Twice Claimed by my Professor Alpha

Lucia's Standpoint.

They say near-death changes you. But what do you call it when you wake up as someone else?

I stood in front of the bathroom mirror for eleven minutes before I started brushing my teeth.

I counted. I do that now, count small things, note durations, collect certainties the way a shipwreck survivor collects driftwood because the alternative is drowning. The girl in the mirror looked exactly right: chocolate brown hair falling past her collarbones, emerald eyes with the dark lashes, a small scar above my right eyebrow from a fall at age seven that I only knew had happened because my mom had told me about it over and over in the hospital with her voice doing the thing it does when she is trying very hard not to cry. My face. My hands. My body. Everything in its correct position and none of it feeling real.

"Lucia, honey?" Mom's voice drifted through the door, warm and hovering. "Are you okay in there?"

"Fine," I called back. My own voice still sounded slightly wrong first thing in the morning, like something that had not fully arrived yet.

I opened the door and she was right there in the hallway, graying hair in a messy bun and that awful floral apron she had owned since before I was born, and she looked at me with this fierce, exhausted, limitless love, and my throat closed for no reason I could explain.

"Are you sure you're ready for classes today?" She asked, reaching up to smooth down my hair at the temple. "We could give it another week."

"No." I caught her hand, held it for a second. "I need to go back. I need something normal to hold onto."

Whatever normal was going to feel like.

Dad was at the kitchen table with his newspaper and his coffee and his weathered crinkled smile that appeared the moment I walked in, and I kissed his cheek and breathed in his familiar scent of coffee and aftershave because I understood, somewhere in my bones, that these two people would do anything for me. The accident had happened to all three of us. It had taken something from all three of us. They had never stopped looking at me like I had survived a miracle, and I kept waiting, quietly, for the part where I felt like one.

The drive to Crescent Vale University felt like passing through someone else's dream. I knew the campus, muscle memory moved my feet while my mind floated somewhere slightly above the experience of it, watching. I knew my locker combination. I knew the name of the woman at the library desk. I knew I had apparently been doing quite well in all my classes before the accident, because there were notes in my own handwriting that felt like reading a stranger's journal.

First class: Advanced Literature with Professor Vane.

I found the room, sat in the second row from the back because something told me that was where I sat, though I had no actual memory of choosing it. Other students filed in around me, some nodding hello, some glancing at me with the particular social awkwardness of people who had heard about the accident and had no idea what to say about it. I smiled back and played the part of the girl I was supposed to be.

Then the door opened and the air in the room changed.

He walked in like he owned the architecture. Tall, very tall, with black hair and dark jeans and a white shirt he had not quite tucked in, with the shoulders of a man who did not sit at desks for a living whatever his job title said. He had silver eyes, catching the light in a way that read as almost animal. He set his bag down on the desk without looking at any of us. Then he looked up and scanned the room, and when those silver eyes met mine, the world made a quiet violent lurch.

My breath stopped. My hands went cold. Heat pooled low in my belly so fast it shocked me, sudden and heavy and completely inappropriate for eight forty-five in the morning in a literature classroom.

"Welcome back," he said, and his voice was rough and low and did something terrible to the backs of my knees. "I hope you all did the reading."

I had not done the reading. I could not even tell you what book we were studying. I was watching his mouth move and thinking about things I had absolutely no business thinking about.

"Miss Rivers." His voice pulled me back. The whole class was looking at me. My face went hot. "Perhaps you would like to share your thoughts on Heathcliff's obsession with Catherine."

I cleared my throat. "I think obsession and love get confused," I said, because it was the first thing that came. "He probably did not know the difference. Most people do not until it is too late."

He tilted his head slightly, silver eyes narrowing. "And what is the difference?"

The question felt larger than the room. "Love wants the person to be happy," I said. "Obsession just wants to possess them."

"And which," he said quietly, "is more powerful?"

I should have said love. The safe answer, the right one. Instead I heard myself say: "Obsession. Because it does not ask permission from right or wrong."

Something moved in his expression. Just a flicker, there and gone. Then he looked away and called on the next student, and the moment passed, but it left a burn behind it.

After class he stopped me at the door.

"Miss Rivers. A word."

I stayed while the other students filed past, some of them glancing between us with poorly concealed curiosity. When the room was empty, he crossed his arms and leaned back against his desk and looked at me like I was a text he was reading for the very first time.

"How are you feeling?" He e asked. "After the accident."

"Fine." A reflex. "Good. Ready to catch up."

"You seem different," he said.

"Different how?"

"I am not certain yet." He pushed off from the desk and stepped closer, slowly enough that I could have stepped back. I did not. "But I intend to find out."

The promise in his voice turned my legs unreliable. I said something vague about being late for my next class and got myself out of that room before I did something I could not explain.

That night the dreams came.

A girl with my face but different eyes, terrified eyes. A cold room and a woman packing clothes in absolute silence while the girl sat on the edge of a bed and shook, her hands pressed together in her lap. A man's voice from somewhere below the room, hard and final and completely indifferent: "you will be married off next week, start behaving like someone worth buying."

The girl touched a bruise on her wrist the way a person touches a wound they have long since stopped expecting to heal. Her lips moved in prayer to the Moon Goddess I did not believe in, begging for any way out, any way at all.

I woke up with wet cheeks and my hands balled into fists at my sides, the grief of someone else sitting in my chest alongside something hotter and older and harder to name, something that lived lower in the body than grief and felt, terrifyingly, like it was aimed at a man with silver eyes I had absolutely no business wanting.

All he did was look at me. And my body is still on fire.

What is wrong with me?

Lucia's Standpoint.

Every time I say his name in my head, I get wet. That can't be normal, right?

I'd been back in classes for a week now, and every Advanced Literature session was pure torture. Not because of the coursework, I was actually enjoying Wuthering Heights more than I'd expected. 

No, the torture came from sitting three rows back, trying not to stare at Professor Vane like a lovesick teenager.

Which was exactly what I was doing.

"The destructive nature of passion," he said, his voice carrying easily through the classroom. "Brontë doesn't present love as something beautiful or healing. She shows us how it can consume and destroy."

I pressed my thighs together, trying to focus on his words instead of the way his mouth moved when he spoke. 

But f*ck, that voice. 

It was like whiskey and smoke, making me think of dark rooms and tangled sheets.

"