The silence in the room was so thick it felt like fabric brushing against skin, suffocating, smooth, and impossible to ignore.
Professor Lucien Ashthorne stood at the front of the lecture hall like a man carved from myth. Today, he wore a fitted charcoal waistcoat over a black dress shirt, sleeves rolled up just enough to reveal lean, veined forearms and silver cufflinks that gleamed like slivers of moonlight. Every detail about him was calculated but not in a try-hard way. No. He just was. Unreachable. Untouchable. And yet, every student leaned forward as if trying to get closer to a flame they knew would burn them.
Elias sat in the third row, stiff as marble, hands clenched in his lap beneath the edge of the desk. He hadn't slept well the night before. Couldn't. Every time he closed his eyes, the professor's brief glance — just that single heartbeat of contact — replayed in his mind like a curse.
He felt… seen.
But not in the way he was used to, not like the suspicious looks he'd learned to dodge his entire life. This was different. Like Lucien Ashthorne had looked through him, not at him. Stripped him bare.
"Before we begin today's topic," Lucien's voice rolled across the room like thunder in velvet, "I want to address one thing."
Elias blinked. Lucien was looking down at a clipboard, but the weight of his voice had everyone holding their breath.
"This is not your average literature course. You will not pass by simply reading textbook answers or quoting dead poets. I expect thinking. Sharp, uncomfortable, inconvenient thinking. If you are not prepared for that" he raised his eyes, "you should leave now."
No one moved. Even Mara, who always liked to whisper during lectures, was frozen.
"Good," Lucien said, finally placing the clipboard down. "Let's talk about obsession."
Elias's spine straightened involuntarily.
"Obsession in literature is often romanticized. But true obsession," Lucien continued, walking slowly across the front of the room, his steps like clockwork, "is ugly. Desperate. It reveals more about the obsessor than the object."
He paused in front of the middle row. Elias felt Lucien's presence shift closer.
"It starts in silence," Lucien said, eyes grazing the room, "with one glance too long. A word remembered. A scent that lingers."
The class was dead quiet.
Lucien looked directly at Elias.
"And then," he said, voice suddenly low, "it grows. Without permission."
Elias's throat dried. He looked away, quickly but it was too late. His heart was pounding.
Why is he looking at me like that?
"Page 114 in your readers. 'The Sickness of Want,'" Lucien said abruptly, turning toward the blackboard.
Elias blinked hard. Was that a line from the lesson or something else?
He opened his book, but the words swam.
Next to him, Calum, the overly confident alpha who always tried too hard leaned in and whispered, "He's intense, huh?"
Elias didn't answer. He was too busy trying to keep his breathing steady.
Across the aisle, Nadia, a bubbly beta girl who loved drama scribbled something in her notebook and passed it to her friend. Elias caught a glimpse of the page:
"New prof is HOT but scary af"
Another note followed:
"Who was he STARING at omg!"
He swallowed and tried to ignore the burn crawling up his neck.
The class continued, with Lucien picking apart the text line by line, challenging interpretations, pushing buttons. When Mara tried to give a flowery answer, he cut her off not cruelly, but with surgical precision.
"I'm not interested in pretty. Give me truth," he said.
By the time the bell rang, Elias was exhausted not from the lesson, but from the tension. Lucien hadn't looked at him again, not directly. But Elias felt it. That strange pull. The way something in the room shifted whenever Lucien moved.
As students gathered their things and trickled out, Lucien stood at the podium, stacking papers. His eyes lifted briefly just once.
Elias hesitated.
Lucien tilted his head ever so slightly, almost like a silent question.
Elias turned and walked away, heart hammering. He didn't look back.
But he felt it again.
That gaze.
That weight.
Like being marked.