sweetestberryofthebunch - Tumblr blog

sweetestberryofthebunch · 42 minutes ago

Text

Impeccable. She absolutely would do that

lucid

summary: In which you keep a journal for writing down all kinds of dreams—including the dirty ones starring a particular blue-eyed professor. What happens when it goes missing?

relationship: Agatha/afab Reader

notes: mention of semi-public sex, smoking, mention of oral sex (R receiving), anxious spiral (R receiving lol), no pronouns used but afab Reader, there's a first-person journal entry but the action of the story is 2nd person POV

word count: 3.7k (ao3)

November 12 It started at a bar.

The place was like a mix of The Hex and Señor S’s, but with the kind of finishing touches that made everything feel dreamy and just a little uncanny.

Wanda was there with me, for a while anyway. It didn’t seem like we’d been there very long before Viz turned up, and then they disappeared. Hardly anyone else was around, so I started walking home.

I had only walked a block away when she pulled up next to me and rolled the window down. “You look like you need a ride.”

I gave her a grin and a shrug. “I’m fine.”

She tilted her head, looked me up and down, and it was like I could feel her gaze on my skin. “You shouldn’t be out alone like this.”

“I’m not that drunk.” And I hadn’t felt like it. Not until that moment.

Her quick laugh told me she didn’t believe me. She reached over then to pop the passenger side door. “Get in.”

So I did.

I barely heard anything she said during the drive. All I could see were her hands—the veins and the rings and the forearms that were exposed by the rolled-up sleeves of her blazer. And then there was her tongue pressing against her cheek. The smell of her perfume. Just her being there. Dizzying.

She somehow knew which building to go to, even though I hadn’t said a single intelligible sentence.

When she parked in the spot furthest from the door, I turned to her. “Well..." I wanted to stall, to find a way to stay, but wasn't sure how. “Thanks, I guess.”

The corners of her mouth just barely curved upward, as if smiling were just another obligation. I got out of the car without another glance. I knew if I looked back—if I saw her start driving away—I’d have to follow.

I was a few steps from the car when I heard her door close behind me. I couldn’t help but turn back.

“Are you coming in?”

She laughed again but said nothing, then lit a cigarette and leaned against the hood of the car.

I stood for a minute, half considering, half just stuck, before I walked back to lean beside her.

It started small—arms brushing, fingers twitching toward each other. When I wrapped her hand in both of mine and kissed the back of her palm, then her knuckles, she barely moved, still staring off into the tree line. It was only when I swirled my tongue around the tip of her thumb that she turned her head, just enough to watch out of the corner of her eye. She still had the cigarette in her other hand, raising it up for a drag now and then, seemingly unfazed.

It was hours (or maybe just a few seconds) later when she finished her cigarette. She stomped it into the asphalt with her loafer, and then—without warning—pinned me to the hood of the car.

I was suddenly, unmistakably, sober.

She was so close, but she wasn’t moving closer; she was just standing there, lips fractions of an inch away, so I closed the rest of the distance myself. It felt like forever that we kissed, the lingering scent of tobacco coming back into focus every time we broke for air, tangled with the dark notes of her perfume.

She pulled away, fingers brushing my jaw, almost gentle, and that felt like the end. Like she was going to get back into her car and leave without another word. I needed to find something to keep her there, to keep her with me.

But then she locked eyes with me, asking a question that I somehow knew how to answer without words. I watched her sink down to her knees in front of me on the pavement, then felt her fingertips, warm against my stomach as she unbuttoned my jeans and tugged them down, then off. My legs started shaking, but it wasn't clear whether it was due to the cool air or anticipation or both.

She ran a hand along my calf, then up my thigh until she could surely feel the molten heat between them. She wore a smirk the whole time, knowing it was all for her.

When she finally hitched my leg over her shoulder and started to dip her tongue inside…

I woke up. Of course. And late, too.

So now I’m just sitting here in class, trying to act normal—like I didn’t just write about my professor getting me off in my dreams.

If she looks at me today, I’ll probably combust.

———————————

You finished scribbling the last words of the entry and then closed your notebook.

It was nothing special at first glance—just a spiral-bound book that you’d bought for a science lab a while back, which you’d ended up dropping. So it sat in your closet, holding just a few pages’ worth of lab notes, until the day you decided you were going to keep a dream journal.

You thought it was clever, really. It just looked like a class notebook. Someone would have to get a few pages deep before they found anything even mildly interesting.

By now, it was nearly full, a couple semesters’ worth of your nighttime imaginings scrawled between college-ruled lines. You could tell which entries you’d written after waking up in the middle of the night—shorter, sloppier, ending abruptly when you couldn’t fight the pull of sleep any longer—and which ones you’d taken more time to flesh out in the early morning sunlight.

It had started as a silly exercise inspired by one of your gen ed psych courses—what could you really learn about yourself from the imagery in your dreams? At this point, though, it was more of a habit than an exercise in personality analysis.

Besides, you weren’t sure you really wanted to analyze the way the contents of your dreams had… shifted over time.

You went from building fantasy lands to scenes that were much more explicit. Sometimes they felt real—real enough that you’d wake up sweaty and heaving and desperate for a touch you’d never felt. And sometimes, they felt real enough that you’d wake up reaching for someone who had never been there.

It wasn’t hard to pinpoint when it all started: at the beginning of the current semester, when you ended up in Dr. Agatha Harkness’s class. The same class you were sitting in at that very moment.

At the front of the room, Professor Harkness was going over the answers to the last quiz, a quiz that you’d aced (or as close to it as one could in a Harkness course). Other students were scratching notes into their own notebooks, except for the guy who was watching a soccer game on his laptop a few seats over and up from you, the sound just a little too loud and spilling from his earbuds. The heater hummed steadily overhead, bringing the room up to “uncomfortably warm” status, but it was better than the alternative.

In other words, there was just enough background activity and just little enough actual information flowing that you didn’t feel too guilty about how you’d spent the first few minutes of class. Since you had woken up late, you didn’t have time to write in your dorm, but if you waited until after class, you’d have forgotten most of what you’d dreamed. So you brought the journal with you, trying to forget how close she was as you recalled the events of the evening.

“All right, that’s enough of that. If you have any questions about your grade, see me after class,” Professor Harkness said, shuffling papers around on the podium without looking up. “As for today, we’re going to be talking about—”

You hurried to swap out your journal for your actual class notes, flipping to the first clean page and clicking your pen into position, ready for the first slide.

The discarded notebook lay half-in and half-out of your tote bag in the empty seat next to you.

You didn’t notice as, over the next fifty minutes, it inched toward the edge of the half-folded seat until it finally slipped through the crack and landed silently on the floor below.

When class was dismissed, you slipped your things into your bag and stood from your chair, the seat grazing your legs as it sprang back into position. As you walked out of the lecture hall, you were careful to avoid Professor Harkness’s gaze. You may have sat through that whole lecture with perfect focus, but that didn’t mean you’d forgotten what you were writing about at the beginning of the hour.

You went about the rest of the day like any other—you attended your second class, grabbed lunch with Wanda and made plans for that night (Thursdays were basically Fridays thanks to some creative scheduling), and then went to the library to get a head start on next week’s readings.

By the time 7:00 rolled around, you were back in your dorm getting ready to go out. Your outfit was strangely similar to what you’d worn in your latest dream…

You shook off the thought, and left to go meet Wanda at the campus gates.

———————————

You barely remembered crashing into your bed several hours later when you woke up the next morning, brought back to consciousness by the bright light filtering in through the windows.

That was the only nice thing about the morning—the sunlight—and even it wasn’t so great. Everything else felt awful: your head was pounding, your stomach was ready to rebel at the slightest wrong move, and your mouth was so dry that you were mildly convinced that you could swallow sandpaper and not even notice a difference.

Unsurprisingly, you only had the fuzziest recollection of whatever it was you dreamed about last night. You knew you’d had one, but it was hard to picture the specifics.

After some negotiating with your protesting body, you decided to write about the dream anyway; maybe more details would come as you went. Or maybe they wouldn’t, and you’d just have some hungover ramblings to look back on someday. It wouldn’t be the first time.

You reached behind you to your desk, where you usually had your journal set for easy access, but your heart rate sped up a bit when your fingers brushed only against the wood of the desktop.

You checked in the space between the desk and the bed; you dumped out your tote bag; you searched through the contents of the bookshelf, your clothes hamper, your closet, hoping maybe, in your alcohol-induced haze, you’d put it somewhere unexpected. You looked everywhere. But it wasn’t there.

That’s when the panic truly settled in. If that journal wasn’t in your room, that meant it was out there somewhere, just waiting for someone to pick it up and read some of your filthiest thoughts.

You threw on the nearest clothes you could find—jeans and a sweatshirt—and left the dorm in a hurry, intent to trace your path all over campus yesterday, starting in the lecture hall.

A few hours later, you’d searched your classrooms, the dining hall, and your favorite floor of the library from top to bottom. You’d checked the lost and found in every building you entered yesterday, and in some that you didn’t. You’d even called Wanda to see if maybe she’d somehow picked up the notebook at lunch yesterday. She hadn’t.

You considered heading back over to the bar, the anxiety and paranoia holding strong, but you knew you hadn’t taken anything larger than your phone out last night. You’d be an even bigger fool than you already felt to have taken that notebook somewhere you intended to get drunk off your ass.

So instead, you went back to your room, fell backwards onto the bed, and stared blankly at the ceiling.

The journal was gone.

Best case scenario: a facilities worker had picked it up and just hadn’t taken it to the lost and found yet.

Worst case scenario: someone you never even met was scanning the whole thing, ready to post it online and force you into your own version of the witness protection program.

And all you could do was wait to see if it would turn up, one way or another.

———————————

The weekend passed, and the notebook hadn’t turned up.

Despite your resignation to just wait and see if the journal would turn up after Friday’s search, you spent hours retracing your steps across campus on both Saturday and Sunday, searching classrooms and revisiting the lost and founds. Maybe you’d missed it, or maybe someone had turned it in since you last checked—but you’d never had that kind of luck.

You could at least console yourself with the fact that no one was using it for blackmail or public humiliation… at least, not yet.

By the time you settled into your senior seminar on Monday afternoon, you’d truly given up hope of finding it untouched, unread. Now it felt like the best you could hope for was that it just vanished and you’d never see or hear about it again.

You couldn’t help but feel on edge, though, bracing for the worst. Paying attention to anything else felt impossible—not the lecture you’d sat through earlier that morning, not Wanda’s stories from her weekend escapades with Viz, and certainly not your classmates’ half-baked thesis ideas.

Your mind was with that book, wherever it was.

You hadn’t started a new one yet. Not because you were expecting the other one back, and not because you were hesitant to put your dreams on paper again (though you were).

You just hadn’t been dreaming.

No vivid memories or even hazy fragments greeted you when you woke from tossing and turning all night long. There was just exhaustion and a fresh wave of anxiety.

On Tuesday morning, you were back in Professor Harkness’s class, sitting in your usual seat.

Your notes were open, your pen was in hand, but you weren’t really taking anything in. You were only catching every other sentence, and, when you looked up at the screen, you’d make it to the end of each bulleted point only to realize you hadn’t understood any of what you’d read.

By the time Professor Harkness dismissed the class, you hadn’t even written out half a page, and that was going to hurt later. Maybe you could get someone to let you borrow their notes before the next exam.

You gathered your things, preparing to head off to your next class, when you heard Professor Harkness call out your name.

Your stomach twisted.

“Yes?” you said, looking up at the podium, trying to look like you weren’t suddenly a little bit terrified.

Her icy blue eyes locked onto yours. “Stay after.”

You nodded but quickly looked away to shove the last of your things into your bag.

This had to be a coincidence. She probably just wanted to hand back the draft of the paper you’d dropped off at office hours last week or something. There was no reason for your throat to be so tight or for the cold sweat that had broken out on the back of your neck.

You stood and walked toward the front of the room, fidgeting absentmindedly with the straps of your tote bag all the way.

Professor Harkness waited until the last student left the room before stepping toward you from her spot at the podium. She wasn’t so close that it was unprofessional, but close enough that you could still smell her perfume.

You cleared your throat, an attempt to distract yourself more than anything. “Is there something you needed, Professor?”

She gave you a quick, assessing look. “You seemed a little preoccupied today.” Her voice was even—not concerned, but not disinterested. “Everything okay?”

“I’m fine,” you replied quickly—too quickly—forcing on a shaky smile. “It’s just that time of the semester.”

“Of course,” she said. She didn’t sound convinced.

For a moment she just looked at you, as if pretending to consider her next move. Then she pulled out the stack of papers that had been tucked under her arm.

On top: an all-too-familiar navy blue notebook.

Your breath caught in your throat.

Shit.

She picked it up, turning it over once to look at the back cover, before holding it out in the space between you. “I believe this belongs to you.”

You swallowed, but it did nothing to clear the lump in your throat. When you tried to speak a broken “Where—?” was all you could get out.

“I walk around the room after each class. Make sure no one left anything behind.” She shrugged, casual, unbothered. “Once in a while, I find something interesting.”

You blinked once. Twice.

In all of your worst-case scenarios, you’d never once considered that she might be the one to find it.

In another universe, you could maybe have played this cool. Shrugged it off, collected the journal and went on your way, assuming she’d just glanced inside for a name.

But in this universe, your face was hot, and the tips of your ears were burning under the heat of her gaze. You may as well have had GUILTY written across your forehead. If she hadn’t read it, you were revealing something just by standing there looking the way you did. And if she had read it? If she knew exactly what you’d written in those pages?

Her expression was perfectly neutral; you couldn’t tell what she’d seen, if anything at all, and that was almost worse than knowing. Knowing would mean resolution. Knowing would mean knowing what you needed to do next.

Not knowing, though, meant you were still scrambling for solutions to every possible scenario. Including the very worst.

Oh, God.

You were going to have to rip that book to shreds. Burn it. Bury the ashes. And after that, you were going to have to drop her class. You were going to take your first “W” on your transcript because you couldn’t keep your wet dreams to yourself. And… could she report you for this? Could you be expelled?

You’d been silent for at least a full minute, maybe longer, and you’d made no move to actually take the journal from her outstretched hand. She waved it a bit, trying to catch your attention, a barely-there smirk and an expectantly raised eyebrow on her face.

“Sorry,” you muttered, hardly loud enough for yourself to hear. You took the notebook and blindly stuffed it into your bag, like if you didn't look at it, it would just disappear (and with any luck, take you with it).

“You should be more careful,” she said, nodding toward your bag. "Anyone could have found that.”

You couldn’t trust yourself to form actual words, so you answered with what might generously be called a hum of agreement. But it was really just a whimper.

“Well,” she said with a soft chuckle when it became painfully obvious that you weren’t going to say anything more. “I’ll see you on Thursday, then.”

Your eyes snapped up, meeting hers for the first time since before she confirmed your worst nightmare had come to life. “For what?”

She raised both of her eyebrows, like it was obvious. “My class.”

“Oh,” you said, but the words did nothing to slow your racing pulse. “Right.”

She looked at you for one last, long moment, eyes alight with something—amusement maybe—before speaking again. “Now if you’ll excuse me,” she said as she stepped around you.

You turned to look over your shoulder as she began walking up and down the rows of seats, as if proving a point.

“If I find anything else of yours,” she was walking away from you as she said it, but her voice was still clear as could be. “I’ll be sure to let you know.”

Heat climbed back up and settled in your cheeks. You had to get out of there.

“Thanks,” you mumbled, almost positive she didn’t hear it, before making a beeline for the exit. Once you were safely in the hallway, the door swung shut behind you, sealing away the sound of heels clicking against the hardwood floor.

You had another class starting in ten minutes, but you weren’t even thinking about going anymore. Your feet were already steering you back to the dorm as your thoughts raced.

Maybe it wasn’t as bad as you thought. Had you actually used her name anywhere? Certainly not in anything recent. These days, “she” could only mean one person. And besides, maybe your descriptions were generic enough that it could’ve been another professor. There had to be at least a dozen other middle-aged female professors with dark hair and blue eyes on campus. But you hadn’t been in any of those other professors’ classes last Thursday, the day you had explicitly written that you were in class while making the entry.

You had been in hers.

When you got back to your room, you reached into your bag and pulled out the notebook before letting the tote and the rest of its contents fall to the tile with a thud.

You just stared at the thing for a moment. Did you really want to know if you’d written anything inside that would’ve given you away? Or maybe it was better to leave it unopened—at least you had it back, and there was no more damage it could do. What did it matter what was inside?

No. You had to know. If you were ever going to be able to look Agatha Harkness in the eye again… you had to.

Bracing yourself, you opened the spiral-bound notebook to a random page.

The first thing you saw wasn’t your own writing.

It wasn’t even the doodles you sometimes made at the tops of the pages.

It was the red ink that was filling the margins, underlining phrases, and bracketing off whole paragraphs of text.

Your stomach flipped.

She graded your dreams?

#fic rec #talented brilliant incredible amazing show stopping spectacular never the same totally unique

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