Rachel Ellis had been practicing her intro for a month.

  She could speak extemporaneously when she needed to. The first day of a lab section just wasn’t the moment to gamble. It was the moment students decided whether you were competent, whether you were strict, whether you were safe to email at midnight, or whether you would fold if someone complained loudly enough.

  So she’d practiced. In the mirror, once. In her head, a dozen times. In the shower, because acoustics were flattering and her apartment didn’t judge her for having stress rituals.

  She’d rehearsed the cadence, the pauses, the little jokes that made her seem human without giving away too much. She’d tested the way her name sounded with authority behind it.

  I’m Rachel Ellis. I am the Lead Instructor for this laboratory section.

  It was muscle memory now—something she could do even when her brain wasn’t cooperating.

  Thank God.

  Because her mind was anywhere but in that classroom.

  Her thoughts kept slipping across the hall: the couch, the dim screen, the illegal early-2000s jokes, Noah’s quiet laugh. His hand at her waist. His cheek under her lips. Rae—said like it belonged in his mouth.

  And then Rachel walked into Lab 211C and found him sitting in the middle row.

  Noah Bennett.

  In a lab coat unmarred by any accidents or experience, in the seat of a student, with his notebook set out neatly like he had never once been the kind of person who showed up unprepared. He looked up at her, and for a single, merciless second his face was just his face—the one she’d learned over the past weeks: the attentive eyes, the dry humor waiting behind them, the calm that wasn’t emptiness but choice.

  Then his face shifted. Horror, small and immediate.

  Rachel’s mind blanked.

  It was a clean snap—like a theory meeting evidence and collapsing.

  Her practiced assumptions reeled through her head like loose papers in a gust:

  He has to be a grad student. He lives in the building. He cooks chili. He owns a stud finder. He’s—Rachel’s eyes flicked to the new notebook, the new pen, the absence of Master’s-program fatigue. Eighteen. Nineteen. Not mid-20s. Not even close.

  A student. Her student.

  Rachel felt her stomach drop with such force she nearly missed her own footsteps.

  She kept walking because stopping would have been worse. Stopping would have meant acknowledging, in front of a room full of first-years, that her life had just fallen through a trapdoor.

  She crossed to the front bench and set her clipboard down with hands that felt strangely distant from her body.

  Her intro waited in her throat, ready, a rope she could grab.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  Rachel inhaled. Her gaze, traitorous, found Noah again. He was looking at her like he’d just watched an elevator cable snap.

  Rachel forced herself not to flinch. Professional. Calm. Competent. She latched onto the words like safety rails.

  She looked at the clipboard instead. She looked at the printed roster with names that suddenly meant something different.

  Noah Bennett.

  Black ink. Clean font. Official.

  Rachel’s throat tightened. She blinked once—hard—and lifted her eyes to the room.

  The students looked back at her with the blank expectancy of people who had no idea they were witnessing the beginning of someone else’s crisis.

  Rachel smiled. It was the smile she used in meetings. The smile that meant I have this under control, even when the building was on fire.

  “Good morning,” she heard herself say, voice steady, and somewhere deep inside her, a part of her clung to the miracle of that steadiness like it was proof she wasn’t about to implode. “I’m Rachel Ellis. I am the Lead Instructor for this laboratory section.”

  The words came out exactly as practiced. Rachel almost hated them for that.

  She taught on autopilot—eyewash station, goggles, attendance—her voice steady while her mind screamed in a separate room.

  Her eyes avoided Noah like direct eye contact was flammable. Every instinct in her wanted to look—wanted to check if he was still there, wanted to see whether his expression matched the horror blooming in her chest.

  She didn't. She couldn’t. She kept her gaze moving over the class, anchoring herself in neutral faces, in procedure, in the familiar comfort of rules.

  Every now and then, she felt it anyway—his attention, steady and silent, like a hand hovering near her elbow without touching.

  Once—only once—she let herself glance at him. It was involuntary, like checking a wound.

  Noah met her eyes immediately. The confusion from earlier was gone—replaced by the cold click of understanding. And something that looked dangerously like distance.

  She looked away so fast it felt like a physical yank.

  The rest of the hour passed in a blur of external competence masking internal catastrophe.

  When the class finally ended and the students began packing up, Rachel felt a faint, dizzy relief. She dismissed them with a practiced closing line, reminding them about pre-lab reading, about goggles, about showing up on time.

  Her voice did not shake.

  Her hands did, slightly, when she began stacking papers.

  As the last students filed out, Rachel kept her head down. She could not look up and see him standing there. She could not see his face in this context—student, subordinate, forbidden—and reconcile it with the face she’d kissed last night.

  A terrible early 2000s comedy, her brain supplied, absurdly. Their laughter. The way he’d leaned closer and she’d leaned further. The way the jazz had been acceptable, somehow, because the room had been warm and dim and he’d been Noah.

  A boy, her brain supplied, and the word felt like an insult.

  Noah had the composure and maturity of the twenty-four-year-old she’d convinced herself he was.

  But he wasn’t.

  Rachel’s hands slowed over the stack of papers. She forced them to keep moving.

  She heard the lab empty around her, felt the last footfalls fade. She didn’t turn. She didn’t breathe properly until she heard the final door click.

  Then her phone buzzed in her pocket and reminded her that she still had tools.

  Texting was the only thing she trusted right now: safe, controlled, expressionless.

  Rachel pulled out her phone. She scrolled up, just once, and saw the last exchange from last night, glowing on the screen like an artifact from a different life.

  Rachel: Will I see you later?

  Noah: If I’m lucky.

  Rachel: You are.

  Rachel closed her eyes for a second.

  You are.

  God.

  She typed quickly, precise and spare, as if too many words would make her fall apart.

  Meet me. 2nd floor, Chemistry Building — East Wing. Hallway past Room 317. Seminar room at the end (319). 10 minutes.

  She hit send before she could reconsider.

  Then she set the phone down, pressed both palms flat on the front bench, and stared at the stainless-steel surface until her vision steadied.

  The lab was hers. It was her space. It was her job. It was the one place she could be competent without having to explain herself.

  Across the hall, a couch existed like an invitation. Soft jazz haunted the back of her mind. And Noah—Noah was ten minutes away, whether she was ready or not.

  Rachel closed her eyes.

  Then she opened them, picked up her clipboard, and walked out of the lab with her shoulders squared and her heartbeat trying to climb out of her throat.