Chapter One - He Walked In

It’s after six. The classroom is silent, the overhead lights humming, and Lena is the only one in her seat.

Again.

Lena Hayes taps her pencil on the rim of the clipboard as if other names might pop up. She turns to the roster, paging through it back and forth, but she already knows it by heart—ten names in smudged ballpoint. Five had shown up last week. Now, just her. Again. A habit-forming.

The air in the annex building feels stale. The stale smell that soaks into your clothes and goes home with you—the stale that is the scent of drywall dust co-mingled with industrial coffee and the faintest odor of the must of a thousand fluorescent-lit nights. She leans across and rolls down the window, a fraction of an inch, wishing that the warm summer air would echo in motion through the room. It doesn’t. It’s hotter outside than in.

Her heels click on the linoleum as she steps to the whiteboard—out of habit, more than hope. Above her, the ceiling fan spins halfheartedly, blades groaning as though they would rather not move at all. She does her best not to take it personally.

A rustle at the door.

Boots. Heavy ones.

She turns, curious.

First, the boots. Then the jeans. Then the hoodie. Dark, worn soft by time. A shape. Solid. Confident in the way one can only become after having gone through something rough.

He enters the room, and time realigns. He’s twenty-seven now; she’s thirty-five. Adult learners’ night class. No gray area about that.

There is tension in her hand as she holds the marker.

“Hey,” he says, a little more sonorous now, weather-etched, like it’s been groaning in backrooms and truck beds. “This English 109?”

Lena’s mouth goes dry.

“Jace?”

He smiles—no, he smirks—and it comes to her like a freight train full of memories. The tilt of his mouth is identical. Reckless. Borderline smug. It was the smirk that got him rewarded with detentions he deserved and into much more trouble than he should have lived through.

“S’pose you wouldn’t recognize me, uh, Ms. Hayes.”

Ms. Hayes.

The name lands with a force that’s not quite appropriate. She hasn’t heard it from him in nearly nine years, and somehow it lands heavier now. Her back straightens instinctively. It’s not just that he says it—it’s the way his eyes remain fixed on her when he says it, as if he’s reeling her into something he’s already decided should be real.

“I—of course I remember.” Her voice tries to stay steady. “You were a… handful.”

He laughs. Not a loud laugh. Not the boyish cackle he would throw across a classroom. This one is quieter. Throatier. Like it’s coming from somewhere lower now.

“You used to say that,” he says. “I guess not much changes.”

But it has.

Everything has.

He doesn’t ask to sit. He only throws his bag on a desk, the way he owns the place, and drops into the front row, leaning way back as if this is his spot every Tuesday night. One leg extended, one bent just enough to curl around the chair leg. Casual, but coiled.

Lena drags her gaze to the clipboard once more. The names blur.

She clears her throat. “You’re… back in Elridge?”

“For now,” he says. “Thought I would give this whole education thing another shot. Never too late, right?”

She has no response to that. A part of her wants to ask what brought him back—who brought him back—but that would be too personal. That would suggest interest. And she’s supposed to be better than that, above him.

“That’s… good,” she says instead. “This is remedial comp, so it’s mostly just writing mechanics. Sentence structure. Thesis building.”

“Sexy stuff,” he says, lips turning up into something halfway between a smirk and a dare.

Lena swivels back to her desk and peruses a syllabus, stalling for time.

There’s a silence between them that is not empty.

It hums.

She feels it on her skin—a crackle, as if static. She puts her thumb in the corner of one of the stapled packets and concentrates on her breathing.

Professional. You’re a professional.

“You were in oil?” she says, attempting to pilot the conversation back to safe waters.

He shrugs. “Yeah. Drills, pipes, safety briefs. Long days. Longer nights. And a lot of time to think. Sometimes too much.”

“And now you’re… what, just moving on to a different career?”

“Trying to stay alive.” His delivery is relaxed, but there’s something weightier playing behind his eyes. “May as well make some credits before I blow my knees out.”

The fan above groans as it spins slowly.

Lena rattles a dry-erase marker, then makes her way to the whiteboard. The movement gives her something to do while she’s not exactly registering what she’s doing: Essay Structure: Introduction / Body / Conclusion. Her script is shakier than usual.

When she looks back around, he’s staring at her. Not the board. Not his notebook. Her.

“You still wear your hair like that,” he says, as though it’s a secret between only them.

A hand goes instinctively to her bun at the back of her neck. “Keeps it out of my face,” she explains.

He leans in, elbow on the desk. “Shame. I liked it down.”

Her stomach tightens. Not in fear. Not even in anger. It’s something worse. Something warmer.

You are not interested in this guy. You are in charge here. You are his teacher.

Except that he isn’t a boy anymore. And the way he’s looking at her? There’s no look here of a student in need of guidance.

It’s the look of a guy trying to remember what her skin smells like.

Lena jerks in place, snapping the marker cap louder than she means to. “Let’s start easy,” she says, as her voice takes just enough command of her to keep her upright. “What is the last book you read?”

He lifts a brow. “Cover to cover?”

“Preferably.”

“Probably Of Mice and Men. Back in high school. Your class.”

“That was sophomore curriculum,” she says without thinking, then hates herself immediately for saying it. Her voice had taken on a note a bit too familiar, a bit too knowing.

He grins. “You remember what I read?”

She crosses her arms. “I remember what I assigned.”

He clicks his pen against the desk, visibly more entertained with every passing second. “You gave me a C on that end paper.”

“You earned a C.”

“I think you just didn’t agree with my take.”

“I didn’t appreciate you handing it in late, written by hand, and on the back of a pizza flyer.”

He laughs—big, rich, unexpected in the still room. “Still holding a grudge, huh?”

She smiles despite herself. It’s small. Controlled. But it’s real. “No. Just good at remembering patterns.”

He doesn’t answer right away. Just leans back in his chair and watches her—the way you would watch a sunset or a lit match, unsure whether you would prefer to savor it or snuff it out.

“You know what I remember?” he finally says. “You would bring your coffee. Every day. A stainless-steel thermos with one side dented in. You’d say the coffee in the teacher’s lounge tasted like burned tears.”

She bites the inside of her cheek. “Still does.”

“I always found it hilarious—the way you perched on the edge of your desk during lectures, rather than sitting behind it. As if you were challenging anyone to call you soft.”

Lena’s breath catches.

“I wasn’t challenging anyone,” she says, sticking up for herself in a quiet voice.

“No,” he murmurs, nodding. “You were just trying to keep it together.”

She blinks quickly, then looks away before her face might reveal anything else. “Let’s start with essay structure,” she says, now her voice is calm again, a little too clipped. “Can you recall how to connect a paragraph?”

He shrugs. “I guess it all begins with a sentence?”

“Smartass.” She whispers, but intentionally loud enough for him to hear.

“You used to say that, too.”

She pauses. He’s right. She did.

Lena takes a deep breath and forces herself to move again, handing him a worksheet. Their fingers don’t meet, but it’s close. Close enough to feel the two of them sweating it out.

He doesn’t even look at the page. “I know why you’re flustered,” he tells her.

She almost fumbles the dry-erase marker.

“I’m not flustered.”

He leans forward again. “It’s okay. I don’t blame you.”

She glares at him. “You’re not trying to flirt with me. That’s not what this is.”

He tilts his head. “No?”

“No.”

“So what is it, then?”

She doesn’t answer. She can’t.

She looks back at the board, but her fingers shake slightly as she writes. Her handwriting—which is usually so neat—wavers for a half a second, a barely noticeable quaver that she catches and corrects.

Behind her, she hears the rustle of paper and the soft scrape of a pen. Good. He is at least feigning attention. She can work with that.

“For this course,” she continues, staring intently at the board, “you will each write a series of personal essays. We’ll look closely at clarity, structure, and tone. Your stories, your thoughts—we need them. But how you express them is even more important.”

His voice is softer now, almost meditative. “You believe that?”

“That writing matters?” She turns, meeting his gaze. “Yes. I do.”

There is a long pause before he answers. “That’s why I signed up.”

She blinks. “To write?”

He nods, slowly. “There’s stuff I need to say. Things that I never really knew how to do.”

Something shifts in her. A flicker of curiosity. Empathy. Dangerously close to soft.

She recovers quickly. “Then you are the right person for this class. But you’ll need to show up. Engage. Be honest.”

He lifts his brows. “Honest? You sure about that?”

She narrows her eyes. “I expect nothing less.”

A pause.

“Alright,” he says. “Honest, it is.”

There’s something in his tone that turns her stomach, something tight, and not fear exactly. But anticipation. A little like one of those warning bells that clanks down with a sound just below the frequency of human hearing, but that you nevertheless pick up somewhere in your coarse, porous bones.

The rest of the class passes in moments and miles. Lena grinds through it, setting out expectations, assignments, and deadlines. All the while, Jace watches her. He doesn’t interrupt again, but she can feel it—the attention, the heaviness of it.

And when the clock finally strikes seven, she exhales; she didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath.

“That’s it for tonight,” she says, and already she is folding up her folder. “Next week we’ll get to narrative perspective.”

He gets up, hefts his bag back onto his shoulder with that same casual confidence. He lingers.

She tries to stay professional. Tries to focus on her papers. But his voice is silk, and it slides under her skin.

“You still talk with your hands,” he says.

She glances up.

He nods toward her. “When you get fired up about something. You’d use a pen to point. Now it’s your marker.”

She gets ready to say something and then doesn’t.

“It’s good,” he says. “It means you still care.”

And then, before having received an answer, he turns and leaves.

The door shuts behind him with a very quiet click that sounds much too loud in the empty room.

Lena glowers at the board in silence for a beat. She still has the marker in her hand. Her pulse is still elevated.

And her body? It has not cooled off at all.

She finally puts the marker down. It rolls an inch along the edge and clinks to a stop against the eraser.

Lena stands there for a long time, hands on the desk, shoulders tight. The room stinks softly of dry-erase ink and old carpet, and in the pipes somewhere overhead, the heater grumbles to life with a groggy hiss. The low roar of the fan hums back on—it’s drawn out and slow, as if it’s just totally exhausted from spinning at all.

She sinks into her chair. Slowly. Carefully. As though the very act of sitting could be a clue to her whereabouts.

Her fingers drum the edge of her desk. Smooth. Familiar. This desk has been her mooring for years. Budget cuts, late-night lesson plans, unpaid hours—so many adult learners, like Jimmy, who want to write their stories again—never once has she felt out of control behind this desk.

Until now.

Jace Maddox didn’t simply shake something loose. He detonated it.

She retrieves her planner—a routine, a ritual—and thumbs through the week’s lesson plan. She stares at it. Then closes it again. The neat, color-coded boxes feel like a ruse tonight.

She pulls open her drawer, takes a mint from the stash she keeps for late nights, and pops it in her mouth. The pungent peppermint doesn’t clear her thoughts. If anything, it makes them snap all the harder into focus.

She had rules. Non-negotiables. No flirting. No favors. No gray zones. The lines were there for a reason—to keep her safe, to keep them safe.

But Jace was no longer that kid. His twenty-seven isn’t a rumor; it’s in his shoulders and his voice. And that was the problem.

And her own body? It hadn’t received the memo that nothing could remotely happen.

Her phone vibrates in her bag. Lena startles. She grabs it—she almost wishes it were something from him, while cursing herself for thinking it.

It’s not. A reminder: Rent’s due. Reality. Bills. Mundane, manageable things. She exhales.

She’s not the kind of woman who falls into this kind of situation. She is not some flustered cliché in a romance movie about forbidden love. She teaches. She grades. She reads. When ink cartridges go on sale, she’ll reorder some. She’s not drawn in, lured into scenarios where there are smirks with rough voices and tattooed arms, previous students.

Except… she already has.

Not completely. Not physically. But in thought? The way she’d started moving her hand toward her belt line just then, before she’d caught herself? That wasn’t nothing.

She leans forward, places her fingertips on her temples, and breathes.

This is manageable. It was just a fluke. A visceral response to an unexpected memory, walking into her classroom with flatter shoulders and a jaw that could split diamonds. It didn’t mean anything. She just needed sleep.

And distance.

Plenty of distance.

When she finally steps into the hallway outside her classroom, it’s empty and silent, and her heels strike the lonesome, dull beat of old tile beneath her feet. A janitor’s cart stands forlorn near the faculty bathroom, a half-full mop bucket on its side; a slight, lingering hint of bleach remains. Overhead fluorescent lights hum, casting long shadows on the beige walls.

She strides with squared shoulders, as if hoping to reclaim some former version of herself that doesn’t come quite so undone. She walks past the trophy case—all the wins trapped behind glass—and remembers once more to tack her night class flyer to the bulletin board. Perhaps someone would now take note. Maybe the room wouldn’t feel so empty next week.

By the time she reaches her car, the parking lot is all but dark. A handful of overhead lamps buzz to life, casting irregular yellow patches on the potholed pavement. She cringes when she unlocks her old Honda, which groans. She eases herself in, puts her bag down on the passenger seat, and… sits.

The stillness is heavier than usual. Not comforting, not restful. Just thick.

She starts the engine. Low NPR hums around the speakers—a quiet-voiced man explaining supply-chain delays—and she turns it off once more. No words tonight. Not someone else’s, anyway.

It is a ten-minute drive home. She takes the long way.

She rolls by slack shutters and closed diners, the faded signs she has been driving past, in some cases, since she was sixteen. Elridge Falls never changed much. Some towns grew, boomed, and reinvented. This one never changed—always a little more broken in at the edges each year, but constant. Predictable.

That’s precisely why she did return.

She pulls up to her building—a narrow triplex at the end of town, still adorned with ivy that refuses to die and neighbors with little curiosity. She ascends the stairs slowly, key in hand, the porch light flickering like it wants to stop.

Her apartment smells faintly of lemon cleaner and dust. She slips out of her coat, sets her bag down, kicks her shoes off one by one, all movements very exact, very practiced. Her home is calm and orderly—a place of clean lines and soft grays—a minimalist’s attempt at control.

She fills a glass of water and leans against the counter; her eyes skate toward the mini-corkboard above the sink.

There, amid a dentist appointment reminder and a picture of her sister’s kids, is a quote she tacked to the wall two years ago:

“Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want most.”

It used to ground her.

Tonight, it seems like the other side of a dare.

She looks at it for an extra second, sips, marches to her bedroom, takes off her blouse, and changes into a simple cotton tee. No lace, no satin. The materials are soft, and the thoughts are quiet.

But when she gets into bed, sleep won’t happen.

Because now—because of a stupid hoodie, a lopsided grin, and a voice she hadn’t heard in nine years—she doesn’t know what she wants more.

She rolls over on her side, tugging the covers over her shoulder to her chin, but her system isn’t fooled. And yet it still feels weird—every nerve ending tuned to a frequency she hasn’t heard in years.

Jace Maddox.

Why did it have to be him, of all people, to walk through her door tonight?

She shuts her eyes tight, but the images come anyway—the way his voice dipped low and teasing, how he leaned back in his chair as if he owned the air between them, as if he knew what he was doing to her. That smirk. That casual stretch. How his hoodie was positioned just high enough to reveal that strip of stomach.

Her stomach clenches again, hard.

She plunges a hand down under the covers—to take the edge off, she assures herself. Just enough to dull the ache and get to sleep. Her fingers slowly graze her hip, her thigh. Shallow, her breath catches, her mind blinks again: Jace, the way he used to look at her like he dreamed about her. Like he still might.

A hand slips over the waistband.

She exhales the slightest sigh.

But then, as she’s preparing to concede, she snaps her eyes open.

No.

She jerks her hand back and throws off the covers, whipping upright, breath ragged. Her reflection stares back at her from the pitch-black TV across the room—wide-eyed, red-faced, disoriented.

This isn’t a fantasy she’s going to indulge.

This is not how the story begins.

She rises and crosses the room, soaking her face in cold water, grabbing the sink rim as if it might hold her down.

“Professional,” she says quietly to the mirror. “You’re a goddamn professional.”

But she can hear the lie in her voice.

[Author’s Note]

🔥 First nights never stay simple. In Chapter Two, that forbidden spark with Jace Maddox gets harder to ignore…