30. Lynn
— ? —
Lynn
I’m sitting in my usual seat, third row, slightly left of center, with my notebook open and my pen ready and absolutely zero ability to focus on anything except the man at the podium.
Professor Draven.
My mate.
Who is currently discussing the narrative function of transformation myths in pre-Christian European literature while I try very, very hard not to think about what his mouth was doing to my neck last night.
“The werewolf, in its earliest iterations, served as a metaphor for the beast within,” Milo says, his voice smooth and academic and completely at odds with the way his eyes keep drifting toward the third row.
“The idea that civilization is merely a veneer - that beneath the surface, we’re all creatures of instinct and hunger. ”
Hunger, I think.
Through the bond, I feel his attention sharpen.
Stop that.
Stop what?
Thinking… suggestively.
I’m thinking about mythology. This is a mythology class.
You’re thinking about last night.
Those aren’t mutually exclusive.
His jaw tightens almost imperceptibly. He turns to the whiteboard, writing something about lunar symbolism, and I watch the way his shoulders move beneath his perfectly pressed shirt.
“Miss Crowe.”
I jolt. “Yes?”
“Would you care to share your thoughts on the passage?”
Twenty pairs of eyes turn to look at me. I glance down at my textbook, which is open to a page I definitely haven’t been reading.
“The, um.” I scan desperately. “The transformation represents a loss of control? The protagonist becomes something other than himself, stripped of the social constraints that define humanity?”
“Interesting interpretation.” His eyes meet mine, and there’s a spark of amusement in them that no one else can see. “Though some scholars argue the transformation represents not a loss of control, but a return to it. The shedding of civilized pretense in favor of authentic desire.”
My cheeks heat.
“That’s… also valid.”
“Indeed it is.” He turns back to the class, and I feel his smugness through the bond like a warm current. “Now, if you’ll turn to page 247…”
I’m going to kill him.
I’m going to murder the king of Ashevale in cold blood, and no jury in the world will convict me.
The lecture continues.
I take notes, participate in discussion, and am, by all external measures, a model student engaged in academic inquiry.
Internally, I’m suffering.
It’s been three weeks since the bonding ceremony.
Three weeks of this ridiculous double life, student by day, queen-to-be by night, of sitting in this lecture hall pretending that the man at the front of the room is just my professor, just another authority figure dispensing knowledge, just someone I definitely haven’t seen naked approximately forty-seven times.
The bond doesn’t help.
Every emotion I feel, he feels. Every stray thought, every inappropriate memory, every time I accidentally remember the way he sounds when he-
Lynn.
Sorry.
You’re not sorry.
I’m a little sorry.
Your heart rate just spiked. You’re not sorry at all.
I bite my lip to keep from laughing.
At the podium, Milo clears his throat.
“As I was saying,” he continues, “the lunar cycle in these myths represents the inevitability of transformation. The protagonist can’t escape what he is, no matter how hard he tries to-”
He stops.
I’ve just licked my thumb to turn a page.
It’s an unconscious gesture, something I’ve done a thousand times, a holdover from childhood when my grandmother taught me that licking your fingers was faster than fumbling with paper edges. I don’t even think about it anymore.
But Milo has stopped speaking mid-sentence.
He’s staring at my mouth.
The silence stretches.
“Professor Draven?” someone asks from the back row. “You okay?”
“Yes.” He blinks, visibly collecting himself. “Yes, I - apologies. Where was I?”
“Lunar cycles,” I supply helpfully. “The inevitability of transformation.”
His eyes narrow at me.
That was cruel.
I licked my thumb. To turn a page. In a classroom.
You knew exactly what you were doing.
I really, genuinely didn’t.
Your smugness suggests otherwise.
I can’t help it. I smile.
It’s small, just a quirk of my lips, but Milo sees it, and something in his expression shifts. Goes darker. More intense.
“The inevitability of transformation,” he repeats, his voice dropping half an octave. “Yes. Let’s discuss that.”
The rest of the lecture is… charged.
Every example he chooses seems pointed. Every myth about desire and fate and bonds that can’t be broken. He paces the front of the room like a caged animal, and I can feel his frustration building through our connection, not anger, not really, but want. Sharp and hot and barely contained.
By the time he dismisses the class, I’m practically vibrating.
“Remember,” he says as students begin packing up, “your final essays are due Friday. Office hours are available for anyone who needs guidance.”
His eyes land on me.
“Miss Crowe. A word?”
A few people glance at me curiously, but no one seems suspicious. I’m a senior taking his class; it’s normal for professors to check in with graduating students about their final projects.
I wait until the room clears, then approach the podium.
“You wanted to see me, Professor?”
“Close the door.”
I do.
The moment the latch clicks, he’s moving, crossing the space between us in three long strides, backing me against the wall beside the whiteboard.
“That,” he says, “was torture.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You licked your thumb.”
“To turn a page. Like a normal person.”
“You made me lose my place in front of my whole class.”
“Sounds like a you problem.”
His hands find my waist, and he leans in close, his forehead pressed to mine.
“Do you have any idea,” he murmurs, “how hard it is to discuss transformation myths while I can feel exactly what you’re thinking about?”
“Tell me.”
“I can’t focus. I can’t think. Every time you shift in your seat, every time you tap your pen against your lips, every time you so much as breathe-”
“That’s very dramatic.”
“I’m a king. Drama is-”
“ - comes with the crown, yes, you’ve mentioned.”
He laughs, low and breathless, and kisses me.
It’s not quick.
That’s the first mistake, or the first surrender, I can never tell which anymore. His mouth slants over mine and the ache that’s been coiling in me since the second he rolled his sleeves to the elbow this morning finally, finally gets a target.
God, his forearms. I spent forty minutes of lecture watching the tendons shift every time he wrote on the board, thinking things a student is absolutely not supposed to think about the man grading her final.
I hated myself for it. I did it anyway. I’m still doing it now, both hands fisted in the rolled cotton at his elbows like I’ve been waiting all semester for permission to touch them.
“The door,” I manage.
“Locked.” He bites the word into my throat. “Checked it before you sat down. I’ve been thinking about locking it around you since your second question.”
“That’s deeply unprofessional, Professor.”
“I’m aware.” His hand drags up under my sweater, splaying hot against my ribs, and I feel the exact moment he catches the change in my scent because he goes still and then he groans, low, like it costs him. “You’re already wet.”
It’s not a question. He can smell it. He’s been able to smell it all morning, and that’s what wrecks me, that he sat at that podium reciting transformation myths knowing exactly what he was doing to me, knowing my thighs were pressed together in the third row, knowing and lecturing anyway.
“Whose fault is that,” I breathe.
“Mine.” He sounds proud of it. “Entirely mine.”
He lifts me onto the edge of the desk, his desk, the one I’m technically here to discuss my grade at, and steps between my knees, and the wrongness of it, the sheer we-should-not-be-doing-this of it, pours down my spine like heat.
This is insane. He is my professor. There are thirty of my classmates who filed out of this room four minutes ago. There is a nameplate on the door that says his title. And I’ve never in my life wanted anything the way I want him to stop being careful.
“Tell me to stop,” he says against my mouth, already dragging my skirt up my thighs.
“Don’t you dare.”
His fingers find me through my underwear and I have to bite down on his shoulder to keep from making a sound that would carry through the paper-thin walls to whichever colleague is grading two doors down.
He curses. Pushes the fabric aside. Slides one finger, then two, into me with a slow, filthy patience that has nothing to do with the fact that we have maybe ten minutes.
“Quiet,” he murmurs, curling them just right. “You have to be so quiet, darling. Can you do that for me? Can you be good while I take you apart on the desk you turned in your essay on?”
I shouldn’t like that. I shouldn’t like any of this, the risk, the title, the way he says darling like a threat. The list of things I shouldn’t like is very long and I’m ignoring every single item on it, grinding down onto his hand, chasing it, past caring.
“Milo-”
“I know.” He drops to his knees.
On the floor of Lecture Hall 3B, in his pressed slacks, the king of Ashevale kneels between my legs and hooks my thighs over his shoulders and puts his mouth on me like he’s got all afternoon instead of minutes, and I have to shove my own fist against my teeth to survive it.
His tongue is merciless. Unhurried. He eats me like the clock isn’t running, like there aren’t footsteps in the hall, like the only real thing in the world is the sound I’m strangling behind my knuckles.
When I come, it rolls through me so hard my heel knocks his stapler to the floor and neither of us stops.
He’s standing before I’ve finished shaking, belt already open, and the sight of him, flushed, wrecked, gold bleeding into the green of his eyes because he can barely hold the wolf back, makes my mouth go dry.
“Turn around,” he says.
I turn around.