Educated & Undressed - Merciless

My back hit the wall.

His pen was still in my fist, biting into my palm...the only real thing in a room that had stopped making sense.

I looked at him. “What did you promise, David?”

“You really don’t remember the last thing I said to you. As your professor.”

I remembered. This isn’t over. It’s never going to be over.

The words had lived in me for sixteen years like a splinter too deep to dig out.

He stepped closer. The blade hung loose at his side, almost forgotten, and that carelessness scared me more than if he’d gripped it tight.

“You look terrible,” I whispered.

“I feel magnificent.” His mouth curved, slow and wrong.

“I lost a title today. I didn’t lose you.”

I lifted my chin. “You never had me, David.”

“Didn’t I?” He said it softly, almost tenderly, and that gentleness was worse than if he’d screamed it.

Worse, because I recognised it, this was the voice he used right before he took something apart piece by piece, patient enough to enjoy every second of the dismantling.

He took another step, and I felt the wall at my back... no give left, nowhere else to go.

“Say it again. Look at me and say it again.”

A whisper, low enough that I had to lean in to catch it...he’d always known that trick, making you come to him even while he was already closing the distance himself.

“You never had me.”

“Your mouth says one thing.” His eyes dropped to it and lingered there too long. “Your body remembers something else.”

“My door was locked.” My voice cracked despite me. “You’re standing between me and it.”

“I know.” He didn’t move. “I like it here.”

“Marcus is expecting me.”

Something ugly crossed his face, gone just as fast, replaced by something colder and more patient.

“Do you have any idea what he did to get that department today? You were in the room for the part he let you see. Not the part that mattered.”

“Stop.”

“He didn’t burn me for you, sweetheart.” He reached up, slowly, and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. I didn’t flinch. I refused to flinch, even as every instinct in me screamed to.

“He burnt me because he can’t share a stage with anyone. You were just the excuse he’d been waiting for.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Ask yourself why tonight.” His hand dropped to my jaw, tilted it up, and forced my eyes to his.

“Why not last month? Why not the day he found out what I did to you?”

“You don’t get to touch me and ask me questions like you still have the right.”

“I have every right.” His thumb pressed into the hinge of my jaw, and I understood.

Not as a threat.

“I made you into someone worth stealing. That right doesn’t expire because a boardroom clapped for him.”

“Let go of me.”

He didn’t. The knife stayed loose in his other hand.

A man holding a weapon like an afterthought is a man who has already stopped being afraid of what he might do with it.

“I’m making this about you,” he said, “thinking you won something today.”

“I did win.” My voice shook on it.

“You survived.” His face dropped closer, close enough that his next words landed against my mouth instead of my ear.

“There’s a difference. I taught you that difference. Are you forgetting your own lessons already?”

“You taught me how to disappear so you could feel powerful watching me do it.”

Something flickered behind his eyes... hurt disguised as fury, there and gone so fast I almost doubted I’d seen it at all.

His grip on my jaw tightened for half a second before he caught himself and eased it.

“You’ll learn soon enough,” he murmured.

“Men like Marcus don’t stop. They get quieter about it. And when his mask slips the way mine did tonight, you’ll be standing exactly where you’re standing now. Except there won’t be a door behind you that opens.”

“Is that a threat?”

“It’s a prophecy.”

His face was inches from mine now, and for one moment I couldn’t tell if he meant to kiss me or end me.

I couldn’t tell which one I was more afraid of, or which one some buried part of me was waiting for.

“David.”

“Say my name again.”

“David.” Steadier this time. A warning.

He exhaled, and something in him seemed to fold...some last thread of restraint pulling taut before it finally held.

He stepped back, one full step, and the space between us felt like the only air left in the room.

“I never begged you to stay,” I said to his back as he turned.

He stopped. His shoulders went rigid.

“I know,” he said, low. “That’s the part I never forgave you for.”

He didn’t step back.

“David.”

“Not yet.”

“You said—”

“I know what I said.” He wasn’t moving. “I lied about that too.”

My pulse climbed into my throat and stayed there.

“Marcus is going to notice I’m late.”

“Good.” His mouth curved.

“Let him wonder. Let him sit in that house and feel exactly what it’s like to lose control of something for once.”

“You want him to suffer.”

“I want him to understand what he’s holding.” His eyes dropped to my mouth and stayed there. “Something that was mine first.”

“I don’t remember your hands the way you think I do.”

“No?” His fingers brushed my collarbone, barely there, and I hated the way my breath caught on it.

“Your body just told me otherwise.”

“That’s fear.”

“Same place in the brain.” He said it almost kindly, like he was doing me a favour by not pretending there was a difference.

Neither of us moved. The apartment narrowed down to the space between his mouth and mine, and he didn’t close it.

He didn’t step away either. David just stayed there, close enough that I could feel the weight of every breath he took, letting the silence do the damage words couldn’t.

“You’ve gone quiet,” he said.

“You only go quiet when you’re calculating. Tell me what you’re counting. The distance to the door? The minutes until he comes looking? Or are you counting how many times I’ve said your name tonight, keeping score like it means something?”

“Maybe I’m counting how many more minutes you have left before this stops being about me and starts being about how you look right now.”

That landed. I watched it land...

Sixteen years hadn’t changed how much he hated being seen more than he hated being defied.

“Careful,” he said, and his voice had dropped into something quieter and far more dangerous than the anger I’d expected.

“You always did think words were armour. They’re not. They’re just the last thing people say before I remind them what silence sounds like.”

“Is that what you did in that boardroom today? Reminded them?”

“I let them do the reminding.” A humourless smile.

“It’s more instructive when they think it’s their idea.”

“David.”

“Say it like you mean it.”

“David", rougher. A warning wearing the shape of his name.

“You keep saying my name like it’s supposed to make me leave.” His voice dropped, low and even. “It’s not going to work tonight.”

“Then what will?”

“Nothing.” He said it simply, almost pleasantly, and that was the part that turned my blood cold. “I’m not finished being here yet.”

“You don’t get to decide that.”

“I already did.” He reached up and tucked the same strand of hair behind my ear again, slower this time, watching my face for the flinch he wanted.

“You handed me that decision the moment you let me back into a room with a locked door.”

“I didn’t let you do anything.”

“You didn’t stop me.” His thumb traced the shell of my ear. “There’s a difference, and you taught me that difference works both ways.”

“Marcus will come looking for me.”

“Let him.” Something sharpened behind his eyes, an old hunger dressed up as patience. “I’d like to see what he does when he finds out I was here first tonight. I want to watch that pretty, controlled face crack open.”

“You’re trying to provoke him.”

“I’m trying to remind him.” He leaned closer, and I felt the words more than I heard them. “That taking something from me doesn’t mean he gets to keep it clean.”

“You’re sick.”

“I’m honest.” He smiled slowly, and it didn’t touch his eyes. “There’s a difference there too.”

He picked the knife back up off the counter but didn’t put it away. He turned it once in his hand, unhurried... and set it down again, closer to me than before.

“Sit down, Lena.”

“No.”

“I’m not asking twice tonight.”

“You don’t get to give me orders in my own apartment.”

“I gave you orders in my own classroom for years.” His voice dropped, quieter, almost gentle.

"You always came around to them eventually. I have time. I have nowhere else to be. My whole life burnt down today, remember?”

He said it like a joke. It wasn’t one.

“So we can do this as long as it takes,” he said, “or you can sit down, and I’ll tell you exactly what I saw the night I followed you both home. Your choice.”

I didn’t sit.

“You followed us?”

“I follow what’s mine.” He said it without weight, like a fact he’d stopped questioning years ago. “Even when it isn’t mine anymore. Especially then.”

“That’s not love, David.”

“I never called it love.” His eyes stayed on me, steady, unblinking.

“You’re the one who keeps needing it to have a name you can forgive yourself for.”

“You need to leave. Now.”

“You keep saying that like it’s ever worked.” He smiled.

“Do you know what sixteen years of losing you did to me, Lena? You didn’t just walk away. You vanished. No number, no forwarding address, nothing. I built an entire career around a woman I couldn’t find, and now she’s standing in front of me acting like that erases something.”

“I left because I had to.”

“You left because it was easier than staying and finding out what we could have become.” He stopped close enough that I had to tip my head back to hold his gaze.

“And now here you are again, right back in my line of sight, like the universe has a sense of humour."

“That’s not fate, David. That’s a coincidence you’ve turned into an obsession.”

“Call it whatever helps you sleep.” His hand came up, not touching, just hovering near my throat. “I could still make you shake without laying a finger on you. Sixteen years apart didn’t change that.”

“Get away from me.”

“You’re not moving.”

He was right, and the realisation sat in my chest like a stone dropped down a well, still falling, no bottom in sight.

My legs wouldn’t obey me. My hands wouldn’t reach for the door.

Some old, buried part of me was still standing in his office at nineteen, still waiting for permission to leave a room he hadn’t dismissed me from.

“That’s the part that should scare you,” he said quietly, reading it off my face like he always could.

“Not the knife. Not tonight. That part right there. Sixteen years of distance, and you still freeze the second I lower my voice.”

“I’m not that girl anymore.”

“No,” he agreed, and something in his tone turned almost tender, almost sad.

“You’re worse. You know exactly what I am now, and you’re still not walking away.”

He reached past me, slow, and set his palm flat against the wall beside my head, boxing me in without ever fully closing the last inch between us...a cage built out of patience instead of bars.

“So tell me the truth for once,” he whispered.

“Are you staying because you’re frozen, or because some part of you never stopped wanting to know how far I’d go?”

“You want an honest answer?”

“I’ve never wanted anything else from you.”

“I stayed because I wanted to watch you say all of this out loud. I wanted to hear exactly how far gone you are, so that when I tell people what you did, no one will be able to say I imagined it.”

For the first time all night, he went completely still.

“You think this is a confession you’re collecting.”

“I think you just handed me one.”

“Careful, Lena.” The tenderness drained out of his voice, and what replaced it was colder...something that had been waiting under the surface the entire conversation.

“I’ve spent sixteen years being patient. Don’t mistake patience for something that runs out gently.”

“Is that a threat too?”

“That,” he said, “is a promise.”

I shoved him back with both hands, hard, and before I could take a single step away, the blade was already pressed against my throat.

“Don’t make me kill you, Lena,” he said low... almost regretfully, as if he were already grieving a decision he hadn’t made yet.

“Or make me relive exactly what I did to you in your office.”