#bronzepascal

[bronzepascal]

a cambridge affair, part one - pedro pascal

pairing: pedro pascal x fem!reader warnings: age gap - the reader is her late 20s, pedro is 50. sexual tension, smut, forbidden relationship between a university professor and his student. swearing. lots of academic talk, the books that have been mentioned are actual real-life books (yes, i actually have had to read them for my degrees). mentions of misogyny. author’s note: PLEASE CONSIDER DONATING/BUYING ME A COFFEE as I take my precious time for the writing and also, I am currently struggling to buy food for myself. please note that i’m dyslexic & non-native english speaker - i make mistakes! feedback is very welcomed! word count: 13.6K or 33 pages. NO MINORS! 18+ READERS ONLY!

The first breath you took in Cambridge was heavier than you’d expected — thick with honeysuckle and something older still, a smell you couldn’t name but felt somewhere in your molars. Not the kind of spring air you were used to in Manchester, where drizzle wrapped around redbrick buildings and trains hummed past your window like impatient insects. No — this was slower and older city - a quieter - more like suspended in time. The taxi cab had rolled past stone colleges and ancient gates that looked like they’d been waiting for centuries just for you to walk through them. You didn’t, of course, not at first. You stood at the edge of King’s Parade with your luggage like a visitor in your own body, a phantom of the student you were supposed to become.

Your room in your private accommodation was on the top floor of a building that overlooked a quadrangle the colour of faded postcards. Creaking wooden stairs and a leaded window with a narrow seat — exactly the kind of place you imagined Sylvia Plath would’ve sulked in. There was a desk made of walnut, older than your parents, probably, and a radiator that coughed when the heat kicked in. On that desk sat a sealed envelope with your name in looping handwriting, the ink slightly smudged. Inside, a welcome letter from your faculty and a reading list so dense it made your eyes ache. You ran your fingers over the spines of the books you’d brought — The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt and The Silence by Don DeLillo (yes, these are actual books), dog-eared and annotated in different colours. You felt both absurd and terrified. Like a child dressing up as a grown-up or like a scholar-shaped ghost.

Cambridge didn’t offer itself easily. Not the way Manchester had — all unfiltered honesty, kebab wrappers and warmth you could measure in sarcasm. Cambridge, instead, watched you with a stare that kind of made you feel like a total outsider - obviously it would, especially when you have a working-class background. It was pretty much evaluated. You walked through the courtyards conscious of every footfall, every flicker of your expression when you passed a don on a bicycle or another undergrad or postgrad student reading Foucault at breakfast. You had chosen to research something that would make you flinch on the page: misogyny, language and collapse — how contemporary fiction on both sides of the Atlantic had become a sort of cultural morgue. Your thesis proposal had earned a lot of polite nods and one raised eyebrow in your interview. They had called it “timely,” but you had seen something else in their eyes — the wary sort of interest reserved for difficult women.

And then came the email. Just two lines:

Your doctoral supervisor has been confirmed. You will be meeting with Professor Pedro Pascal in Room 326, Sidgwick Site, Tuesday 11am.

No context, no bio. No link to an academic profile. You Googled him, of course as everyone did and would do. The results were surreal — red carpet photos, interviews in Variety, a résumé filled with ghosts: Oberyn Martell, Javier Peña, Joel Miller. And yet there he was, listed on the Faculty of English website, a Visiting Professor in Contemporary Literature and Languages with a research focus in narrative ethics, masculinity and post-celebrity fiction. The notes said he had submitted a dissertation on performance theory in late-stage capitalism and published a monograph with Verso.

You didn’t know what to expect. A well-known actor turned academic? Maybe it was a publicity stunt on Cambridge’s part? But the moment you stepped into his office, all of that dissolved, kind of.

The room was warm with dust and soft light, full of papers and second-hand books and the distinct smell of old wood and bergamot. There was a long, designer coat thrown over the back of an armchair — not posed, not performative, just human. And then there was him. Not behind a desk, as you had imagined, but seated in the windowsill, one foot braced against the radiator, a notebook open on his knee. He looked up as you entered and there was that brief flash of recognition — not in the celebrity sense, not “you know who I am,” but something more complicated. Something that read: You’re going to be difficult. Good.

“Hello, please, take a seat,” he said simply. His voice was quiet, but it had weight. American, yes, absolutely — but softened by years of silence. “You’re early.”

“Old habit, time anxiety stuck in me,” you replied, surprised at how clear your voice came out. “I don’t like being late and given stares when I enter the room on time or a few seconds later.”

He smiled at that, mainly with his eyes. There was a weariness to him that felt earned, not worn. He gestured to the chair opposite the desk and you sat, your hands resting on your knees in a way that felt both composed and childish.

He glanced at the paper in his notebook. “You’re writing about misogyny and contemporary fiction, I see on this document - themes such as transatlantic scope, politically charged notes and quite ambitious I can tell.”

You nodded. “Is that a problem?”

“No,” he said, closing the notebook. “It’s exactly the sort of thing that makes this place uncomfortable as it should be. That’s usually a good sign.”

There was a pause. A long one. Not awkward — loaded.

He leaned forward slightly, elbows on knees. “Why fiction? Why not politics straight up? Or history?”

You shrugged. “Because people lie less when they are trying to make something up.”

That earned you a proper smile out of him. The kind that made his eyes crinkle and his shoulders relax a fraction. He looked at you again — not the way men look at women, but the way readers look at books they have not decided how to feel about yet. Being extra careful and curious. With a certain respect that bordered on reverence.

“Good,” he said finally. “Then let’s see how well you write lies.”

And just like that, supervision began. He did not ask you to read anything aloud from your notes or your proposal — didn’t even glance at the printed copy peeking out of your satchel, as if its presence was enough. There was no discussion of a timeline, no mention of quarterly objectives or formatting guidelines, none of the bureaucratic scaffolding you’d half-expected to be given, like some sort of strong basis to begin with. He didn’t offer you a reading list or a framework or a milestone calendar as there was no attempt to define the rules of your four-year academic contract. Instead, he sat in that slanting, honeyed light and asked questions — slowly, carefully, not the kind designed to elicit tidy, quotable answers, but the sort that took up residence in your chest like a draft, unsettling everything you thought had already been arranged. They were questions that tugged at your intellectual certainty like loose threads — pulling apart your comfortable definitions and reweaving them, word by word, until you felt slightly tilted inside your own head. It was not so much that he wanted to know what you thought; it was that he wanted to see what you would do when your thoughts were turned upside down, stripped of polish and certainty, and laid bare in front of someone who had no intention of saving you from your own mind.

But the questions — God, the questions — they didn’t reach for answers. They reached for you. They curled around your thoughts like smoke, soft and lingering, and forced you to follow them long after they’d been asked. Questions like: Who taught you to trust first-person narrators? Which scenes in fiction do you find unbearable — and why? If misogyny is a structural force, what kind of architecture does it build? And are you living in it when you write? They didn’t test your knowledge; they tested your footing. Each one rearranged the furniture in your mind — not violently, not to shame you, but like someone lighting the room differently so you could see that the chair was never where you thought it was in the first place.

“How do you define misogyny?” he asked at one point, his voice calm but deliberate, like the question had been waiting all morning for its chance to surface. He leaned back slightly in his chair then, his long fingers steepled just beneath his chin, eyes fixed on you — not with challenge exactly, but with the quiet intensity of someone studying a text they hadn’t annotated yet. Pedro wasn’t smiling as he didn’t need to. The question was doing all the work.

You’d prepared for it, of course — it was the opening paragraph of your proposal, the fulcrum of your research. But you hadn’t prepared for the way it would sound coming from him: unhurried, low, slightly gravelled at the edges, as though the word itself weighed differently in his mouth. It made you want to rewrite everything — your thesis, your notes, your so-far written out citations — just to match the cadence of his voice. You swallowed, steadying yourself, and offered what you’d written: that misogyny isn’t just hatred of women, but a regulatory force—social mechanism. The way a culture disciplines and corrects female behaviour not through overt violence alone, but through more subtle methods — shame, silence and storytelling. The kind of stories that are handed down like doctrine or slid under the skin like anaesthetic.

You told him that, post-2016, fiction has started staging this correction in newer, more fractured ways. That unreliable narrators have become not just literary devices, but metaphors for surviving in a world where women are disbelieved by default. That timelines collapse in novels the way they collapse in trauma. That male characters in contemporary literature often dissolve into abstraction — all theory and posturing — while female pain becomes hyperreal, rendered in such granular, physical detail it almost aches to read.

Pedro nodded, not as a seal of approval, but as an invitation to go deeper. He didn’t want to interject. He let the silence stretch just long enough to make you uncomfortable and then a little longer — until you felt the need to fill it, to explain yourself more thoroughly, as though the thought was only halfway formed until it met his gaze.

“And I think,” you added quietly, “the reason literature’s handling it differently now — on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean — is because the social contract has broken. Fiction isn’t pretending to fix it anymore. It’s just holding the fragments up to the light.”

At that, something flickered in his expression. Not surprising. Not even agreement. Something quieter and older. Like a nerve catching fire somewhere behind his eyes. He looked down at his hands for a moment, his fingers clasped loosely together, like a man remembering something personal and trying, with some difficulty, not to offer it just yet.

“That’s good,” he said finally, voice lower than before. “Painfully good.”

You didn’t thank him nor did you give a smile. You just took a small, controlled breath and reached for your notebook like you were trying not to shake — like you needed to touch something solid.

The next twenty minutes passed in a kind of suspended haze — part supervision, part philosophical interrogation, part something else entirely. He asked you about genre: why female writers were so often shoved into autofiction whether they asked for it or not, while their male counterparts were allowed abstraction, grandiosity, experimentation. He asked about class and taste, about the canon and who gets to be included in it. Why British fiction seems to fear sincerity when it comes from a woman’s mouth. Why certain working-class narrators are branded “unreliable” even when they’re plainly telling the truth.

You found yourself talking about Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo, about My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, about the shift in fiction from confession to performance — how women writers are no longer allowed to simply confess, they have to perform that confession for an audience already primed to doubt them. You argued that we are past the age of catharsis. That contemporary fiction doesn’t want to cleanse the wound — it wants to show the infection.

Pedro pressed you on every point. Never cruelly and never condescending. Just relentlessly. The way a very sharp knife presses into the skin — not to draw blood, but to remind you exactly where your nerves are.

At one point, you were gesturing with your pencil — nothing dramatic, just an instinctive flick of the wrist — and you caught his eyes shift. Not to your face or to your hands. But to the breath you had just held, sharp and invisible. For a second, he watched it — the pause in your chest — and then he looked away. Too fast to mean anything.

“I’ll want a chapter draft of the thesis by the end of term,” he said eventually, standing with a kind of slow, unfussy finality that startled you. He hadn’t raised his voice, but the shift in his posture — the closing of the session — was unmistakable. “Doesn’t need to be polished. Just honest.”

“Of which chapter?” you asked, collecting your things with hands that felt colder than they should have.

He looked down at you — a flicker of mischief in his eyes now, too brief to name.

“Whichever one scares you most.”

You hesitated. “What if they all do?”

He tilted his head, his mouth curving into something not quite a smile — something smarter than a smile. “Then you’re probably on the right track.”

He turned towards the bookshelf behind his desk, scanning the spines with a practiced hand, and pulled a book free — a thin copy of The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. Its spine was creased, corners bent, faint pencil markings ghosting the margins. He held it like something familiar. Like something lived with.

“Take this,” he said, extending it to you without flourishing. “It’s mine, so don’t annotate it. Just read.”

You took it with both hands, the pages still warm from his fingers, the cover soft at the edges where it had been handled too often. You could smell the faint scent of his aftershave on the paper. Sandalwood, maybe.

“Do you-” you began, but stopped yourself. It felt like a question that had too many endings.

He turned slightly, his expression unreadable. “Do I what?”

You faltered. “Do you always lend your own books to students?”

His gaze lingered which held yours just a second too long. A beat too sharp. And then: “Only when I want them to come back.”

You didn’t reply, a sharp breath took you back to reality. You couldn’t really comprehend the response from him.

And with that, you were dismissed.

Outside, the light had shifted — that golden-grey hue peculiar to late autumn in Cambridge, where the sky bruises gently and the air tastes like pages curling in the corners of old libraries. You stood at the edge of the stairwell for a long moment, the book pressed tight to your chest, trying to remember your own name. You told yourself it had been a supervision. A meeting about your thesis and research.The only reason you were here, as you thought.

But somewhere beneath your ribs, something had already begun to smoulder. Quiet. Patient. Fatal.

And you knew, even then, that whatever had just begun in that room — it wouldn’t be written into your thesis. But it would write through it.

Cambridge in February is a study in restraint. The city hunkers down in greys and silvers, the cobbled streets rimed with frost, ancient stone buildings exhaling cold. Even the river seems quieter now, its slow eddies carrying ghost-thoughts between the punting poles and the bare, outstretched branches overhead. You’ve taken to walking the long way to your supervisions — through Clare’s Fellows’ Garden, along the Backs where the colleges brood like old aristocrats, then down Trinity Lane, your breath spiralling out ahead of you like mist. You don’t mind the cold. It helps. Gives shape to nerves that have otherwise begun to slip their names.

You’re holding your chapter draft in your bag — twenty-eight pages of thought you didn’t know you had until you wrote them. It nearly destroyed you. Not because of the content, though the content was difficult — an excavation of narrative rupture in post-Brexit British fiction, specifically how contemporary female authors are dismantling ideas of national identity through the lens of female fragmentation. You wrote about Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk, about the notion of the unreliable mother as a metaphor for a nation gaslighting itself. You wrote about alienation, class betrayal, the ache of belonging somewhere that has made itself unrecognisable. But none of that was the real rupture.

The real rupture was writing it as though Pedro Pascal would read it with his whole attention.

And now, he would.

You climb the stairs to his office slower than usual, with no ill-thought intention. It’s just that your body knows things your mind won’t say aloud. It knows that once you cross the threshold, something will change — maybe imperceptibly, maybe irrevocably.

He’s already there, as always. Reading, glasses on this time, hunched slightly forward with one elbow resting on the desk. There’s a mug near his hand — chipped navy ceramic, the kind that feels like it belongs in a house rather than an office. He looks up before you knock.

“You’re early, again,” he says, voice still lower than it should be for an academic building at 10am.

“I walked like a snail,” you answer. “Needed to clear my head.”

He smiles — the small, crooked one that you’ve learned is genuine. “Did it work?”

You shake your head. “Not even remotely.”

That earns a soft chuckle. He gestures to the chair opposite him — same one as last time. You sit on the same chair as before, funny, right? The chapter draft is already on his desk, marked faintly in pencil as you had to send it via email. Pedro most definitely printed out to read it properly. No red ink, no harsh scribbles. Just margin notes, underlines, the occasional vertical line beside a paragraph he apparently wanted to return to. There’s a paperclip at the top. The kind detail your nervous system latches onto.

He doesn’t hand it to you yet.

“I read it three times,” he says instead.

You blink. “Three?”

Pedro nods. “Twice quickly. Once out loud to myself.”

There’s something intimate about that. The thought of him reading your sentences not just with his eyes but with his voice — alone, somewhere in the stillness of his flat or this office or some strange, off-hours place in between. You wonder if he paused between sentences. If he cursed at the phrasing. If he let the silences carry him.

“You wrote like someone with no skin left and your anxiety was trying to punch you into your guts,” he adds. “But in a good way.”

You let out a breath that’s almost a laugh. “That’s sort of how it felt.”

“I can tell. There’s a lot of pain and anxious feeling in this, but also clarity. You’re writing toward something unspeakable — which is, paradoxically, the most honest kind of writing there is.”

He finally slides the draft across to you, fingers grazing the paper just before yours do. You feel it within a distance. A single electric nerve lighting up somewhere behind your knee. You don’t look at him as you open it, flipping to the section he’s bracketed in the margins.

“I think this paragraph is dangerous, a bit too emotional,” he says, leaning forward. “Not because it’s wrong — but because it’s right, and you don’t yet know what that means.”

You read the paragraph aloud which you hadn’t planned to. But suddenly you need to hear it outside of your own skull:

“Misogyny, at this point in history, doesn’t need to be a monster with teeth. It just needs to be shrugged as institutional forgetfulness. A curriculum where female anger is always called hysteria and male violence is just a tragedy we footnote. It’s in the silence that follows a disclosure. In the sighs of men who say ‘we’ve heard this before’. Misogyny has become ordinary and structural.”

Pedro is quiet for a moment after you finish. He leans back again — always that subtle shifting of distance, the pull and release you’re starting to recognise as his way of not crossing lines too quickly.

“You should put that on your title page,” he says finally.

You half-laugh, half-scoff. “It’s a bit dramatic.”

“No,” he says, and his voice is calm, serious. “It’s true. And if you keep writing like this — if you don’t flinch — it’s going to be a painful thesis. And a beautiful one. But make sure you stick to your academic guns.”

That word - beautiful. Spoken so plainly you don’t know where to put it. It lands differently coming from him. Not like praise, more like knowledge.

Something shifts then. Not in the words exchanged, but in the air between them. He reaches for the mug, takes a sip, and you notice — absurdly — the slight smudge of ink on the side of his index finger. He’s been writing or annotating — or maybe just touching books again, the way he always does, like they’re alive and breathing.

Your gaze lingers too long. He notices.

Neither of you speak.

He sets the mug down.

“Have you ever thought about including autofiction?” he asks suddenly. “Blending your own experiences into the argument? Just enough to destabilise the line between analysis and memory?”

“I thought that was risky.”

“It is,” he says, voice lower again. “But so is telling the truth.”

You nod slowly, unsure whether you’re agreeing with the idea or the man offering it.

“Besides,” he adds, almost as an afterthought, “you write like someone who already knows where the pain is. You may as well trace it.”

You don’t reply.

You glance down at the book he lent you months ago — still in your bag, carried like a relic. You wonder if he remembers and wonder if he meant for you to.

“I think about it more than I should,” you say instead, the words slipping out before you can filter them.

He lifts an eyebrow. “The thesis?”

You shake your head. “This - the supervision and the theme of my thesis. Also, kind of these conversations. I think about them when I’m writing and when I’m not.”

The air changes again. Sharper now. Thinner.

Pedro looks at you then — properly. Not like a professor to a student. Not even like a man to a woman. But like someone on the edge of saying something that could shatter both of you.

He doesn’t say it. Not yet.

“Good,” is all he offers, standing to signal the end. “Then it’s working.”

As you leave — book in your bag, the printed chapter pressed to your chest with the notes and scribbles from Pedro — the wind catches just behind you, and you swear, for one disoriented moment, that the city bends itself around your thoughts.

And though nothing is said — though everything remains technically unbroken — you walk away with the trembling certainty that the boundary between intellectual desire and something else entirely is becoming less a line, and more a breath.

The third supervision was meant to be routine. You told yourself that as you stood outside the door — rehearsing neutrality, adjusting your scarf like it might tighten the spine you’d been steadily losing around him. The draft you carried was smaller this time, more refined. You’d written about contemporary transatlantic narratives and female embodiment — how American and British authors alike were confronting trauma by literalising it in the body. You referenced Melissa Febos as you wrote about pain as performance. You didn’t intend to make it personal, but somehow, there it was — small confessions braided into the theory, like threads you didn’t remember weaving.

Pedro opened the door before you knocked.

“Wow, you are punctual, on time, today,” he said, stepping aside to let you in. “Should I be worried?”

You smiled, stepping past him into the office that had started to smell faintly of him — cedar, ink, black coffee. “Worried? That I’ve become institutionalised?”

He laughed — properly this time. Voice in the lower register and lovely. “I meant for myself. You’re getting sharper. I may have to start preparing.”

That was new. The compliment was veiled, playful. You turned toward him slowly, letting your coat slip from your shoulders with a practiced ease that wasn’t exactly deliberate — but not innocent, either.

“I thought you liked being the smartest man in the room,” you replied, setting the draft on the desk between you.

He tilted his head, smile lingering, eyes darker than they had any right to be on a Thursday morning. “I like being challenged. It keeps me honest.”

You laughed — because you didn’t know what else to do. The tension and air in the room had changed. Maybe it was because he wasn’t sitting yet as usual before you both started discussing the matters or because his gaze was still fixed on you like you’d said something far more dangerous than you meant to.

Now, you both sat.

And for the next forty minutes, the supervision went on as usual, mostly. You discussed the text. He scribbled margin notes, argued with your syntax, pushed your thinking on embodiment and fiction. But something had shifted — his posture had relaxed, his smile stretched longer, his voice dipped lower when he asked questions. At one point, he leaned back in his chair and said, out of nowhere:

“You know, you’re very good at making things sound like the truth.”

You looked up sharply. “Is that a compliment or a warning?”

He grinned. “Both.”

There it was again. That slant to his words. Like he was speaking in italics.

You laughed him off — again. You always did. It was easier and less dangerous. Safer to believe you were imagining it all. A man like that — charming, intelligent, impossible — didn’t flirt with his PhD students. Not seriously - let’s be real at this moment.

But as you packed your bag and stood to leave, Pedro remained seated, gaze following your hands.

“Do you know what I like about your writing?” he said quietly, like it was the last line of a page.

You paused. “What?”

“You let the reader come to the conclusion. You don’t drag them there. You invite them to get a little lost first.”

You smiled, warm and awkward, unsure if he meant the thesis or this very moment.

“Thanks,” you said, your voice half-caught in your throat.

He nodded. But his eyes were too steady. Too patient. Like he was still waiting for you to catch up.

You left with a strange flutter in your stomach — one you didn’t fully name until days later.

It was a Wednesday when it finally clicked. You were re-reading your draft, Pedro’s notes in the margins, and there — at the top of page seventeen, scrawled in small, neat pencil — was the line:

“There’s more you’re not saying. You should write like you trust me.”

You stared at it for a full minute. Then another. Then read it again, even slower. Not because it was inappropriate. It wasn’t, well, not technically. Certainly not academically. But there was something in the phrasing. Something that curled under your skin and stayed there.

That night, in bed, you thought about the way he’d looked at you. Not leered — not once, but he watched. Like he was tracing a thesis of his own and you were the hypothesis. Like he was waiting for you to realise he was writing something, too — just not on paper.

And once the thought arrived, it wouldn’t leave. Day after day, it returned, featherlight but constant. Pedro hadn’t crossed any lines, not yet, but he was close enough that you felt the wind of it. Close enough that your body had reacted before your mind caught up.

Friendly, yes. But friendliness isn’t the same thing as innocence.

And Pedro Pascal was many things — brilliant, respected, relentlessly composed — but innocent was not one of them.

It happened one afternoon in late November, when Cambridge was already starting to fold into winter, when the streets smelled of woodsmoke and wet wool, and the light fell too early, painting everything in that ghostly half-gold. You’d stayed later than usual in the faculty library, chasing a footnote on post-Brexit fiction that had somehow unravelled into a full paragraph. By the time you packed up, your hands were stiff from the cold and your phone had just buzzed with a message from him.

“Office door’s open. If you’re still around.”

Just that. No greeting. No sign-off. You read it three times anyway. In your mind, you just thought maybe he just wants to give some more advice or go over some literacy paragraphs, you did not think too much of it.

The corridor outside his office was dimly lit, mostly empty. Your boots echoed softly on the worn stone as you walked. You paused before pushing the door open, just long enough to inhale.

Pedro was seated on the windowsill, uncharacteristically casual, backlit by the dusky amber outside. He was nursing a mug of coffee — or maybe tea — sleeves pushed up, collar undone. There was a novel half-open beside him, pages curling slightly from the air.

You stepped in. 

He looked up and smiled — slowly. “Didn’t think you’d still be around.”

You shrugged, setting your bag down near his desk. “Didn’t think you’d still be working.”

“Who said anything about working?” His voice had that soft, teasing lilt again. You looked over, and he gestured to the battered leather chair across from him. “Come on, sit. Let’s waste some time wisely.”

You sat. Warily, curious.

He didn’t reach for your thesis notes or a pen. Didn’t say anything about your chapter. Instead, he asked, 

“What are you reading lately? Not for your research — just for yourself.”

The question disarmed you. Not because it was strange, but because you’d almost forgotten what it felt like to be asked anything without purpose in this place.

You said something — a name, a title. He nodded, leaned forward. Asked what you thought of the ending. You responded, gesturing now without realising. He mirrored you, eyes fixed with that look — like he wasn’t just listening but mapping you in real time.

The conversation spun out. Not quite flirtation, not entirely innocent. You talked about books that made you angry. Authors who disappointed you. Sentences you underlined for reasons you couldn’t always articulate. Somewhere between laughter and argument, you felt yourself tip slightly — inward, toward something unnamed.

And then he said:

“You do that thing,” he murmured, voice almost lost beneath the clink of his cup. “Where you look away when you say something vulnerable. Like you’re protecting the sentence from being too real.”

You froze. The air went thinner.

“I—” You smiled, lightly. “I didn’t realise I was being psychoanalysed.”

He chuckled, unbothered. “It’s not analysis. It's an observation.”

You looked at him. Really looked. “Are you always this intense outside office hours?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Would you prefer I saved it for daylight?”

You didn’t answer, you couldn’t. Because your throat was dry, his gaze had done something to your balance, your body was alert in a way that had nothing to do with caffeine or cold air.

The silence stretched.

And when he finally stood, brushing past you to put his cup in the sink by the back wall, you caught the faintest touch of his hand on your chair — not intentional, but not accidental either.

When he turned back, you were already watching him.

He smiled. Slow. Knowing.

“Same time next week?”

You nodded, your voice lost somewhere beneath your ribs.

“Don’t forget your notes.”

You rose, grabbed your bag, and turned — and just before you stepped through the door, he said, casually:

“Oh — and wear that scarf again. The red one. It suits the way you think.”

You didn’t reply.

You just walked all the way back through the college, past the archways and the chapel and the old trees spilling leaves like gold coins, with that sentence blooming slowly through your chest like a match catching fire.

And you wondered — truly, wildly — what game it was he thought he was playing, because whatever it was, you were starting to play it, too.

The seminar room had that soft hush particular to Cambridge in the late afternoon — filtered light slanting in through tall windows, dust caught in the sunbeams like static. The table was oval, polished, and far too big for the six of you. Five PhD students, one professor, and a tray of untouched tea things sweating quietly in the middle of it all.

Pedro sat at the head, sleeves rolled, a black pen in hand that he never once used. He didn’t need to. He had that way about him — of drawing out discussion without force, letting silences grow until someone rushed to fill them. You had seen your cohort fall under his spell one by one: Georgia with her brilliant but brittle reading of Houellebecq, Ravi with his postcolonial angle on Zadie Smith, the others who danced nervously around their ideas like the floor might crack beneath them.

You had tried to remain detached, a bit clinical, but even here, in a group, you felt it — that silent architecture between the two of you, shaped by private supervisions and quiet provocations. His questions always cut a little deeper when they were aimed at you. And today, they were relentless.

“What do we mean,” he said now, “when we talk about the unreliable narrator? Is it a literary device or is it something we’ve inherited socially? Particularly in narratives about trauma — who gets to decide what’s believable?”

Your heart was already racing before he turned to you.

“Go on,” he said, too lightly. “You’ve got strong feelings about this.”

It wasn’t a question.

You answered — something smart, polished, half-prepared — but you could feel him watching you the whole time. Not just your words, the way you gestured. The way your mouth shaped certain syllables. You looked away too quickly when your gaze flicked back, he was still watching.

Afterwards, the group trickled out slowly — laughter, coats pulled on, someone making an awkward joke about going to the pub. You stood, tucking your notebook into your bag, ready to leave, when his voice came — soft, low, just behind your ear.

“Come by my office.”

You turned.

He was close. Closer than he needed to be. One brow arched slightly, like he’d asked if you’d remembered your umbrella, not inviting you into something dangerous.

“Now?” you asked, quietly.

He didn’t smile. “Just for a minute.”

You told yourself it was harmless. Maybe he had feedback. Maybe it was something about the chapter draft you’d emailed that morning, the one you weren’t ready to talk about yet. But you felt the heat blooming at your collar as you walked beside him — neither of you speaking — through staircases that echoed and corridors that held every word like a secret.

Inside his office, the door clicked shut behind you.

The room was still warm from earlier. His scarf was draped over the back of his chair. A lamp glowed on his desk, casting everything in honey and shadow.

He didn’t sit. Neither did you.

“I wanted to ask,” he said, stepping toward the desk, fingers grazing a copy of A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing. “That moment in your draft. The bit about performance replacing testimony in modern feminist fiction. Did you mean to implicate yourself in that?”

You frowned. “Implicated?”

He looked at you fully now. “You’re performing restraint. In your work. And in here.” A beat passed. “But I don’t think it’s natural to you.”

Your breath caught. You were suddenly very aware of how quiet the room was. How close.

“Is this still supervision?” you asked, not moving.

“That depends,” he said, voice even, “on whether you want me to keep playing the part.”

The silence that followed felt like standing at the edge of a drop. He didn’t touch you and he didn’t move.

He just waited — letting you feel the weight of his gaze, the shape of the room, the way the floor felt beneath your feet as something in the atmosphere snapped taut.

And then — as if the moment had never happened — he turned, picked up a book from the shelf behind him, and held it out.

“Read this before next week,” he said. The calmness was settling in. Your fingers brushed the book as you took it.

He didn’t say anything else and you didn’t ask.

You walked back to your room in a kind of trance, the cold cutting against your cheeks, the book pressed tight to your chest.

The question now wasn’t whether something was going to happen. It was how long you could stand the wait.

The more you had to attend the supervision meeting, the more nervous and anticipated you started to get. It was after four o’clock in the afternoon when you climbed the staircase again, the same narrow one that creaked slightly underfoot, its wooden banister worn smooth by generations of hands. His email had been simple: “If you’re free, I’d like to go over your second chapter. Nothing urgent.”

That was a lie. Everything about this supervision and thesis were urgent.

The hallway outside his office was quiet now, the kind of hush that settled over the university campus after most of the undergrads had fled to the pubs or their rooms. Through the narrow window at the end of the corridor, you could see the lantern glow of a bike parked against the gate. Inside, his lamp was already on, the same strange amber hue as last time, the door just slightly ajar.

You knocked, and his voice came — low, casual: “Come in.”

He was sitting this time, glasses on, sleeves rolled to the forearms, a few pages spread before him like he had been waiting for an excuse to read them again. You stepped inside and closed the door behind you. That simple act — the soft click of it shutting — felt louder than it should have.

“You’ve changed it,” he said without looking up. “The middle section. You brought in Milkman.”

“I thought it made sense,” you said, crossing the room slowly, “with the themes of surveillance. The way characters and people monitor each other through silence — through what’s left unsaid.”

He glanced up now, the barest flicker of something moving behind his eyes.

“Social policing,” he said, nodding slightly. “Power through insinuation. Yes, that fits as it is very Irish, kind of like bashing down Britishness . But it’s also... universal now, isn’t it? This idea that silence speaks louder.”

You perched on the edge of the chair opposite his desk. “I think it’s gotten worse since 2016. Or maybe it just got louder. The silencing, I mean.”

“And so you want to read that through the body,” he said, tapping the corner of the page, “materiality. Lived experience. Not just a metaphor.”

“I don’t think this metaphor is enough anymore,” you replied. “Metaphor doesn’t get bruised.”

That made him stop, like really stop. He took off his glasses and set them down, then looked directly at you.

“Say that again.”

You blinked. “Metaphor doesn’t get bruised.”

He leaned back in his chair, considering. “You like ambiguity,” he said at last. “Not just as a subject, more as a method.”

You tilted your head slightly. “Don’t you?”

He smiled, but not fully. The corner of his mouth curved, but his eyes didn’t quite follow.

“I like clarity,” he said. “But only after I’ve tested every route that might lead to misdirection. There’s a pleasure in getting lost first, in this... disorientation.”

You met his gaze and didn’t look away.

“I think ambiguity can be more honest than certainty,” you said quietly. “Certainty can be a kind of performance. Ambiguity leaves room for truth.”

The silence between you was no longer the pause of scholars thinking. It had changed shape — thicker now, slow and warm, the kind that filled your lungs and sat low in your stomach.

He stood.

Moved toward the bookshelf behind you, but slower than necessary. His hand reached past your shoulder, fingers trailing lightly over the spines, and you could feel him there: not touching, but close enough that the space between you felt charged. His breath stirred the loose tendrils of hair at your neck.

You didn’t move. You didn’t and couldn’t dare.

He pulled out Bodies That Matter — the paperback edition with the worn corners and a faint English Breakfast tea or black coffee stain at the bottom — and set it on the desk between you.

“Let’s talk about how materiality functions in your argument,” he said, voice low again. Steady. “What do you mean when you say female pain is being written more bodily in recent fiction?”

Your fingers hesitated on the edge of the book. “I mean… that the body’s no longer metaphorical. That trauma isn’t described as something ethereal or poetic — it bleeds now more often. It looks and sounds like vomit and it bruises all around. In A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, for example... the pain isn’t lyrical, it’s anatomical. I think literature’s trying to reclaim physicality as a political act.”

He was watching you too closely. The kind of watching that had nothing to do with critique.

“And you think that’s a post-#MeToo shift?”

You swallowed. “I think it’s older than that, but the language sharpened after 2016, it had to as metaphor started to feel like complicity.”

He said nothing for a long moment. Just looked at you — and not like a professor anymore. Like something else.

When you reached to collect your draft pages from the desk, your fingertips brushed his by accident.

It was almost nothing. Almost. He didn’t pull away, neither did you.

For a second — no longer than that — you looked at each other like something had already happened, and neither of you knew how to undo it.

Then he blinked, as though surfacing from water, and straightened his spine.

“You should get some rest,” he said, softly. “Your work’s sharpest when you’re not exhausted.”

You nodded — a little too quickly. At the door, your hand froze on the handle, you didn’t turn.

But you could feel it: the weight of his gaze between your shoulder blades. Hot, still and certain.

“You’re not…” you began, voice quieter than you meant. “You’re not playing games with me, are you?”

The silence that followed was deliberate. A choice.

Then: “Not unless you want me to.”

And you walked out — breath caught somewhere in your chest, the click of the door behind you louder than it should have been. Every step away from his office echoed like a heartbeat.

The next time you saw Pedro was in a public gathering in the middle of Cambridge. Controlled environment mainly, almost disappointingly so.

A faculty event — wine in non-wine glasses, more like milk glasses, cubes of cheese curling at the edges, conversations about funding, politics and which department had most recently butchered its hiring process. You arrived late on purpose as it gave you something to hide behind — a reason for the flutter in your chest that had nothing to do with him.

Pedro was already there, of course. In a lavender blazer and open collar, a glass in his hand and a student on either side of him. Not your cohort — these were from another college, another discipline. They were laughing way too loudly. One of them touched his arm in that absent, familiar way that felt designed for you to notice.

You didn’t go next to or near him, you did not need that kind of attention as you wanted to be in your bubble and calm environment.

Instead, you stood near the book table, idly flipping through a new collection of essays on contemporary identity politics, pretending to be absorbed while your skin prickled with every movement in the room.

It wasn’t until half an hour later that he approached.

You had not even seen him move as your mind was on the academic papers. One moment you were alone, the next he was beside you, a half-step closer than etiquette required. Cambridge was very strict with its ethics and rules.

“Are you actually interested in that,” he asked, low, “or just trying to avoid conversation?”

You turned your head slightly, didn’t smile or give a quick glance.

“Maybe both.”

“Wise,” he said, his voice pitched so only you could hear it. “No good conversations happen here. Only careful ones.”

You turned over the academic paper. “I didn’t think you were the careful type.”

“Oh, I am,” he said. “Careful, deliberate — same thing, really.”

He sipped his drink, eyes scanning your face with that same professorial intensity he used on your footnotes — like he was looking for something you hadn’t cited properly.

“Your chapter’s stayed with me,” he added, casually enough that it didn’t quite sound like flattery. “The bit about narrative violence. How stories can be a form of containment. Or punishment.”

Your mouth went dry. You hadn’t known he’d read the whole thing. He hadn’t said anything after you sent it — no comments, no annotations, just a brief “received, thank you” email.

“I didn’t think you’d get to it so soon,” you said. “You’ve got six other students to supervise.”

His expression didn’t change, but something in his voice shifted. Dropped an octave or so, as though slipping into a lower gear.

“Yes,” he said. “But they’re not you.”

And there it was — the thing that hovered always just beneath the surface. The thing he never said outright. The way he bent the rules without ever breaking them.

You could have laughed, rolled your eyes. Deflected, like you always did.

But instead you said, “Are you going to clarify what you mean by that?”

He didn’t answer right away. He studied you for a moment, as if deciding what version of himself to give you.

Then, he whispered: “Come to my office tomorrow. I want to show you something.”

“Something related to my thesis?”

Another pause. Then a smile — small, conspiratorial.

“Let’s pretend it is.”

He turned and walked away before you could respond, leaving you staring after him, heart hammering against your ribs like it was trying to warn you of something you didn’t want to hear.

The next day, you arrived at his office exactly on time. Not a minute early, not a second late. The corridor was even quieter than usual, the college in that liminal space between lectures and evening supervisions. A campus cat moved past the archway below, silent as a thought.

The door to Pedro’s office was open. Inside, the room looked the same — books still arranged in chaotic precision, a coat folded over the back of his chair, a teacup half-drained beside a stack of marked essays, but the air felt different, a bit tense, or maybe just expectant.

He was standing by the window this time, looking out at the quad.

“Close the door,” he said without turning. You did as he asked, nicely.

He waited until you were seated, until the silence had lengthened just enough to press at the edge of discomfort. Then he moved — slow, considered — and picked up a small volume from his desk which was pale blue and slim. No title on the cover.

He handed it to you.

“An unpublished manuscript,” he said. “Written in the early ’90s by a woman who never submitted it anywhere. I only have it because she gave it to me after a seminar years ago and told me it wasn’t meant for public eyes.”

You turned the book over in your hands. The paper was soft, lived-in. The margins filled with faint pencil notes in a spidery, slanted hand.

“What’s it about?”

“Power,” he said. “And narrative, and obsession.”

You glanced up.

“She wrote it about her professor?” you asked.

“She never said that outright,” he responded.

“But you think she did,” you answered back.

He smiled again, and this time, it did reach his eyes.

“I think she wanted me to wonder.”

The words hung between you like smoke.

You looked back down at the manuscript, suddenly aware of how warm your hands had become.

“So this is why you brought me here?”

“Partly.”

“And the other part?”

He walked around to the front of the desk and sat, not in his usual chair but directly across from you, very close, closer than you were used to.

“I like watching you think,” he said simply.

The air in your throat caught.

“That’s wildly inappropriate,” you said, but your voice was quieter than it should’ve been.

He nodded, as if agreeing. “And yet, here we are.”

You stared at him — really stared — and for the first time, you saw the game that he was trying to play. It was not that cruel, not too careless, but pretty much very deliberate. Like chess with no clock.

“You’re trying to destabilise me,” you said.

He leaned forward, forearms resting on his knees.

“No. I’m trying to see if you’ll destabilise yourself.”

You held his gaze, held it even as your pulse began to skitter, even as your mind tried to make sense of what was happening. Even as your fingers closed tighter around the book in your lap.

But somewhere in the quiet space between your thoughts, something was already beginning to crack open.

It was two days later when the invitation came. Not by email this time. Not a scheduled appointment in his calendar. Just a note, slipped under your door sometime between dusk and now.

It was handwritten — not typed — on a torn scrap of lecture paper. You recognised the slanted cursive instantly.

Dinner. My place. Nothing formal. 8:30.You’re probably curious enough to come. P.

No signature, just the single initial, as if he knew you’d be watching for it.

You stared at the note longer than you should have, fingers tracing the indentation of his writing. It felt… loaded, but not in a way you could defend aloud. On the surface, it was nothing , just a simple dinner invitation. Professors invited students to dinners all the time, for just some morale, for “community” purposes.

But this wasn’t about morale or community. Pedro knew that you pretty much had acknowledged this.

His flat was in a row of Georgian townhouses just below Jesus Green, on the street of Park Parade, right near the entrance where you could see a different type of trees in a row. The staircase smelled like old paint and wood polish, the kind of scent that clung to time, like an usual British flat smell.

He opened the door before you knocked, Pedro was wearing jeans, a dark jumper, and he was barefoot.

“Good,” he said, stepping aside. “You actually saw the invitation and came..”

“You sounded very sure I would.”

He smiled, just slightly. “I was betting on curiosity.”

You stepped in, slowly, eyes scanning the room, weirdly enough his flat has high ceilings which is not common for an usual British apartment. Shelves packed with books, but less organised than his office — a little more lived-in, a little less performative. A record player in the corner and an open bottle of wine on the counter. A single place set at the small kitchen table, just one.

You raised an eyebrow.

“No dinner party?” you asked. “No group bonding?”

He shrugged, unbothered. “I found them dull. I thought you might too.”

You turned slowly toward him, arms crossed. “So I’m your entertainment?”

“Hardly.” He tilted his head. “You’re the interruption.”

You did not know what that meant, but it hit you somewhere low in the ribs, like he had marked the shift in the atmosphere before you even walked through the door.

He poured the wine and handed you a glass full of it. The same way he handed you books: without ceremony, but with intent.

The food was simple, homemade, cooked by Pedro himself. Pasta with some creamy sauce and chicken, a Caesar salad that he whipped together. You talked about books, music and all-around topics mostly — novels that disappointed you, songs that haunted you, theories that made you want to argue with walls. He was better at listening in private than in seminars, he seemed less guarded. Maybe just more interested.

And then — after the plates had been pushed aside, after your second glass of wine, after he’d leaned back in his chair like the room itself belonged to him — he said:

“You know I’ve had students here before.”

You didn’t look away. “I assumed.”

“But it’s not like that,” he said. “Not with you.”

“Because I’m smarter?” you asked, arching a brow. “Or just more subtle?”

“No,” he said, and this time his voice dipped, softer than before. “Because I can’t quite tell what you want or what and who you are.”

That landed somewhere between your lungs.

You didn’t answer. Instead, you shifted slightly in your seat — leaning forward just a little — and held his gaze until the silence grew some teeth-rotting tension between you two.

“You like not knowing?” you asked.

“I like the process of finding out.”

And then — casually, almost absently — he reached across the table and touched your hand. Just his fingertips against your knuckles. A single glide, smooth and slow, before withdrawing again.

It wasn’t accidental. It wasn’t impulsive.It was most definitely deliberate.

But what surprised you most was that it didn’t unsettle you. Not in the way you’d expected. It was kind of electrifying. But still — you kept your voice level.

“You do that often?”

“What?”

“Seduce your students over some pasta and Judith Butler?”

His smile curved, crooked. “Only the difficult ones.”

You tilted your head, meeting his provocation with one of your own.

“So you want difficulty?”

“No,” he murmured, rising slowly from his chair. “I want a surrender.”

The word felt like a match struck in your stomach. You stood too, unsure if you meant to mirror him or defy him. The air between you was charged — not quite touch, not quite restraint.

You stepped closer, so did he. When he reached — slowly, gently — to tuck a loose strand of hair behind your ear, his fingers brushed your jaw, lingered, then fell away.

“You can leave anytime,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “You don’t owe me anything.” You nodded, but didn’t move.

He looked down at your mouth, then back at your eyes. “Unless you want to stay.”

Your breath hitched. Your hand — of its own accord — moved to rest lightly against his chest. You could feel the slow, steady beat of his heart beneath your palm. It felt realer than it should have. For a moment — one slow, suspended moment — you leaned in. Your lips were close enough to feel the warmth of his breath.

But then you stopped. Taking a step back from Pedro. Not dramatically and not in fear. Just enough, enough to say: not yet. His eyes didn’t change, he just studied you. As though even your retreat told him something he wanted to know.

You licked your lips, heart pounding, and whispered, “You want me to surrender?”

He nodded once.

“Then earn it.”

With that, you walked past him, out the door, the click of your heels against the wooden floor the only sound left between you. The moment that had just happened was not going to fade away anytime soon. After arriving back to your flat, you needed to take multiple deep breaths in and out to assess the situation and interpretation of your and Pedro’s actions and behaviour.

The following week after the heated moment, a thunderstorm had rolled in over the city sometime after six o’clock in the evening, soaking the ancient brick and cloaking the college campus in a hush even more pronounced than usual. You were the only one still on the floor, the seminar having ended an hour ago. The others had filtered out quickly, leaving behind the faint smell of rain and the creak of chairs being straightened. You should have gone, too.

But there was a moment when Pedro looked at you — not as a professor looks at a student, but as a man who’s been holding something back too long — you knew you wouldn’t. He didn’t ask this time. Not aloud. He just left the door open as he walked back into his office. An invitation — silent, reckless and clear.

You stepped in, slowly.

He was by the window, one hand braced against the frame, his shirt sleeves rolled to his elbows, hair slightly damp from the walk back from the Hall. The storm lit him in pulses, flashes of white and blue slicing across his cheekbones, the sharp line of his jaw. You closed the door behind you. This time, the sound didn’t startle you. Neither of you spoke, not yet.

You moved to the desk where your notes were still laid out — untouched since the seminar. You reached for them out of habit, but his voice stopped you.

“Leave them,” he said quietly. “That’s not why you stayed.”

Your fingers hovered over the pages, then dropped.

“No,” you admitted. “It’s not.”

He turned then, slowly. Watching you the way someone watches a line in a poem they have read a thousand times but only just to understand enough of it. There was nothing academic in his gaze now, just heat. Something deep and unfiltered. Something that had waited long enough.

You felt it as you breathed: the inevitability of it.  Like gravity and the falling of it.

“I’ve been trying to ignore it,” you said, your voice barely above a whisper.

His brow twitched. “So have I.”

You stepped forward, until the edge of the desk pressed against the backs of your thighs.

“It feels like something out of a bad romance novel,” you said, lips twitching — but your throat tightened the moment the words left your mouth. “Like… Fifty Shades behind an office door.”

He gave a small laugh, but it was strained. “Except I’m not offering you a contract.”

“Just chaos?”

His eyes dropped to your mouth, and when they rose again, they were darker.

“No,” he said. “I’m offering you honesty, finally.”

Your pulse thrummed in your ears. You wanted to step closer, to close the distance, to feel the pull of him, but your mind fought it — the instinct, the power, the risk.

“I’ve started to have feelings for you,” you said, quickly, before you could stop yourself. “And I hate that I have, because it complicates everything.”

He took a slow step forward. Then another.

“Then let it be complicated,” he said. “Just for tonight.”

He was close now — not touching you, but so near you could feel the heat of him like a fire lit too close to your skin. His voice dropped, gentler now, intimate.

“May I kiss you?”

That question — not a command, not a presumption, but a request — undid something in you. You nodded, then paused. 

“Yes. But—,” your voice got caught. You tried to steady the nervous clump in your throat. “It has to be a one-time thing. Just… tonight.”

His smile was soft, but his eyes didn’t believe you. Not for a second.

“If that’s what you want,” he murmured. “Then we’ll lie to ourselves together.”

And when his mouth finally met yours — slow, deep, reverent — it didn’t feel like a first kiss. It felt like something that had already happened a hundred times in the spaces between words, between glances, in every silence that stretched too long.

It felt inevitable. You let him kiss you like that. The kiss was like a forbidden notion between you two. Like you were both about to break the rules of the world. Even as you whispered again — “Just once” — you knew the truth already bloomed between you: it was never going to be just once.

It didn’t become an affair overnight.

It began, instead, in half-lit margins — in meetings that were never scheduled but always somehow expected. You never talked about it, not in any official way. Pedro never said come see me after, and you never asked can I stay a bit longer? From now on, you always did as the emotional part of you got the best of you. You stayed and he waited.

Sometimes it was after a seminar, sometimes under the soft alibi of needing to “go over revisions.” Always late, always when the halls had emptied and the air felt saturated with the hush of things left unsaid.

And then the kisses.

At first, they were cautious. Hands lingering at the edges of coats, the soft slide of knuckles along your jaw. His touch always asking first — not aloud, not with words, but with the way his eyes searched yours, giving you the chance to leave. You never did.

The first time he kissed you like he meant it — not gentle, but starved — was in his office, the blinds half-drawn, the rain whispering against the leaded glass. You had brought a new chapter, but he had not opened it. Pedro stood when you entered, circled behind you without a sound, and just as you turned to ask something — he kissed you passionately. Hands in your hair, thumb resting just beneath your ear, mouth firm, open and wanting.

It startled you, how much you wanted it back.

You clutched at his shirt — the linen one you always secretly liked — and kissed him like you had been waiting months. Because you had, you both had.

There were moments it turned urgent — your back against the door, his hands slipping beneath your coat, mouths colliding with a low sound of relief — and others when it was slow, deliberate, as if he were memorising you one kiss at a time. He kissed the edge of your mouth first, then the hollow beneath your ear, then the base of your throat. You would gasp his name, half-warning, half-confession.

And he would whisper: “Tell me if you want me to stop.”

You never did.

The library became dangerous. The King��s Parade cafés became unbearable, even during group supervisions, you would feel his gaze catch on you and flinch — not from discomfort, but from the way your body reacted instantly, breath tightening, spine straightening, thighs pressing together beneath the table like a reflex.

In the evenings, he started to send you the odd message: Are you awake? — never past midnight, never signed, just the implication. Sometimes you would ignore it, on purpose. Sometimes you wouldn’t.

One Thursday, just after the clocks had gone back and the evenings darkened early, he asked you to meet him by the back gate of Trinity. Said he had something for you — another fucking book, you assumed. You had barely slipped through the wrought-iron when Pedro was there, pulling you into the shadows between two buildings, lips on yours before a word could form. It was rough that time — hand flat against the wall behind your head, his hips pressed to yours, the kiss almost angry in its hunger. You moaned — quiet, breathless — and his fingers caught yours in the cold, holding them like a secret, tight and trembling.

“Tell me you’ve thought about it,” he muttered into your mouth. “Tell me you want me.”

You did. God, you did, but you also knew what you were standing on — a knife’s edge of risk and desire. You pulled back just enough to speak, your voice hoarse: 

“We can’t. Not all the way. Not yet.”

Pedro pressed his forehead to yours, eyes shut. His breath was warm on your cheek.

“I know,” he whispered. “But I swear, if you asked me to take you home right now, I’d lose the will to resist.”

You bit your lip. You didn’t say no, didn’t say yes, either. Instead, you kissed him again — softer this time, aching — like a promise you weren’t ready to name. You told yourself you wouldn’t go. That you needed distance, control, clarity. As you were leaving a hollow hole between you two, you walked faster than ever back to your accommodation. But when he had messaged you right before you managed to insert the key to the keyhole of your front door — Come over, we need to talk — something in you caved, quietly, without a fight.

You didn’t answer his message, just turned around, back to the road you had just walked from. The wind caught your coat as you retraced your steps through the emptying streets of Cambridge, the kind of evening where every light in a window felt like a secret, every rustle of leaves like someone watching. You knew your way by then — across Jesus Green, past the slow trickle of the Cam, through that quiet corner where his building stood tucked behind ivy and iron. He buzzed you in without asking, without saying anything at all.

“You came,” he said. Not as a question.

You stepped inside and shut the door behind you. The click echoed in the empty hallway. You didn’t know what to say, weren’t sure if this counted as a line being crossed or just the continuation of something neither of you had dared name.

“I wasn’t going to,” you murmured, making it sound more like a sarcasm.

“I know.”

And then, silence again — dense and humming — before he moved. Like you were a wild animal, like too much noise might send you bolting. He stepped toward you, but didn’t touch. Just looked.

“I need to be sure,” he said, voice low. “That you’re here because you want to be.”

You swallowed. Your pulse was a storm under your skin. “I want to be.” That was all it took.

The space between you vanished like a breath on a mirror. His hand found your jaw first, not rough, but certain — fingers warm, calloused from books and years of different activities. The kiss was soft, reverent at first, as if the moment itself was too fragile to break — then deeper, hungrier, as your hands tangled in the hem of his jumper and his mouth moved with quiet desperation over yours, like he had been waiting far too long. There was no performance, no pretense. Just heat, and a kind of aching gratitude — like you had both stumbled into something holy.

He led you to the sofa — not the bedroom — as if unwilling to waste a second. Clothes came away slowly, not torn, not rushed. Every button undone was a hesitation answered. Every inch of revealed skin was read like a page. He kissed your shoulder, your neck, the hollow just beneath your ribs. You trembled when his hand found the curve of your waist, not from fear, but from recognition as it didn’t feel like the first time. It felt inevitable.

As Pedro was smoothly and slowly hovering over you, the kisses got a bit more rough. As it got to the culmination of the heated moment, Pedro asked:

“Are you all good?” He was trying to catch his breath.

“Yes, I am alright,” you looked into his eyes. “I am more than okay to proceed to the other level.”

With that, Pedro aligned his hips between your thighs, his length already hard against your entrance. He asked one more time if you are all good, you just nodded and took his hard phallus inside of you. 

The first thrusts were slow, a bit painful for you as you have not had intercourse for years. The movements that Pedro did were certainly careful, making sure that you were comfortable and feeling in a safe zone. 

“Ah, fuck,” you whispered. Your whole body and mind felt like you were on some sort of LSD or ecstasy trip, in a good way. The pleasure that you both were feeling and getting was building up thrust by thrust. Every single one of them was passionate. Pedro started to move his hips faster to set you both closer to the climax. There were lots of moaning to be heard, many names were said into each other’s ears. The room was filled with passionate lust and lovemaking. You dragged your nails against his back, leaving red trailmarks, marking yourself on Pedro’s skin. Pedro was holding your right thigh strongly against his hip, making sure you were not falling, protecting your position and body. 

“I am so fucking close, darling,” Pedro spoke near your lips. In this very heated closing moment, your mind went blank from the bliss and pleasure that your stomach was full of knots, butterflies and everything that could be named out when you are at the edge of the orgasm.

“I am as well,” you said word by word as you tried to reach the blissful climax. 

Pedro tightened his grip on your thigh and pulled out quickly before letting the seed insert your body. Both of you came to the highest point of your orgasm, breathing heavily and laying down on the sofa for a couple of minutes to catch your breath.

As the heart rates of both of yours had calmed down, Pedro went to the bathroom and brought back a damp towel with him to clean up the white mess he had bursted out on your tummy. 

“Sorry,” Pedro said, smiling, you giggled at his comment. He softly cleaned up all the shit on your skin and even gave you a long kiss on your lips. He carefully caressed your thighs to relieve the tension and pain so you could get home without any limping but you could not give a single fuck about that. You thought that this must be the sweetest and kindest aftercare you have ever got. Pedro even brought a blanket and a cup of tea for you which made no sense in your mind as in the past, when you have had intercourse with someone, they asked you to leave straight away. 

Pedro wanted to make sure, again, that you were all good and everything was alright. You reassured him that everything was top notch and everything that happened between both of you will be locked in the cage of your mind, lips completely sealed.

The night ended up with you staying at Pedro’s flat.

The next morning came cloaked in a strange hush, like the world outside had conspired to keep your secret. The sheets were still tangled around your ankles when you opened your eyes, the sun too high for comfort, streaming in through half-closed blinds. Pedro had fallen asleep beside you at some point — though you'd tried not to let him — one arm heavy across your waist, his breath warm against the back of your neck. You’d watched the light shift on the ceiling for what felt like hours, willing yourself not to attach language to what had happened. The words would make it real and you weren’t ready for that.

He stirred when you moved to sit up, reaching out without opening his eyes, fingers brushing your thigh like muscle memory.

“I should go,” you whispered, already reaching for the shirt you couldn’t remember taking off.

Pedro exhaled slowly, like he’d known this would be the first thing you said. “Your supervision’s at eleven.”

You checked your phone. 10:42.

“Shit.”

You were out of the bed and half-dressed in seconds, pulling on yesterday’s clothes with the clumsiness of a dream breaking apart. He didn’t offer coffee as you were in a rush and he didn’t stop you either, but he watched you the whole time — silently, deliberately — as if he were trying to record this version of you too: post-you, post-him, post-everything. Something in your chest pulled tight at the thought of it.

You slipped out of his flat with your coat half-buttoned and your hair barely managed, heart hammering like it was trying to sprint ahead of you. You had to leave Pedro’s place first, just in case, so people would not catch on to your messy appearance and would not start questioning whereabouts you hung around last night - you knew what was going in the minds of every single student or coursemate that you talked with. Pedro left 5 minutes later, you already speed walking halfway to his office on the campus.

By the time you reached his office door, it was 11:07. You knocked once — out of habit — then pushed the door open without waiting. He was already inside as he took another route to his office and entered the other door. His shirt was… crisp. Papers were laid out on the desk. Calm restored like nothing had happened.

You hated how good he was at it.

You took your usual seat and let your hands rest in your lap, trying not to look at the sofa, still remembering the weight of his body against yours, how it had felt when he said your name like a confession and not a fact.

Pedro glanced up from your printed draft and got straight to the academic point of your chapter: “You’ve tightened the second half. The argument’s more cohesive.”

You nodded, because that was safer than speaking.

He paused, pen still in his hand. “You all right?”

You met his gaze. “Fine.”

Just then, there was a knock, too brisk to be ignored. The door pushed open before either of you had a chance to answer.

George, your new and good friend that you met on your first day. He had a kind of effortless charm that made you trust him before you even knew why. He had joined the programme the same year as you, though his Master’s in Politics had been completed at University of Sheffield, and the polished confidence he carried from that world clung to him like an expensive aftershave — subtle, but unmistakable. His intelligence wasn’t performative; he never flaunted it. Instead, he wielded it with grace, like someone who had nothing to prove but everything to offer. All tousled curls and a rugby scarf, holding a folder with the kind of earnest energy that only someone two years too young for you could carry.

He was tall — lanky, really — with an artfully dishevelled mop of dark curls and a wardrobe that somehow made corduroy look cool again. Tweed blazers, patterned scarves, round tortoiseshell glasses on days he felt dramatic, which, admittedly, was most days. He spoke in long, looping sentences, often peppered with witty asides and theatrical impersonations of lecturers. You had laughed so hard once during lunch that you’d nearly choked on your chicken wrap, and he’d only grinned and bowed like a stage actor after curtain.

George was out — proudly, joyfully so — but never in a way that sought applause. He made it easy to talk about anything, really. You’d told him things in the warmth of shared pints at the Eagle that you hadn’t told anyone else on the course. He was the kind of friend who walked you home in the rain without mentioning it once, who remembered your birthday without needing Facebook to nudge him, who instinctively stood between you and anyone who raised their voice in the pub.

“Oh��sorry—thought it was my time?” George asked.

Pedro didn’t flinch. “You’re early. Give us a few minutes, George.”

George hesitated, eyes flicking between the two of you — not long enough to suspect anything, but enough to plant a seed you didn’t like the taste of. 

“Sure. I’ll just wait downstairs.”

As soon as the door clicked shut, you exhaled hard — realising only now how still you had been sitting.

Pedro rubbed the bridge of his nose. “That was close.”

You swallowed. “Too close, shit.”

He didn’t answer at first. Then, slowly, he looked up, and his voice dropped into something quieter.

“Do you regret it?” you asked him, a bit louder than a mouse's squeak.

“I—I don’t, actually,” he responded, gently. “But we have to be careful now. More careful than before and ever.”

You nodded, your throat feeling thick and full of saliva.

“Because this—” he said, tapping the page in front of him like it was some code for everything unspeakable, “—can’t be the only thing between us that’s brilliant.”

And there it was again — that dizzying, disarming ambiguity. The place where literature and longing for each other collapsed into the same sentence.

Before you left, you stood from the desk chair and Pedro stopped you by taking your wrist into his grip, not with a force but with a feather touch. He gave you a passionate kiss as he did not want to say goodbye yet but he acknowledged that there was another student waiting to be given advice for their thesis. You left five minutes later, paper in hand, pulse still misbehaving — and George didn’t look at you when you passed him on the stairwell, but something in the tilt of his head told you the universe wasn’t going to let you keep this clean for long. Obviously, he was clueless as fuck what was going on but the body language that your body was telling stories in was something different.

George had invited you out for a pint or a few of them — not in the usual bustling pubs near Market Square, but a quieter place tucked behind a side street off King’s Parade. He said the chips were excellent, and you had needed the distraction. You needed some other kind of environment to get the thoughts of Pedro to fly away from your brain. George was your safe person. 

You sat in a booth under the low cylinder lights, the conversation light for a while — gossip about other PhD students in the Humanities department, how Professor Whitaker was still marking with a green pen like it was 1963, and how George’s last date had ghosted him after a two-hour museum crawl. But your laugh wasn’t as free as usual. You were clutching your pint of Neck Oil a little too tightly.

He noticed, of course. George always noticed when you were flinching, clutching and stimming. 

“Alright, gorgeous?” he asked, his voice warm, his eyes soft behind those ridiculous glasses. “You’ve been tense since your supervision today. Did Professor Pascal assign you a three-volume thesis on Judith Butler, or...?”

Your mouth opened before you even realised you were speaking. Maybe it was fruity from Neck Oil’s taste or maybe you just needed to tell someone who wouldn’t implode.

“I slept with him.”

There was a pause, a very fucking long pause.

George blinked. Once and then twice. Then he sat up straighter and slowly set his pint down.

“I’m sorry — you what?”

“I know,” you buried your face in your hands. “I fucking know. It was… it’s been going on for a bit now. He has been my supervisor, and I know it’s mad, absolutely fucked up and unethical and probably incredible disgusting but—”

George held up a hand, then let out a stunned laugh that turned into a snort. “Okay, I was not expecting that, bitch. I was ready for ‘he yelled at me about citations or your perspective of some silly arse Brexit topic’ because he is an American sausage or maybe even ‘he made me cry over a book that you read, but not this.”

You looked up, mortified, your pulse hammering. “So, wait, you’re not actually like—judging me?”

“Oh, please, babes,” he said, shaking his head. “Do you know how many questionable flings I’ve had? I once dated a visiting American professor who insisted on reading poetry to me in bed. T.S. Eliot, no less. You think I’m in a position to judge?”

Relief flooded you so fast it made you dizzy. You laughed, maybe too loud.

“I’m not saying it’s not… complicated,” George added, more gently now. “And I do worry about you because he’s got power, and you’ve got so much at stake. But as we both know, you’re not stupid. You are an intelligent, independent woman — an absolute queen! Just — be careful. If it goes sideways, I’ll be here with bottles of white wine and something outrageously unhealthy.”

You reached across the table, squeezing his hand. “Thank you.”

He smirked. “Also, I expect every single sordid detail every single day. I want chapters, like Professor Pedro Pascal demands — you hear me, yeah?”

For the first time in days, you felt like you could breathe.

As you left the pub that night, the sky already bruised with summer dusk, George walked you to the junction nearby your street and kissed your cheek in that chivalrous way of his — part friend, part protector. He did not press for more, he didn’t ask what would happen next.

But when you glanced over your shoulder, just before turning the corner, you saw that look in his eyes — quiet, calculating, concerned. A hint of something unspoken. Like he was turning it all over in his mind, weighing things, ready to act if he had to. 

Something told you he wasn’t going to let this go. Not completely. Not now that he knew.

And as you walked back through the Cambridge streets, a few of the street lamps flickering to life above your head, you felt the pull of something tightening. Not just desire or secrecy — something else. Like the first crack in a dam, the quiet before the rush.

Whatever was coming, it was already on its way.

Your phone buzzed just as you reached your door. A single message. No preamble. No name needed.

We need to talk. Come by. Be quick, P.

--

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