I gathered my jacket from the back of the chair and paused.
I wasn’t in a hurry to get back to my office, which was unusual.
The space would be empty, and up until a week ago, I fucking preferred it that way. Everything about it was unchanged, yet it felt different when Archie wasn’t there.
Assistantship or not, he had his own schedule. His own lectures. His own obligations pulling him across campus on a rhythm that didn’t include me. Most days, the university scattered him elsewhere.
Christ.
It irritated me.
In more ways than one.
I didn’t do this. I didn’t let a twenty-something grad student rearrange my pulse just by existing in the right way.
I didn’t letanyonerearrangeanything. That was the point.
And yet my mind kept returning to the moment in the admin office and the way Archie had stood there with his folder bent under his grip, trying to make his body look casual while his nervous system seemed to scream.
He’d been braced for impact, and I’d seen that kind of posture before.
On men sitting across from me in interview rooms, hands cuffed, faces calm in a way that didn’t come from peace. On women whose stories had been cut into clinical language because that was the only way anyone would listen. On teenagers who’d learned early that survival was mostly a matter of predicting who would hurt them and when.
The trauma wasn’t what made Archie unique.
Everyonehad trauma.
It was the way he refused to soften himself into a digestible version of it.
My jaw tightened, fingers curling around the stack of papers as if I needed the pressure. Control wasn’t just a mood.Not for me.It was a structure I maintained daily, and letting one student step into my orbit shouldn’t have been enough to make the foundation creak.
But it had.
I slid my notes into my bag and turned off the projector, the screen rolling itself back into the ceiling with a low mechanical hum. The sound echoed in the now-empty room.
The door at the back of the lecture hall opened. “Henry.”
Goddamn it.
I exhaled slowly and finished zipping my bag before facing him, letting the quiet stretch a beat too long before clearing my throat.
“Dean Randolph.”
His smile was fake as fuck, polished and well-practiced—the kind worn by men who cared too much about being liked. Dark, expensive fabric moved with him as he stepped farther into the room, the suit effortlessly unremarkable and tailored within an inch of its life.
Something in his demeanor tugged at me, like a scab you couldn’t stop picking at. The polish, the cultivated ease, the falsified kindness—it all reminded me of my father.
Which was likely why I hated him.
He stepped farther into the room and stopped short of meeting me halfway, planting himself like the space should do the rest of the work for him. One hand lifted, fingers turning his ring deliberately—the university crest catching the light.
He cocked his head. “I caught the end of your lecture. Compelling, as always.”
“I don’t tailor my material for drop-ins.”
“No, of course not. I wouldn’t expect you to.” He gestured vaguely toward the rows of seats. “Trauma and procedural adaptation. You make even the bleak topics sound… inevitable.”
“That’s because they are.”
