Tales of Desire
(Daniel's POV)
I never expected one student to crack the careful distance I had maintained for twelve years of teaching, yet there she was on that rainy Thursday afternoon, sitting in the front row of my advanced literature seminar with her notebook open but untouched while every other pen in the room scratched furiously across paper. The lecture hall smelled of damp wool and old oak, the kind of scent that usually grounded me in the familiar rhythm of my days, but today it felt heavier, as though the rain outside had seeped through the tall arched windows and settled into the very air we breathed. I had been speaking about moral restraint in Victorian fiction, tracing the way authors layere