9. Lynn
— ? —
Lynn
The email arrives during my morning class.
I read it over and over, trying to figure out what I did wrong.
Gorman isn’t one of my professors this semester, I had him for freshman composition two years ago, but he’s notorious in the department. The kind of older faculty member who thinks deadlines are sacred, accommodations are coddling, and anyone under thirty is inherently inferior.
I check my grades. All current. No flags.
My registration is all clear too.
I check my email history for anything I might have missed. Nothing.
But the email says “immediate attention,” so at 2:55 p.m., I find myself standing outside his office door, trying to remember if I’ve somehow offended him without knowing it.
I knock.
“Enter.”
His office is exactly what I expected: cluttered desk, walls of books that look like they’ve never been read, the faint smell of pipe tobacco despite the campus smoking ban. Professor Gorman sits behind his desk like a toad on a throne, his gray eyes tracking me as I step inside.
“Miss Crowe.” He gestures to the chair across from him. “Close the door.”
Something prickles at the back of my neck. I close the door.
“You wanted to see me about a grading concern?”
“Yes, yes.” He waves his hand dismissively. “Sit down.”
I sit. The chair is too low, positioned so I have to look up at him. Everything about this office feels designed to make visitors feel small.
“I’ve been reviewing your file,” he says, leaning back. “Interesting academic history. High school was… challenging for you, wasn’t it?”
“I did fine in high school.”
“D in sophomore English. C-minus in junior year. You only made it to this university through your last-minute improvement senior year, isn’t that right?” He’s smiling, but there’s nothing warm in it. “Quite the turnaround. Almost suspicious.”
My hands tighten on my thighs. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean, Miss Crowe, that students like you often require… assistance… to maintain their standing.” He stands, moving around the desk, positioning himself between me and the door. “Accommodations. Extensions. Special treatment.”
“My accommodations are approved by the disability office.”
“Ah, yes. ADHD.” He says it like it’s a dirty word. “The fashionable diagnosis. Every student who can’t focus claims ADHD these days. Makes one wonder who actually deserves the extra time.”
I should leave. Every instinct I have is screaming at me to stand up and leave. But he’s blocking the exit, and my body has gone rigid with the kind of freeze response I haven’t felt since high school.
“I’ve noticed your scholarship,” he continues, moving closer. “Merit-based. Requires a 3.5 GPA to maintain. That must be stressful. All that pressure.” His hand lands on my shoulder. “A girl in your position should learn to be… accommodating.”
I can’t breathe.
His thumb brushes my collarbone. His face is too close.
The tobacco smell is overwhelming, and I’m back in tenth grade, frozen in the hallway while a teacher told me I was too stupid to succeed, frozen in the principal’s office while they explained I just needed to “try harder,” frozen frozen frozen-
The door explodes inward.
Miles.
He fills the doorway like a storm about to break, his eyes blazing gold, his whole body radiating violence. I’ve never seen him like this, not even in wolf form. This is the predator underneath the professor, ancient and terrifying.
“Get your hand off her.”
Gorman steps back, sputtering. “Now see here - this is my office - you can’t just-”
Miles moves.
One punch. Just one.
It’s almost beautiful in its efficiency, the way his fist connects with Gorman’s jaw, the way the older man crumples like wet paper, the way he hits the floor and stays there, unconscious before he even lands.
Miles steps over the body without looking at it.
“Lynn.” His voice is rough, urgent. “Lynn, look at me.”
I can’t. My mind is still trapped where Gorman’s hand was on my shoulder and I couldn’t do anything.
“Darling.” Warm hands cup my face, tilting it up, and Miles is kneeling in front of me, his eyes searching mine. “You’re safe now. I’ve got you. Come with me.”
He helps me stand. My legs don’t work right, but he wraps an arm around my waist and half-carries me out of the office, down the hall, into-
His office.
It’s smaller than I expected, lined with books and smelling like leather and pine.
He settles me onto a worn couch in the corner and wraps something around my shoulders, his cardigan, I realize distantly, the charcoal one he wears on lecture days, and then he’s moving to a small electric kettle on his desk.
“I’m making tea,” he says. “It’ll be terrible. I haven’t figured out the proper steeping time yet.”
A laugh bubbles out of me, slightly hysterical. “Okay.”
He brings me a cup a few minutes later. He’s right, it’s terrible. Too weak and somehow also too bitter. I drink it anyway because he made it, because he’s here, because I’m safe.
He kneels in front of me again.
“Lynn.” His voice is so gentle it makes my chest ache. “Are you okay? Did he touch you?”
“Just my shoulder. He was - he was going to - but you-”
“I heard.” His jaw tightens. “Through the walls. I was walking to my office and I heard him, and I-” He stops. Breathes. “I’m sorry I didn’t get there sooner.”
“You got there.”
“Not soon enough.”
We sit in silence for a moment. The terrible tea warms my hands. The cardigan smells like him, pine and wood and something deeper, something that makes me feel safe in a way I haven’t felt in years.
“Lynn.” He’s still kneeling, his hands on my knees, his eyes searching my face. “I need to ask you something. And I need you to be honest with me.”
“Okay.”
“Has anyone hurt you?” His voice drops low, barely leashed. “In this goddamn place. In this school, this town, anywhere you’ve been. Has anyone hurt you? Tell me, darling, and I’ll burn everything to the ground for you.”
The words crack something open inside me.
Because no one has ever asked. Not like that. Not with that look in their eyes, like my pain matters, like my history deserves vengeance, like they would genuinely destroy the world if I named a single name.
“It’s not - it’s not just one thing,” I whisper.
“It’s everything. It’s teachers calling me lazy because I couldn’t focus.
Students calling me stupid because I needed extra time.
Kids who decided I was an easy target because I was ‘different.’” I pull his cardigan tighter around me.
“Brittany and Jessica have been making my life miserable since freshman year. They call my accommodations ‘unfair advantages.’ They leave notes in my backpack asking if I’m ‘actually disabled or just dramatic.’”
“What?”
“And Gorman - he’s not the first professor to imply I don’t deserve to be here. I’ve been fighting so hard to prove I’m smart enough, good enough, real enough to belong, and it’s just-” My voice breaks. “It’s exhausting. It’s so exhausting, Miles.”
He’s staring at me with a fierce, protective heat burning in his eyes, almost frightening in its intensity.
“Everyone,” he says slowly, deliberately, “who has ever made you feel small. Everyone who called you lazy or stupid or told you that you don’t belong. They will answer for it. All of them.”
“You can’t-”
“I can.” His hands tighten on my knees. “I will. You are the most brilliant, capable, extraordinary person I have ever met, and the fact that anyone made you doubt that for even a moment-” He cuts himself off, breathing hard.
“I’ll ruin them, Lynn. I’ll ruin every single one of them, and I’ll make sure they know exactly why. ”
“That’s… kind of terrifying.”
“Good.”
“Miles-”
He moves up onto the couch beside me, wrapping his arms around me, pulling me against his chest. I go willingly, burying my face in his shoulder, letting him hold me while the trembling finally stops.
“I’ve got you,” he murmurs against my hair. “I’ve got you, darling. You’re safe now.”
We stay like that for a long time.
Eventually, my breathing steadies. My heart stops racing. I become aware of other things: the warmth of his body, the strength of his arms, the steady thump of his heartbeat beneath my ear.
I pull back slightly, looking up at him.
His face is inches from mine. His eyes have faded back to green, soft and worried and fixed on me like there’s nothing else in the room he’d consent to look at.
I want-
He leans in.
I lean in.
Our noses brush. Our breath mingles. I can feel the heat of him, the want, the same pull that’s been winding tighter since the first day.
And then I pull back.
“I think,” I whisper, “I should go.”
Disappointment crosses his face, and under it a longing he doesn’t voice, but he nods slowly, not pushing, not asking for more than I can give.
“I’ll walk you home.”
He does.
We walk side by side across campus, not touching but close, and when we reach my dorm, he stops at the entrance and looks at me with such tenderness that it almost breaks me.
“Goodnight, Lynn.”
“Goodnight, Professor.”
His mouth curves. “Miles. Please.”
“Goodnight, Miles.”
I turn and walk inside before I can change my mind. Before I can go back and close the distance between us, or let myself fall any further into something I’m not sure I can survive.
But when I reach my room and close the door behind me, I press my fingers to my lips and imagine what it would have felt like.
His mouth on mine.
His hands in my hair.
The moment I’ve been waiting for since the day we met.
I wish he’d kissed me.
God, I wish he’d kissed me.