The Alpha's Tutor: His Forbidden Luna

chapter Five

Lara

I sat there for longer than I meant to, staring at a name on a screen like it might rearrange itself into someone else if I looked hard enough.

Assigned Tutee: Alexander Kane.

I didn't know the last name. I didn't know anything about him beyond a photograph and the memory of eyes that had followed me across an entire lecture without once looking away, like I was a problem he intended to solve whether I cooperated or not.

I told myself it was nothing. New students stared. Some of them got fixated on their professors for a semester and then forgot they existed the moment finals ended. It happened every year, and every year I ignored it, filed it under things that weren't worth my attention.

This didn't feel like that.

This felt like standing too close to the edge of something without being able to see how far down it went.

I closed the email. Opened it again. Closed it a second time, annoyed at myself for the repetition, for the way my pulse hadn't fully settled since I'd walked out of that classroom.

He was intimidating in a way I couldn't fully account for — not loud, not aggressive, nothing so simple as that. Just... present. Dangerous, almost, in the quiet, contained way certain things are dangerous precisely because they don't need to announce themselves.

I didn't like it. I decided, somewhere in the middle of my third read of his file, that I didn't like it at all.

The door swung open without a knock, which meant only one person.

"Hey, girl." Clara dropped into the chair across from my desk, taking one look at my face before I'd said a single word. "What happened? Is it Joy again?"

"It's not Joy."

"Because if it is, I've been saying for months we drag her somewhere, kicking if we have to. There's that facility two hours out Marcy's cousin went to — "

"Clara. It's not Joy."

That stopped her. She sat back, studying me with the same unnerving precision she always used when she suspected I was hiding something from her, which — fair — I usually was.

"Okay," she said slowly. "Then what has you looking like you saw a ghost during your own lecture?"

I hesitated, which told her everything before I managed the actual words.

"There's a new student. Transfer, one of the older ones than the rest of them." I turned my monitor slightly so she could see the file still open behind me. "He didn't stop staring at me the entire class."

Clara arched an eyebrow, already halfway to amused. "Lara. Baby. Students stare at you constantly. You're aware of this, right? You've seen the crush wall Olivia thinks I don't know about?"

"This was different."

"Different how?"

I tried to find the words and came up mostly empty. "I don't know. Something about him felt — off. Wrong, almost, in a way I can't explain. And underneath that, something familiar, like I've seen him before, except I know I haven't, because I would remember someone like that."

"So he's intense and hot, and you can't stop thinking about him. Groundbreaking. Truly a mystery for the ages."

"I'm being serious, Clara."

"So am I." She leaned forward, tone softening slightly. "You get like this sometimes. You build a wall around anything that gets too close too fast, and then you convince yourself the wall is a warning sign instead of just... a wall."

"This isn't about walls."

"Isn't it?" She tilted her head. "Because I just watched Whitfield's office send down a tutoring assignment with your name on it for a guy who apparently made your entire nervous system short-circuit in under an hour, and your first instinct is to find a reason to say no."

I hadn't told her I was considering saying no. I hadn't needed to; she'd known before I'd fully admitted it to myself.

"It's extra hours I don't need," I said. "Extra time I don't have. Extra —"

"Extra money, which you do need, given the number of times Joy's little habits have quietly drained your savings this year," Clara said gently, but she said it. "This isn't a promotion, Lara, I know. But it's nothing either. And avoiding a job because a student's eyes unsettled you for one lecture is — respectfully — a little bit of an overreaction, even for you."

"You didn't feel it."

"No," she agreed. "I didn't. But I also don't feel half the things you feel, because you've spent five years building yourself into someone who doesn't let anything get close enough to feel it with you."

I didn't have an answer for that one. She wasn't wrong, and we both knew it, and neither of us needed to say it out loud a second time.

"Just think about it," she said, standing, mercifully done pressing before it turned into something neither of us wanted to finish having in an office with paper-thin walls. "You don't have to decide anything before lunch."

"Is it lunch already?"

"It has been lunch for the last twenty minutes. Come on. You've got that look you get when you skip meals to spiral, and I refuse to enable it today."

I let her pull me up from the chair, let her steer me out of the office and down the hall, chatting about something entirely unrelated within seconds, the way she always did when she'd decided I'd had enough of a subject for one sitting.

But some part of my mind stayed behind in that office, still turning over a name on a screen, still circling the strange, unshakable certainty that saying yes to this particular assignment was going to cost me something I hadn't agreed to spend.

I just didn't have a name for what that something was. Not yet.

I didn't want to think about it. I really didn't. The more I tried to understand it, the more dangerous it began to feel.

As soon as we got to the canteen, Clara ordered something and then looked back at me.

“Or maybe you've been watching too many horror movies. I knew you weren't listening when I told you to stop.”

I sighed.

“It's not that, Clara,” I said firmly, though I was gradually beginning to wonder if she could be right.

“Just stop overthinking it, okay?” she said.

I looked down, hoping I could.