MasukLENNON
Leonard's leg felt like lead as he climbed the stone steps to the lecture hall. Every muscle in his body ached in a way that was both foreign and humiliatingly familiar. It was a deep, intimate soreness that pulsed with every step.
He had showered twice this morning, scalding hot, then ice cold, trying to scrub away the evidence of last night.
The marks on his hips were already blooming into bruises shaped like fingerprints. The bite on his shoulder throbbed beneath his hoodie. And lower, he still felt stretched open, claimed like his body had been rewritten in someone else's handwriting.
He told himself he was fine. He was not fine. He was everything but fine.
The double doors loomed ahead. He was late, and the thought of those cold grey eyes flicking to him in disapproval made his stomach flip in a way that had nothing to do with fear. He slipped inside just as the clock hit 9:34.
The hall was already full, 200 students hunched over laptops and notebooks. Lennon kept his hood up, head down and beelined for the back row, his and Archer's usual spot.
The moment Lennon sat down, he thought he should have known better. Firstly, his raging storm of a best friend, Archer, was not there to distract him. And secondly, from the place he sat, it was like having a perfect view of the podium where Damien Grayson stood.
He was dangerously breathtaking. Black suit, crisp white shirt, sleeves rolled once to reveal strong forearms inked with swirling black lines that disappeared beneath expensive cotton. His hair was pushed back a few strands falling forward like he'd drawn impatient fingers through it. And his eyes were unmistakably on Lennon. They didn't move, not once. Not even for the first thirty minutes of lecture that felt like an eternity.
Then, as if the universe had smiled upon him, Archer walked into the hall with a shit-eating grin and headed straight for the seat right next to Lennon.
The moment Archer settled down, he leaned into Lennon's space and said, “I don't know if you noticed but 10 o'clock, that daddy Grayson is literally eye fucking you in front of the whole class.”
Lennon's breath punched out of him. His face went up in flames.
"Shut up," he whisper yelled at Archer.
"Make me," he replied, eyes sparkling. Lennon elbowed him so hard he wheezed and stared at the notebook on his lap for the rest of the lecture.
Lennon squirmed. He couldn't help it. His thighs pressed together under the desk, trying to ease the sudden throb between them. He was half hard and mortified. His notebook remained blank.
He was too busy remembering: the rug under his knees, the blindfold, that voice.
Fuck.
When the lecture ended, students surged toward the doors.
Archer had hurriedly left as well, saying that he had other engagements.
Lennon stayed rooted, knuckles white around the edge of his desk. He told himself he'd wait until the room emptied, then he'd bolt.
He didn't bolt.
Grayson closed his laptop with a soft, deliberate click.
“Mr. Kessler.”
Lennon's head jerked up. Grayson was watching him with the faintest tilt of his head. Like a wolf deciding whether the rabbit was worth chasing.
“A word.”
It wasn't a request.
The last students trickled out and left them both alone.
Him, Lennon Kessler, was alone in the lecture hall with his hot professor, Damien Grayson.
Lennon thought the day couldn't get worse.
Silence stretched. Lennon stood on shaky legs and made his way down the aisle. Each step felt like walking toward a guillotine. When he reached the front, he stopped a safe three feet away.
Grayson didn't let him keep it.
He stepped forward once, twice, until Lennon had to tip his head back to hold eye contact. Up close he smelled like cedar and something musky.
“You were late,” Grayson said, almost softly.
“I… Sorry, traffic.” That was a lie. Grayson's gaze dipped to Lennon's mouth, then lower, lingering on the faint red mark peeking above his collar. When he spoke again, his voice was... deeper.
“Traffic,” he repeated in an almost amused tone. “Interesting.”
Lennon's heart slammed against his ribs. “I'll make sure it doesn't happen again, Professor.”
“See that you do,” Grayson said, then paused, his eyes flicked back up, pinning Lennon in place.
“You seem distracted today, Mr. Kessler. Everything all right?”
Lennon opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again.
“I'm fine,” he managed a bit too quickly, voice cracking like a fourteen year old’s. Grayson’s lips curved, not quite a smile, but it made Lennon weak in the knees.
“Are you?” he murmured. “You look...” His gaze dragged down Lennon's body, again slow and unnerving, “uncomfortable.”
Lennon's knees nearly buckled. “I'm good,” he lied again.
“Great, perfect, I should...” He gestured vaguely toward the door. Grayson didn't move, didn't even step back, just watched him with that unnerving patience.
Lennon's eyes betrayed him then, flicking down before he could stop himself.
And froze.
The front of Grayson's slacks was stretched tight, the unmistakable ridge of a hard om straining against his pants, thick and obvious.
Lennon's breath caught so sharply it hurt. No, no way, it was just biology. Or maybe Grayson had gotten a text from some girlfriend, some hot colleague, some...
His brain short-circuited. Because Grayson just shifted just slightly and the movement made the fabric pull tighter, outlining every inch.
Lennon's mouth went dry. He jerked his gaze up, cheeks burning. Grayson was watching him with unblinking intensity. Something dark and knowing flickering behind storm-grey eyes. “Something wrong, Mr. Kessler?” Grayson asked softly.
Lennon shook his head too fast. No, I'm fine, he stuttered. Grayson's gaze dropped deliberately to his own crotch, then back up, the corner of his mouth twitching.
Heat flooded Lennon's face, his chest, his dick. He was rock hard himself now. Trapped behind denim, and the idea that Grayson could see it didn't seem to deter his dick.
Lennon's knees nearly gave out when Grayson leaned in, just enough that his next words brushed the shell of Lennon's ear.
“Run along now, Mr. Kessler. I wouldn't want to get in the way of your debaucheries.”
Lennon made a strangled sound. Grayson pulled back, expression cool and composed, as if he hadn't just set the entire room on fire. He gathered his laptop, slid it into a leather satchel and started for the door.
At the threshold, he paused, not turning around. “See you on Wednesday, Mr. Kessler,” he said over his shoulder. “Try not to be late again.” The door clicked shut. Lennon stood rooted to the spot, shaking, cock throbbing painfully against his zipper. Debauchery. Professor Damien had just used the word. While rock ha
rd.
Lennon dragged both hands through his hair and whispered to the empty room, voice cracking: “Fuck.”
The email had been sent at four fifty-three PM from an address that resolved to nothing, a string of randomized characters at a domain that Roman's people would take approximately forty minutes to trace back to a burner account purchased with cash at a store in New Jersey two weeks ago.Damien knew this because Roman told him twelve minutes after the email arrived, while Lennon was still sitting in the office chair reading the message for the third time.The photos referenced were not specified. That was deliberate, the ambiguity was the point, a way of making the recipient's imagination do the work. But Lennon could think of at least four separate moments over the last two months that, if captured, would be sufficient. The corridor outside the faculty lounge where Damien had pushed him against the wall one evening and kissed him. His father's PI had been on campus for weeks. The math was not complicated."We need to know what they actually have," Roman said, from the doorway. "Befor
Archer had hacked the camera feed using a laptop, a coffee shop's open Wi-Fi, and what he described as “intuition and personal charisma,” which Lennon chose not to examine too closely.The footage was grainy and shot at an angle that caught the east service road from above the campus security system, which Archer had accessed through what he called a “creative interpretation” of publicly available network infrastructure. He had the relevant clip pulled up and paused on a still that showed the shooter's vehicle pulling away from the service road at speed.Roman took the laptop from him. He watched the clip twice. He set the laptop on the desk and looked at Archer with the expression he had been deploying on Archer recently, which was not quite assessment and not quite something else and occupied an uncomfortable middle ground that Archer appeared to find extremely encouraging."You accessed the campus security network," Roman said."I accessed a network that the campus security system
Richard Kessler walked into the English building at four-seventeen PM like he owned it.He had two aides with him and the particular bearing of a man who had never once in his adult life waited for anything to be offered before taking it. He spoke to the department secretary for approximately ninety seconds, during which time the secretary looked progressively less comfortable, and then he was in the hallway, moving toward the stairs, with campus security trailing behind him at a distance that suggested they were escorting him without having been entirely sure they could stop him.Lennon met him at the bottom of the second-floor landing.He had had seven minutes to prepare for this. He had spent four of them listening to Damien tell him what to say and three of them deciding which parts of that he could actually deliver with a straight face. His arm still had traces of Damien's blood on the inside of the sleeve where the fabric had pressed against the wound. He had turned the cuff ba
The graze was two inches long and not deep.Lennon found this out by pulling Damien's sleeve up with hands that were not entirely steady and looking at it himself because Damien had said “I'm fine’ in a tone that did not constitute medical information. The skin was torn and bleeding freely but the bone was intact, and the wound was clean at the edges. Lennon had taken a first aid course his sophomore year because Archer had dared him to and had promptly forgotten most of it, but he remembered enough to know that this was not the bad version of what a gunshot wound looked like.He pressed the folded sleeve of his own hoodie against it anyway and held it there."I said I'm fine," Damien said."I heard you." Lennon did not move his hand. "I am doing this anyway."They were in the small storage room adjacent to the office, door shut, the overhead light flickering slightly. Roman had put them here while his people swept the building. Lennon had not argued. He had needed somewhere that w
The campus hold had been in effect for eleven minutes when Lennon decided he was not going to stay in the lecture hall.He had told himself he would. He had sat in the back row with his phone in his hand and the emergency alert still blinking on the screen. He listened to the professor at the front telling everyone to remain calm and stay seated, he had sat where for approximately four minutes before his brain caught up to the one specific detail that mattered.Damien's office was on the north side of the building.The security officer had said the incident was near the north path.Lennon was already standing before he had finished the thought. The student next to him looked up. He did not explain, he picked up his bag and walked out the side door into the corridor and then out the building's east exit into the afternoon and kept moving.He texted Damien while he walked. “Where are you.”No reply.He texted again. “Damien.”Still nothing.He walked faster.The English building was qu
The news arrived in Lennon's phone at seven forty-two the next morning and by seven forty-five he had read the message four times and was still sitting on the kitchen counter staring at it.“He kissed me back Lennon. Roman Grayson kissed me back in a stairwell and then walked away like he was leaving a board meeting. I have not slept, i feel incredible and insane. I feel incredibly insane.”Lennon typed back: “I thought you kissed him first.”“The second half was mutual. Are you home? I need to talk about this in person.”“I have Damien's office hours in an hour.”“Perfect. I will come. He won't mind.”He would absolutely mind, Lennon thought. He typed “fine” anyway and put the phone in his pocket.Damien came into the kitchen already dressed, took one look at Lennon's face, and said: "What.""Archer kissed Roman."Damien poured his coffee. He said nothing for a moment, set the pot down and picked up the mug. "When.""Yesterday, at the east building stairwell apparently."A pause. "An







