#this is now somehow 26k. lsdjkflsdjf

[astxrwar]

ties that bind [4/8]

SUMMARY: Quentin Beck– your old college biology professor– is still a bastard. Apparently, you’re kind of in to that.

RATING: Explicit

WORD COUNT: 8k+

CONTENT WARNINGS: extremely under-negotiated kink, character-typical behavior, more sex albeit less gratuitous, established-dynamic-typical Everything. Some plot in this one, finally!

PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 | [PART 4] | PART 5

The thing about lab work is–

There’s generally always going to be something that could use doing after-hours.

Dr. Banner presumably interprets your sudden apparent willingness to be the one to sacrifice your evenings once or twice a week or so as an attempt to suck up; or maybe just a deep, avowed interest in microbiology.

Neither are true.

You’re not sure how Beck even knows; who he must be talking to– interrogating, more likely– to figure out when you’ll be there, at night, with everyone else gone. You don’t care. On those days you wind yourself so tight with anticipation that you can hardly think straight, never more grateful for your deep familiarity with the lab procedures, given you’re so fucking distracted. It’s hard not to be– after that second time, Beck goes right back to showing up everywhere, like he’d only been waiting, the week before, biding his time until you inevitably came back within reach of him again, and once you were and once he knew beyond suspicion that you still– that you wanted– that you would let him –

It’s like after that, all bets are off. Before, he’d always been careful, words measured and insinuations meticulous, pre-planned, balancing so expertly on the knife’s-edge boundary of appropriate and acceptable that half the time you felt like you must have been imagining it, the way he tormented you. You don’t really even have to imagine anymore; he crosses the line with impunity, now, with an unrepentant and unapologetic enjoyment. All he ever has to do is look at you the way that he does, for too long, the sum of it too familiar, the way his eyes swallow up every inch of you, or press his palm to your lower back to move past you through a doorway, just for a dizzying fraction of a second, or call you honey in that voice– sly and deliberate and fucking patronizing, that twitching half-smile hidden behind a cup of dining hall coffee at seven in the morning, so early that you’re unable to remember to even try to hide the reflexive, immediate shiver that trembles straight through you, every nerve in your body already humming and alive.

Most times Beck’s waiting for you when you leave, lingering at the other end of the building, engaged in some plausibly-deniable excuse of an activity like grading exams or stocking lab supplies or writing up. Once, though, you run into him before you’re even finished, when you step out to grab something for the lab, and that’s both better and worse– he fucks you in the closed-off third-floor bathroom, the one that’s been disconnected from the water main and essentially abandoned for the last six months, and then you just have to go back to work like nothing happened, your muscles twitching, your body liquid and sated and sore–

He gets off on that, probably. 

So do you, though, is the thing.

It’s worse this time around, too, because of that– because this time you can identify attraction and desire and wanting and name them for what they are, something you couldn’t have done before. It was so much easier when those feelings were distant and incomprehensible, when the worst thing he could ever elicit in you was anger, when you could say that you hated him and still wholeheartedly believe that it wasn’t more complicated.

Needless to say, it’s actually extremely complicated.

You do this for the entire rest of the semester– you actively make time for it, even towards the end with finals on the horizon for you and the undergrads that you TA for, glad for the fact that there’s actually no possible way for him to know that you’re, technically, prioritizing this over review for your structural biochemistry final. 

It’s six-thirty in the evening and you’re in his office when you should be anywhere else, in the library or in the commuter lounge or just fucking home, the exam is tomorrow, and instead of studying or preparing or even really thinking about it at all you’re letting him stick his tongue in your mouth and his hands under your skirt, letting him bend you flat over his desk until your hands can reach all the way across to the other side of it, until your fingers can curl around the edges so tight that your knuckles go pale and bloodless when he fists a hand in your hair and pulls it until it hurts and aligns himself with an ease that is, by now, practiced and familiar, bottoms out inside of you with a groan that reverbates through your whole body like some kind of horrible electric fucking shock–

He fucks you hard, and it wipes from your brain anything about your exam or your fucked priorities or the abysmally fucking long to-do list of your responsibilities that apparently all came second to this, a terrible and grating truth that he would never let you live down– but he doesn’t know, and you don’t tell him, and the stress of the entire fucking week thus far and the tension that had built in you trying to manage all the end-of-semester bullshit stops mattering for all of a horribly gratifying fifteen minutes.

When you let go of the edge of his desk to touch yourself, turning to the crook of your arm to muffle the traitorous and immediate gasp that breaks out of you, he chuckles, the tenor of his voice ragged and rough and split in pieces by the absolutely fucking ruthless rhythm of his thrusts– like he’s trying to break you, shatter your resolve, like that’s what he wants most out of all of this. “You gonna come for me, honey?”

“Fuck you,” you bite back at him, the words dissolving into a choked-off moan, and then you do.

And then you go home and you study for your structural biochemistry exam and you still do pretty decently on it, somehow, and you resolve to take to your grave the fact that your ability to weigh the relative importance of immediate gratification versus the entirely less gratifying things that you should be doing is broken beyond all repair. That he broke it. Or maybe you both did; combined effort. Irrelevant, really. You’re not anything, you and him, you’re not friends, or acquaintances, and you don’t, strictly speaking, even actually like each other, which means that you never have to tell him any of that.

And so you don’t. 

You do, though, see him on the last day before break, coat already on and stupid little expensive leather laptop bag slung over one shoulder, and you do walk a little faster to catch up to him before he reaches the door, glancing at him sidelong and saying with far less nonchalance than you’d intended, far more want– “Leaving?”

Beck turns to you and stares and his eyes are dark and amused and the sight of that alone sends some merciless heat searing right through your stomach. “Yeah,” he says, the silence after just as pointed and intentional as the fact that he hasn’t moved.

He wants you to ask for it, and you know that, and maybe the fact that you don’t care can be blamed on the abject fucking lack of adequate sleep you’ve gotten all week or the burning bright pulse of want that thunders dangerously through your nervous system or maybe just on– whatever. Who cares.

“Do you have to be somewhere right now?” you say, so blunt that it almost surprises you, “Or in the next, what, ten to fifteen minutes?” 

The smile that spreads slow across his face is arrogant and vicious and deeply self-satisfied and if it inspires any sort of anger in you at all, you can’t even begin to separate it from the frenetic surge of desire and the dizzying rush of anticipation that ramps up even higher at the sight, and later you can be upset about it or pissed off or whatever, but right now you can’t even really summon the barest fucking remnants of any of that. Can’t do anything but want.

“No,” he says, grinning like a wolf, “No, I don’t.”

Whatever complete absence of ability for rational thought or logic or reasoning you’re experiencing then – it doesn’t magically abate after the door to that same stupid small supply closet is closed, certainly doesn’t when his hands are on you again, his mouth , not even when he breaks from kissing you to to whisper against your jaw you want it that bad you’re gonna have to do something for me, honey, and still not even when he says, lower, rougher, the words dripping with implication and so clearly a power play that you should, rationally, tell him to go fuck himself, but–

“On your knees,” he tells you, and–

And you let him, god, you let him tell you to kneel and you let him wind his fingers through your hair and pull, tip your head back to force you to look up at him, to witness whatever wild and vicious thing is swirling in the dark of his irises; you let him reach for you and press the pad of his thumb past your lips and against your tongue and you let him squeeze the hinge of your jaw to force it open and you let him work the head of his cock into the heat of your mouth and urge you to take it, take more, all of it, just like that, fuck, honey, there you go, his hand steady and firm and warm at the base of your skull–

Something absolutely fucking treacherous inside of you vibrates when he doesn’t even really try to cage back an immediate groan this time, lazy and dark and satisfied.

Yeah. Okay. This–

You don’t actually think about it then, not when he’s fucking your mouth and not when you’re letting him and not when he’s rucking up the hem of the little t-shirt dress you’d worn because you couldn’t be bothered with pants on the fucking last day of class. Definitely not when he’s dragging your panties to the side or when his cock is pressing hot and solid between your legs and slipping and sliding up and nudging your clit and missing the mark more than once with the way you’re fucking dripping for him, god, and not when he grits out fuck all breathless and disbelieving and still somehow fucking smug, not when he has to actually use a hand around the base of his dick to guide it into you and not when he fills you up, again, the second time in two days–

You don’t, in that moment, really think about how your reaction to any of this– all of it, really, to all of it, or maybe just to him in general, whatever’s worse– may, technically, potentially, be approaching territory that is getting dangerously close to an actual fucking problem.

In your defense, it’s really fucking easy to not think about it, with the dull plastic edge of the shelf digging into the small of your back and one of your legs hitched over the crook of his arm and your entire center of balance so dependent on him like this that you don’t even have to actually move at all, your bodies so close together that the warmth of him bleeds right through his clothes. His stupid coat and that satchel-thing- whatever are discarded and forgotten somewhere on the dusty, cobwebbed floor, and him even doing that conflicts with fucking everything you know about him, but that, too, is conveniently not something you think about. He bites at your bottom lip and plies your mouth open with his tongue and licks into it like he can take this and anything else he wants from you and you’d just– let him. You’d like it. He barely even has to touch you this time and you’re already just– gone, and maybe the immediacy of it is what drags him over the edge too, because he doesn’t last much longer after that, either.

“Wait,” you say, breathless, when he moves to pull back, your head dropping onto his shoulder and your thoughts spinning, directionless, bouncing around inside your skull like it’s fucking empty in there, like your brain is the size of a fucking ping-pong ball, god, embarrassing, terrible – “Hold on, give me a second, or I really am going to fall this time.”

Beck just laughs, only vaguely mocking, breathing ragged but steadying, and holds you until your perception of things like gravity and your own center of balance and the otherwise generally simple concept of, like, standing upright, realign themselves in the disarray that must be your motor cortex. And he laughs, too, when you make a whiny and petulant noise at the fucking mess that’s between your legs, fumbles around in the dark of the supply closet until he finds one of those rolls of scratchy recycled paper towels that the bathrooms are all stocked with, and then you laugh when he grumbles under his breath at the dust clinging stubbornly to the heavy wool outer lining of his coat when he picks it up off the floor again. 

You do not think about any of that, either, at least not until you’re home, and then you do think about it– all of it, the weird parts and the concerning parts and the fact that there’s still, even now, that tiny little flicker of warmth somewhere inside of you.

Bad, you think, lying in your room in the dark, very bad.

But by then the semester is over, and it’s winter break for four weeks, and there’s the holidays to think about; Christmas, and all the logistical details that need to be worked out for that, and then New Years, which you’re pretty sure nobody even counts as a real holiday anyways, and then you realize you forgot to work out a second lab rotation and spend the rest of the break frantically sending emails– life happens, basically, and everything with Beck ends up on the back-burner, at least while he’s not within your immediate line of sight.

Maybe, you think, sometime in early January, the upcoming semester looming in the distance, maybe in the span of time between now and when you see him again, you’ll manage to get your head screwed back on straight.

---------------------

Perhaps predictably, that is not what happens at all.

Beck corners you in the east stairwell your second day back. This is despite his office being on the west side and despite the fact that there’s absolutely no fucking reason for him to even be there– he still is, of course, smiling, smirking, pressing his palm flat to the dusty brick wall near your head, his arm between you and the ascending stair. None of this is new, anymore, technically, and you’d spent the last month promising yourself that you’d fucking get over this, but for whatever reason it’s like that little base and instinctive part of your hindbrain– or maybe just your body, your entire nervous system, the way it reacts to him– hasn’t realized any of that, yet. Or just doesn’t care.

“Hey, honey,” he says, grinning wide,  “Miss me?”

“No,” you reply, dry and emphatic and somehow mostly steady, rolling your eyes if only to avoid looking at him and wishing it was more than only half-true.

Later– when you’re done for the day at one-thirty, stupidly and unusually early, and when you’re walking the long way out to the parking lot through the length of the still-mostly-empty biology building for absolutely no justifiable reason at all, you pass the cracked-open door to his office, and–

You just cannot seem to fucking help yourself. 

Beck is at his desk, posture relaxed and attention directed at something important, ostensibly; the door creaks even though you don’t so much as touch it, drifting further ajar behind you by a matter of what must have only been millimeters. The sound draws his attention and it’s like the second his eyes are on you or the second it registers he’s standing and across the room in an impossibly small number of strides, so fast that you don’t really have time to move or breathe or think . And maybe if you had time to do any of those things you would have thought to taunt him for it, how quick he is to just abandon everything else, the single-minded ferocity of his focus and how much it undercuts him when he says “You need it that bad, honey?” all arrogant and mocking like you’re alone in that, like the total sum of his own actions when laid out side by side doesn’t absolutely fucking betray him too—

“Fuck you,” is what you say instead, because it doesn’t register, not with him slamming the door shut with his hand above your head and forcing you right back against it, not with the immediate, precarious, dizzying lurch of adrenaline that vibrates right through you, brighter and warmer and sharper than anything you’ve felt in the month since you last saw him.

And, god, you will think, still later and still not then, not when it’s happening, because you never do– isn’t that just the fucking worst.

---------------------

You don’t actually come back from break early to get railed by your undergraduate biology professor. No, the actual reason is to help out in Dr. Banner’s lab, assisting in setup for his introduction to microbiology class both as part of the terms of your scholarship as well as in exchange for his advice on your nebulous future plans— you needed to at least tentatively have picked out a lab to do your thesis in and an actual official faculty advisor to pursue by the end of the semester, and you still hadn’t seriously started on either, yet.

“I was thinking about immunology, actually,” you tell him, sifting through a dusty, crumpled cardboard box full of micropipettes that you’ve been tasked with sorting by size, “I took intro in undergrad, and I did really well and I thought it was interesting, so I’m taking advanced immunology this semester with Dr. Stark– I was going to ask if he has space in his lab for me to do my third rotation.”

Dr. Banner doesn’t look up from where he’s painstakingly filling rows of those annoying too-small centrifuge tubes with pre-mixed DNA primer; yet another of an endless array of menial, boring tasks that need to be done to get everything set up for the class. 

“I think that’s a great idea.The only thing, though,” he says, reaching the end of the row, snapping closed all of the tiny plastic caps, and then starting on the next one, “Tony’s the Dean, and everybody’s always falling over themselves trying to get into his lab, so I would keep your options open. Just in case. I can talk to him for you, put a good word in, and if you do well in the class I don’t see why he wouldn’t be up for it, because your grades are otherwise great, but– still, y’know?”

You make a noncommittal sound, catching your bottom lip between your teeth and worrying at it; with the micropipettes now sorted, you work your way methodically around the room to set one of each size at every seat. “Yeah, I know– I just don’t know what I would want to do otherwise.”

“Who do you have for your second rotation?”

“Dr. Cho.”

“And, what– you’re not thinking about asking her?”

You shrug, emptying the box at the last bench. “I’m less interested in structural biochemistry,” you reply, and the degree to which you’re actually incredibly not interested in structural biochemistry must be evident in your expression, because Dr. Banner chuckles under his breath.

“Don’t let her hear that, it’ll break her heart,” he says, smiling. 

There’s a brief, not-uncomfortable silence, filled only with the sounds of the plastic casing of the micropipettes set down on the epoxy surface of the lab benches, the quiet, rhythmic click-click of the syringe depressing as he fills and then empties it over and over.

Finally, he makes this noise, a hum, kind of, like he’s considering the merits of whatever he’s about to say. “Tony’s not the only one who does immunology research. If that’s what you really want to pursue, I mean.”

You’re halfway into the adjacent storage room when he says it, off to fill the empty box with pipette tips that you’d have to similarly deposit at each lab station– god, you don’t know how he does this, year after year, it’s so fucking boring– but something about the tone of his voice makes you pause in the doorway. “He’s the only one listed on the department research page,” you reply, nonplussed, “I’ve checked.”

“Yeah, I know.” The prickle of annoyance underlying his voice– one that you recognize– betrays who he must be talking about before he even says it. “Beck’s lab isn’t listed, because he doesn’t want to have to deal with taking on undergrads for research experience. And Tony, he just– lets him, for whatever reason.”

Your mouth goes a little dry and that stupid traitorous thing inside of you trembles, the response so embarrassingly pavlovian that you should honestly be multiple times more ashamed than you are. You ignore it, and focus instead on the fact that somewhere in the back of your mind you were at least marginally aware of what he’s told you– that Beck had a lab, he did research, he wasn’t just teaching faculty. 

“It’s really not worth asking, though,” Dr. Banner continues; if he’s at all cognizant of the way you’d gone suddenly and uncharacteristically silent, he doesn’t make mention of it at all. “He’s– I mean, you know how he is.”

Yeah, you think; yeah, I do. 

“What does he– um, what’s his research area?” you ask, kicking yourself internally at the way that you stumble through the question, awkward and stilted and uncomfortable, trying to focus instead on stacking the little sachets of pipette tips into the cardboard box in neat, orderly rows. You only need forty-two– one of each of three sizes, for fourteen lab benches– but somewhere along the way you realize you’ve lost count and just mindlessly filled the entire thing.

“You’re not seriously considering it, are you?” Dr. Banner’s voice, incredulous, drifts from somewhere in the lab room proper.

“I’m seriously considering needing a backup plan,” you reply, bringing the too-full box of pipette sachets back into the lab classroom and beginning to lay those out, too. 

That much, at least, is true.

He makes another sound that could best be described as the wordless equivalent of the phrase your funeral, which is distressingly appropriate. “I think he mostly does biologics. Developing new immune regulators, monoclonal antibodies, stuff like that.”

Right. 

It would work out that way, wouldn’t it– that Beck’s research aligns so neatly with the only ideas about your future that aren’t ill-defined. You’re sure of at least one thing; that being you wanted to go into industry after this, private research and development for some pharmaceutical company, ideally; something that pays well and that’s far outside the bureaucracy and tedium and bullshit that is academia. Dr. Stark’s research is in a similar vein, but focused more on exploratory models of immune systems than the development of novel treatment strategies for, like, humans ; the difference, while small, is meaningful in the grand scheme of considering how well your PhD experience would translate to valuable skills in industry.

“Look at it this way,” Dr. Banner says, having finished filling up the primer tubes, moving past you to the storage room ostensibly to start on whatever the next menial, repetitive task needed to be accomplished, “At least you have time to figure it out. And who knows, you might get into Tony’s lab, and then you won’t have to worry about it.”

“Yeah,” you sigh, “I guess,” staring down at the box of pipette tips, still half-full even after all the lab benches were stocked, mind racing and thoughts elsewhere and not feeling all that much better about it.

---------------------

Your rotation in Dr. Cho’s lab goes fine. That is the best descriptor because it is itself the most nondescript; nothing special, but nothing bad, either.

You become gradually acquainted beyond a vague theoretical understanding with stuff like x-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance imaging and cryoelectron microscopy, familiar with the weird and kind of janky processing software that analyzes the data and renders the images of the molecules and the cell receptors and essential enzymes and whatever else, and eventually you become friendly with a new set of labmates. It’s not boring, it’s just that it’s not what you think you want to do for the five (but, really, in life sciences it’s always more like six or seven) years of your PhD, and markedly less adjacent than the work you’d done in Dr. Banner’s lab in your rotation last semester. 

A not-insignificant part of your uneasy ambivalence might be attributable to just how goddamn much you hated organic chemistry. 

Nonetheless, you do the work, and the semester does the same things all semesters always do– it starts off slow, and then sometime after the third week it starts to pick up, until around the fifth or sixth it’s just this never-ending stream of assignments to complete and projects to finish and responsibilities to fulfill; an endless march towards some nebulous, ill-defined end.

Somehow through all of it, for reasons that you could not explain, you still end up seeing Beck.

A lot.

---------------------

Well, no-

The reasons are not that difficult to explain. They are, actually, extremely simple.

The sex is really good. 

End of story.

---------------------

Dr. Banner gets the flu towards the end of February.

This is important only because it means his intro microbiology laboratory class falls a week behind. Normally, they’d have done the first few baby steps of their extractions that week, and you and the other TAs would have handled the rest of the process the following week. With him out, the lab gets pushed back, meaning the kids do their part the first week in March, and somebody would need to do the rest of it over the week of spring break, or the entire course would fall even further behind.

Dr. Banner explains this to you in his office on Friday morning in that still-kind-of-sick voice that sounds like somebody’s forcibly holding his nose shut, growing increasingly dismayed.

“Please,” he says finally, slumping in his chair, looking far too pale and far too wan to be even out of bed, much less back to work yet, “If you could. I know you always get stuck doing it, but everyone else has plans for spring break, and I’m supposed to be giving a presentation at a conference in Toronto, and–”

“It’s fine,” you reply, “Don’t even worry about it. I haven’t done anything for spring break since, like, sophomore year.”

“Thank you,” he says, visibly relieved. “You are a lifesaver. Really.”

Later, as you’re leaving his office after stressing to him that he really should go home and rest if he’s insisting on still going to a conference he’ll have to leave for in less than six hours, you allow yourself to think about the things that usually tended to happen last semester, all the other times you stayed late.

And then you think about it for what amounts to basically the entire day. Which, you know– fine. It’s the Friday before spring break. It’s not like you’re actually doing anything.

You’re still thinking about it when you’re in lab, as you work mindlessly through the familiar task of the extractions, as you siphon pungent ethyl acetone off from the bottles you’d done last week, the smell like drug-store nail polish remover still making your nose burn despite the fume hood; as you wait, otherwise unoccupied, for the rows of neatly-labeled glass bottles to finish steeping in the steaming vat of dry ice. It’s perhaps slightly– perhaps more than slightly– embarrassing, how much time you actually spend thinking about it– him– but by now when you’re by yourself you don’t even bother warring with the thoughts anymore. Whatever you think about when you’re alone stays between you and god– it doesn’t count.

(That, the still-rational piece of you thinks– the piece that hasn’t been reduced to a hormone-addled perpetually-horny teenager, however small it might be – that’s a terrible excuse.)

You’re still thinking about it as you clean and lock up the lab, though, right up until the moment that you’re not.

 In the hallway, you fumble for your car keys in the pockets of your coat, outside ones first, and then the inside pocket, anxiety starting to prickle, and then your jeans, and then your backpack— and come up empty.

Oh, fuck.

You try to peer through the little rectangular frame of glass in the door to the lab to see if you’d left them on the stainless steel tabletops or the back counter, squinting into the dark of the room. In your head you’re already retracing your steps, the pace of your thoughts rapidly bordering on frantic, trying to figure out where you had–

“Hey, honey. Long day?” 

You nearly jump out of your skin, the mounting stress having already done a number on your startle response– Beck is standing there, watching you quizzically, hands in his pockets. For once, you’re too focused on something else for the immediate, instinctive pang of warmth that flares at the sight of him to be anything more than an afterthought, and you’re kind of glad for that, unfortunate circumstances aside– that you’re at all capable of prioritizing this.

“I think I just locked my car keys in the lab,” you tell him in lieu of returning his greeting, a frown worrying at the corners of your mouth. 

“Oh yeah?” His bark of answering laughter grates on your nerves, and, god, isn’t that just like him, you think sourly, already pissing you off. “Amazing job. Really proud of you.”

“Fuck off,” you tell him, acerbic and sharp and so not in the mood, even as that stupid impulsive part of you remains painfully aware of the shrinking distance between you when he moves closer, your pulse stubbornly ticking up, your autonomous nervous system incapable of caring whether you want it to or not.

“Relax,” Beck says, unaffected, “I have a key.”

You’re too irritated to thank him, and he looks at you with amusement, because he knows that, presumably, and because it’s funny to him. That heat you’d felt at the sight of him you think must be mostly frustration, now;  it should maybe be a little concerning how difficult it is to even tell the difference in the first place, but you’re still too anxious to care.

He unlocks the door for you and flicks on the two rows of industrial overhead lights, which buzz to flickering life, bathing the room back in artificial brightness. You know within the first few seconds of glancing around that they’re not there, a realization that triggers a panic that lurches through your stomach like a cold stone.

“God damn it,” you grit out, dragging your hand over your face, the other clenching into a fist at your side, not even wanting to say out loud what you’ve realized– wishing more than anything that he wasn’t here, his particular brand of smug, condescending bullshit the exact opposite of what you needed right now.  “They’ve got to be in Dr. Banner’s office, because they’re not here.”

You wait for another bordering-on-insulting remark, but it doesn’t come, even as the silence stretches on, pointed and expectant.

“Well, I can’t get you in there,” he says, trailing behind you as you leave the lab, flicking the lights back off and pulling the door shut behind him as you rifle through your pockets again, the pockets of your coat, too, anxiety driving the search to be disorganized and frenetic as your desperation ramps higher. “The master keys only work on the rooms with hazardous materials, for emergencies. Labs and storage, mostly.”

He watches you, impassive, as you tear your backpack apart, find nothing, and then dejectedly put everything back together again. “You should call Bruce, you know he’d come back.”

You slump forward, defeated, burying your face in your bag where it’s still hanging on the wall hook. “He’s in fucking Toronto,” you mutter into the fabric, muffled, “For three days.”

At a loss for what else to do, you eventually right yourself and take your backpack up off the hook, slinging it over your shoulder with a long-suffering sigh. When you turn in the direction of the door, Beck follows after you; you’re not really thinking about what he’s probably thinking about, not right now, too concerned with how you’re going to get home, but– and this triggers a wince and a flicker of shame, a feeling that has become a lot harder to elicit in you as of late– you could probably be convinced to stop thinking about that for some indeterminate length of time, if he were to try. 

“I can give you a ride to your apartment,” he offers.

Somehow, the realization hadn’t struck you until then, but– “Oh my god, my house keys. I can’t even get in.”

“Wow,” he says dryly, “You’ve really fucked up, huh?”

“Shut up.”

There’s a pause, as you near the doors; your mood somehow sinks even lower at the state of the sky outside, already an absolute pitch black. It’s only six, but it’s still somewhere between spring and winter; the time hasn’t changed yet and a late cold front had swept in earlier in the week, so not only is it dark, it’s freezing. And you still had no fucking idea what you were going to do. 

The lights are still on in the biology building, and because of the contrast you can see both yourself and Beck clearly reflected in the glass of the door; he’s looking at you, expression unreadable.

“You have a friend you can call? Roommate?”

“No roommates. I don’t even have a spare key.”

You chew on your bottom lip for a moment, and then turn to look at him– really look at him, not just his reflection, pointedly ignoring the way you have to squash down the rise of something warm up through your abdomen just to do it. “Look– I appreciate it, but I’ll be all right. It’s my fault I got into this stupid mess anyways, I’ll figure it out. You don’t have to stay any later.”

He looks at you a moment longer, eyes steady, and then his mouth twitches up at one corner, more of an acknowledgement than a proper smile. “No, I guess not, huh?” 

Part of you is more than a little irritated at that, at the implication, because, seriously, did he think you would just, what, decide to put off figuring out how you’re going to get home– where you’re even going to sleep– because he wanted to get laid? 

(A smaller part of you is angrier still at the fact that, yeah, you probably would, if only he were capable of being more empathetic and less of an asshole for all of a meager five fucking minutes –)

“You could come with me.”

Your brain stalls, grinds to a halt and then stutters and rights itself enough for the words to process and the meaning to crystallize– and, yeah, okay, there’s a spark of electricity that strikes up in your belly at the idea, the precarity of it, even just the notion triggering that spiraling, panicky, adrenaline-infused sensation of being wildly out of your depth-- but that same small idiotic impulsive part of you, though, likes that feeling. Wants to chase it, past the point of reason or excuse.

“No,” you blurt out, before you can think about it for any longer, resolutely ignoring the part of you that’s kind of disappointed in your response. You’re not going to his fucking house, that sounds like a horrible, horrible idea.

Beck looks at you a moment more, and then his expression seals off– you wonder absently if you’d upset him. Hurt his feelings, maybe? Did he even have those?-- and he moves towards the door. When he pushes it open there’s a blast of dry and frigid air that still tastes like winter, a mixture of wood smoke and car exhaust, and he looks at you one last time, his eyes tracking back and forth across your face like he’s searching for something. “Suit yourself,” he says finally, and then he’s gone.

You stand there for a while just staring at your solitary, sullen reflection in the glass, before you pull out your cell phone and try to call someone– anyone, really, family, a friend; you even consider the merits of calling the campus police until a cursory google search reveals that all available master keys for buildings lie with the corresponding department head and are then disbursed at their discretion. The department head, of course, being Dr. Banner. Who was in Toronto. For three fucking days.

No one answers their phones; you send a few text messages out to make sure they’re not just avoiding answering calls, and after that, having realized you’ve run out of Useful Things to do, you settle for just trying to not panic. It’s admittedly a task that requires most of what limited attention you still possess at six-thirty at night, and for that reason you don’t notice the car when it appears outside; not until the driver lays on the horn for several uninterrupted seconds.

The sound jolts you, violently, out of whatever dissociative trance you were in; you register beams of light from those obnoxious, blinding-bright LED headlights and the steady rumble of an engine, the car itself parked at such an angle that you can’t make out the model from inside for the glare. You hesitate for a while, squinting at the shape of it in the darkness and trying to make out the details from the nice comfy warmth of inside, until the driver punches the horn again, three times in quick succession.

“Okay, okay, Jesus Christ,” you mutter to yourself, zipping up your coat and bracing for the solid wall of cold air that rushes to meet you when you open the door. 

You have your arms wrapped around yourself as you approach the passenger side of the car— newer-model BMW, sedan, black, tinted windows, expensive— trying to ward off the cold and not succeeding. The window rolls down as you get close; without a light on, it’s still too dark for you to make out anything inside, but you know the voice when it calls out to you.  

“Come on; I’m not gonna just leave you here, honey.”

Beck must have reached out to pull the latch for the door, because it swings wide open. The interior light flicks on with it, illuminating his face and the inside of the car, which is spotless and leather-upholstered and warm, the glow rendering the heat visible, rising out of the cabin in wavering lines. Standing as close as you are you can feel it, radiating outwards, and you sway towards it without meaning to, drawn instinctively away from the cold.

“I said I’d be fine,” you protest, with far less conviction than the first time. 

“Yeah? You didn’t prop the door open, and you don’t have your keys,” he says, lips pressed together in a way that tells you he’s trying not to laugh, “So now you can either wait there or you can wait in my car, because I’m not getting out just to let you back in again.”

“Oh my god,” you reply, equal parts indignant and alarmed, glancing back to check— god damn it, you really had just locked yourself out. “I wouldn’t even be out here if you didn’t–”

“I know,” he says, cutting you off, properly smiling now– and of course he’d only been fucking with you, and of course you’d just headlong and blindly let him get you riled up. Again . “Look– were you even able to get ahold of anyone?”

A lengthy beat of silence passes; the wind picks up, the door sways on its hinges, and you try– fail– to hide a violent shiver.

“No,” you admit, reluctant.

“Jesus Christ,” he says, tone long-suffering but that stupid fucking smile still playing at his mouth, “Quit being so stubborn and just get in the car.”

You weigh your options for a moment, again, thinking about all the ways in which this is a spectacularly bad idea– there was probably somebody still inside who’d let you in the main door if you walked around to the front of the building, and once there you could wait and maybe somebody would respond to your texts– but it’s half-hearted. You don’t actually want to do any of that. When he’d first asked, there had been this part of you– stupid, impulsive, impetuous part of you– that wanted to just say yes , without forethought or consideration, interested only in the way that the offer had brought back the same feeling as when he had first cornered you in his office, like something inside of you had melted, turned liquid and pliable and hot . 

That part of you is an unabashed and committed hedonist, apparently, and a sucker for being totally out of your depth— and the second time around, that part wins.

Buzzing with adrenaline, you reach for the grab handle on the ceiling of his car and, wordlessly, you pull yourself into the passenger seat, yank the door closed behind you, and stow your backpack at your feet. 

The light shuts off as soon as the door closes, the process entirely automatic, and for a second you can’t make out much more than the outline of him, pitch black. You can’t breathe, at first, and you tell yourself it’s because of the heat shock, your body adjusting from the cold, but a not-significant part of it might just be you freezing up at the immediate reality of being somewhere that’s his . The office was one thing, but the inside of his car– maybe because it’s so small, too personal — it’s different. It makes you feel like you’re drifting, unmoored, beyond the realm of plausible deniability or excuse; where you could justify being in his office, technically justify being really anywhere in the building, there’s no justification here, and that awareness thrums, electric, just under your skin.

He shifts the car out of park, and something inside of you trembles. 

“I thought we were going to wait for–”

Beck chuckles, and there’s that familiar biting edge to it again. “No you didn’t,” he says blithely, eyes straight ahead as he pulls out of the lot.

The words are matter-of-fact and a little bit mean and the sound of them makes you feel like you’ve dropped ten stories–the floor pulled right out from under your feet, that weightless, shivery feeling pulsing in the pit of your stomach. Of course he knew that. You don’t bother trying to deny it. 

“D’you think we’ll pass a drugstore?” You ask instead, carefully and pointedly ignoring what he’d said– there was an insinuation inherent in that, too, though, an implicit admission that he’d been right, and you can see when you glance at him that it registers, the corner of his mouth twitching up. 

“Yeah,” he replies, shifting gears as he turns out of the university entrance and onto the main road– the fact that he drives a stick is unsurprising. You’d kind of figured he was the type. “Why?”

You stretch out in the passenger seat just to give yourself something to do, warm enough now to uncurl your shoulders and unwrap your arms from around yourself; you stretch your legs and reach up to stretch your arms, too, for good measure, the movement long and languid and so much more relaxed than you feel. Out of the corner of your eye you catch the glance he casts at you, sidelong, and feel an immediate rush of satisfaction.

 “I need to get a toothbrush,” you say eventually, working to keep your voice casual.

He makes a noncommittal noise in response. “You can use my toothbrush.”

You don’t reply, but the face you must have made at that, unintentional and reflexive, it makes him laugh– really laugh, something that seems like it isn’t entirely on purpose, a sound that’s softer and rougher around the edges than the ones you’ve heard him make before, his eyes crinkling up at the corners in a way that so utterly disarms him that for a second it’s like you’re looking at a totally different person. 

Whatever you feel at that sight, as strange as it is, is so fleeting that you don’t get the chance to examine it in any amount of detail.

“The things that you’ve let me put in your mouth and you draw the line at my toothbrush,” he says, grinning, shifting gears again with a familiar efficiency as the car picks up speed. "Really, just-- illogical."

You can feel yourself flush, the sensation running from your face right down to your toes; you’re glad, now, for how dark it is, the only light the rhythmic flashes of passing streetlamps that flicker through the cabin.  “Oh my god, don’t be fucking gross.”

“I’m being scientific,” he replies, humor still suffused into his expression, “It’s basic biology; do you know how many germs a person has on their—”

“Yes, oh my god,” You cut him off before he can finish the sentence, fighting back the admittedly childish desire to cover both your ears. “ I also majored in biology, asshole, I know about microbiomes. I draw the line at societal convention, which pretty much never has anything to do with science, anyway, so--"

“Okay, well, no, that’s definitely bullshit,” his voice has gotten lower, and while he’s still smiling, it’s not the same lighthearted one from before, that smug, self-satisfied edge back in it, “You don’t give a shit about societal convention, honey, you’ve spent the last four months proving how little you care about that.”

You don’t need him to elaborate to know what he’s talking about; the implication is clear– god, four fucking months, you think, how had that even happened?-- though you get the feeling if you don’t respond he’s going to say it out loud, and that would be worse. You know that this is something that you shouldn’t be doing– he was your professor, for fuck’s sake, he’s still technically your superior, you’re still technically a student, even if you’re not his– and you don’t particularly need or even want him to say any of that, especially not the way he is now; like he’s found some hole in your reasoning, a fundamental logical misstep. 

He used to do this when you were in class, too, when you’d argue then; pull these bizarre non-sequiturs that gave you whiplash, poke holes in arguments you hadn’t even made. And god, you hated it then and you still hate it now— how he twists the conversation, twists your words, often at random, pushes and prods and needles you until you’re made to be defensive, forced to justify the most pointless, insignificant bullshit that you’d never even said in the first place.

“Yeah, well,” You fold your arms over your chest, suddenly more irritated than anything that you’re in his car and not someplace where you can just tell him to fuck off and walk away. “I pick and choose which conventions I give a shit about. Like most people do. Happy?”

He’s gotten under your skin, again, so much so that you don’t realize he’s pulled into a space in the otherwise-empty parking lot of a Dollar General until he turns, pointedly, to look at you, mouth still twitching like he wants to smile but realizes that would just piss you off more. You stare right back, stubborn, irritation prickling hot at the nape of your neck— irritated both with him for always being such an unrepentant bastard but also with yourself, too, for the fact that you can’t ever seem to stop reacting to it.

When he leans over the car console and takes your face in both hands and holds you still so can kiss you, just for a moment, you’re dizzy with vertigo and burning up with frustration and playing desperate, disorganized catch-up with whatever the fuck is going on to the point where you never really get the chance to respond– but there’s still that heat that brims up inside of you, the spark of adrenaline, and it sucks, actually, how easy it is for you to forget that you were even angry in the first place. Or maybe it’s just that he’s gotten the wires in your brain crossed so completely that you can’t even tell what the difference is, anymore. When he lets go and pulls away, you have to fight the urge to sway forwards, and that sucks, too, the way that he doesn’t even really have to try to get this from you, the wanting; it’s just always there, right under the surface, and all he ever has to do is remind you of its’ existence and everything else in your head is gone.

 “Am I happy with which conventions you choose to ignore?” Beck clasps his hands behind his head, and reclines back in his seat, eyes closed. He’s still smiling, an arrogant and self-satisfied thing that fills you with frustration and want and shame, all in equal measure. “Take a guess. And then go get a toothbrush, before I decide I’m just going to leave.”

A muscle in your jaw ticks as you unbuckle your seatbelt and crack the car door. “You’re so fucking annoying.”

“See, if only you were brave enough to ever say that during your undergrad,” he calls out after you as you’re rounding the front of his car, having rolled down his driver’s side window to do so, leaning forwards so he can hold eye contact through the windshield. It’s kind of funny, actually— how willing he is to abandon that illusion of calm disinterest, dismissal, that he’d constructed only moments earlier, if it meant even just one more chance to get a rise out of you. 

You wonder if that’s new, or if he’s always been that way, and you were just too caught up in being angry to notice.

“I said it a lot, ” you inform him, unable to suppress the beginnings of a small, reflexive grin at the thought–that maybe it’s not just you. Maybe he can’t really help himself, either. “Just not to you.”

You don’t look back, after that, but you don’t need to; you can hear him laughing.

---------------------

A friend responds to your earlier frantic text as you’re waiting at the checkout for the solitary employee to return from where they’d been stocking product somewhere within the haphazardly-organized, labyrinthine maze of the local Dollar General. 

She’s back home in Connecticut for spring break, so it would take her two hours, maybe more, just to get here, and you had already set it up with the janitor to be let back into the lab to check on the extractions over the weekend, anyways– so there are plenty of perfectly rational, perfectly objective reasons for you to respond with a “ dw lol, figured it out already. thank u tho!! ”. 

Logistics, for one. Efficiency, for another. That winding, precarious sensation of anticipation creeping up inside of you– it’s not a factor, you tell yourself reasonably. If it had been any of your friends nearby, you’d have taken them up on the offer, because of course you would have.

(You don’t even know for sure if that’s true. Deep down, you might be a tiny bit relieved that it was her who answered, and not anyone else, not someone who lived within the general vicinity of campus–  you don’t really want to know what you would have done, then, what you would choose, and this way you don’t have to find out.)

You return to his car with the toothbrush, still in its flimsy cardboard and plastic packaging, and a crumpled receipt; you think you might see something in his expression that brightens at the sight of you, but maybe it’s just a trick of the light. The toothbrush goes immediately into one of the pockets of your backpack– you’re not really thinking all that much right now, and you don’t trust yourself not to lose it otherwise– and by the time you sit up again and reach to pull the seatbelt on, he’s already peeling out of the lot. 

Beck drives like an asshole, accelerates too fast and maneuvers around other cars and egregiously violates the speed limit– huge surprise– but it’s not distressing, which is to say, begrudgingly, that he’s good at it. It’s clear that he knows the car, what it can do, shifts through the gears to bring it humming from ten to thirty to sixty miles an hour over the span of a handful of seconds in a motion so smooth that it seems effortless. You know that it’s really not, if only because the one time you’d ever tried to drive stick– a friend’s car, an already-beat-to-shit Pontiac Firebird– you couldn’t even figure out how to time the clutch right. Never so much as made it out of the parking lot.

“You drive like a fucking maniac,” you say instead of admitting any of that, and then you ignore the way that his answering laugh makes something bright and warm and weird bloom in the general vicinity of your chest, and you ignore, too, how his immediate mocking of your proclivity towards using the word fuck and its’ derivatives as if it were the world’s most liberal and universal adjective doesn’t, actually, make you angry or irritated or anything even close. Not even when he says in that too-sweet patronizing tenor something about how it’s unbecoming behavior for a PhD student, inappropriate and far too unprofessional, evidence that, well, y’know, maybe you’re just not cut out for this after all, honey–

You tell him to shut up, kind-of-not-really meaning it, finding it probably a little too easy to ignore all those things, the same way you ignore everything else that’s ever inconvenient or uncomfortable about any of this– knowing, in some distant and far-off part of your brain, that you will probably have to deal with it eventually. 

Eventually, though–

The thing about instant gratification is that it always makes that eventually seem like it’s some meaningless, incomprehensible distance from you, miles and oceans and light-years away, and while you know, logically, intellectually, that that won’t always be the case, that it isn’t, technically, even the case now–

It doesn’t click. 

It doesn’t stick.

Beck turns into a concrete several-story parking garage attached to a mid-rise tower block of apartments– condos, actually, you catch the sign on the way in, large and deliberately eye-catching and illuminated brighter than anything around by a row of obnoxious spotlights– and when he pulls into a spot marked with the stenciled number 34 in white spray-paint and parks and shuts off the engine–

It doesn’t really matter, then, what clicks or sticks or even registers at all. The surge of adrenaline, of want and anticipation and warmth and whatever else–  as soon as he moves to get out of the car, it thunders back in like the rush of high tide, like something inevitable, and the ferocity of it has you wondering as you shrug your backpack over one shoulder and close the passenger door if there might actually be something wrong with your nervous system, if something inside of you was misfiring that would explain, logically, why you still fucking feel like this–

You decide, abruptly, to stop thinking about it.

(You’ve gotten really fucking good at that.)

“Got your toothbrush?” he says, grinning, sly, somehow managing to make an otherwise–innocuous phrase sound like it’s meant to be an insult.

You roll your eyes and he just smiles wider. “Yes, I have it, asshole.”