Chapter Text
On the first day of the fall semester in the second year of your graduate degree, you were sure the last thing you expected was to see the man from last night standing behind a lectern in your lecture hall.
It was the first thought that yes, it was definitely the same guy, but the more you looked at him, sitting in the back middle of the room, maybe it wasn't him after all. You were being crazy, still a bit hungover. The lecture hall began to fill to the brim with students for this class, conversations buzzing around while you dug around in your backpack for a pen.
Your head still ached from the drinks you had last night.
"Okay everyone, settle down."
The room began to quiet until silence.
"Welcome to Cognitive Psychology. Since apparently introductions are necessary," he said, voice dry. "My name is written on the board along with my email. Structure your emails correctly or you won't get a response."
You looked up to see your professor motion to the whiteboard behind him, and your stomach dropped.
Professor Levi Ackerman.
The neon sign on one of the walls of the bar flickered while you looked down at your third or fourth drink of the night.
"You never told me your name," you said, leaning your hand on the elbow propped up on the table.
The man gave a grin, taking a sip of his whiskey, before saying into the cup, "Levi."
"Just Levi?"
He set the glass down with a clink. "Levi Ackerman."
Professor Ackerman continued to speak despite your spiral, pacing back and forth in front of the whiteboard while he explained his syllabus that was projected. "Attendance is mandatory and if you're looking for an easy advanced credit, you're welcome to drop the course."
His gaze grazed across the crowd of students, obviously looking to see if there were people going to walk out of the room. You watched his face, a hint of amusement on it until it scanned across the row you were sitting in.
Professor Ackerman was staring right at you, eyes looking a little bit too long.
You felt sick, the events of last night coming into full force in your mind.
"Do you want to get out of here, Levi?"
"Your car or mine?"
You could see recognition in his eyes and his speaking faltered for a moment, his mouth parted before he hid it behind the same unreadable expression he had since the lecture had begun. He started talking again about the syllabus, mentioning the clauses about late attendance and late turn-in assignments and all you could do was look down at your notebook so quickly, staring down at the blank page as if it was going to have all of the answers of what you were supposed to do.
Out of every single professor in the university, every single graduate seminar, and every single bar in the city — it had to be him. When you met him last night, you didn’t know that he was a professor. All he said was that he did research, you hadn’t put two-and-two together that he would do research here.
“This class will run under the presumption that you retained most of what you learned in your undergraduate cognitive psychology course,” Professor Ackerman said. “If not, refresh your memory before our next class on Thursday. Please utilize office hours if you feel you need more help with past material, but I will not hold your hand throughout the entire course. It’s above my pay grade.”
Looking back up, you stared at the slides on the projector but the words held no meaning for you, they blurred into hazy lines, meaningless. Your mind couldn’t stop racing, replaying every single moment of last night until you felt your headache come back.
Stepping into the modern-esque apartment, you hung your coat on one of the hangers near the door. It was decorated simply, the signs of someone who had just moved into the space.
“Did you just move here?” You asked, walking deeper into the apartment. To your right was the kitchen which was cleaned impeccably, so much so that there wasn’t even any water stains in the sink. Did he even live here, or did he just have an amazing cleaning lady? Low lights hung from the bottom of the cabinets, illuminating the space only enough for you to see the shape of his face when you looked back at him.
Levi nodded. “A week ago.” When you swiped your finger against the counter, seeing no evidence of any dust or crumbs, he laughed. “It bothers me when things are out of place.”
“Are you sure you’re not a serial killer?”
You wondered how you had missed it. There were psychology books lining the bookshelves in the living room and you had even commented on them while he stood behind you. Maybe you had been too tipsy to think twice, or maybe it was because after you had he pushed your hair to your other shoulder and started pressing warm kisses to the back of your neck. It was a phantom feeling, you could still feel them as you sat here now.
“Now that that’s over with, does anyone have any questions?”
The lecture hall was silent, a few exchanged glances here and there. Professor Ackerman waited for a moment, and then another, eyes scanning the lecture hall once again for hands raised. All of the hesitation and recognition that you’d caught earlier was buried under a guise of practiced professionalism. If you hadn’t spent hours with him last night from the bar all the way into the early hours of the morning, you would believe that he always looked like this. Untouchable and unreadable, a professor that addressed his graduate students with indifference.
Levi gave a single nod, reaching for his laptop to change the slides over to the first official lecture material. “Good, then let’s get started.”
Despite your best efforts to keep up with the material, most of the lecture was unsuccessful in terms of learning. Every time Professor Ackerman said something even remotely similar to what he said to you last night, you freezed, blinking hard enough to blur your vision, forcing yourself to stare at the projector so that you couldn’t focus on anything else.
The dry cadence of his voice brought you back to that apartment, tugging another memory to the surface. His hand would graze against the wooden edge of the lectern and you would remember the way that it felt running against your bare thigh, body pushing you deeper into his firm mattress.
“You can take more, can’t you?” Levi whispered against your ear from behind, hand pushing against the small of your back to arch your ass up. He slid into your warm heat again, a low, raspy groan leaving his lips when your cunt accepted him without any restraint. “Just like that, good girl. Already so wet for me.” His words sounded broken, ragged, like he was tearing at the seams.
By the time the lecture ended nearly ninety minutes later, your notebook only contained a few bullet points of information you weren’t even sure was relevant. Students began to sit up and leave the classroom while you sat there, watching Professor Ackerman talk with some girl who walked up to the desk. She was wearing a frilly pink top, already bargaining with him about attaining extra credit if she could be his teaching assistant. By the looks of it, he didn’t seem amused, shaking his head and saying something you couldn’t make out.
You wanted to go up to him, to tell him that you didn’t know he was the professor for your class. If you had known you never would have come onto him last night. You wouldn’t have gone home with him, kissed him, fucked him into the early hours of the morning.
But there were other students beginning to crowd his desk as well, and the last thing you wanted to do was create some type of scandal between the two of you on the first day of school if someone was to overhear.
Standing up from your seat, you grabbed your things, shoving them into your backpack and beginning to scoot past the chairs and desks of the row you were in to reach the steps that led outside. Maybe if you got out of the room quickly enough, you could go to the scheduling department and ask if there was any other course you could take in order to satisfy the credits you needed. Maybe you wouldn’t have to confront him and could drop out of the class before—
You made it to the top of the stairs when a voice cut through the murmurings of the last group of students to walk out of the classroom through the other doors to your right. You stopped in your tracks, slowly turning around to see him looking directly at you.
The door thumped, echoing in the hall between the two of you alone. He kept staring while you walked down the stairs, holding your bag against your side. Up close, you could see the familiar shape of his jawline, the tiny scar beneath his lip that you had kissed more than enough times now.
He studied you for a moment now that you were a few paces away from him, grey-blue eyes watching your every move like he was trying to figure out the right thing to say.
“I didn’t know,” you said, words tumbling out faster than you had hoped they would. “I promise I didn’t know. My advisor told me that someone else was going to teach this course.” Which was the truth, your advisor told you that a Professor Davis was teaching this semester, she was the only professor that taught this course on campus for the past five years. You knew the schedule like the back of your hand, there was no Professor Ackerman anywhere in it.
“I accepted the position two weeks ago,” he said. “The department had already posted the lecture with the previous professor. They were planning on sending the updated information today.”
You sighed in relief now that you knew he believed you. You didn’t want him to think that this was some type of trap, that you had specifically planned this. It could’ve gotten you into big trouble in terms of getting your graduate degree, hell, it could’ve cost your entire enrollment in university.
It had just been a coincidence.
A cruel, unfortunate coincidence.
You took a deep breath, relief flooding through your entire body. “Thank god,” you whispered. “I thought you’d think that . . . I don’t know. Planned this. I truly had no idea.”
Levi’s brows knit together before he raised one of them. “I never considered that. I’ve only been in town for two weeks, I didn’t know I was teaching this seminar until three days ago.”
An awkward tension crept back up between you both, both of you reaching the same conclusion silently. You were still his student, he was still your professor.
“What happened last night,” Levi said, swallowing so hard you could see his Adam's apple bob. “It happened before we knew who each other were.”
“I know.”
“We can’t discuss what happened with anyone,” he continued. “Unless you already did, and then we have another problem.”
You shook your head immediately. “No, I haven’t. My roommate doesn’t even know where I went after I left the bar.”
Levi held your gaze for a moment, searching for any hint that you weren’t being truthful. Satisfied with what he didn’t find, he gave a small nod. “Good.”
“And you?” You asked, though you were sure you already knew the answer.
The corner of his mouth twitched up for a moment. “I don’t discuss my personal life with colleagues.”
You wanted to laugh at how he said it in such a matter-of-fact way, but you bit the inside of your cheek instead.
“I don’t want this getting out any more than you do,” he added. “The university has policies, as I’m sure you’re aware.”
As is the case with all universities, relationships between faculty and students within their own classes and departments weren’t just taboo and frowned upon, they were the things that warranted investigations and disciplinary hearings. It didn’t matter that neither of you had known before it happened or before he officially became your professor. All of those would be considered things that were just inconvenient details to the advisory board.
“It wouldn’t end well,” you said quietly. “They’d just know I slept with my professor.”
You’re so tight, fuck, you take me so well.
Heat rushed to your face, prompting you to look away, your eyes focusing on a crack that ran through one of the hall tiles.
Levi’s eyes casted down to the floor like he was thinking the exact same thing you were. “Yes, they won’t care about the details. So we draw boundaries.”
Boundaries, right. Like you couldn’t remember the way his mouth felt while he kissed the soft skin of your inner thighs, or how bruising his hands felt against your wrists while he held them above your head. It felt stupid, knowing that no matter how many boundaries the two of you spoke of, it wouldn’t change the past.
“Outside of the classroom, we don’t know each other,” Levi stated clinically, almost as though it was a fact. You almost believed it even though it wasn’t true. “What happened before this morning stays between us. I’m just your professor.”
The words sounded like rejection even though it wasn’t. It was practical and it was necessary, probably the smartest thing that either of you could do in this situation if you couldn’t switch sections. Still, that didn’t stop it from feeling like rejection.
“No personal texts or calls,” Levi continued. “If we happen to run into each other off campus, we keep the interaction brief or have none at all.”
“You’ve really thought about this.”
“I’ve been thinking about it since the second I saw you sitting in my lecture.”
Levi’s expression softened then, realizing that what he said probably sounded harsher than he meant. “I don’t want to put your degree at risk or my job,” he said. “If circumstances were different . . .” He trailed off, glancing over at the door like someone was going to come through, not finishing what he wanted to say. “It doesn’t matter. They aren’t.”
You could fill in the blanks, you didn’t need a psych degree to do that. If you hadn’t enrolled in his seminar, it would be different. If he worked at the neighboring university or if you had already graduated, it would be different. Maybe there could be something there between the two of you.
Instead you were standing in an empty lecture hall.
He was your professor, you were his student.