Professor Off-Limits

Debt

ALEENA’s POV

I stood there, his question hanging unanswered in the air, and I definitely do not have an answer for him yet.

“You know,” he said, finally breaking the awkward silence between us, leaning back against the edge of the desk, his arm crossing loosely over his still half unbuttoned shirt, “you interrupted me in the middle of something.”

“I’m aware,” I said, my voice coming out sharper than I intended, mostly just to cover how badly my face was still burning. “I said I was sorry.”

“Did you, though?” He tilted his head in a lazy way and that somehow made him look more dangerous. “I don’t remember an apology… I only remember a lot of staring and stammering.”

Heat crawled up my neck all over again. “I wasn’t staring.” I protested.

“You were.” He stated it simply as a fact. “As several specific things in fact.”

My mouth opened and closed several times because there was nothing I would say that wouldn’t make it worse, so I just clutched my bag tightly and refused to make eye contact with him.

He pushed off the desk and started taking slow steps towards me, like he had all the time in the world and knew I didn’t have anywhere to run to.

I stepped back instinctively, and my spine bumped into the edge of the bookshelf behind me.

I winced at the pain. “W—what are you saying?” I asked, even though some horrible traitorous part of my brain had already guessed what he meant.

He didn’t answer right away. He just looked at me, and something shifted behind his eyes, and it was in that loaded silence that my gaze decided to betray me completely and dropped without my permission to the front of his trousers.

He was still hard—visibly, obviously and unmistakably hard. His d**k was straining against his trousers and that was when I realized with horror that Sylvie hadn’t clearly finished her job before I interrupted.

I swallowed and forced my eyes back to finally meet his gaze which was even worse because he was watching me with an expression that made it very clear that he knew where my attention just went.

“Did you see something you liked?” He asked in a low,amused and utterly shameless tone.

“I didn’t—“ I looked away, at the window, at the table, at anything that wasn’t him. “I wasn’t looking at anything.”

“So since you interrupted me,” he said and there was a new weight to his voice now, something that made my pulse pick despite every instinct telling it not to. “I think it’s only fair you finish what she started.”

My gaze rushed to meet his face, and I stared at him wide eyed. It took me a full second for the words to finally assemble themselves into something I understood, and when I understood, my whole body went rigid with outrage.

“What?!” My voice cracked on the word. “Hell no! I’m not doing that.”

“No?” The corner of his lips tilted into something that looked like a smile, like my refusal was what he had been hoping for. “You don’t think that is fair repayment? A debt for a debt.”

I frowned. “I don’t owe you s****l favors, Lorcan.” I was already turning around, reaching for the door handle, and my whole body was humming with the need to put distance between us before I said or did something I would regret. “The reason I came here was to find out what I actually owe you—not to—not for that.”

Before my hand could reach the handle, his hand closed around my wrist and I spun around, breathless with fury and something underneath the fury that I refused to examine. “What the hell are you doing!?”

"Collecting a debt," he said, calm as anything, like he hasn't just grabbed me mid-escape.

"I don't owe you anything." I yanked my wrist free, and surprisingly, he let it go easily, which somehow made me angrier. "That's the whole reason I came here in the first place—to find out what you meant by that stupid text—and instead I walked in on you and Sylvie, and now you're trying to turn my own confusion into some kind of—of payment plan."

Something in his expression shifted, amusement giving way to something closer to real consideration, like he was recalibrating me in real time.

“Fine,” he said, and the single word landed lighter than I expected, almost like he was retreating. “No payment plan.”

I blinked twice, thrown off quickly by how he let it go. “Fine?”

“Fine.” He straightened up, buttoning the last of his shirt slowly and the tension in the room easing without fully disappearing. “I’ll tell you what you actually want to know… for free. Since you’re clearly too proud to negotiate properly.”

“I’m not proud… I’m—“ I stopped myself before I said something that I’d still have to explain again. “Just tell me.”

He moved to his desk and unlocked a drawer, pulling out his phone, and scrolling for a moment before turning the screen towards me.

I squinted my eyes as I looked at the screen. It was an email—forwarded and timestamped from the day before, and Vivienne’s name was unsurprisingly in the sender field, the board’s shared inbox in the recipient line, and attached to it was unmistakably, the photo she took of me and Lorcan at the Velvet room.

My stomach dropped even though I already knew on some level that this was exactly what she’d done.

“She sent a mail to the board formally, framing it as academic misconduct. It would have gone to the board this morning if I hadn’t flagged it and pulled it before anyone opened it.”

"But how did you even—"

"I have access to flag certain submissions for review before they're distributed. Professional courtesy, between faculty." He said it simply, like it was actually nothing. “It is gone and no one saw it.” He crossed his arm and looked at me intently now. “But she didn’t just stop there by sending an email, she went to the board personally.”

“The hell?” I muttered beneath my breath.

“Luckily, I was in the building when she walked in,” he continued. “I had a brief meeting with the Dean actually—unrelated to any of this.” He gestured vaguely in the air. “The board was still in their meeting when Vivienne showed up with a folder demanding someone sees her immediately.”

I frowned. "So they just let her in?"

“No one dares stop a Draycott from walking into a room, Aleena. I know you should be aware of that by now.” He said flatly. “They were mid vote on something else and couldn’t break for it, so the Dean asked me to take whatever she had since I was still there, and they said they’d review it after the session ended.”

I couldn’t respond because I was still dumbfounded on the lengths Vivienne would take just to prove a point!?

“To cut the long story short,” Lorcan’s voice brought me back from my daze. “I told the board later on that it was a personal matter—unrelated to university business—just a thing about a jealous ex, and nothing worth their time.”

My stomach dropped. “So they believed you?”

“I am a tenured professor, and she is a student with a documented habit of starting drama over men who don’t want her.”

I stared at him, my hands still not quite steady, the relief and the disgust tangling together in my chest.

“You’re welcome by the way.” he said, after waiting minutes for a response.

“N—no,” I stuttered, trying to find the right words. “Thank you, Lorcan.” I said sincerely because if he hadn’t intercepted the email and the file, I wouldn’t even be standing here at this moment.

“Hmmm.” He muttered, watching me for a whole full second with a curious expression. “I’ve been thinking… what exactly did you do to her that made her hate you enough to come up with such a plan for revenge?”

I pressed my lips together. “Nothing,” I said quickly and too defensive enough to make it feel fake.

Lorcan raised a brow. "People don't usually go to this much effort over nothing."

"I don't want to talk about it."

"Aleena." His voice dropped, quieter now, and almost gentle in a way that caught me off guard. “What did you do to her? I might not be there the next time she tries to pull such a stunt… So tell me.”

Something in me finally snapped, some thread that has been pulled too tight for too many weeks now.

“You know what? Why do you care? Why does it matter to you?” I half yelled, feeling something hot and sharp rise in my chest.

"Because I'd like to understand what I'm protecting you from."

"You're not protecting me from anything." The words came out before I could stop them, sharp and bitter. "You're the reason half of this exists in the first place. You blackmailed me into detentions. You threatened to report me for seducing you. You and Vivienne aren't that different, Lorcan—you both decided you had the right to use whatever leverage you could find against me."

Something moved across his face—fast, there and gone, but real, unmistakably real in a way nothing he had shown me before had been. Not anger. Something closer to being struck, caught off guard by a truth he clearly hadn't expected to hear from me, or hadn't let himself consider before now.

For one unguarded second, he looks almost young. Almost unsure.

I saw it, and some part of me wanted to stay and watch it, wanted to understand what just cracked open behind his eyes—but I didn’t trust myself right now, not with everything else sitting on top of me already, so I forced my gaze away instead, down to the floor, to the door, to anywhere that isn't his face.

I shook my head. "I should go," I said quietly, and he didn’t stop me this time.

“What does everyone really want from me?” I thought to myself, walking out, and my chest was tight in a way that had nothing to do with home anymore and everything to do with the sheer exhausting weight of being wanted, used, threatened, and fought over by every single person who’s decided my life is theirs to shape. Vivienne, Xavier, Mira in her own quiet way. Even him.

I was so close to crying that it scared me more than anything that had happened today, so I just pressed my nails into my palm instead, hard, until the sting pulled me back from the edge of it