Professor Off-Limits

Leverage

LORCAN'S POV

I got back to my office, and it was quiet in a way it only got during classes, and the only sound left was the faint hum of the radiator and the occassional footsteps passing the hallway outside.

I sat behind my desk with a stack of papers I had no intention of grading that moment, my pen resting untouched beside thdm, and my attention was focused on the bottom drawer ony left.

I hadn't opened it since the night I had put that photograph inside, and that was the first time in a long time I had opened that drawer.

There was something I needed to know. Something I couldn't get from watching her in class, the careful way she arranges her face whenever I was near. Those versions of her are oerfomances, calibrated for me, shaped by whatever she thought I wanted to see or what she refused to give me.

What I needed was something unscripted. I needed to see her tested by someone who knew her before any of this—before the detentions, before I existed in her life as anything more than a name on a course schedule—someone who might still held a piece of her I didn't have access to.

A knock on the door broke the quietness—which I guessed was Aleena and Xavier, and I straightened up, arranged the file in front of me and called them to come in.

Aleena walked in first, and I watched her take in the room first. She stopped a few feets away from my desk, her hand gripping the strap of her bag tightly bracing herself for whatever I wanted to say.

Xavier walked in a moment later, his face completely blank, as he stood a few inches from Aleena, a considerable amount of distance set between themselves.

"You were both absent from my class this morning," I said finally, keeping my voice even. "So you'll complete a project together. Consider it a consequence."

"Together?" Xavier's voice came out sharper than he probably intended, his eyes flicking toward Aleena and then quickly away, like he was embarrassed by how fast the objection left his mouth. "With her?"

"I'm not doing a project with him." Aleena said, almost in the same breath, her chin lifting into the posture I had come to recognize well by now—the one she wore before she decided to fight me on something.

I let them both finish. I didn't rush to reply.

"You can refuse," I said, once the silence had stretched long enough to turn uncomfortable again, long enough that I could see Xavier start to fidget with the strap of his bag. "I'll simply have a conversation with the Dean about both your recent attendance records." I let a pause sit there, watching the weight of it settle over the room. "And anything else worth mentioning."

I watched the word land on each of them differently, and the difference itself told me something. Xavier's jaw tightened, and something crossed behind his eyes that read closer to fear than defiance. Aleena's face, by contrast, went still in an entirely different way—not fear exactly, something more controlled.

Good. Let them both sit with the uncertainty of what I might mean. It did more work than a direct threat ever could.

"Sit," I say, gesturing to the two chairs across from my desk. "We'll start now."

They sat, and neither looks at the other while they did it.

I slid a printed excerpt across the desk toward the space between them—the same passage the rest of the class worked through this morning, a short piece on consent as a structural condition rather than a personal choice.

I chose it deliberately, knowing exactly what it would sound like spoken aloud between the two of them, knowing neither of them would catch the second meaning sitting underneath the first.

"Annotate it together. Out loud." I leaned back in my chair, folding my hands, letting my expression settle into something unreadable. "I want to hear your reasoning, not just your conclusions."

Xavier reached for the paper first, more out of habit than actual eagerness, sliding it toward the center of the desk so it sat equidistant between them. He cleared his throat once, glancing at her sideways.

"You start," he said, and there was something almost sheepish in how quickly he yielded the floor—nothing like the confidence I remembered from earlier in the semester, back when he still believed proximity to me made him untouchable in every room he walked into.

Aleena didn't look at him. She pulled the paper closer and read the passage once in silence, her eyes moving steadily down the page, and then she spoke without waiting to be asked twice.

"The argument's about consent being structural, not just personal." Her voice was even and precise, the same tone she used in class when she was certain of an answer and I was surprised of how much I already noticed about her. "The appearance of choice doesn't mean the choice is actually free if the power underneath it is unequal."

"Right." Xavier nodded too fast and eager. "Yeah, that's—that's basically what I was going to say."

"Were you?" She didn't look up from the paper and her tone didn't rise, it was almost bored, and it did more damage to him than an insult would have.

I saw him flinch at it anyway, small and involuntary, his fingers tightening slightly around the pen he's picked up without using.

"Give me an example from the text," I said, mostly to see what happened when I inserted myself back into the exchange, curious whether he'd take the opening or let it pass him by again.

Xavier opened his mouth to say something, but Aleena answered before he got the chance.

"The tenant and landlord example. Page two." She still didn't looked up from the paper. "The tenant can technically say no to unreasonable terms. But if saying no means losing housing, the no isn't really free. It's compliance dressed up as agreement."

I let a beat of silence sit after that, watching Xavier's face carefully for whatever crossed it—and something does, fast, there and gone, an expression I couldn't fully name before he smoothed it away.

"That's—yeah." He cleared his throat again, glancing at me and then quickly away, visibly aware now of how thin his own contribution sounded sitting next to hers. "I was gonna bring that up too."

"You keep saying that." Aleena finally looked up, meeting his eyes directly for the first time since they sat down. "And you keep not doing it."

Something tightened hard in Xavier's jaw, and for a moment I genuinely expected him to snap back at her, some flicker of the old ego rising to meet the challenge. He didn't. He went quiet instead, his shoulders dropping a fraction.

I noted it, filing it away with everything else. Whatever confidence he had built his entire identity around, it didn't survive sustained contact with her indifference. He wanted something from her still—attention, maybe, or just the version of himself that existed when she used to look at him like he mattered. She had nothing left to offer him, and she wasn't interested in pretending otherwise for his comfort.

"Continue," I said, and I watched the rest of it unfold the same way for the next several minutes—her answers precise and efficient, giving him nothing beyond exactly what the assignment required; him trying twice more to insert himself as something other than an afterthought, and failing both times without her ever once raising her voice to make it happen.

Neither of them looked at the other for longer than the exchange strictly demands.

—

I ended the session once I had seen enough, cutting them off mid-sentence with a deadline and nothing more—no explanation for why the exercise mattered beyond the excuse I gave them at the start, no acknowledgment of anything I might had actually been watching for.

They left separately, a full minute apart, as if some unspoken agreement passed between them not to be seen walking out together.

Alone again, the office settling back into its familiar quietness, and I let myself finish the thought I'd left unfinished an hour ago, before either of them had walked through that door.

I hadn't needed to see how well they work together at all. I'd needed to see how she holds herself when someone from her past is close enough to reach—and now I had my answer, clearer than I expected it to be.

She doesn't run toward familiarity when cornered—she doesn't run at all. She simply stops offering anything for them to reach.

I didn't know if it was because I was here —I didn't know anything at all.

If she really was who that photograph keeps insisting she might be, that wasn't a resemblance worth dismissing. That was a difference worth paying very close attention to.