The Professor and The Secret Alpha

I bought wine on the way home.

Hopefully that should help smooth things over today.

Adrian, my fiance, had been quiet on me all week. And as much as I always loved a little quiet here and there, the one I've been getting from was just not the comfortable type.

Nah, it was the type that comes accompanied with side comments once in a while.

We never just sit together anymore, Lila.

You're always somewhere else even when you're in the room.

At this point it was getting exhausting and I could see it affecting our relationship negatively. So when my department meeting wrapped up forty minutes early on Thursday, I stopped at the shop on Creston Avenue, stood in the aisle longer than necessary, and picked out a Merlot.

I drove home feeling like I was finally doing something right.

I'd try to fix the broken walls in our relationship. We could talk and I'd let him pour out all his complaints then I'd find a way to work around them.

I had barely approached our room, when I heard the noise.

I stood outside the door for maybe three seconds, to perhaps convince myself that what I was hearing was just a fragment of my imagination.

But the noise came again as it gave me the confirmation I needed to know what exactly was going on in there.

My heart sank as I pushed the door open bracing myself. But nothing prepared me for the sight of my fiance Adrian, naked in bed fucking Caitlyn...my graduate assistant.

The twenty four years old sweet girl whose recommendation letter I had spent an entire Sunday writing because I genuinely believed in her.

She saw me first. The color drained out of her face completely.

I looked at her for one long moment.

"Get out," I said.

She gathered her clothes off the floor and left without a word or a sound, and the front door clicked shut behind her like a period at the end of a sentence, and then it was just Adrian and me and the room and a silence so complete I could hear my own pulse.

He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at me. And the thing that broke something open in my chest - quietly, almost cleanly, the way ice cracks before it gives - wasn't the guilt on his face.

It was the absence of it.

He looked like a man who had been caught doing something mildly inconvenient.

Already recalibrating.

Already somewhere a few steps ahead of the moment.

"Lila," he said. "Let's not make this into something catastrophic."

I set the wine on the dresser. "Talk," I said. "I'm listening. I'd really love to get an explanation to what I just walked in on."

He stood up and - God help him - straightened his shirt before he spoke. "You want honesty? Fine."l I am a man with needs that go beyond discussing literature over dinner with someone who has already mentally left the room. I have spent two years trying to reach you - actually reach you - and every single time I hit the same wall. You're somewhere else, Lila. You have always been somewhere else."

"What the fuck does that mean?"

"It means that you are like a rigid stone!! Don't you get it? Do you know what it's like being in a relationship with a woman as cold as you? A woman who has no single passion in her? There's no spark, there's no romance. Even our sex are boring!"

I blinked, his words twisting my chest painfully, "Adrian....i bright wine." I said helplessly not knowing what else to say. "I left work early and was coming home to surprise you."

"One bottle of wine after two years of emotional absence doesn't balance the account." His voice was almost gentle, which was somehow the cruelest version of it. "You are extraordinary in that classroom. I have watched your students lean forward when you speak like you are the only thing in the room worth listening to. And then you walk through that front door and it is like something in you just - switches off. You go cold. You go somewhere I can't follow, and I have spent so long standing at the edge of that distance wondering if you even notice I'm there."

I said nothing.

"Caitlyn is different. She's everything you are not. She knows how to make me like a man. She looks at me with passion and the times I've spent with her have seriously been the best times of my life since I met you."

He shook his head slowly. "I am not a piece of furniture, Lila. I am not something you keep around for company and forget about the rest of the time."

I staggered back, not believing my ears. I thought we understood each other....but he was just lying to me about understanding them fucking my assistance?

Not just cheating on me but having the guts to stand there and point out that she is better than me?

My heart was racing frantically now and my hands too shaky I had to carefully set down the bottle of wine on a nearby table.

"You should have told me you were unhappy," I said.

"I did tell you." Something shifted in his face. "Three times in the last year I sat down and told you something was wrong between us, and all three times you nodded, said you understood, and went back to your work." He looked at me steadily. "It's almost like you dont want a partner, or you don't know what it takes. Because you just expect me to be a roommate who shows up at your convenience."

"You could have left," I snapped. My voice came out very even, which surprised me a little. "You could have walked out the door and told me the truth and I would have been devastated, but I would have respected you for it. Instead you slept with someone I mentored, in our bed, and now you're standing here explaining to me how I basically drove you to it." I let that sit for a moment. "Tell me which part of that is supposed to make me feel like the unreasonable one."

His jaw tightened. "I never called you unreasonable."

"You called me cold. Distant. A wall you kept running into." I let each word land where it landed. "You just told me your hands ended up on my assistant because of my personality deficiencies. That is blame, Adrian. That is exactly what that is."

He opened his mouth and closed it again.

I looked down at my left hand. The ring - slim gold band, small diamond, both chosen by me because I had told him once that I liked things understated and he had remembered, and I had believed for years that remembering meant something.

I pulled it off and set it on the dresser beside his watch with a soft, deliberate sound.

"You said I'm like a stone," I told him. "Maybe you're right. But a stone doesn't betray someone and then calmly explain why it was justified." I looked at him one last time. "That's a very specific kind of human weakness. And I want absolutely no part of it."

I turned around, walked back down the hallway, picked up my bag from the entryway floor, and took the wine with me because I had paid thirty dollars for it and he did not deserve a single drop.

Symbolism is one of those things you can't teach. Not really.

You can explain it until your voice gives out, draw diagrams, put quotes on the board - and some students will still look at you like you're describing a color they've never seen.

The ones who get it, get it because something clicked.

Because you asked the right question at exactly the right moment and something behind their eyes shifted.

That's the job. Finding that moment.

"Forget what Gatsby wants," I said, moving between the rows. "We all know what he wants. What I'm asking is - why does he still want it? He's rich. He's made it. He's standing on a beautiful lawn. So why is he still staring across the water at a green light?"

The class went still in the way that meant something had landed.

Maya Chen had her hand up before I finished the sentence.

Devon Okafor, next to her, was chewing on his pen and staring at the ceiling the way he did when something was turning over in his head.

I called on Devon first, partly because Maya would get her turn, and partly because Devon needed the push.

He sat up. "It's like... if he actually got her, it'd be over. The dream only works because she's still over there. Out of reach."

"Yes." I pointed at him. "Exactly that."

The class shifted - that small, almost imperceptible lean forward that meant we'd hit something real. I felt it too, that little spark of a discussion finally finding its footing. It never got old.

And then I glanced toward the back left corner and felt it go out.

Ethan Blackwood was staring at his desk. He wasn't sleeping and he wasn't on his phone. He was just gone somehow, sitting right there in his chair, watching the whole room from somewhere very far away.

Three weeks ago he would've jumped in before Devon finished his sentence.

He was the kind of kid who made other students rethink things mid-thought, who got a little too loud when he was excited about an idea and didn't seem to notice or care.

Lately he had been too distant and quiet in classes and I had no idea what was going on with the poor boy, but I had to help him out because even his grade weren't doing well.

I looked away and let him have the desk. For now.

After the bell I was cleaning the board when Sandra showed up in my doorway, one shoulder against the frame, arms crossed, already wearing the expression that tells me she had something to tell me.

"Sooooo....its Friday and the whole department are having drinks tonight at Giacomo's. You are invited of course..."

"I can't."

"I haven't even finished."

"You don't need to." I dropped the eraser in the tray. "I have papers."

"Oh my God, Lila." She pressed her fingers to her forehead like I was giving her a headache in real time.

"Every single week it's papers. You always have papers. Teachers have had papers since the dawn of time and somehow the rest of them still manage to eat dinner with other human beings occasionally."

"I'm very productive."

"You're a hermit."

"A productive hermit."

She stepped into the room, which was new - Sandra usually delivered these invitations from the doorway like she was afraid of what I'd say if she got too close. "Two hours," she said. "That's all I'm asking. You come, you have a drink, you pretend to laugh at Marcus's jokes-"

"I do actually laugh at Marcus's jokes."

"-and then you go home to your papers and your cats-"

"I don't have cats."

"-and you sleep peacefully knowing you spent two hours being a person." She looked at me. "You remember being a person, right?"

I laughed, and it surprised me a little because it was genuine. "Next time. Sandra, I promise."

She shook her head and left, still making a face.

I stood there for a second in the quiet she left behind.

Married to your job - that's what she'd called it last month, half-laughing, and I'd let it land like a joke because it was easier that way.

What I couldn't explain - what I didn't know how to say without it sounding worse than she already thought - was that work wasn't something I hid inside.

It was the one thing I understood right now. I came in, I taught, the kids pushed back or they didn't, and at the end of the day something had happened. Something concrete.

The rest of my life didn't feel like that lately, and I didn't particularly want to examine why.

I grabbed my bag and went to find Ethan.

Coach Harris had cornered me after the staff meeting last month. Blackwood's my best player. If his grades don't come up by mid-term, I lose him. I'd said I was watching it.

It was time to stop watching.

I found him in the bleachers above the gym, three rows from the top, phone in hand, watching the other boys shoot around below him like he was on the other side of a window - present in the building but somewhere else entirely.

I climbed up and sat beside him.

He clocked me immediately, and you could see him recalibrate in real time, working out what this was and what it meant.

"Ms. Monroe."

"Hey." I didn't launch into it. I looked out at the court for a moment and let the silence sit there without filling it.

Then: "What's going on with you?"

He looked back at his phone. "Nothing. I'm fine."

"Ethan." I waited until he glanced over. "I've read enough of your work to know what you sound like when you're actually trying. Your last paper didn't sound like you. The one before it didn't either." I paused. "I'm not here to pile on. I just want to know if you're okay."

His jaw tightened and he didn't answer right away, and I didn't push him to.

"I'm fine," he said again, and this time his voice came out quieter, which usually means the opposite.

"Okay." I shifted to face him slightly. "Here's what I'd like to do. I want to reach out to your dad this week - not to get you in trouble, I want to be really clear about that. I just think it helps to have everyone in the same room so we can figure out what you actually need. Does that work for you?"

Something crossed his face when I said your dad - but it was there and then it was gone, folded back up somewhere I couldn't see.

"Yeah," he said. "Sure."

"And if something's going on and you want to talk - not for a grade, not because I'm checking a box - you can come find me. Okay?"

He nodded without looking up.

I stood, pulled my bag onto my shoulder, and left him there in the bleachers with the hollow sound of the ball echoing below and whatever he was carrying that he hadn't yet found words for.

My apartment was quiet when I got home, and I had gotten good at quiet lately. I changed my clothes, stood at the counter eating leftover pasta I didn't really want, and stared out the window at the parking lot while the sky went dark.

My phone buzzed with my mom's name on the screen.

I watched it ring.

Then my sister called and I watched that one too.

Then a text came through: We're worried about you. We've been trying to reach you for weeks but you keep ignoring us. You keep pulling away. Please just call us.

I turned the phone face-down on the counter and stared at the ceiling.

I knew exactly what would happen if I picked up. The careful voices, the questions dressed up as concern - are you eating, are you sleeping, have you thought about talking to someone - and underneath all of it, the thing nobody would say out loud but that I'd feel in every pause: it's been three years, Lila. Shouldn't you be doing better by now?

Maybe. Probably.

I wasn't.

Ever since I walked out of Adrian's apartment three years ago, the only thing that made sense to me was my work, and I loved it that way.

I didn't have the time or zeal to socialize or get tangled up with another man again.

The documents weren't going to read themselves, so I read them.

That was how I worked - not because I enjoyed it, not because the numbers were interesting at eleven at night, but because the alternative was sitting in a quiet house with nothing between me and my own thoughts, and I had learned a long time ago that was not a position I could afford.

The whiskey on the corner of my desk had been there for an hour.

I hadn't touched it.

I'd poured it out of habit and then forgotten it was there, the way you forget a light you left on in another room.

I heard Ethan's footsteps before he appeared in the doorway - I'd learned them years ago, the particular weight and rhythm of them, the way they slowed when he was working up to something.

I didn't look up right away. I gave him the moment.

"There's a conference tomorrow," he said. "My English teacher wants to talk about my grades."

I set my pen down and looked up.

He was leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed, his gaze somewhere around my shoulder

. He had delivered the information the way he delivered most things lately - flat, stripped of anything that might invite a follow-up question.

"What time?"

"She said she'd email you."

"All right."

He pushed off the frame and started to turn, and I said, "Hold on."

He stopped.

"Are you okay?"

He paused for a few seconds then nodded, "Yeah," he said. "I'm fine."

I had heard enough lies in my life to know the difference between someone who was hiding something and someone who had simply stopped knowing how to tell the truth, and my son had crossed into the second category somewhere around October and hadn't come back.

I didn't push. I had learned - slowly, painfully - that pushing Ethan right now was like trying to open a door by throwing yourself against it. You didn't get in. You just left a mark.

"Okay," I said. "Get some sleep."

He nodded once and walked away down the hallway, and I sat listening to his footsteps fade and then the soft click of his bedroom door, and then the house settling back into its silence.

I leaned back in my chair and looked at the ceiling for a long moment.

Five years ago I had stood in front of the Riverside Pack's council and made the announcement that ended my life as I had known it. Not dramatically - I hadn't thrown anything, hadn't made a speech.

I had simply stated my intention to leave, surrendered my title without ceremony, and walked out through a room full of people who had known me since childhood and watched them look at me like I had lost my mind.

Maybe I had. I was still not entirely sure.

What I knew was that Ethan was eleven years old and had just lost his mother, and the pack was already starting to talk about the boy's bloodline and his future role and the obligations that came with his name.

I had listened to those conversations for about two weeks before I understood with complete clarity that I was not going to let my grieving child become something for other people to plan around.

So I packed what mattered, sold the rest, and moved us both somewhere no one knew our names.

For a while it seemed like exactly the right decision.

Ethan settled in, made friends, started smiling again in a way that reached his eyes. He was doing well in school, genuinely well, the kind of student his teachers mentioned by name.

There was a lightness to him in those years that I was careful not to take for granted, because I understood it had cost something to earn.

And then this year his wolf surfaced.

It started the way it always starts - restlessness, sleeplessness, a raw irritability that had nothing to do with mood and everything to do with something waking up underneath the surface.

I recognized it immediately because I remembered my own emergence, the disorientation of suddenly carrying something in your chest that had no outlet and no language and no patience. The difference was that I had gone through it surrounded by people who had done it before me and knew exactly what it meant and what to do.

Ethan was going through it in a suburb with no pack, no elders, no one who could sit across from him and say I know what this is and it's going to pass. Just a father who knew what it was and had spent five years hoping we'd have more time before it arrived.

I picked up the glass and drank. The whiskey had gone warm.

The photograph on the bookshelf was one I'd taken myself, though I couldn't remember taking it.

Anna in the backyard at the old house, caught mid-laugh, turning toward something just out of frame.

She looked startled and delighted at the same time, which was very much how she'd moved through the world - like it kept surprising her in ways she didn't mind.

I had never been able to throw that picture away and I had stopped trying to figure out if that was healthy.

I didn't talk to it. I knew men who did that, stood in front of photographs and said the things they couldn't say anywhere else, and I understood why, but it had never been my way.

I just looked at it sometimes, usually late at night when the house was quiet and the weight of the day had settled fully onto my shoulders, and I let myself think about what she would say if she were here.

She would not be gentle about it.

You moved him to the middle of nowhere and cut him off from everything he is and now you're surprised he's struggling?

She would say it without cruelty but she'd say it plainly, because Anna had never seen the point in softening things she considered obvious. He's your son, Marcus. He doesn't need you to have the answers. He needs you to stop standing in the hallway outside his door and actually knock on it.

She had always been able to read me faster than I could read myself, which had infuriated me and also, in some way I'd never found the right words for, been the steadiest thing in my life.

The rogues had come on a Tuesday in March, when Ethan was at school and I had been twenty minutes away.

I had not been there. I would never stop knowing that I had not been there.

And in the weeks that followed, as I arranged the funeral and held my son through the worst of it and felt the grief coiling into something harder and colder in my own chest, Anna's last words kept coming back to me over and over like something on a loop I couldn't turn off.

The boy first. Always the boy first.

I had honored it. I had chosen Ethan over the revenge that still lived somewhere in the back of my jaw like a clenched muscle that never fully released.

Chosen fatherhood over the pack, over the title, over every path that would have required me to be something other than present and reliable and here.

I had done that deliberately, every single day, for five years.

I just hadn't known that keeping my son out of that world might also mean keeping him from understanding what he was in this one.

I set the glass down and closed the documents on my desk without finishing them.

Tomorrow there was a teacher to meet. I didn't expect much from it - not because I thought poorly of teachers, but because she was going to walk into that conversation with a framework built for problems she knew how to name, and whatever was happening with Ethan was not one of those problems.

She would talk about grades and engagement and support systems, and I would listen carefully and say the right things, because I owed my son the effort of trying every door, even the ones I doubted would open.

I stood, stretched my neck, and turned off the desk lamp.

The hallway was dark except for the thin line of light under Ethan's door.

I stood outside it for a moment, my hand not quite raised to knock. I could hear music playing faintly, low and tinny through earbuds, and underneath that the particular silence of a person who is awake and not sleeping and waiting for the night to be over.

I lowered my hand.

I walked back to my own room, got into bed, and lay in the dark for a long time before I slept.