Lilliana knew she was being ridiculous.
That did not make it stop.
Morning light spilt across the academy paths in pale gold, warming the stone just enough to soften the lingering chill of early summer, and Lilliana walked through it with far less composure than she usually managed.
One hand held her bag close against her side, the other pressed briefly to her temple before dropping again, as though touching her face might somehow settle the thoughts circling there.
It did not.
Her ears twitched once, then flattened for half a second before she forced them still again.
Last night had been enough to leave anyone unsettled.
She could admit that much, at least privately.
She had fed from a human directly for the first time in her life, and not just any human, but Soren, sweet, earnest, reckless Soren, who had offered without hesitation and then looked at her afterwards with concern instead of fear.
That alone would have been enough to throw her off.
The problem was that it had not ended there.
After he left her dorm, she had stood in silence for longer than she wanted to admit, staring at the table, at the shallow dish still left there, at the dark red caught in the lamplight.
She had meant to clean it immediately.
That would have been the sensible thing, the proper thing, the thing a composed adult should do.
Instead, she had hesitated.
There had been quite a lot left.
And because wasting it had felt wrong, and because storing blood properly was hardly unusual for her, she had sealed it away for later with the same practical motions she used for preserved stock.
That "later" had become breakfast.
Her steps faltered.
Lilliana closed her eyes for one brief moment as she kept walking, her expression tightening with helpless embarrassment.
It was not only that she had drunk it; it was how easily she had done so.
No need to prepare herself, no inward flinch before the taste, no quiet endurance like there usually was with livestock blood or processed packs.
She had uncapped the container, taken one sip, and then the next, and by the time she had fully registered what she was doing, it had already been gone.
She had stood there in her little kitchen afterwards, container still in hand, staring at it as if it had personally betrayed her.
It should not have tasted that different.
Logically, she knew why it did.
Fresh blood held heat, mana, vitality, all the subtle things that were thinned out or lost in safer substitutes, but logic was not helping very much when her body had responded to it with immediate, terrifying certainty.
And worse, when she had tried to drink from one of her usual packs afterwards, the taste had turned her stomach so quickly she had nearly dropped the glass.
Too stale.
Too thin.
Too wrong.
She had ended up rinsing her mouth at the sink for far too long, one hand braced against the counter, feeling increasingly horrified by what that implied.
Her grip tightened around her bag.
This was absurd.
She was a grown woman, a professor, entirely capable of managing her own appetite and her own body, and yet her thoughts kept circling the same place no matter how firmly she tried to redirect them.
The warmth of his skin beneath her mouth.
The sudden rush that had gone through her the moment she tasted him properly.
The strange, dizzying lightness that had washed through her body afterwards, as if every frayed edge in her had briefly gone still.
Lilliana pressed her lips together.
That part frightened her most.
Not the hunger, not even the change in taste, but the sheer intensity of it.
She had lived her whole life carefully.
Carefully eating, carefully controlling herself, carefully managing every instinct that might draw attention to what she was.
Even when she wanted something, she knew how to hold it at a distance.
Last night had not felt distant at all.
It had felt immediate, vivid, unbearably close.
And then there was the other problem.
Her heart.
Every time she thought about it, it beat too fast.
Not in the sharp, predatory way hunger sometimes brought, and not in fear either, but something softer and more confusing, something that made her want to hide her face despite the fact that there was nobody around to see.
She did not like not understanding herself.
'I am not in love with him,' she reminded herself for what had to be the tenth time that morning.
That was ridiculous.
Love was not something that sprang fully formed out of one bewildering evening.
It was something built slowly, tenderly, with time and trust and ordinary moments layered one over another.
And Soren, however dear he had become, did not even resemble the sort of person she had once imagined herself falling for.
If she had ever let herself think that far ahead at all, it had always been in vague, distant shapes.
Someone older, perhaps, someone broad and steady, with a solid sort of presence, someone whose very existence felt dependable in a way she could lean against without thinking.
Soren was not that.
He was slim where her imagination had once supplied breadth, soft where she had once thought of sharpness, delicate enough in build that half the academy seemed determined to remain confused about him no matter how many times he corrected them.
Even his voice did not help.
It was clear and gentle, but sat in that unfortunate middle ground where it refused to neatly satisfy anybody's assumptions.
When she had first met him, she had been careful for exactly that reason.
Not cold, she hoped, but careful.
She remembered noticing the uncertainty in herself, the momentary hesitation before settling firmly on "Mr Arden" and never once allowing any trace of that earlier confusion to show.
Thinking about that now only made her ears burn hotter.
Because whatever uncertainty she had once felt then was nothing compared to what she felt now, with the memory of his neck still far too vivid in her mind.
Lilliana exhaled slowly, then realised, with some alarm, that she had already reached Class F.
She stopped in front of the door and gathered herself as best she could.
Her hand closed around the handle.
She straightened her shoulders.
She was a professor, this was homeroom, and she would enter, conduct herself normally, and stop behaving like a girl half her age.
She opened the door.
And shut it again almost immediately.
The movement was a little harder than she meant it to be, wood hitting frame with a sharp noise that echoed down the corridor and sent a pulse of panic straight through her.
Lilliana stared at the closed door with wide eyes, one hand still gripping the handle.
Her heart was pounding now for an entirely different reason.
Because in that single brief glance, she had seen him.
And he had his hair tied back.
Not loosely, not half-done, not falling over one shoulder the way it usually did, but properly tied away from his face and neck in a way that left the whole pale line of his throat exposed.
Lilliana closed her eyes.
'Ren, what are you doing to me?' she thought helplessly.
Under ordinary circumstances, it would not have mattered.
Under ordinary circumstances, she would have noticed it perhaps, privately thought that it suited him, and continued on with her day.
These were not ordinary circumstances.
Her senses still felt too awake from the night before, sharpened in all the ways she did not want them to be, and the sight of his neck had hit her with such immediate force that for one terrible second all coherent thought had vanished.
She brought her free hand up to cover part of her face and stood very still in the hallway, breathing carefully through her nose.
In.
Out.
Again.
By the third breath, she trusted herself enough to lower her hand.
'Get a grip, Lilliana.'
She opened the door a second time and entered.
A few students looked over at her, unsurprisingly.
One or two blinked at the earlier noise, then at her face, perhaps trying to determine whether anything had happened, but nobody said a word.
For that, she was profoundly grateful.
She kept her gaze on the attendance list in her hands as she moved to the front.
That was safest.
Her posture remained perhaps a little too straight, her expression a little too composed, but those were manageable failures.
Better stiff than obvious.
"Good morning," she said, and was relieved to hear that her voice sounded mostly normal.
Roll call began.
She made it through several names without issue, her tone even, her eyes fixed resolutely on the page, until she reached his.
"Re—"
She stopped herself.
Only just.
A beat of silence passed.
Then, with what she hoped sounded like a natural correction and not the desperate recovery that it was, she spoke again.
"Soren Arden."
He answered at once, unaware of how close she had just come to disaster.
Lilliana did not look up.
She was almost afraid that if she met his eyes right then, the mortification alone might kill her.
Her ears were burning.
She could feel it.
By some mercy, nobody commented.
Either they had not noticed, or they were too half-asleep to care, and she continued as smoothly as she could, though the rest of homeroom passed in a haze of disciplined self-control.
She kept everything short that morning, instructions clipped to the essentials, answers neat and professional, nothing indulgent, nothing that required too much thought.
It was not her best performance, and she knew it.
By the time she dismissed them, the atmosphere in the room had shifted into that peculiar low murmur students adopted when they sensed a teacher was in a strange mood and wished to discuss it the moment she left.
Lilliana did not hear the precise form the speculation took.
Had she heard that some students had concluded she was simply "having woman problems", she might have chosen to be offended.
As it was, she was only grateful nobody had guessed anything remotely close to the truth.
————「❤︎」————