“Then tell me,” I say, folding my arms across my chest, my voice smooth but pointed, “what was Ted Bundy’s victim profile?”
The room stills instantly. A few students shift, a few murmur, but Jasmine doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t blink.
“White women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. Brunette. Thin. Pretty. Often perceived as educated or ‘clean’—respectable enough to warrant headlines.”
I nod once. “Almost.”
Her jaw twitches, and I watch her process the information like she’s skimming through a mental file. She’s close. So fucking close.
“What’s the missing factor?” I push.
She narrows her eyes, lips curling into something between a smirk and a dare. Then she tilts her head, her smile going shark-sharp. “They all reminded him of a woman who rejected him. Sounds like most men, Professor.”
There’s a ripple of laughter across the classroom. The kind that’s nervous but entertained. My mouth parts—ready to retort, to assert control—but I find nothing waiting on my tongue.
She’s not just answering the question. She’s challenging me. And for the first time in this room, I feel cornered.
“Well,” I say finally, straightening and adjusting my cuff with deliberate calm, “I wouldn’t know about that, Miss Rivera, would I?”
She slumps back in her chair, arms crossed tight over her chest, exasperation written across her face like a red flag. That scowl—that searing contempt—it should put distance between us.
But instead, it does the opposite.
Because that flicker of rage. The spark of the girl who held Marcus King at gunpoint. The girl who bled fear and fury the night she reached for me—begged for comfort—and I turned my back. That’s the girl I want to pull out and lay bare in front of me.
And like the sick bastard I am, I want more of it.
I want the feral version of her. The version on the edge of a breakdown. I want to peel back every perfect layer until she bares her teeth at me. Until she snaps. The scowl she throws at me lights a hunger low in my gut. I want to dismiss this class. I want to bend her over this podium, fuck her until she is toocummed out that all she will be able to say is fucking “thank you.”
I clear my throat, slow and deliberate, letting the tension settle like dust in a room too tightly sealed. A few students shift uncomfortably in their seats. One coughs. Another pretends to jot something in their notebook just to avoid the heavy silence curling between me and the girl in the back row.
“Now,” I say, finally—quiet, but sharp enough to cut through the noise. “Miss Rivera brings up a compelling point.”
Jasmine doesn’t look up, inside she pulls out her laptop. The blue light illuminates the cool contour of her face.
“Rejection,” I continue, folding my arms slowly behind the podium, eyes scanning the rows of exhausted, barely-holding-it-together undergrads. “Let’s discuss what it does to the human psyche—particularly when an individual is not taught to accept it as a normal, inevitable aspect of life. When they aren’t given the tools to process it.”
The rest of the hour passes in a slow, aching grind. Every second drips like sap from a wound. When the projector clicks off and the lights hum back to life, there’s a breath of relief that moves through the room.
“Don’t get too excited. I have your forensic lab reports.” I announce, eliciting a wave of anxiety throughout the room.
I pick up the stack of papers from the corner of my desk—lab reports from the midterm forensic lab rotation—and flip slowly through the top few. My pen’s already in my hand.
Then I see her name. Jasmine Rivera.
Top corner:A-.Tight margins. Annotated references. Surgical-level precision in her comparative analysis of wound patterns. It’s excellent. Of course it is. But I stare at it for a beat longer than I should.
I let myself imagine her writing it. Curled up somewhere late at night, hoodie sleeves pulled down to her knuckles, chewing on her pen while she tries to explain why a woman was carved from collar to hip like she was meat.
I imagine her biting her lip in concentration. I imagine her scent—cinnamon and vanilla bourbon—clinging to the pages.
And then I take the pen in my hand, and with one clean, deliberate stroke, I drag a D across the top of the paper. I press the report back into the stack and hand them to my TA.
“Make sure each one goes to the correct student,” I say, voice quiet but firm, barely more than a breath.
My TA nods and begins the pass-through. Row by row, the stack thins. The usual noise returns—backpacks unzipping, chairs scraping, a few half-hearted conversations. The classroom settles into its end-of-period hum.
Hands folded behind the podium. Spine straight. Eyes cast downward, but not blind. I don’t need to look to know where she is. I don’t need to breathe to feel the annoyed click of her pen as she awaits her grade.
