanted to touch his student.
I had wanted to hear her beg and bite back tears, to feel the tension break under my hands until she couldn’t keep pretending that distance could save her.
I had wanted to destroy every inch of space she used as armor and make her admit that the control she worshipped was only another form of fear.
Yet another part of me—the colder, quieter part—had wanted her nowhere near me.
That part remembered what it had meant to lose, to fail, to stand in the ruin of a choice that couldn’t be undone and watch someone you loved die because you were too slow to make the right one.
It remembered the blood, the rain, the silence that followed.
It remembered the sound of my own breathing when hers had stopped.
I should have left Edwina alone. I should have ignored the sharpness in her tone and the gleam of defiance that lived beneath her polished words.
I should have walked away the first time she looked at me with those hauting eyes that didn’t waver.
But I hadn’t. I had pulled her closer instead, knowing full well what I was doing.
She had unsettled me in ways that had nothing to do with sound or movement.
Her presence changed the air itself, turned it heavy and charged until the silence between us felt alive, until every thought became an echo of her.
She had been a question I never wanted to answer, a risk I swore I would never take again, and still, I took it.
I had dragged her into my orbit, and once she was there, I couldn’t stop circling her, even when I told myself I should.
I didn’t want to stop. Not really. I wanted her close enough to scorch me, and if I was honest, I wanted to see if I could burn her too.
The room had long since gone still, the faint hum of the radiator the only sound breaking the quiet, her name repeating through my mind until it blurred into something wordless.
I hadn’t turned on the lights. I never did when the thoughts grew too sharp.
The dark had a way of shaping things, of making the edges softer, the guilt more bearable, the ghosts easier to tolerate.
The phone had buzzed then, and I had let it ring before answering, not out of reluctance, but out of habit.
“Still up?” came the voice, low and familiar.
Elias. The last living connection to a life I should have buried years ago.
We had studied together once, lived under the same suffocating expectations, sat through the same dinners where silence was a performance and ambition the only acceptable emotion.
He had stayed in that world and let it consume him.
I had left it behind, though not cleanly.
“I figured you’d be grading,” he had said. “Or brooding. Though, in your case, they’re probably the same thing.”
I hadn’t answered. Elias never needed my permission to keep talking.
“Your father’s been asking,” he continued. “He wants to know how long you plan to hide in that ‘dead-end job.’ His words, not mine.”
Of course they were.
I had leaned back against the desk, the wood biting into my palm as I gripped the edge harder than I needed to. The room was still dark except for the narrow slats of city light spilling through the blinds, cold and gray against the wall.
“He says you’ve made your point,” Elias went on. “Whatever that point was. He wants you to come home, take your place, stop pretending you’re someone else.”
The words sank into me the way his always did, carrying the weight of something long overused, too familiar to hurt cleanly, reopening a wound that had forgotten how to bleed.
“I’m not coming back,” I had said, my voice low, even, stripped of anything that might sound like hesitation.
Elias hadn’t spoken for a moment. When he did, there was no surprise in his tone, only resignation.
“You know, I still don’t understand it. You were the one they trusted, the one they built everything around.
So what the hell are you doing teaching disinterested undergrads in a city that forgets your name before the ink on the roster dries? ”
“I liked the forgetting,” I had murmured, rolling the whiskey glass between my fingers until the cold sweat from the glass soaked into my skin.
He sighed softly. “Hayden, how long are you going to keep punishing yourself?”
The question had hung in the room, suspended in the dark, cutting in a way that wasn’t cruel but was still too close to the bone.