Howard Sterling walked the corridor with the asured, deliberate stride of a man who refused to look like he was retreating.
But the taste in his mouth was bitter. The specific flavour of a rejection he hadn’t seen coming.
Tisha’s voice echoed in his skull, polite, dismissive, and each replay made the humiliation sharper.
She hadn’t even been rude. She’d treated his advance like a scheduling conflict... noted, declined and forgotten before he’d even left the room.
That alone would have been manageable.
He’d been rejected before. Rejection was just the opening act—the part of the performance where the woman convinced herself she wasn’t interested before he began the real work.
He thrived on the slow, thodical dismantling of a woman’s defenses, peeling away her resolve layer by layer until the no beca a maybe, and the maybe beca a desperate, broken yes.
He didn’t just want them; he wanted to prove them wrong about themselves.
But what burned wasn’t the rejection. It was the boy.
That boy, sitting in the chair like a throne, looking at him with the quiet, unbothered patience of soone watching a dog bark at a passing car.
No fear or recognition that he was in the presence of a man who could dismantle his academic career with a single phone call.
’Who the fuck are you?’
The question had been gnawing at him since he left that office.
A student. But students didn’t sit in female professors’ offices in the evening with the door closed and their legs crossed like they owned the building.
Sothing was going on. The certainty of it settled in his gut like a swallowed stone.
But certainty didn’t translate to concern. Not for Howard Sterling.
He’d had competition before. Junior lecturers with their earnest eyes and their research grants. Visiting professors who thought a conference dinner and a bottle of wine could accomplish what Sterling had spent months engineering.
He’d buried all of them, not through confrontation, but patience and persistence. Through the simple, immovable fact that Howard Sterling did not give up on a target.
And he certainly wasn’t going to give up on Tisha Wells.
A slow, private smile crept across his face as the image assembled itself unbidden—Tisha beneath him, that professional composure finally shattered, her voice stripped of its academic steel and reduced to sothing raw and desperate and his.
"I’ll see that face soon enough," he murmured to the empty corridor. "When you’re begging and there’s no boy to hide behind."
The fantasy carried him down the corridor, warming the bruised places in his ego, until his feet stopped of their own accord.
He was standing in front of an office he knew well. The brass naplate caught the fluorescent light:
Professor Siobhan Connolly.
Sterling studied the na for a mont, the way a man studies a nu when he’s already decided what he wants.
Siobhan.
Fiery and Proud.
She’d had the sa untouchable act when he’d first approached her. The sharp tongue, the withering glare, the righteous indignation of a woman who believed her boundaries were made of sothing stronger than his patience.
That had lasted four months.
Now she answered his texts within minutes. Kept her Wednesday evenings free without being asked. Wore the perfu he’d once ntioned he liked, as if the detail had been a request rather than an observation.
’Just like you, Tisha,’ he thought, his hand closing around the door handle. ’Every single one of you thinks you’re different. Thinks you’re stronger. Thinks you’re the one who won’t break.’
Sterling straightened his tie. Adjusted his cuffs. The humiliation of Tisha’s rejection was still lodged in his chest like a splinter, and he needed it removed.
He stepped inside and turned the lock behind him. The sharp click echoed through the small office like a period at the end of a sentence.
Siobhan Connolly was hunched over her desk. Red hair falling across her face as she marked what appeared to be a stack of second-year essays with the chanical disinterest of a woman running out the clock on her evening.
She looked up at the sound of the lock.
The transformation was instant, and to Sterling, deeply satisfying.
The bored, glazed expression vanished, replaced by a brightness that swept years off her face. She dropped her pen mid-sentence, the essay abandoned without a second thought.
"Howard." She was already on her feet, crossing the small office in three quick strides before her arms wrapped around his neck. Her body pressing against his with the eager, unguarded relief of a woman who had been waiting longer than she wanted to admit.
Sterling let her co to him.
"You look rather busy, and cute." he said, his voice carrying that low, teasing warmth he deployed like a scalpel... precise, deliberate, designed to make a woman feel like the centre of a very small, very exclusive world.
"I’m not. Not anymore," Siobhan whispered, pulling back just enough to look at him with a needy, searching gaze.
"I thought you weren’t coming tonight. I was trying to bury myself in work just to stop checking the clock."
She pulled back just enough to look at him, her eyes searching his face with an open, hungry vulnerability that she would have been mortified to display in a faculty eting.
"I was tied up," Sterling said, his hand sliding to the small of her back with a practised, proprietary ease. "Sothing urgent ca up. But it’s been... postponed."
He paused, letting his thumb trace a slow circle against the fabric of her blouse.
"Which ans I can give my full, undivided attention to the woman who actually deserves it."
The line landed exactly where he aid it.
Siobhan’s cheeks flushed, her fingers tightening on the lapels of his jacket as she tilted her face up toward his.
He kissed her. Not gently... Sterling didn’t do gentle, not when his ego was bruised and the taste of Tisha’s dismissal was still fresh on his tongue. He kissed her the way a man drinks water after crossing a desert.
Siobhan responded instantly, lting into him with the practised ease of a woman who had morised the shape of his demands.
Her fingers slid up into his hair, her breath catching as he deepened the kiss, his hand pressing harder against her lower back, pulling her flush against him.
They broke apart gasping, Siobhan’s lips swollen and her eyes half-closed, a dazed, breathless smile spreading across her flushed face.
Sterling looked down at her and felt the familiar, temporary satisfaction of being wanted settle over the bruise Tisha had left.
It wasn’t enough. It was never enough. But it would do for tonight.
Siobhan gasped, a sharp, broken sound that was half-shock and half-surrender as Sterling’s hand descended. The slap echoed in the quiet office, the impact firm and proprietary against the curve of her skirt.
"Ah... Howard," she moaned, her head lalling back as she looked up at him through a haze of sudden, dizzying heat.
She saw the dark, consuming hunger in his eyes... a raw intensity that she mistook for passion, unaware it was fueled by the bile of another woman’s rejection.
She knew that look; it ant he wouldn’t be patient tonight, and the realization made her knees weak.
"Let ... let just pack," she breathed, her voice a fractured whisper.
"Yes. Do it fast," Sterling commanded, his voice dropping into a low, jagged baritone. He traced the line of her heated cheek with a knuckles-first caress. "I’ve prepared sothing special for you tonight. A vintage Sancerre, that silk wrap you wanted... and a very long night where I remind you exactly who you belong to.
Siobhan nodded shyly, a frantic, giddy energy taking over as she turned back to her desk.
Her fingers fumbled with her briefcase, sweeping lecture notes and half-graded essays into the leather bag with a reckless disregard for the work she’d spent hours on.
Howard had whistled, and the world outside of his shadow had ceased to exist.
Sterling didn’t wait for her to finish. He turned and stepped back into the corridor, his ego stabilizing with every frantic rustle of paper behind him.
He walked toward the end of the hall, his shoes clicking rhythmically until he reached the glass-walled balcony that overlooked the faculty lot.
He leaned his forearms on the railing, his eyes narrowing as they searched the pool of orange streetlight below. His gaze settled on his black Audi, sitting solitary and silent in its reserved spot.
’Is Heena gone?’ he wondered, a flick of habitual annoyance crossing his mind.
"But she’s a good wife," he murmured mockingly to the glass, a sharp, private smirk tugging at his lips.
He was pleased with her lately; she didn’t dare to question his schedule anymore, staying in her lane like a well-trained shadow.
He checked his watch, then scanned the rest of the lot, his mind already drifting back to the high-stakes ga he was playing with Tisha. Heena was the background noise of his life... constant, reliable, and easily ignored.
But as his gaze settled on the far end of the lot, his posture stiffened.
Tisha was erging from the building, her stride fluid and confident even in the dim light. And trailing just behind her was that bastard, the student, moving with a quiet, irritatingly dominant ease.
But it was the third figure that made Sterling’s vision blur with a sudden, white-hot flash of rage.
Heena.
His wife was walking right between them, her head tilted as if she were a natural part of their circle. She wasn’t a shadow; she was a participant.
"What the fuck is going on?" he hissed, the words hitting the glass like a curse.
He watched, paralyzed, as they reached a car that wasn’t his... a car he didn’t recognize.
"Why is she with Tisha?" He searched their body language for a sign of a trap, for a sign that his "good wife" had finally stepped out of her lane and into his business.
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