Chapter 15: Six Days

|HER POV|

I almost didn't go.

I stood in my dormitory doorway for forty seconds with the library book under my arm and my coat half-on, telling myself I was returning it because I was done with it, because leaving borrowed things unreturned was a habit I didn't have, because it was simply practical to return it before term ended and the lending system closed.

Not because the fourth floor study room was where he would be.

Not because six days felt suddenly very short.

Practical, I told myself. Go.

I went.

The building was empty in the specific way that buildings were empty when everyone had somewhere louder to be. The end-of-term gala was downstairs — I'd heard it from my room, the specific quality of institutional celebration, music and voices and the particular social performance of people who had survived a semester and needed everyone to know it. Saoirse had texted at eight: come down, there's champagne, I found Petra, please for the love of god come down.

I had not gone down.

I climbed to the fourth floor and pushed open the study room door and found him there, which I had known I would, which was the part I wasn't examining closely.

Dark turtleneck. The glasses that had stopped looking like a disguise three months ago. Notebook open, pen not moving.

He was waiting. The thought arrived and I filed it immediately under noted, moving on.

I set the book on the table. He looked at it, then at me. I sat down. Opened my own notebook. The radiator knocked in the corner. Rain against the window. The lamp threw its amber circle and we worked in parallel for twenty minutes and the silence had the specific pressure of everything the courtyard conversation had left in the air between us, the weight of I have been moving toward you since before you had a name sitting unresolved and heavy and entirely present.

I looked up. He was already looking at me.

The silence that followed was four seconds too long to be accidental.

I looked back at my notes. Read the same line twice. Looked up again.

He was still looking.

"You're staring," I said.

"Yes."

"That's not a denial."

"No."

I set my pen down. Picked it up. Set it down again. Outside the narrow window the city lights blurred through the rain and the gala noise filtered up faintly from the floors below, distant enough to make this room feel like its own separate world.

Six days, I thought. Six days and then he tells me everything. Six days and then—

"You're doing it again," I said.

"You keep looking at me first," he said. Flat. Accurate.

I looked at my notebook.

He was right, which was the most irritating possible thing he could be.

I had been looking first for weeks. The formal. The courtyard. The library table every evening for three months. I had been telling myself it was observation, assessment, the natural attention you gave to a variable in your environment that hadn't resolved into a complete picture yet.

It was not that. It had not been that for a long time.

I was sixteen years old and I had spent my entire life making myself not need things, and somewhere between a September index system argument and a December courtyard bench, I had started needing something without noticing until the need was already structural.

This was inconvenient.

Profoundly inconvenient.

I stood up.

Not to leave. Just because sitting still had become impossible in the specific way it became impossible when a decision was already made and the body had understood before the mind had finished the authorization process. I went to the window. Looked at the rain. Listened to the distant music from the gala, the radiator ticking, his quiet breathing behind me.

Say something sensible, I thought. Be practical. Turn around, take your notebook, say goodnight.

I turned around.

He had stood too. He was three feet away, which was the distance that had been reducing since September with the specific patience of someone who had decided where they were going and had not been in a hurry to get there because they had already waited four years and a few more months was not a significant variable.

I looked at him.

The silver-gray eyes without the glasses tonight — he'd set them on the table at some point, I registered this distantly — and the composed expression doing, as always, more work than it appeared to, and something underneath the composure that I had been watching crack incrementally since a winter formal where he'd crossed a floor in front of sixty people without considering the social cost once.

Tell me something, I thought. Give me the managed version. Give me the careful distance.

He said nothing. He just looked at me with the direct, unmanaged attention, and the rain came down outside, and the lamp flickered once in the wind.

I made a decision.

Not the sensible one.

"If I asked you to kiss me," I said, with the specific flat precision of someone presenting a hypothesis, "would you."

The silence that followed lasted exactly long enough for me to consider whether I had actually said that out loud.

I had, apparently, said that out loud.

His expression did something I had no category for — not the composure, not the patience, something underneath both of those that had been building since September and had just been handed a question it had been waiting for without knowing how long it had been waiting.

"I would not need to be asked," he said.

I looked at him for one more second.

Then I closed the distance.

The fourth-floor study room was a sanctuary of dust and stale air. It was a Friday night, the final week of term, and the rest of the student body was downstairs, losing their minds at the end-of-term gala. Here, the only sound was the radiator’s intermittent, metallic rattle and the rhythmic lash of rain against the narrow, leaded window. The contact in the east building was likely logging my late-night arrival, but for the first time in four years, I didn't care if the report mentioned who I was meeting.

I stepped inside, the library book tucked against my ribs, and found him there. He was sitting at the scarred oak table, his notebook open, but he wasn’t writing. He was simply waiting. He didn't look up when the door clicked shut, but the way his posture tightened—a subtle, predatory stillness—told me he’d been tracking my arrival since I hit the stairwell.

I set the book down. He didn't acknowledge the movement, but he shifted, his gaze finally dragging away from the empty wall to meet mine. We worked in silence for twenty minutes. It wasn't the comfortable silence of colleagues; it was a pressurized, volatile thing. It carried the weight of the courtyard conversation, the eight days remaining, and everything still unsaid.

I looked up, my pen hovering over my notes. He was already looking at me.

Neither of us looked away. The intensity of it made my lungs feel too small.

"Stop looking at me like that," I said. My voice was brittle.

"Like what?" he asked. His voice was a low, dark timber that seemed to vibrate in the floorboards.

"Like you’ve already decided something."

"I decided a long time ago," he replied.

I closed my notebook. He closed his. I stood and walked to the window—not leaving, just needing to move, to put space between the electricity of the room and the sudden, frantic thrumming of my own heart. I stared out at the rain-streaked dark, the city lights below blurring into smears of gold and neon. I heard him rise, the scrape of his chair against the carpet, and then the quiet, heavy tread of his boots as he closed the distance.

He stopped just behind me. He didn't touch me, but the heat radiating from him was a physical weight. I turned toward him.

He reached up and fixed the strand of hair I never managed to keep pinned—the back of his fingers barely grazing my jaw—and didn't move his hand away.

"You should have told me sooner," I whispered.

"I know."

"I’m still angry about that."

"I know that, too."

I looked up into his eyes, searching for the mask, but it was gone. There was only the raw, unchecked intensity of a man who had spent four centuries learning how to control everything, only to find himself completely unraveled.

"That’s not a reason to stop," I said.

He didn't need further invitation. The scene was slow. Deliberate. Every movement was preceded by a pause where either of us could have stopped—neither of us did. His hands learned the line of my jaw, my collarbone, the curve of my neck. My hands found the collar of his dark turtleneck and held on. His mouth learned the corner of my jaw, the hollow beneath my ear, the place on my neck where my pulse betrayed every suppressed want. I let him. My breathing changed; his composure—four centuries of it—was entirely gone.

"You've waited long enough," he murmured against my skin, his voice low and threaded with a desperate, thickening tension.

The lamp flickered, casting amber ripples over us as I arched into him. My breasts brushed his chest, my nipples tightening against the friction, while his hands grew bolder, mapping my body with a hunger he had hidden behind a thousand dossiers. His cock stirred against my hip, hard and insistent through his trousers, but he moved with exquisite, terrifying care.

One hand threaded into my hair, tilting my head back to expose my throat to his tongue’s slow, possessive exploration. My pussy clenched in response, a slick, searing warmth pooling deep inside me.

"Kae," I whispered, the name falling out of me, undecorated, real.

He stilled for one heartbeat, his breath hitching, then continued with even greater focus, as if I required precision, his free hand cupping the swell of my breast, his thumb circling the peak through the thin cotton until my breath fractured into ragged, involuntary gasps. The distance between us evaporated. My thigh parted instinctively, meeting the rigid, throbbing press of him, and I pulled him closer by the collar, my fingers trembling as we wove through the physical heat.

He called me Eirlys—my name, held in his mouth for years, finally spoken like a claim.

We pulled apart slightly, only enough to gasp for air, our foreheads resting against one another. My hands were still fisted in his collar; his hand remained tangled in my hair, gripping me as if he were afraid I’d vanish into the night.

"End of term is in seven days," I said, my voice breathless.

"Six," he corrected.

I laughed, a dry, incredulous sound. "You’ve been counting."

"Since September."

I slowly released his collar. I took one step back—my choice, my terms. I picked up my notebook, my pulse still hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs.

"I'll see you tomorrow," I said.

"Yes."

I turned to go, but stopped at the door, my hand on the cold brass handle. I didn't turn back.

"When you tell me the rest of it," I said to the shadows. "Tell me all of it. Not the managed version."

"Yes," he promised.

I left then, the door clicking shut behind me. He stayed in the pool of amber lamplight, his hand still raised from where it had been in my hair, the room smelling of coffee, cedarwood, and the lingering, dangerous warmth of a man who had finally let go of the reins, and discovered he didn't want them back.

~~~