Chapter 7: The Nebula Lecture
The flat still smelled of them a week later, or maybe Catriona just imagined it did. Every surface held a memory: the couch, the shower door, the kitchen counter where she’d found a chip in the stone from her frantic grip. Her body felt different now, a map of pleasant soreness and rediscovered thresholds. She worked through her client’s hideous magenta-and-lime palette with a strange, buoyant patience, the colors just photons, meaningless next to the feel of Aidan’s hands.His lecture was at three. She’d never seen him in that world.
The University of Leeds lecture hall was a brutalist concrete box trying and failing to feel intellectual with cheap wood veneer.The lights hummed with a cold, bluish frequency. She slipped into the back row, the plastic seat creaking under her weight. A few scattered students scrolled on their phones, waiting.The air was dry, tasting of dust and unwashed coffee cups.
He walked in, a different man.Pressed trousers, a simple grey jumper, a loaded satchel. He didn’t see her at first. He moved with an efficient, detached authority, setting up his laptop, adjusting the microphone.“Right,” he said, his voice amplified, crisp and steady. “Star-forming regions. Or, as I prefer to think of them, cosmic maternity wards.” A polite chuckle from the front.Catriona watched, fascinated. This was the calm, patient listener she knew, but forged into a pillar of expertise. He spoke about ionization fronts, about stellar winds carving cavities in molecular clouds.He showed images: the Pillars of Creation, vast and hauntingly beautiful. His pointer traced the contours of gas and dust. “Here,” he said, his voice dropping into a more intimate register even through the speakers, “the old structures are being destroyed by the very light of the new stars.It’s a violent, necessary death.”
Her skin prickled. She uncrossed and recrossed her legs, the soft fabric of her skirt riding higher up her thighs. She’d chosen it deliberately, a deep green that he’d once said reminded him of forest moss.
He was mid-sentence, explaining Bok globules, when his eyes finally swept the back of the hall.They landed on her.On the pale expanse of her thigh above her boot. His words faltered. “…dense, dark clouds of… cosmic dust…” He blinked, looked down at his notes, and cleared his throat.A faint pink tinged his neck. When he looked back at the screen, his knuckles were white around the pointer.
She kept her gaze steady, a small, secret smile playing on her lips.The last fifteen minutes of the lecture passed in a blur for her. For him, she could tell it was an act of sheer will. The casual authority was strained now, his glances toward the back row more frequent, more heated. The students filed out eventually, leaving the cavernous room hollow and silent but for the fading echo of their footsteps.
He busied himself with packing his bag, deliberately slow.She waited until the last student had vanished. Then she stood, the sound of her boots on the steps deliberately measured, echoing in the empty space.
He didn’t look up until she was right in front of the lectern. “That was… informative,” she said.
“You’re a distraction,” he replied, his voice low, stripped of its amplified polish.“A gravitational anomaly. Threw off my entire orbit.”
“Good.”
He slung his bag over his shoulder.“My office.Now.”
It wasn’t a request. A thrill, sharp and electric, shot through her. He led the way, his stride long and quick down a linoleum-lined corridor smelling of floor cleaner. His office was a small, windowless box, walls bowed with overloaded bookshelves, desk buried under open journals and scattered star charts. He locked the door behind them with a definitive click.The silence was immediate, dense. The hum of the fluorescent light was a shrill whisper.
He turned, leaned back against the door, and just looked at her.The professional mask was gone, utterly. What remained was the raw, wanting man from the kitchen, from the shower.“That skirt,” he said.
“You noticed.”
He pushed off from the door. In three steps he was before her, his hands circling her hips, pulling her against him.His mouth crashed down on hers, not with kiss but with possession. It tasted of coffee and the faint, metallic tension of his lecture. His hands slid down, cupping her arse through the fabric, squeezing hard.A groan vibrated from his chest into hers.
He turned her, smoothly, his body pressing her forward until her palms flattened on the cool, cluttered surface of his desk.A pen rolled off and clattered to the floor. He gathered the green skirt in his hands, bunching it up around her waist.The air hit the backs of her thighs. He hooked his fingers in the waistband of her knickers and pulled them down, just enough.
There was no preamble, no gentleness. He freed himself, the sound of his zip loud in the small room, and positioned himself. The broad head of his cock pressed against her entrance, already slick with her anticipation.He pushed in, a single, deep, conquering stroke that filled her completely.
“Oh God,” she gasped, her fingers scrambling for purchase on a star chart.
He set a pace that was brutal and perfect, each thrust jolting her forward on the desk. Papers rustled.A coffee mug trembled. He leaned over her, his breath hot on her ear, his voice a rough, Yorkshire-tinged whisper against the slap of skin.
“See… that nebula,” he gritted out, his hips piston-drive steady. “The violence… the light punching through the dust…” He drove into her, deeper.“That’s what this is.You. Taking me… in the dark.”
His words unspooled her. She was a collapsing star, a supernova of sensation building in her gut. She was close, so close, her cries muffled by the crook of her arm.He felt it. He stopped, pulling out abruptly, leaving her clenching around empty, frantic air.“No,” she whimpered.
“Turn around.”
He helped her, his hands turning her like she was weightless, seating her on the edge of the desk.Star charts crinkled beneath her. He pushed her knees apart, wide, staring at the flushed, glistening proof of her need. He reached for his satchel, rummaged past textbooks, and found the small bottle of lube. The pragmatic move in the academic setting made her head swim.He coated his fingers, his eyes locked on hers. One finger pressed against her ass, circling, and then slid in, easy as anything. She was open for him.Always now. He worked a second in alongside the first, the stretch a breathtaking, welcome burn.“My brilliant, dirty girl,” he murmured, watching his fingers disappear into her. “My perfect, willing cosmos.”
He replaced his fingers with the head of his cock. He didn’t guide her, he guided himself, notching perfectly at the center of her universe.He pushed.
It was smoother than the kitchen, deeper than the shower. One seamless, undeniable invasion that seated him to the hilt inside her tighter channel.Her back arched, her head falling back. A ragged scream tore from her throat, unanswered in the soundproofed room.
He fucked her ass with a devastating, focused rhythm, his hands gripping the backs of her thighs, holding her open, driving into her. The desk creaked in protest.The books on the shelves seemed to watch. The pleasure was untenable, a white-hot wire pulled taut from her core to her skull.
“Come for me,” he commanded, his voice shattered.“Let it go.I want to feel you shatter.”
She did. It wasn’t a wave but a detonation. A silent, screaming convulsion that locked her body and milking him violently, triggering his own release. He slammed home and stayed, pulsing, emptying himself deep inside her with a groan that was half agony, half prayer.
The aftermath was the smell of sex and old paper, their ragged breaths the only sound. He slumped forward, his forehead resting on her shoulder, his body still joined to hers. Slowly, carefully, he softened and slipped out. He righted her knickers, smoothed her skirt down with a tenderness that belied the fury of moments before.He looked around at the disordered desk, the displaced charts. A slow, dazed smile spread across his face. “I’ll have to reorganize my entire research.”
She laughed, shaky, her legs unable to support her yet. “Worth it?”
He leaned in, kissing her softly, a long, slow communication that had nothing to do with stars. “It’s the only thing that makes sense,” he said quietly.Then he glanced at his watch. “Department head meeting in twenty.”
Reality, with all its mundane borders, reimposed itself. But it was a reality they had remade, one desk, one lecture hall at a time. She slid off the desk, her body humming, and helped him gather the scattered papers, their fingers brushing over images of distant, exploding light.