The Professor and The Secret Alpha

I bought wine on the way home.

Hopefully that should help smooth things over today.

Adrian, my fiance, had been quiet on me all week. And as much as I always loved a little quiet here and there, the one I've been getting from was just not the comfortable type.

Nah, it was the type that comes accompanied with side comments once in a while. 

We never just sit together anymore, Lila. 

You're always somewhere else even when you're in the room. 

At this point it was getting exhausting and I could see it affecting our relationship negatively. So  when my department meeting wrapped up forty minutes early on Thursday, I stopped at the shop on Creston Avenue, stood in the aisle longer than necessary, and picked out a Merlot.

I drove home feeling like I was finally doing something right.

I'd try to fix the broken walls in our relationship. We could talk and I'd let him pour out all his complaints then I'd find a way to work around them.

I had barely approached our room, when I heard the noise.

I stood outside the door for maybe three seconds, to perhaps convince myself that what I was hearing was just a fragment of my imagination.

But the noise came again as it gave me the confirmation I needed to know what exactly was going on in there.

My heart sank as I pushed the door open bracing myself. But nothing prepared me for the sight of my fiance Adrian, naked in bed fucking Caitlyn...my graduate assistant. 

The twenty four years old sweet girl whose recommendation letter I had spent an entire Sunday writing because I genuinely believed in her.

She saw me first. The color drained out of her face completely.

I looked at her for one long moment.

"Get out," I said.

She gathered her clothes off the floor and left without a word or a sound, and the front door clicked shut behind her like a period at the end of a sentence, and then it was just Adrian and me and the room and a silence so complete I could hear my own pulse.

He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at me. And the thing that broke something open in my chest - quietly, almost cleanly, the way ice cracks before it gives - wasn't the guilt on his face.

It was the absence of it.

He looked like a man who had been caught doing something mildly inconvenient. 

Already recalibrating. 

Already somewhere a few steps ahead of the moment.

"Lila," he said. "Let's not make this into something catastrophic."

I set the wine on the dresser. "Talk," I said. "I'm listening. I'd really love to get an explanation to what I just walked in on."

He stood up and - God help him - straightened his shirt before he spoke. "You want honesty? Fine."l I am a man with needs that go beyond discussing literature over dinner with someone who has already mentally left the room. I have spent two years trying to reach you - actually reach you - and every single time I hit the same wall. You're somewhere else, Lila. You have always been somewhere else."

"What the fuck does that mean?"

"It means that you are like a rigid stone!! Don't you get it? Do you know what it's like being in a relationship with a woman as cold as you? A woman who has no single passion in her? There's no spark, there's no romance. Even our sex are boring!"

I blinked, his words twisting my chest painfully, "Adrian....i bright wine." I said helplessly not knowing what else to say. "I left work early and was coming home to surprise you."

"One bottle of wine after two years of emotional absence doesn't balance the account." His voice was almost gentle, which was somehow the cruelest version of it. "You are extraordinary in that classroom. I have watched your students lean forward when you speak like you are the only thing in the room worth listening to. And then you walk through that front door and it is like something in you just - switches off. You go cold. You go somewhere I can't follow, and I have spent so long standing at the edge of that distance wondering if you even notice I'm there."

I said nothing.

"Caitlyn is different. She's everything you are not. She knows how to make me like a man. She looks at me with passion and the times I've spent with her have seriously been the best times of my life since I met you."

He shook his head slowly. "I am not a piece of furniture, Lila. I am not something you keep around for company and forget about the rest of the time."

I staggered back, not believing my ears. I thought we understood each other....but he was just lying to me about understanding them fucking my  assistance?

Not just cheating on me but having the guts to stand there and point out that she is better than me?

My heart was racing frantically now and my hands too shaky I had to carefully set down the bottle of wine on a nearby table. 

"You should have told me you were unhappy," I said.

"I did tell you." Something shifted in his face. "Three times in the last year I sat down and told you something was wrong between us, and all three times you nodded, said you understood, and went back to your work." He looked at me steadily. "It's almost like you dont want a partner, or you don't know what it takes. Because you just expect me to be a roommate who shows up at your convenience."

"You could have left," I snapped. My voice came out very even, which surprised me a little. "You could have walked out the door and told me the truth and I would have been devastated, but I would have respected you for it. Instead you slept with someone I mentored, in our bed, and now you're standing here explaining to me how I basically drove you to it." I let that sit for a moment. "Tell me which part of that is supposed to make me feel like the unreasonable one."

His jaw tightened. "I never called you unreasonable."

"You called me cold. Distant. A wall you kept running into." I let each word land where it landed. "You just told me your hands ended up on my assistant because of my personality deficiencies. That is blame, Adrian. That is exactly what that is."

He opened his mouth and closed it again.

I looked down at my left hand. The ring - slim gold band, small diamond, both chosen by me because I had told him once that I liked things understated and he had remembered, and I had believed for years that remembering meant something.

I pulled it off and set it on the dresser beside his watch with a soft, deliberate sound.

"You said I'm like a stone," I told him. "Maybe you're right. But a stone doesn't betray someone and then calmly explain why it was justified." I looked at him one last time. "That's a very specific kind of human weakness. And I want absolutely no part of it."

I turned around, walked back down the hallway, picked up my bag from the entryway floor, and took the wine with me because I had paid thirty dollars for it and he did not deserve a single drop.