The CLOWN™

The doctoral candidates deep in their dissertations. The disillusioned second-year graduate students who reek of coffee and cigarettes. The strangers from other departments, art history or public policy, sinking low in their seats as if their cover might be blown at any second. Baelor knows the archetypes who sit around his seminar table so well. He sorts them into columns, knows which ones will drop after the first week, knows which ones are already preening for a letter of recommendation. The class changes every semester—new articles to examine, different nuances to be teased out of a particular reading—but the cast of characters never does.

You’re harder to categorize. He feels it from the first week when you take the seat nearest to him on his brown-eyed side. The one that the rest of your peers, either out of shyness or respect, had left vacant. He bristles. Wonders if your nonchalance might be synonymous with a lack of seriousness.

That concern dissipates as soon as he hears you speak. You’re exactly how you sounded in your email, and more. Curious. Clever, but subtly so: no pretense, no frills, no ticking off as many five-syllable vocabulary words as you can in one sentence.

“It’s a bit of an ungenerous reading, though, isn’t it?” You chime in twenty minutes into a conversation about an article analyzing the diaries of Nymeria of Dorne. He watches your eyes dart around the room before landing on his.

There’s a fierceness to you as well, he observes. A severity that makes all the others look dull in comparison.

The table is slow to react, so he prods. “Ungenerous how?”

“I mean, it’s more interested in what her mentions of the grain trade mean for the structure of the early Dornish economy than what it might mean about her.” You flip through your flimsy dogeared copy of The Diaries of Nymeria of Dorne: 2nd Edition Translation, and Baelor can’t help but try to make out what some of your scribbled annotations are. “Here: ‘Spring rains flood the Greenblood. Barges bring wheat and salt for lemon cakes.’ She’s in the middle of a war and she’s looking forward to eating lemon cakes. Doesn’t that speak more to who she was as a person than what the economy was like?”

“For an article concerned with economics, I might argue it’s a particularly congruous quotation,” he pushes back, though with none of the ice in his voice that he might usually use to shut down a fruitless line of inquiry. He leaves the door open, inviting you through, wondering where your mind is headed.

And you, without hesitating, take his invitation. “I think it’s a wasted opportunity, that’s all. It’d be lovely if any of these historians treated Nymeria like a real human with actual desires rather than a convenient primary source.”

“That’s usually how historicization works,” one of the other students, Willem, pipes up. It’s not entirely unfriendly, but there’s an air of patronization in his tone, an unspoken assumption that of course you wouldn’t know something like that. Heat flares in his chest, a chivalric impulse that makes him flex his fingers and want to speak up on your behalf. But you only stare back at him and shrug.

“Well. Their loss, then.”

He finally gets a good look at your annotation at the end of class, while you’re chatting to the art history student next to you who had been too shy to speak the entire time. There’s a harsh circle around one of the paragraphs in the article you’d disapproved of and Fuck off! nestled in the margins.

Not a fawn, he realizes. More like a hawk, biding your time before you swoop in with something new and fresh and entirely unexpected.

Last one to leave, you pause by the door while he’s still packing up his papers into the worn leather satchel Jena had gifted him one nameday, years ago. “I hope I’m not giving my program a bad name.”

“The opposite, actually,” he says, and the grin that spreads across your face seems like some sort of prize. It’s a twisted thing to think about a bit of well-received encouragement. He swallows hard, focuses on his coat. You don’t seem to notice his silent self-flagellation. You just lean against the door handle, giving him one last little wave.

“Good. Well. See you next week, then.”

When he steps outside, the winter air hits him harder than the bullets he’d taken in the army. He rubs a hand across his chin and sighs. Nothing is different. Every term begins with the same simmering anticipation. But something has changed. He can feel it in his bone marrow, in the fingers that already threaten to go numb in the frigid night. He can feel it in the way that he’s already anxious for next week, for whatever surprises you have waiting behind those sharp, subdued eyes of yours. Stop this, he tells himself, but it’s beyond his control. Something dormant inside of him is stirring, opening its eyes, coming back to life.

He doesn’t mean to spy. It’s a coincidence, truly, that his office has a view over the steps of Penrose Hall. He’s watched thousands of students come and go from their literature classes for years. The doors creak open and light soaks the courtyard below. Half nine. The last graduate class letting out for the night. 

There you are, hugging a pile of papers to your front. A tired slant to your shoulders. While your classmates pair off and head home in groups, you keep your own company. He wonders whose choice that is; theirs or yours.

It’s concern that makes him watch you until you disappear beyond the courtyard, he tells himself. You’re a young woman walking alone after dark. It’s your safety he has in mind. But when he looks down at the paper he’d been grading, there are dents embedded from his grip. Baelor drops it, lets it flutter to the ground. Even in the low light, the gold band of his wedding ring glares like an open flame.

“Is this a good time?”

It is. And isn’t. Of course, he says, waving for you to take a seat, because he knows the policy on his syllabus. Open office hours, noon to one, no appointment needed. You make him nervous, though. Make him feel like the nearly-shut door is a sin.

“I wanted to ask about the term paper,” you jump right in. “I know you don’t accept creative projects, but I wondered if you might be open to a more sentimental approach.”

“Hm. What does sentimental mean to you?” He leans back in his chair, rotating each ring one by one while your eyes begin to sparkle. It’s utterly captivating, utterly new. Such a question would usually make his students jump to defensiveness. Scramble to explain themselves or shut down and back away from the line of questioning. But you approach it with fascination, like he’s handed you some shiny gift to unwrap.

“I just don’t want to fall into the trap of treating history like it’s dead. I read your article about the influence of pre-Andal art on the development of Dornish culture,” you say, and he can’t deny how his ego swells at that, “and I thought about how sad it is, that people like Willem think that historical means unemotional. That article almost made me cry.”

Baelor’s cheeks turn hot. A bit of praise isn’t unusual from students who hope to stay in his good graces. He wouldn’t normally blush at a comment about his reading of a source or his criticism of previous scholarship, but you see past all the technicalities and stare right into his soul. He shouldn’t indulge himself. Shouldn’t feed on that genuine admiration and curiosity that’s plain to see. He’s only a man, though. He can’t help the wretched, white-hot need that burns inside of him.

“Go on,” he concedes. “Tell me more.”

And you do. You talk and talk and he asks and you answer. You rant about an article which has found itself in your good graces and two others which you can’t conceal your disdain for. You flesh out a point you’d made about the translation of Nymeria’s diaries, the tragedy of all the gaps through which language can slip. You go on until he’s running late for his lecture at two, and you’re laughing a bashful laugh and saying gods, sorry, I lost track of time. I’ll see you next week?

True to your word, you’re there next week. And the week after that. His office hours morph into a standing appointment, reiterating points you’d made in seminar and elaborating on the ones you’d cut short. You fill his empty world with your armful of books, your patchwork philosophy, your sarcastic asides.

The silence after you leave is always the worst. It reverberates, pierces him, makes the whole room seem colder. 

In the wake of you, the guilt seeps in. Pervasive as winter’s iron-strong grip. Its poison makes his blood curdle in his veins, makes the walls close in around him. Sick, he calls himself, sick, depraved, perverted, disgusting. You’re closer in age to Valarr than you are to him. Every thought he has disgraces him. That part of himself that you’ve woken is bright-eyed and alert now, roaring and clawing at the inside of his chest. Die, he begs it, die, or at least sleep, but it’s a feral thing. It demands attention. Demands tribute.

“I know it’s not due until tomorrow.” You dance into his office one day, a grin blossoming as you hand him your term paper draft. His fingers brush against yours for half a second. That’s all it takes for his skin to turn sparkling warm. Your eyes search his. He’s started to pick up on your little tells. It’s praise you’re seeking, so it’s praise he gives.

“Ah. Trying to impress me?” He asks as a wry smile surfaces.

“Maybe.”

He shouldn’t feel so hopeful. He isn’t even certain what he’s hoping for. At best, he’s a mentor with all the wrong motivations. At worst, he’s some sort of monster. But he feels real. Painfully, explosively real for the first time in years. You’ve brought him back from a grave he was digging himself. Woken him like a bird perched outside his window, singing your smart, sweet song.

So he lets himself hope.

It’s long after you’ve left one afternoon, when he’s gathering his things to walk home for the day, when he notices one of your books forgotten on the chair. An Anthology of Westerosi Women Poets. Golden-brown pages and glue-stained binding on the spine make it look especially frail, though the date on the inside cover isn’t even years past. Well-loved, then. Tended to.

He opens to the middle of the book, but as soon as he glimpses your annotations, he shuts it. It’s an intrusion. A voyeur’s view of your relationship to the poems within. The skin on his neck prickles as if someone’s watching, though the only audience are his own books leering from their shelves.

Tucking it into his satchel, he tells himself it’ll be safer at home. Less of a chance it’ll be lost in the piles of papers on his desk or picked up by another student by mistake. He’s only being careful.

It’s frightening, really. The lies he tells himself. The excuses he makes.

There’s nothing careful about how he takes it to bed. Glass of whiskey on the nightstand, rain thrumming against the window, he opens it like a secret and runs his fingers over the pages. Feels the dips of the underlines you’ve made. The curves of your comments. Stray couplets populate the margins, imitations of your favorite lines. It’s more intimate than undressing. Like he’s seeing into the bones of you.

Somewhere in the whiskey-tinted evening, he drifts off. Snippets of poetry and the smell of ink constellate his dreams. When he wakes, his cheek is pressed to your book. Traces of your perfume cling to its pages, a ghost of you now embedded in little lines on his face. His cock is shamefully, achingly hard.

It’s Jena’s face he pictures while he stands under scalding water and curses himself for being so horrible, so weak. But it’s your face he pictures when he puts his hand on his throbbing cock. Your face he imagines under him, sharp tongue gone dumb while he fucks you. Your face that makes his heart go heavy and hollow while the water goes cold, while the shower washes come down the drain.

Microwaved stew and cigarette smoke make for a less than ideal welcome home. In the kitchen, Maekar is glaring at something on his phone, a bowl of leftovers already polished off. Somehow, Baelor is more relieved than he is annoyed. As much as he wishes he’d pillage someone else’s fridge for once, it’s good to know that his brother is at least taking the time to feed himself.

“I thought you were trying to quit,” he sighs, opening a window with a pointed look.

“I was.” Maekar groans, smoke spilling from the corners of his mouth. “Guess which one it is this time.”

“Daeron?” It’s a genuine guess. Also a translated prayer: please, not Aerion. He doesn’t wish any more suffering on Daeron than his nephew already inflicts upon himself, but he’s certain Maekar would prefer the familiarity of rehab over whatever scandal of Aerion’s might already be plastering itself over the covers of gossip magazines.

“Father. Crafty bastard tried to set me up. Sent me off to meet with the president of philanthropy at Citadel College on his behalf and forgot to mention the meeting was at a winery and the president’s a fucking widow.” He scoffs as he flicks the cigarette over the ashtray that Baelor keeps around just for him, just in case. “He ever do that to you?”

He winces. It’s not a pleasant memory: some Hightower woman, a daughter of a friend of his father’s, pushed toward him at a charity gala at Dragonstone barely two years after Jena’s death. Baelor, show her around, Daeron said, conveniently disappearing a moment later. She had been friendly. Decent enough to look uncomfortable once she saw the ring on his finger. It was the closest he’d ever come to raising his voice at his father.

“Once.” 

“Well, turns out Arbor red still gives me a bloody headache. Had to ask her for a paracetamol. Dy would’ve loved that.” Maekar chuckles at himself, and even Baelor has to laugh. He remembers a holiday years ago at Summerhall, his brother flushed and whinging after supper while the children ran wild through the sitting room and Dyanna fished around in her purse. Oh, give him a break, Baelor, she’d said when he teased, poor thing’s on his cycle. 

Maekar nudges the chair next to him with his foot. Baelor lets out a long breath as he sits down, all the day’s pressures rolling off of his shoulders and into the gentle, menthol-streaked haze of the kitchen. A copy of your seminar paper draft is still on the table from where he’d mulled over it the night before. His praise adorns the pages. Perhaps it’s soft of him, but in place of critique there’s only intrigue. Say more on this written where he might tell another student Explain. There’s a stain on a corner now. The pages are ruffled from where his brother had—utterly unashamed of himself, of course—been reading it.

“You look good,” Maekar says. Baelor finds himself subject to the scrutiny of a furrowed brow and two narrowed blue eyes.

“I do?”

There’s a gruff hmm as he takes another drag. Not a visit, then. More like an interrogation. Sometimes Baelor wonders if he’s his brother’s seventh child. One who needs less checking in on, perhaps, but still. He wonders how Daeron and Aerion have become impervious to that steely gaze. Whatever mask he wears, whatever act he puts on, it carves through him all the same.

“It’s been a better term than most,” he says, and it’s true. The lectures come easier. Campus seems brighter. The classroom is all he can think about, singing a siren song while he ought to be thinking about something, anything else.

Maekar turns his attention to your draft. “This one’s clever.”

“She’s in my graduate seminar,” Baelor says all too quickly. His attempt at an unexciting diversion only makes his brother’s stare intensify.

“Yes, I can read.” He grunts, but there’s a little smirk dancing over his mouth as he looks over something you’d written. “Funny. You must like her.”

 Wringing his hands, the rings make his fingers feel like lead. “I do.”

“Well.” That makes Maekar pause, uncharacteristically still for a moment. “Good for her.”

Is it? Baelor wonders. The way he feels when he reads your work, when he sees your mouth open in its witty way right before you speak… nothing about it feels good. Dangerous, perhaps. Like he could break you from the sheer weight of his want. His hands could sooner ruin you than offer you tenderness. It disgusts him. It compels him.

“You don’t need to worry about me.” It’s only half of a lie.

“No. Gods know I don’t need to be fucking worrying about you and yet you’re good at giving me reasons to worry,” Maekar grumbles, snuffing out the remnants of his cigarette and running a hand through his already askew white hair. “At least wait until she’s not your student before you do something stupid. Father says his blood pressure is fine but we all know that’s not true.”

“It’s not like that.” But Maekar raises an eyebrow, sees right through him, and Baelor finds himself admitting: “I wouldn’t know how. Not anymore. I’m not… meant for it.”

“Huh.” 

There’s a gleam in his brother’s eyes, a joke wanting to be made. He waits for the punchline. Some juvenile comment, surely, but the blow never comes. 

Perhaps it’s the common ground they both stand on but rarely speak about. How to move on. If moving on is possible. Whether they ought to accept that love was for a softer time, a younger time, or whether they should shake their warrior instincts awake and fight to prove themselves wrong. Jena and Dyanna would’ve retched to see them both where they are now. Such hardened, hopeless old men.

“Well, whatever this is,” Maekar says, and Baelor knows what he means, knows that it’s the solitude and the silence and the self-sabotage and everything else he forces himself to endure, “you’re not meant for that either.”

Half nine, and the doors of Penrose Hall are whining and groaning while the writing students file into the crystalline spring air. Two of them are bursting with laughter, smacking each other’s shoulders and giggling as they fade off into the lamplit haze. A group of three pauses for a smoke break and then go their separate ways. There’s a warmth starting to wake up King’s Landing from its winter slumber. Sound and movement ripple where campus used to be frozen.

Baelor watches for ten minutes. Fifteen. Twenty, and you still haven’t come out. The bells of the campus chapel strike ten. An uneasy feeling gnaws at his gut. His mind conjures up images of you in a claustrophobic corner with some man’s hands clawing at your clothes, or you on the slick, dewy cobblestones with an ankle twisted at some unnatural angle, and he’s pulling on his coat and charging down the stairs before he realizes what he’s doing.

It doesn’t take long to find you. You’re on the other side of Penrose Hall, curled up on the steps, staring at the barely-budding willow tree that brushes up against the side of the building. Knees drawn into your chest. Shoulders like shuddering wings hunched inwards. You shrink against the night’s soft sibilance, the rattle of the wind, the thickness of the dark.

“Oh, sorry. Hi.” You’re quick to wipe your eyes when you see him approaching. Even in the shadows, he can see rivulets on your cheeks. An angry tint around your irises.

“Did something happen?” It’s harsher than he intends. There’s a threat woven into the question. Blood singing, bones humming, his army-trained body is suddenly ready to carry out any command you might give him.

“No.” You say too quickly, and even a halfhearted attempt at a smile barely lasts a second. “Nothing. Fucking… it’s nothing.”

But it’s not nothing. Not to him, not if it means you’re holding yourself as if the world has sunk an angry fist into the center of your stomach. Baelor takes another step forward, gently pushing into the stormy atmosphere of you. He can feel the clouds circling, the tension becoming electric. His skin is primed for a lightning strike. 

You make a defeated little shrug, your voice straining to hold back. “It’s so lonely. In there. Or it’s like they’re all there and I’m somewhere else, or… I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t know…”

And then the storm breaks. Your face falls. The gravity around you gets heavier, heavier, and all his body can do is kneel against the cold stone steps and let your arms form a death grip around him while you cry.

It’s strange. It’s wrong. Muscle memory makes him hold you like he would have held Jena. He rubs uneven circles over your back, stiff and slow to surrender.  It takes a minute for his hands to adjust. To sculpt themselves to the contours of you. Trembling just as much as you are, the thought of someone coming across you both in this twisted embrace is somehow less terrifying than your warbled I don’t know. You, always on the path of some unexpected thesis. You, stringing words together in ways that make language feel lustrous. You, reduced to I don’t know, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry sobbed into the fabric of his shirt.

He’s the one who ought to feel sorry. Ashamed. He ought to pity you, and instead he’s full of a disgusting pride, so smug about the fact that he’s the one holding you together. Such uncanny power he wields over you. So sick and so selfish. In his core, a nagging truth: it feels good to be needed like this. To let his own desire bloom in return. He needs you. Your brokenness, your brilliance, he needs it all, he needs to walk into it like a room, he needs to lose himself and discover you.

“I know,” he murmurs, while the wind kisses the willow branches and his breath does the same to your hair, “it’s alright. I know.”

“I know.”

You’re sad, Jena said, that it was what tumbled out in reply. Sleep-deprived under the soulless hospital lights, he should have waited for his mind to sync with his mouth before he spoke. I’m not, he should have said. Too late for that. Too late for so many things.

Time collapsed in that sterile room. The date on the whiteboard that the nurses updated every day could have been in a different language for all it mattered. Change came in the form of a new drawing from Matarys taped to the wall or the slow decay of a bouquet on the side table. He stayed awake through the night and slept without dreams in fleeting fits during the day. All the world was taupe and white. Antiseptic. What a mundane hell.

Jena rattled out a breath. “We used to be such happy people.”

And they had. They’d done everything beautifully, achingly right. They’d studied shoulder-to-shoulder in the library and kissed on the stoop of her flat after he walked her home. He’d given her his mother’s engagement ring. Their wedding had been featured in the King’s Landing Times style section. They’d had the boys. Summered in Dorne and Pentos. Bought a house at the edge of the city limits with a pool and a view of Blackwater Bay. They’d gone to the boys’ football games on weekends and gone out for fish and chips after, win or lose. They’d hosted dinner parties. Made love on weeknights. They’d been so blindingly happy. Until they weren’t.

“I’ll take it with me.”

“You’ll take what, sweetheart?” All those chasms in their conversations. The bridges he had to build. How ironic. He’d fallen in love with her mind, her law school logic. Every day, a little less of it remained.

“All that sadness.” Half of her face tried to smile. “So you can go on living. Will you let me do that for you?”

Her hand reached for his. Rings loose around her bone-thin fingers. Nails painted pink from the last time Dyanna visited. The tremor they hadn’t noticed until it was too late made the glitter catch the light with each little twitch. It was so easy to acquiesce. Dose promises like morphine. What a good liar he was. What a coward.

A month later, and there were still flecks of blush-colored polish on her nails when she was buried. He kept the engagement ring for Valarr. Her wedding ring for Matarys. All of his sadness, he kept for himself.

The last week of term arrives with a warm front that thunders its arrival over King’s Landing and then rests its humid remnants across the city. Baelor spends the afternoon tidying his desk, putting the office to rest before the holiday. Down in the courtyard, a group of students have set up camp around a bench. Their laughter echoes against the old stone buildings. No revising will be done, surely, yet it fills him with fondness. He thinks about the boys. Wonders what they’re doing on the first summery day of the year.

You catch him in the doorway just as he’s leaving, out of breath from the stairs. There’s a tin in your hands. A loop of twine around it, tied in a bow, slightly askew. So relieved to see you, he can’t stop the sigh that wrests itself from his lungs. Your name comes out of his mouth the same way he might say thank the gods.

“Um, I wanted to thank you.” You sound flustered. “For the other week. You were so lovely and patient, I’m sorry I was such a mess.”

“Please, you don’t need to apologize. I hope everything’s alright,” he says, although he knows it’s not. That expression on your face had been something wretched. A kind of hauntedness that can’t be fixed in one night. It’s there even now. Softened by the mellow sunlight, maybe, but still fluttering across your eyes. If only he could be the kind of man who would erase that darkness. Someone younger. Someone easier. He’d just make your darkness deeper, he tells himself. He’d be another ghost perching on your sad shoulders.

And yet he’s letting you slip like water through his cupped palms. Classes over for term, summer rushing in to sweep you away, you’ll be lost to the past soon. A five-month fever dream he’ll try to relive every night. He’ll miss your melancholy, yet he’ll miss that rare, swooping joy of yours even more fiercely.

“I’m looking forward to reading your seminar paper.” It’s a last-ditch attempt to prove to himself that he can make you smile, and gods, it works. You light up like the morning sky. He wishes he could stay in your light forever. Bask in it. Burn in it. Die in it.

“Bribe for good marks, then?” You offer him the tin with a sheepish grin. “I’m not a great baker but I figured you can’t go wrong with shortbread, and I added some cardamom so it’s a little different…”

He can tell you’re circling a thought as you trail off, afraid to tuck your wings and land. Your gaze keeps flickering down at the tin. Just as quickly as your clouds had parted, they’re gathering again. When you finally do look up at him, there’s a glint of something he can’t analyze. Hope, maybe. Or danger. Perhaps the two are the same.

“I really loved your class. I’ll miss it,” you say, and then there’s a small catch in your voice, a confession wriggling its way out, and you whisper, “I’ll miss you, too.”

There it is: the wondering and the wishing suddenly stripped back, all just a maze of prose leading to your hushed thesis. It’s daybreak after a long night. Sunrise over Blackwater Bay, streaked with crimson. You give him exactly what his sinful soul has yearned for and doom him in the same breath. Damnation feels dangerously akin to relief.

The doorway frames your body impossibly close to his. Your eyes are fixed on his, wanting, asking. He exhales and makes your lashes waver like minuscule feathers. One hand lifts to brush against the front of your shirt. It would be easy to push you away. It would be even easier to pull you closer. Baelor’s lips part ever so slightly. He watches you mirror him, watches how you wait right at the brink of some invisible boundary. You make it his line to cross.

He inhales. Closes his eyes. And chooses.

“And?”

“And what?”

There’s a drawn-out groan from the other end of the call. “Oh, gods. What’d you do?”

“Nothing.” He answers. “We said goodbye and she left.”

The pathetic finality of it echoes around his kitchen. He brushes shortbread crumbs from the side of his mouth. Thanks again, you’d blurted out. The tin, shoved into his hands like it burned you. The second he hesitated too long, you knew. Smart thing. Sweet, smart, beautiful girl, you’d seen right through him, right to all the fear and guilt holding him back. Your crestfallen expression and the sound of your footsteps fleeing down the hall loop endlessly in his mind. Baelor-breaks-things, destroying all the softness of that moment in the name of safety.

“And what are you going to do?”

“Nothing.” Because there is nothing left to do. You were a sparrow flickering by his window, a final warm day in the autumn of his life. Term is over. That final look of hurt will grow smaller and smaller in his mind each year, until he can’t remember whether you were real or a dream he had just before waking.

Maekar is quiet. Maekar is never quiet.

“I thought nothing was exactly what you would’ve had me do,” he pushes, interpreting silence as disapproval.

“Well, if there was ever a time to do something, I’d say you fucking missed it.”

Frustration stabbing at the front of his skull, he rubs his forehead as he leans over the table. “You said I’d be mad to get involved with a student.”

“She’s not your student anymore, is she?” There’s a sharp exhale and probably a cloud of cigarette smoke haloing him. “First woman you’ve fancied in eight years. Seven hells, and you call me stubborn.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” He snaps. For once, he craves direction. Someone to tell him what to do. What not to do. It’s exhausting, these mazes he builds for himself, the dead ends and the sharp corners he gets trapped in. He wants an answer, except he’s terrified that when it comes to him, it’ll be in the shape of you.

“I mean,” Maekar says, “I don’t like the idea of you doing nothing forever.”

When he sees you again, he thinks he’s dreaming.

He’s not meant to be on campus. He’s not even meant to be in King’s Landing, but with his family packed uncomfortably tight in Summerhall and both of the boys off on their own holiday adventures, it had seemed best to retreat back to his townhouse for a week or two. Try to finish the research he’d meant to finish months ago. Try to write, prepare for the autumn term, distract himself with routine.

It’s sweltering in the capitol. Even the pages of the book he’d come all the way to his office to retrieve are swollen with humidity. The heat crawls up his back, stains his collar with sweat, makes the city vibrate from the constant hum of aircon units. Evening brings relief, but not much. When he rounds a corner and sees you descending the steps outside the library, he half-wonders if he’s gone delirious.

Oh, hello, you exhale, and he shouldn’t be so satisfied by the way your mouth twists into a little smile, but he is. He shouldn’t insist to walk you home, but he does. He shouldn’t let his heart leap into his throat when your bare arm bumps against his rolled-up sleeve, but how can he not? His whole body burns with a heat that goes beyond the simmering summer air.

“I mostly just sit there. It’s not so bad,” you tell him about your job at the circulation desk. “When I’m bored, I’ll search up people I know and see what titles they’ve checked out.”

“Oh?” He raises an eyebrow. “I’m afraid my library records wouldn’t be terribly fascinating.”

You give him a sideways look full of mischief. “No. They’re not. Sorry.”

Over the city skyline, the sunset drenches the brick houses in shades of tangerine. Windows reflect rich, warm light. It halos you, makes you seem like an angel framed in stained glass above the shrine in a sept. Baelor can’t remember the last time he prayed. Before Jena’s death, most likely. The sight of you, smiling and chatting in the golden hour glow, could put him on his knees. Could make a devotee of him.

You’re on a tangent about your landlord—the scum of the fucking earth, you hiss—when he slows to a stop outside his townhouse. There’s a bus stop at the end of the row. He ought to leave you there and say goodnight, to stop himself before he can destroy you with the ferocity of his longing, but gravity is pulling him inside and threatens to sweep you along with him.

“This is yours?” Your wide eyes absorb the facade of the building, the old door, the original windows he paid far too much to have restored. It’s a fault he’s keenly aware of, one he chalks up to a historian’s instinct. Refusing to let go of the past. Forcing it to suffer in his hands instead of letting it go.

“Can I make you tea?” He offers, struck by the notion of you in his home. “I never thanked you properly. For the shortbread.”

“The shortbread was a thank you, you don’t need to thank me for it.” Smart girl, you see through his poor excuse to prolong this sweet, sudden interlude. “Tea would be lovely, though.”

It’s odd seeing you drift through his living room. Your eyes wander over the art that Jena had collected. The old pictures on his mantel. Your hands cradle a teacup he’d inherited from his grandmother, who had probably inherited it from her own grandmother. You’re an interloper in his quiet world. And yet you fit in so seamlessly. Lean on the kitchen table and talk to him like it’s just another evening, like you were meant to be here. He listens to you ranting about your classmates with wonder clouding his vision and guilt nipping at his heels. So wrong. So oddly right.

“...and he’s smart, but gods, he was such a cunt.” Bashful, you hide your lips behind the teacup. “Sorry.”

“It’s alright. We’re not in class anymore.”

It sounds too much like permission to be innocent. For a searing moment, you hold his gaze. He’s seen you make the same calculations before in class. It’s the sort of scrutiny that could make lesser men shrink into themselves. That asks: what do you really mean?

He knows what he means, even if he’s too ashamed to admit it to himself.

It’s dark by the time he walks you to the door. Excuses draft themselves in his head: he ought to walk you to the bus stop, or he ought to drive you home, or you ought to stay until it cools off a bit more. They’re brimming in his throat as you linger in the foyer, as he finally picks up your poetry anthology from its spot on his side table where he’d thought about taking it back to his office for half the semester. It’s intoxicating, thinking of his fingerprints overlapping invisibly with yours on its pages. 

“Gods, I thought I’d lost this! Thank you.” Brimming with a strange kind of light, there’s a shift in the weather of you. “Honestly, thank you, Professor Targaryen, so much. For everything.”

“Baelor,” he insists. He doesn’t typically let students drop the honorifics with him, but you’re not his student anymore, are you?

“Right.” You lock eyes with him as your hand covers his own. “Thank you, Baelor. I really will miss your class.”

“I’ll miss you.” he admits all of a sudden, as if it’s ripped out of him just by the soft pressure of your palm over his knuckles. “You were brilliant. Are. You are a brilliant writer.”

What happens next, he isn’t entirely certain. He knows he leans in. He knows that his eyelids drift shut, his head bows in prayer. Whether it’s you or him who finally closes the distance, though, he can’t tell. He can only hope that it’s him. To hope that there’s still a part of himself brave enough to do something rather than nothing.

It’s more of a fight than a kiss. Both of you pushing and pulling, breaking the last boundaries of decency. He’s messy, out of practice, stiff lips taking their time to thaw and melt against yours. Your book clatters against the floor. Salt streaks across his tongue. His hands perch against the contours of your neck, drawing you closer, wanting things that only a starved man could want. Your sweetness, your submission, it makes a monster of him. Ignites that reawoken beast in his chest. When you finally gasp for air, he finds himself chasing your mouth, greed outweighing tenderness.

“I’m sorry.” He could be apologizing for any number of things. Maybe it’s not you he’s truly apologizing to. All the neurons in his brain are hopelessly still. His animal instincts latch onto the taste of you and howl a song throughout his body.