Chapter Two - You Call That a Boundary?

Lena arrives fifteen minutes early. She always does. It’s half discipline, half armor — if she can get into the room before anybody else, maybe she can sneak a breath before everyone else sees her trembling. Perhaps she can grasp some control of it before the world asks too much of her.

She's not as dependent on the buffer as she is here, but she may still need it later on.

But tonight she’s been a throb under the skin all day. A mild, electric hum that is always present. It started in the shower and never stopped. It was with her at lunch, buzzing along her chest while she graded essays, her red pen missing errors no more than it caught. It followed her here, into this tired room with its soft hum of fluorescent lights and paint-chipped desks.

She’s just getting started straightening up a heap of papers when she hears it: those boots once more.

Not the latecomer lazy dawdle. Nothing is as octopus-quick and guilt-ridden as a student trying to impress her. These are slower. Heavier. Measured. As though the very hallway is collapsing under his weight.

Her stomach stuffs itself, clenches right before the door squawks.

It does. And then there he is.

Hoodie unzipped. Black T-shirt molded to his chest as though he'd ordered it that way. Shoulders squared, spine loose. One hand was in the pocket of his hoodie jacket, the other clutching a backpack near the bottom of one side, as though it barely registered. He's dressed like it's effortless. Like he doesn't care. Which makes it so much worse.

Because he looks good, see.

And the worst part — she knows it, too.

He's not quite smiling. Only the faintest hint of an understated half-smile at the corner of his mouth. A suggestion of something cocky. Something dangerous.

She stands up from a stooped-over position, her fingers splayed across the top of a desk. “Class doesn’t start until six.”

“We’re at 5:49,” he says, checking the hour meter. “Thought you liked early birds.”

“I like boundaries,” she says, a little too sharply. She tosses him a half-smirk to take the edge off.

He’s back at the Mollye desk he was sitting at the night before. It creaks beneath his weight; he stretches his legs out as if he has been there for hours. As if he owns the room now.

Lena forces herself to turn aside and go home.

She’s worn that blouse a dozen times already this semester. Pale blue. Tucked in. Neatly ironed. But tonight it feels thinner. More fitted. Her cardigan is draped across the back of her chair, but she has not put it on. Her skin’s too warm.

And underneath the crisp lines — under the slacks she wore like armor — she’s in the kind of underwear she swore she’d never wear to school again. A little lacy slip of a thing that she would save for hotels and birthdays. Now it’s just… there. “And every time she moves her hips, she feels it.”

A reminder of bad decisions.

Or maybe impending ones.

“You never, ever look like that when you’re mad?” he asks, voice low.

She turns, caught off guard. “Like what?”

“Like you’re afraid to say what you are thinking.”

She swallows. Hard.

“I’m not angry,” she says, gathering up the rack of worksheets and carrying them to the front. “I’m… focused.”

Jace leans across his desk, forearms planted on the desk, cocking his head as though considering it. Or unpeeling her.

“Focused,” he says, sounding out the word. “Yeah. I remember that. You were always that way.”

She pretends she doesn’t hear him and turns away, resuming writing on the whiteboard as she prints the word voice in careful block letters.

Behind her, he continues.” You were the only teacher who didn’t look at me and see a fight waiting to happen.”

Lena goes still — only for a second — the marker stopped mid-stroke.

“That’s not true,” she says, too insipidly.

“It is,” he says, his voice soft now. “You saw me in that way as I was important to someone. Even when I was screwing up.”

She doesn’t respond. Not right away. Not when she feels a thousand things to say — that her country can feel safe.

So she takes the cap off another marker and does the Mollye. “We are not doing this,” she says over her shoulder. “Not tonight.”

He chuckles. Low. Knowing. “What aren’t we doing, Ms. Hayes?”

She finally turns. “This flirt-and-provoke game.”

His smile is slow and sharp. “Who’s playing?”

“You are,” she fires back. “And you know it.”

He stares into her eyes, unwavering, looking her in the eye. “Maybe I’m just being honest.”

Her pulse skips again. That damned pulse — it was blue-streaking on her, left and right, with a vengeance. She places the heel of her palm on her hip, as if to anchor her there.

“Honesty is overrated,” she says, reclaiming the clipboard and scanning it for anything to grasp hold of.

“I disagree.”

“Of course you do.”

The room is too quiet again. And far too warm. The air-conditioning is shitty in this part of the building, and she can feel a bead of sweat forming between her shoulder blades.

He notices. She knows he does. He looked once and cast his eyes back to her face without an apology.

“You wear heels to class?” he drawls in his casual voice of gravel and suggestion.

“They’re just work shoes," she snaps, but she feels the arch in her back and the lift in her step as she strides across the tile in them.

“Mmm,” he hums. “Seems like trouble.”

To avoid blurting something out, she chews the inside of her cheek.

Focus, Lena.

“You brought your assignment?”

He reclines again and pulls out a folded sheet from his notebook. It has been folded this time, folded in threes, and then smoothed out again so that he might read it — so that he might live in it—before bringing it here.

She unfolds the page. And here she is caught off guard once more.

Not by the content. But by the tone.

It’s raw. Stripped-down. Messy in the best way.

“You write like you know things,” she says, so softly it almost hurts to hear.

"I do," he says. "And I think you do too."

She looks up, startled.

But he’s not smiling now.

He’s just watching her.

And something shifts inside her chest.

“You don’t know me at all,” she spits, but her voice lacks the bite to land. It’s defensive, not dismissive.

“I know you always have a pen behind your ear, even when you’ve got one in your hand,” he says. “I know you drink coffee, you fake a grimace at the first sip. I know that you wear black because you’re afraid, and you pretend to smile when you think no one is listening.

Heart pounding in her throat, Lena sways on her feet. “That’s just… observation.”

He shrugs. “So is writing.”

Her eyes drop to the paper in her hand — his scrawl. It’s not polished, not perfect. But it’s honest. And that’s what gets to her. There’s a voice in it, and it’s raw and restless, and it wants to break through.

“I suppose I could help you with this,” she adds quietly. “But it’s already good to be honest.”

He blinks, caught off guard. Probably debating whether to play it cool or pretend he didn’t hear her right. Either way, she knows he wasn’t expecting the compliment.

“You think I’ve got something?”

“I do.”

He nods once before leaning in, forearms stacked on his knees.

"I've been thinking about applying to the fellowship," he says. "The writing one."

She lifts an eyebrow. “Seriously?”

“Yeah,” he says. “I’ve got time now. And maybe a reason.”

She tilts her head. “What’s your reason?”

He doesn’t answer right away. He instead makes the silence roll itself out, weaving through until it crisscrosses languidly around them, like steam. “Well, maybe I just like the way you look at me when I do something right,” he says with a smirk.

Her stomach flips — an unwelcome tingle. He means it. Or at least part of him does. And the part that doesn’t? That’s the dangerous part.

“Jace,” she starts, and he cuts her off, softly.

“I don’t want any freebies,” he says. “Not really.”

“Then what are you doing?”

“I don’t know.” He drags a hand through his hair and down to the back of his neck, eyes on the ceiling, the edge knocked off his usual confidence. “Trying to be seen, I guess… as childish as that sounds.”

That undoes her a little.

She walks to her desk, sets down his paper, and takes a seat — not behind the desk, but in a chair next to it, facing him.

“You were exposed,” she says. “Just not the way you wanted.”

“I was angry,” he admits. “Angry all the time.”

She nods slowly. “You scared people back then.”

“I know.”

His voice is quieter now. Less teasing. More grounded. As if he’s lowering a shield she hadn’t known was raised.

“You didn’t scare me,” she says after a beat.

His eyes meet hers. “Why not?”

She exhales slowly. “Because I’ve been angry too.”

She pauses, then lets the memory surface. "And because I remember you standing up for someone once. It was, what… seventh grade? Behind the east wing after school."

He tilts his head slightly, listening.

"Travis Kingsley. That tiny sixth grader with the crooked glasses. A couple of eighth-grade boys had him cornered, knocked his backpack over, and dumped everything out."

She gives a slight, almost amused shake of her head. "You didn't say much. You just walked over, picked up the backpack, and stared them down until they backed off. Then you handed Travis his stuff like it was no big deal. Didn't even look at him twice."

His expression softens—surprise flickering first, then something more uncertain. Vulnerable.

“You’ve always had that in you,” she says, voice lower now. “Even if you pretend not to.”

Something flits between them as they pass each other — a fragile awareness of each other, a couple of wires touching at the right angle to make a spark. It’s not about attraction anymore. Not only. It’s about familiarity. About grief. About having a sense of what it is to bear the weight of something you can’t name.

“You never told anyone anything,” he says.

“No.”

And there it is — a silence that isn’t empty, but full because it’s full of all the things neither of them will say. Not yet.

But it’s there.

Between breaths. Between glances. The way her knees are angled toward his is now ever so slightly.

Jace doesn’t break eye contact. Not once. “You still carry that anger?” he asks softly.

She doesn’t answer with words—just the slightest nod.

He rocks back, his arms folding across his chest — not defensively, but appraisingly. Measuring her.

“I think I knew,” he says.

“That I was angry?”

“That you were lonely.”

Her breath hitches. She hadn’t expected that. Not from him. Not spoken aloud.

“That’s not something one student should say to a teacher,” she says, with no edge in her voice.

“No,” he agrees. “But I’m also not 17 anymore.”

That phrase punches her in the ribs.

He lets it hang there, and then he shifts in his chair, his knees brushing up against the edge of her desk. “Can I ask something?”

Lena crosses her legs, struggling to keep it together. “That depends.”

He smirks. “When’s the last time somebody kissed you like they meant it?”

Her lips open in a grumble and then a silent grumble.

“I mean it,” he says, softer now. “Not like some passé date night. I mean—kissed. The kind where you’re pressed up against the door, neck arched back, and words aren’t even part of it.”

Her thighs tighten before she can stop them.

“What a line, Jace. Come on,” she mutters, then throws his words back at him with a shaky laugh. “When’s the last time you were kissed?”

But he doesn’t laugh.

“Isn’t that kinda cheesy?” she says as she stares at him and scrunches her nose with a face that says “this is cringe.”

“Probably,” he says. “But I still want to know.”

Too quickly, Lena stands up from the table, not enough air to breathe, and their need for space to walk. She turns to the wall and then reaches for the marker again, feigning the search for a cap she already holds.

“We can’t talk about this stuff in class.”

He doesn’t rise. Just the smallest of head tilts as he stares at her from beneath his lashes. “Maybe we don’t need to be in the classroom all the time.

She spins. “You think it’s a game?

“No,” he says. “You’re just dying for a precedent to be set so you don’t have to.”

Silence. Raw. Electric.

She takes two steps in his direction, only half-conscious that she’s doing it now even as her heels snap back twice against the floor. “You don’t know me, Jace.”

“I know what last night was about,” she says quietly.

“I know you read my paper… and I know you did it in that low voice of yours.” His voice is getting softer.

She swallows, eyes flicking to his. “I need you to focus.”

“I know,” he says. His voice is gentler than she expects.

Welcome back to the real world, she thinks. The place where that kind of vulnerability feels dangerous.

Somewhere outside, the moment shatters.

A voice cuts through the quiet like a slap.

“Never at work, old man.”

Lena flinches, head turning toward the open window. Across the courtyard, Bryan and Leon, two maintenance workers from campus, are bickering again. Leon's inside the supply room, voice muffled but irritated. Bryan's halfway out the window with a wrench in one hand and a Gatorade in the other.

“I told you it’s not the belt,” Leon grumbles. “It’s the damn timing again.”

“Yeah, well,” Bryan calls back, “maybe if you hadn’t bypassed the switch panel like a caveman, we wouldn’t be here.”

Their voices echo across the courtyard, oblivious to the room they’ve just invaded with their noise.

Lena freezes.

The moment between her and Jace collapses, the tension vanishing like vapor. But the heat lingers—low and thick in her belly, her skin still buzzing.

“You’re imagining things,” she mutters, voice low.

Jace stands slowly. Under the flat flicker of the fluorescent light, his silhouette sharpens—tall, unrushed, and watching her.

 “Am I?” he asks, stepping closer.

She takes a step back — then, one, a single one is all it takes — and trips over her desk. He stops two feet from her, close enough for them to touch, if one or the other were to budge even an inch.

“You want all this to stop,” he says quietly: “tell me.”

She opens her mouth. Closes it again.

The room is silent, except for the hum of the fan above.

He doesn't smile. Doesn't gloat. He's just going to stare at her face, as if he's afraid she'll vanish if he blinks.

“I’m gonna go away,” he says, his voice clotted with kept-in feeling. “But you have to understand — I was serious. What I wrote.”

She nods, barely.

“And I’ll stop pushing. If that’s what you want.”

But that’s the thing. She doesn’t know what she wants. Only what she’s afraid of. What she’s not supposed to like. What could happen if this line is crossed, not so much for ethical as emotional reasons. The fact was, Lena wasn’t sure how she could get hurt again, at least not by him.

She shifts, just until the desk stops digging into her lower back.

“You don’t have to go,” she says softly, horribly, contrary to every good impulse. “We have ten minutes of class remaining.”

His brows lift subtly. “Alright.”

He is seated once more, but something in the room has changed. It’s not the distance. It’s the air. Thicker now. Charged.

Lena gets off the bed and crosses the room to her desk, where she sits down and lifts the flap of her laptop open, her fingers moving across the trackpad with more confidence than with intent. "Let's review your draft. We'll keep it… constructive."

He nods.

She scrolls to his last paragraph and reads it aloud.

“The ink disappears, but the memory remains there. I can cover up the mark, but I can’t cover up the pain. And maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be — some things are meant to stick, not to slip away.”

She stops. Her throat tightens.

“You wrote this?”

He shrugs. “Sometimes stuff just comes out. You see it and you snatch it or you lose it.”

She swallows hard. “It’s good.”

“The sort of thing you get for a rent-a-hall blue-collar dropout?”

“No,” she says quickly. “Too pretty with someone going, you should just walk away.”

That gets a reaction. His mouth flickers — not a smirk, but something gentler. Something real.

“I used to sit in the back of your class,” he says, quieter now. “Not cause I didn’t care. I just… couldn’t,” he could not look at her and concentrate.

She flinches slightly.

“You were the one who saw through all the noise,” he says. “Even back then.”

“Jace…”

“I’m not trying to make your life harder,” he says, looking her in the eye. “But I’m not gonna lie, though. You enter a room, and it’s as if the whole damn room resets.”

Lena begins to sit back down in her chair, gingerly. Her hand moves over her sternum — it’s a reflex, thoughtless, a way to keep herself from shattering by holding herself together, holding onto her bones.

He watches that, too.

“You don’t have to say anything,” he says. “So … I give up, am I way off base? If you aren’t, it just makes me warm; I can let go. No pressure.”

She wants to lie. Would like to have an easy “No.” Cleanly. But her silence betrays her.

“I should be warning you not to,” she says.

“But you’re not.”

“No.”

He gets back up, and this time he’s not coming for her. Quietly, he packs his bags. But right as he is about to go, he whirls at the door.

“See you next time, Ms. Hayes.

It’s the way he says it. Like a promise. Like a warning.

And then he’s gone.

Lena doesn’t move right away.

The door clicks softly, then louder than it should. It’s a silence that feels like the silence after something seismic, not a bang or crash, but an earthquake in the earth. A deep one. The kind that shifts the furniture of your interior world.

She massages her temples slowly, then breathes out slowly and leans back in her chair. The room is too hot again, her skin has not stopped crawling with heat since the moment he walked in. She stares, blinking, at her screen, but the letters are white, hollow. The cursor blinks, too fast, too defiant, as if mocking her, daring her to write something she can't utter.

She reaches down and grabs his paper, rereads it, and the line that’s been pounding through her head like a second heartbeat comes back: My memory can cover the scar, but the memory will come back. Cover the scar, but I still remember the pain.

Why does that look like something he wrote to her?

She sets the page aside, crosses her arms on her desk, and rests her chin there, just for a second.

She’s never done this before. Never before, in 17 years as a teacher.

He’s what—twenty-four?

She’s thirty-six.

Twelve years.

That should be lethal to the thought.

She tells herself it wouldn’t even work — that he’s chasing some half-baked fantasy, that this is about his once-hot teacher and he’ll brag about it over beers later to his friends. Perhaps even make a joke of it.

But that’s not how he’s seeing her now. But this? Jace?

He was never just a face. Not just the next month, but also to whom to deliver information. Yes, there was something queer about him — something wild, long years ago. Not unsafe, exactly, but unsettled in a way that made it itch in her mind as to his origins, this wounded face.

And now here he is once more, older and more articulate, now pained by what he does to her.

It’s not fair.

It’s not professional.

It’s not allowed.

But she’s never been someone to mix up morals with chemistry.

Finally, she raises herself from the bed and closes her laptop with a soft clack. She collects the papers, including his, and shoves them into her satchel more roughly than is called for.

Out in the hallway, the building is like a spooky ghost town. The lights are out in most of the classrooms. At the far end of the hallway, there’s a janitor’s cart, and beyond a set of double doors, someone hums off-key.

Her heels stomp in time along the linoleum — a metronome to thoughts she's unable to still. She tells herself she'll shrug this off by morning, that it's just a one-time moment. She will be tougher next week. Colder. Less vulnerable.

But then her phone buzzes.

She stops. Pulls it out.

Unknown Number:

Still thinking about that line?

Her stomach flips.

She doesn’t reply. But she doesn’t delete it.

She slips the phone back into her purse and focuses on steadying her hand, which is shaking. And the hallway's too quiet again, and it's as if the world is holding its breath to see what she'll do next. She doesn't let it get to her.

The wind has increased outside. It mashes her hair in front of her when she releases her car lock, and she wrenches the door open harder than she needs to. The engine turns over, the heater awakens with its customary wheeze, and for a moment she sits there — hands on the wheel, forehead barely touching the rim — and she breathes.

Still thinking about that line.

God.

She should block the number. She should file something, mutter something, and restore the line before it goes too far. But a flicker of something else is under her skin — something mean and electric—and she can’t shake it until it is extinguished.

Not yet.

She drives home with the windows half open, hoping that the wind will clear her thoughts. It doesn't.

The lights are off, and the air is stale by the time she shambles into her apartment. Her shoes thud against the floor, and she lets her bag drop at the edge of the kitchen counter and pours herself a glass of wine she doesn't deserve. She doesn't bother with dinner.

She kicks her slacks away with a shoe, unbuttons, and pulls off the blouse, the pantyhose sliding down to the floor, along with the lacy underwear she shouldn't have worn. She stands there, mute, for a moment. The mirror on the wall above the couch catches a glimpse — a single, naked shoulder, the shallow downward dip of her spine, a woman who looks tired and flushed, and nothing like the Lena who stood at the front of her classroom not so many hours ago.

She takes her wine and settles down on the couch, pulling the blanket tightly around her just as though it could protect her from herself.

The TV mutters in the background, and how can her mind keep up? Her mind is back in that room, in that line, on his purposeful curl of the fingers around that pen. On the pause, he took before he asked her if she'd ever written anything that scared her.

She had. She still does.

But tonight?

Tonight, what frightened her was the yearning to say yes.

Halfway through her wine, she realizes she’s clenching her phone and still staring at that message.

Still not deleting it.

Still thinking about that line?

She taps once. Then again. Opens the message thread. It’s just that one.

She types a reply—just one word.

Maybe.

Then deletes it before sending.

Instead, she types:

[Lena]: Lose the hoodie next time. It’s not fooling anyone.

She hovers.

Then, press send.

It is like a scratch from a match to her.

She chugs the rest of the wine and sets the glass down.

Her phone buzzes from across the room.

She picks it up.

[Jace]: So you are telling me to wear less? Got it.

Her mouth goes dry.

There’s no emoji. No wink. No follow-up. It’s there in the words alone, measured and raw, raining upon the outrage landscape like he knew the nerve he was hitting and was going to hit it anyway.

She doesn’t reply. Can’t. There’s too much blood in her cheeks, too much heat prickling behind her knees, too much ache pooling between her legs for her to think of anything clever.

She looks up at the ceiling and counts breaths as if she’s back in grad school, taking her orals.

One.

Two.

Three.

Eventually, she drifts off to sleep, curled up in her blanket armor, the phone still on her chest, Jace Maddox still behind her eyelids.

He’s early again for the next class. Five minutes this time. Long enough to be sure it wasn’t a fluke.

She’s halfway through wiping off the board when she hears him. That walk. That weight.

Everything in the room is different when he appears to enter. Or maybe it’s her.

She doesn’t say hello to him this time. Only a wink, and it's business as usual.

[Jace]: “What scandal?”

That's what he texts her—like the message he sent earlier hadn't already unraveled her completely the moment she read it.

He unzips his backpack all quietly; there’s no parade or anything. Then he opens his notebook. Only this time, the sleeves are rolled up —on purpose. He doesn’t wear the hoodie. He doesn’t have to.

She keeps looking at his forearms. The tendons will flex when he uncaps his pen. She hates herself for it a little.

“New prompt?” he asks, voice low.

She yanks open her folder and wordlessly shoves the worksheet at him. Their fingers brush. Just barely.

And it’s enough.

He smiles, as if he had felt it as well, like he knows.

Tonight’s lesson is narrative pacing — how to slow time down in all of the right places, how to stretch a heartbeat across the spread of a page. She doesn’t miss the irony.

Tonight, for once, she has a whole class.

“Your story should be a slow burn,” she tells the room. “You don’t sprint to the climax. You earn it.”

Someone chuckles. Jace doesn’t.

He’s looking at her again, unavailable and very much there as though he were attempting to memorize. And maybe he is.

About halfway through class, he passes her a sheet. It’s nowhere in the assignment. A single paragraph it was, and in the Mollye fine lines I had notched.

She wasn’t going to rush in where angels feared to tread. But she knew exactly where to stand so the smoke wouldn’t make her dizzy. And him? He wasn’t the fire. He was the inhale.

She reads it.

Rereads it.

Then she folds it in half and slips it into her folder as if it were her secret.

Because it is.

And she isn’t going to give it back.

[Author’s Note]

🔥 Pretending the tension isn’t there won’t last forever. In Chapter Three, someone’s about to slip…