Truly, Madly, Deeply

by Marian Tee

  Damn old man.

  Goddamn old man, to stop playing the song just so he could follow his wife---

  "Papa? Did you hear me?"

  "Sorry, kiddo." He had to cough and clear his throat. Blink his eyes a few times, too, since they were itching like hell. But it was just an itch, Matthijs thought forcefully, and nothing else. He glanced at his daughter, now in the process of tucking herself in the bed. "What was that you were asking?"

  "Tell me a story. Please?"

  He grimaced, thinking he should've pretended he hadn't heard anything instead. "You're only asking me that to torture me," he grumbled. The brat knew it was his least favorite fatherly duty, but just like her mother, it was also for that same reason she wanted Matthijs doing it for her every night.

  "Papa, pleeeeeeeeease. Please, please, please---"

  He scowled. "You think just because you've said please I'm going to tell you a story?"

  "Uh huh." And the manipulative kid resumed her plea right after. "Please, please, please. Papa, please, please, please---"

  "Alright, alright." Matthijs was torn between exasperation and pride, knowing that his daughter could have only inherited her cunning from him. "Move over then." But he was already scooping her up as he spoke, causing Tilda to giggle as he deposited her on the other side of the bed and had her bouncing against the mattress.

  Leaning against the headboard, he asked, "Any particular bedtime story you'd like me to ruin?"

  In between giggles and twinkling dark eyes, she answered rather innocently, "Mama said one day she'd tell me how Grandpa went to heaven."

  Fuck.

  "Do you know the story, Papa?"

  "The question you should be asking is whether he really---"

  "Matthijs." A warning threaded with helpless amusement interrupted him, and father and daughter turned to see the lovely Mrs. de Graaf standing by the doorway, hands planted on her hips.

  "It's possible he could've stopped by a McDonald's first," he drawled. "That's all I wanted to make clear."

  "Uh huh."

  "Ye of little faith," he mocked. "I'm starting to wonder why you agreed to be my wife when you keep thinking the worst of me."

  The words, however, only earned him an eye roll as Tilda's mother retorted, "Loving you doesn't make me blind---" Her words ended in a shriek as Matthijs suddenly yanked her down and caused her to fall onto his lap.

  "Matthijs!" But her voice was breathless, and all the love in the world was shining in her eyes as she looked up at him.

  He kissed her on the nose, saying under his breath, "I love you."

  Her expression softened, and she nuzzled up to him, a tactile response to his words. I love you, too. His chest eased, but there was still the slightest reluctance in him as he let his wife go and let her settle on the other side of the bed, their wide-eyed daughter sandwiched cozily between them.

  "So..." His wife's voice was light. "What's our bedtime story for tonight again?"

  "How Grandpa went to heaven," Tilda answered promptly.

  "A good choice," his wife said softly. "Or rather...it's a good time as any to talk about it." Because it's been weeks, and you still haven't let yourself grieve.

  Albeit unspoken, the message in her knowing gaze was all too easy to hear, but his expression remained bland. He had kept telling her it was nothing, that she was making a mountain out of a molehill, but she always did like to worry.

  Well, only time would show which one of them was right.

  But for now...

  He glanced down at his daughter. "Shall I start?"

  Tilda nodded eagerly. "Yes, please."

  "Alright then." Deepening his voice in an effort to sound like Liam Neeson as Aslan, he said slowly, "Once upon a time, there was this horribly---" Seeing that his wife was shooting daggers his way again, he readily changed track, finishing, "---handsome man who didn't know what love was. And he would never have known it at all if not for this girl..."

  Her

  All You've Got To Do Is Fall In Love by Benji Hughes

  24-year-old Diana Leventis was late.

  Which she hated to be, hence the quietly frantic rush to her morning class, and her temporary indifference to the way puddle water turned her lower extremities into a soggy mess. The whole situation was as unattractive and uncomfortable as it sounded, with her leggings now a cold, wet layer of second skin, and her suedes visibly pleading for rescue from permanent ruin.

  But still she trod on, her breath coming out in pants and puffs as she forced her limbs to work overtime.

  I just can't be late on my first day, Saint M. I just can't.

  A short distance down the road, the impressive Neo Gothic facade of the university's main building beckoned with not the slightest pretense of modesty. Lavender gables and lush red stone walls, snarling gargoyles perched atop its towers and its centerpiece, a massive, ornate rose window.

  As legends had it, the melancholic outline of a nun may be glimpsed in nights where a blood-red moon would rise to the sky. She was said to be the specter of a woman who had died centuries ago, her family having forced her to make her vows as a bride of Christ rather than have her marry the peasant she had lost her heart to. A dutiful daughter, she had done her best to lead a quiet life, but upon learning that her beloved had lost his life in the war, she, too, had lost her will to live. The parchment pages falling from her fingers, she was said to have a serene smile on her face as she calmly climbed the railings.

  And then she let herself fall, whispering her last words to the wind.

  I cannot wait to see you, my love.

  Try as she might, Diana couldn't keep her mind from visualizing Lady Ethel's final moments, and she winced involuntarily as her thoughts churned out its own twisted, ghastly version of the girl's death. What was supposed to be hauntingly heartbreaking turned into something creepy and ghastly.

  That serene smile?

  It was all blackened teeth now.

  And those words ---

  "WATCH OUT!"

  A pair of hands seized her waist to yank her back, and Diana blinked dazedly, not quite understanding as a red-faced horticultural student (the apron he wore, with the monogrammed initials of his department, was a massive clue) dashed past her.

  "So sorry!" But the boy's apology was half-hearted, the words flung over his shoulder as he nearly tripped on his own feet in his haste to run after...

  A wagon full of daisies?

  The irony wasn't lost on her, and she shook her head, thinking she could've been figuratively doing that if a stranger hadn't - OH!

  She looked down, and there they were, a pair of hands still clutching her waist.

  Long fingers, deeply tanned, and so much larger than hers.

  In other words -

  A man, she thought dumbly, and one whose grip spoke volumes. Power, such as what was imbued within the sharpened edge of a sword's blade, and authority that was as merciless as it was just.

  "Are you alright?"

  The words, spoken in a deep, cultured voice, jarred Diana out of her strangely fanciful musings, and she found herself blinking. "I'm...umm..."

  Save me, Saint Matthew.

  While most people relied on the intercessory powers of their guardian angels, Diana was the type to seek assistance from her guardian saint, whose feast day fell on the same day as her birthday.

  "Oh, for fuck's sake." The impatient irritation in the stranger's voice made Diana shrink, the sound reminding her of the countless times her mother would snipe at her for being worthless. She was about to step back, intending to mumble her thanks before walking away, but the hands on her suddenly tightened, and she stiffened.

  Another moment passed, and then she was being spun around, and her head lifted automatically when she realized she was about to see who her grumpy savior was.

  Blazing leonine eyes captured her gaze just before raking her appearance from head to toe. It was done in such a blatant, thorough manner that Diana could feel her cheeks turni
ng a self-conscious shade of pink. She wished she could tell him he was being unnecessarily rude, but how could she?

  For now that she had seen him---

  Oh wow.

  She told herself to stop staring, but her stubborn, fascinated gaze remained glued to him.

  He's exquisite, Saint M.

  His chiseled visage enthralled her, and breathing somehow became a struggle as her dazed gaze took in the way his dark gold hair brushed defiantly past the oversized collars of his trench coat. Which happened to be tweed of all things. The one fabric that was most identified with boring old gentlemen, and yet this stranger was so potently male he was able to take away the drabness of the material and transform it into something overwhelmingly sexy.

  Everything about him was just too perfect that it didn't feel fair. His height was imposing, his build precisely proportioned. Even his bone and muscle structure was flawless, every piece of it seemingly sculpted by an Italian maestro under bronze, sun-kissed flesh.

  He was, in sum, an intoxicating sight, and only now did Diana understand what it truly meant, for one to be drunk on beauty.

  Because this man---

  "You seem fine." The stranger's voice had gone from annoyed to brusque now, with his lips even tightening in acute...disgust?

  Him

  Professor Matthijs de Graaf was pissed.

  He held between his hands the tiniest waist: a fuckably good thing in most cases, but not now. Not when he was staring at what his subconscious recognized as his predestined downfall, and his dick not giving a shit about the sense of foreboding that had turned his body rigid with tension.

  The girl's long, dark hair was twisted up in a neat bun, with a few ebony strands escaping to outline the elegant curve of her cheeks. A respectable look on all accounts, and yet it only sharpened his attraction to her with a violent edge.

  Ah, dammit.

  Why did he find her so fucking hot?

  An erotic vision suddenly seized hold of his mind: this lovely beauty on her knees, her silky locks twisted around his fingers as he guided her rosebud mouth to his---

  FOCUS, DAMMIT.

  He finally managed to jerk his gaze away and tried to look for something else to see or think about, but his eyes only ended up latching on to something more dangerous.

  She stared at him, and dammit, her big, dark orbs were just the way the professor liked them: quintessential doe eyes that had the highest success rate in beguiling assholes like him. The same could be said for her sartorial modesty, which only made him want to rip her shapeless sweater off and have her dainty breasts spill into his already itching palms.

  Moments passed, and still she stared, looking up at him the way only someone pure and untouched could do so. Her doe eyes gawked and gobbled him up at the same time, and it was easy to see she was just too fucking naive to realize how her innocently yearning gaze had the professor thinking of the other things she could gobble up.

  Like his already-swollen dick, for instance.

  The thought, forbidden but inevitable, came out of the blue, and his teeth gnashed as lust turned his pants into a tight-squeezing torture. When the professor realized he was still holding on to the girl's waist, he removed his hands from her person with a muttered curse.

  She heard this, of course, and it had her eat-you, eat-me eyes blink at him in hurt bewilderment.

  Oh no, you fucking don't.

  His jaw clenched against an instinctive desire to pull the girl close and soothe her pain with his mouth and hands. His dick might not care about what his mind knew, and it was that this girl was a fuckable disaster waiting to happen - but no goddamn way was he going down on her without a fight.

  "I'm s-sorry---"

  FUCK. FUCK. FUCK.

  Her voice was soft and trembling, and since it was also just the way he liked it, he cut her off brusquely and spoke in a low voice filled with contempt. "Just watch where you're damn going next time. You can't have everyone wasting their time saving idiots like you."

  Her

  Diana was dumbstruck.

  She wasn't brainless as a rule, but the beautiful man in front of her was doing a fantastic job at making her wonder if she had overestimated her own IQ. He had called her an idiot, for heaven's sake - and here she was, struggling to make her vocal chords work. "Uh..." But words still failed her, and when she nervously wetted her lips, she saw Mr. Furious grow, well, even more furious.

  Help me, Saint M.

  Why was this man so mad, and why did he affect her so even when he was so unbearably rude?

  Before she could figure out what to say or do next, Mr. Furious was already turning away, and her last glimpse of his hard, handsome face was the way his lips had compressed together in icy contempt.

  Seeing this hurt, but she was at a loss to explain why. Masculine beauty wasn't something she was unfamiliar with. One could say she had become immune to it even, with her own brother Damen often likened to a Greek god, as were all of his friends.

  And yet...

  Mr. Furious was different.

  No.

  Mr. Furious was the one.

  No.

  Mr. Furious was an encounter, Diana told herself determinedly, one she wasn't even certain she would add to her diary, and that was all. She absently righted the strap of her bag over her shoulder as she turned back towards the school---

  Oh my God.

  School!

  A gasp of dismay escaped her when she saw the time. She was more than ten minutes late now, and if there had been the slightest chance earlier of slipping into the classroom unnoticed, well, not anymore.

  Just the thought of having everyone's heads turning towards her was enough to make Diana flinch, and she knew it could get even worse, easily. She could be made to stand in front of the whole class, made to talk and explain herself...

  Diana shuddered in fear.

  No, never.

  She would just call in sick this time. It was only once anyway. It shouldn't be a problem. Right?

  Him

  The professor was about to masturbate.

  His eyes squeezed shut as his hand gripped his dick in a familiar manner.

  Damn her.

  Goddamn her.

  Goddamn her for making him want her so fucking bad he had to do this.

  Matthijs was an intensely sexual man, the kind that could go long for hours, and while this served his reputation well, it also had its downside. Or an upside rather, with his dick, upon making its presence felt, requiring immediate action. Once it saw, it wanted, and it wanted and stayed hard. Hence a detour to the nearest fucking restroom, just to get his damnable erection out of the way.

  The professor jerked himself off in a predetermined number of strokes, his fingers conscientiously angled to induce an orgasm in the shortest amount of time.

  In the normal course of things, the professor's sexual relief should have earned him a modicum (pun intended) of calmness and clarity. But when he stepped out of the cubicle, agitation still had him in its grip, his every movement stiff and aggressive. His inner equilibrium, normally formidable and imperturbable, was shot to pieces.

  To make up for his late arrival, Matthijs assigned his students double the amount of their usual workload, and he heard not a word of dissent even as their collective faces contorted in inaudible grimaces.

  At precisely 09:30 in the morning, the university's public announcement system played Symphony No. 40 in G Minor, and the professor dismissed his students with a curt nod.

  Helder Meer prided itself for doing away with the more uncouth applications of long-standing tradition, and the clip of classical music playing in the background was one such change, with the typical, unappealingly shrill school buzzers replaced by Mozart for Mondays, Tchaikovsky for Tuesdays, Wagner for Wednesdays, and so forth.

  Of course, not all such changes were of minor or aesthetic consequences. Ad Altiora Tendo, the university's motto, translated to 'I strive to higher things,' and this manifested itself in H
elder Meer's approach to education, which some praised for being groundbreaking (the professor, for instance, taught Applied Psychology with Respect to the Christian Faith) while others criticized it for being unnecessarily radical (e.g. the permitted use of recreational substances within specific areas on campus).

  Radical or not, the professor didn't really give a damn about public perception of the university. What he did feel strongly, however, was the university board's continued refusal to grant professors leeway in kicking students out. Instead, the old fucks were still stuck in the past, with their ludicrous insistence that students had to miss three classes consecutively before professors could permanently cross them out of their lists.

  In the professor's experience, students who missed his first class were and would always be a complete waste of his time. More often than not, they turned out to be egoistic, self-entitled animals, like leopards that hadn't even the self-awareness to realize they had spots to begin with, much less appreciate the need to change said spots.

  The one student he had to mark Absent on the attendance sheet earlier would undoubtedly be the same, and the professor's lip curled when he thought of what was likely to happen afterwards. Helder Meer's students had a remarkable affinity for histrionics regardless of gender, and it was always unpleasant business when the professor dropped the ball and the truth of their ineluctable dismissal from his class stared at them in the face.

  Young people today had it too easy, and they didn't even know it. The nature of his thoughts made for hideous company, and the professor's mood was succinctly reflected on his strikingly handsome features.

  Female students were able to catch sight of it despite the professor's long-legged stride making brisk work of the walk back to his office, and this mere glimpse was enough, the carved, aristocratic lines of his face seemingly a preordained canvas for haughty derision.

  As one infatuated (and no doubt somewhat masochistic) student had once put it: the professor's scowls only made him look hotter, and his looks of icy derision were a huge turn-on.