Chapter Text
'We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.'
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
~~~
The first transgression is eye contact.
By his third lecture of the day, the bitter faculty lounge coffee cooling to the left of Mark's podium has a paticular biting odor that he'll deny later when Gemma smells it on his breath.
Outside - a brisk early September rain rattles against the windows.
Inside - he flicks to a recycled slide on Dostoyevsky. One that never quite seems to capture the attention of the half-populated Monday morning lecture halls the way he'd once hoped it would when first putting these slides together once upon a time.
The faces rotate, semester to semester, but the thinly-veiled disinterest remains consistent.
Sparcely packed auditorium seating occupied by Freshman trying their very hardest to appear as if they're taking notes. After the faux-enthusiasm of the first few weeks lulls, some don't even bother with pretense. Fidgeting with sleeves or scribbling in margins.
Not that he can blame them.
He hears himself, briefly, as he drones on about urban life in 19th century St. Petersburg - even he feels his mind switch to auto-pilot as he speaks, mentally drifting elsewhere...
The bag of clothes he was supposed to take to the dry cleaners this weekend still in the boot of his car.
The news report he'd half payed attention to on the TV at the bar last night.
The email he needs to send to the HOD later today.
Normal things.
Frivolous things.
He's taught this slide, in this hall, for this module more times than he can count. The script is muscle memory by now.
Easy to recite even as he drifts someplace else in his head.
Even while consumed by a great and terrible inertia.
That is - a great and terrible inertia, and the crippling hangover from passing out in the porch at 3am last night.
Gemma didn't even wake him.
She must have seen him, he thinks, as she came down the stairs to make her coffe this morning.
There once was a time where she'd have hauled his sorry ass off the floor and upstairs to their bedroom.
She'd even showered him, once, in their late-twenties, when he'd come home from the dive with a shirt drenched in his own vomit. Got him in fresh clothes, made sure he was in the recovery position against the mattress, left an advil and water for him on the nightstand.
That was not how this morning went.
He woke to her already dressed, already stepping over him to leave for work, muttering that she won't make an excuse for him this time if he doesn't show up for the morning faculty meeting.
The irony is not lost on him as he quotes Dostoyevsky to the class.
"His wife, however, happened to
be the only woman in his life who
failed totally to arouse any
passion in him whatsoever."
It's then that a hand raises at the back.
A long, thin arm held in the air, drawing his eyes to a fox haired girl with a laptop open infront of her. Perched in the back row, one fawn-ish nylon-clad leg draped over the other.
There's something in her posture.
That's the first thing Mark catalogues.
Spine held pin straight against the wooden back of the chair. Distinctly other when observed amongst the slouched backs of her peers.
She has green eyes.
Even from rows away, there's a quiet intensity in her forest gaze.
Engaged. Sharp.
The act of audience participation is, in of itself, an anomaly for Mark's classes. It isn't often that anybody bothers to actually raise their hand.
He realises then that he's been silently staring at her for a pass too long without actually calling on the gesture.
"Yes, Miss...?"
"Helena." She introduces, unhurried.
She presents her point almost conversationally, maintaining an unblinking eye contact as she speaks. Voice even.
"I find it strange how often male narrators describe emotional detachment as something imposed on them. As if they’re victims of their own indifference.”
Professor Scout is, suddenly, no longer thinking about laundry.
Given the anomalous nature of someone raising their hand in the first place he'd half expected her to ask if she could go to the bathroom. Some of the more anxious Freshman don't realise they no longer have to raise their hand for that - it wouldn't have been the first time.
He blinks, caught off gaurd, clearing his throat before responding.
"Detachment is rarely that simple," he explains, "In Dostoyevsky, emotional paralysis often precedes moral catastrophe."
She retorts near instantly, not defensive, but cooly doubling down.
"I think men like Dostoyevsky’s narrators often times prefer paralysis... It lets them observe their own moral decline without actually having to intervene. Take Raskolnikov for example. He doesn’t begin with murder. He begins with the belief that his feelings, or lack there of, exempt him from consequence.”
That one catches him off gaurd too.
For a few fleeting seconds he is stunned, once again, into silence.
Something dangerously close to a smile threatens at the edges of his mouth.
Bemusement, mostly.
"Well, Helena. I have to say that’s a far more prosecutorial reading than most first-year students attempt."
The comment draws a wolfishly amused smile from her. Like that's exactly the sort of anwser she'd expected him to give.
She nods.
Dismissal. Approval. It isn't clear which.
His gaze stays fixed on her longer than intended, still watching even after she looks back down at her laptop screen, tapping away at the keyboard infront of her, unphased.
He keeps finding her after that.
Gaze drifting up to her seat with every new slide.
By the end of the lecture, chairs scraping and sneakers squeaking on linoleum, crowd thinning out through the large double doors at the left of the room, Mark is unsubtly staring as she slides her things into a brown leather bag she slings over one shoulder.
He calls her over as she descends the steps, his sleeves rolled, both hands leaning on either side of the lecturn.
"Helena, may I borrow you for a moment?"
She stops a few paces short of him.
"I don't think I've seen you in any of my classes since the semester started?"
Mark doesn't consider himself the most observant man. But looking at her now - long fawnish face, thick lashes, copper haired, emerald turtle-neck sweater hugging her slight frame - he's sure he'd have taken note of her had she been sat in the back row these last three weeks.
"Late enroll," she offers.
"You should have received an email."
Mark nods once.
"Must have slipped by me."
For a pass neither says anything.
"Well, welcome to Ganz, Helena." Mark continues. "My office hours are from 3. I can make sure you recieve the slides and assignments you missed."
"Thankyou, Professor Scout."
Before he can think better of it, he keeps talking.
"Are you staying on campus?"
She tilts her head a half degree to the left, her brows raising a centimeter.
"No."
A pause, deliberate.
"My family prefers I stay elsewhere."
There's something peculiar in the phrasing, Mark notes.
Impersonal.
'My family prefers.'
He nods again reflexively, though the anwser does more to sharpen his curiosity than settle it.
The follow up comes swiftly, tone light but too rehearsedly casual to be neutral.
"Long commute?"
She adjusts the strap on her bag as she speaks.
"Not paticularly."
Mark shifts his weight, folding his arms now, straightening his back.
A subconscious recalibration.
As if he's speaking to someone older, or at least, someone not bound by student precarity.
"Literature major?"
"Political Philosohy. Literature adjunct."
He realises, belatedly, that he's still studying her in a way that has very little to do with academics.
He clears his throat - the second time in under five minutes.
"That explains the prosecurtorial instincts," he says, attempting levity.
Her eyes hold his as she speaks.
It makes something inconvenient spike in his chest.
"My father always said moral arguments are wasted if they aren't structurally actionable."
Mark hums in acknowledgement.
Something in his expression suggests he's filing that sentence away for later examination.
"And does he work in acadamia too?"
"No."
Flat. Final.
She doesn't look away as she says it, if anything, her gaze sharpens slightly.
"Well," he adds, reaching for a stickynote and writing something in biro as he speaks. "I'm very glad to have you here, Helena."
He holds out the small slip of paper with his email on, "If there's anything you need, don't hesitate to find me."
There's a brief moment of contact as her soft, willowy fingers graze his, taking the note.
Her fingernails are painted a deep burgundy colour.
Another seemingly inconsequential detail he notes.
Cataloguing.
Calculating.
She smiles.
Small.
Knowing, almost, though maybe he was imagining that part.
She thanks him politely and turns, leaving without so much as a glance back over her shoulder.
He watches the door as it swings shut behind her.
The name stays on his mind long after she's out of his sight.
Helena.
Helena.
Helena.
~~~
It's past seven.
Two figures sit at opposite ends of a table in a dimly illuminated dining room.
Gemma is staring down into her food, absentmindedly moving something honey-roasted with her fork. Her thoughts are somewhere else. Lesson planning, maybe. Book club. Something like that.
Mark never learned to read her mind.
He hasn't touched his own food in fifteen minutes.
The distance between them is routine. Marital disinterest so commonplace it may as well be part of the carefully kept furniture.
"We had a late enroll today." Mark comments after a long pass of silence.
Small talk. Inconsequential.
Gemma makes an absent humming sound, acknowledgement, not engagement.
"She had some interesting takes on Dostoyevsky." He continues, despite the blatant lack of interest.
Dostoyevsky. Russian lit. Mutual grounds for polite dinner conversation.
She exhales before responding, like she's a little exasperated by his presence alone, much less the conversation.
"Always nice when someone's paying attention."
He doesn't catch the jab.
Or he does, and chooses to ignore it.
"It was...prosecutorial," That word again.
"First years don't normally give that kind of insight."
"What was her name?"
The question doesn't mean anything.
He responds anyway.
"Helena."
Gemma doesn't look up from her plate.
"Greek....Means torch."
"That's interesting."
They fall back into their regularly scheduled silence after that, the conversation lulling.
Not for lack of the name still ghosting Mark's lips and ringing in the back of his mind.
Helena.
Helena.
Helena.
~~~
By eleven Gemma has her back turned to him in bed, sleeping, or pretending to.
Mark is ontop of the sheets, laptop balanced on his lap.
He's been half-heartrdly grading papers for the last thirty minutes.
Helena.
Helena.
Helena.
The name creeps in again on loop.
He doesn't know why.
If anything the thought is frustrating. She's just another student. Another face at the back of his lecture hall.
He turns her words from earlier over in his mind.
'I think men like Dostoyevsky’s narrators prefer paralysis.'
She was right.
Annoyingly so.
The slow, all consuming decay of inertia. There's an odd sort of comfort in it.
In knowing what to expect from life, from routine, even when miserable.
Even when rotting in suburbia, dying death by a thousand cuts and cold dinner table glances.
Some men prefer the solace of their paralysis.
Because dying, even slow, is easy.
And living is much harder.
His eyes fall on the screen infront of him.
He knows he shouldn't.
He does anyway.
Clicks out of the essay he was mid-grade on, pulls up his register, scrolls until he finds her.
The cursor blinks where it hovers over her name.
Helena Eagan.
Eagan.
That must be where he recognises her from.
Press-releases, Lumon funded university galas, circulars in the mail. He can't recall ever seeing her face specifically, but the Eagan's are prolific, public facing.
He huffs a low breath through his nose, the ghost of amusement.
He'd be prosecutorial too, he thinks to himself, if that creepy-eyed old bastard was his father. Jame Eagan. All white haired and clammy hands, sour faced even under stage lights while speaking at fundraising mixers.
He clicks through onto her file.
Myrtle Eagan's school for girls. Top-scholar. 4.0. Exceptional LSAT scores.
'A scholarly young lady.' One line from a former teacher reads in her reccomendation letter.
Helena.
Helena.
Helena.
Before he can think better of it, he's pulling up Google in a new window.
'Helena Eagan'.
The rhythm of her name against the keys is oddly pleasing.
As he taps through onto images - her face floods his sight.
Those wide set green eyes, freckles like constellations over the pale of her skin, a slight flush to her cheeks under certain lights.
He clicks on one of the photos and it enlarges until she occupies the full of his screen.
A Gala, he assumes.
She's sparely built, model-thin and wisp like. Svelte and elegant in a shimmering emerald dress.
Those legs.
God.
He shouldn't be staring at them as intensely as he is.
The long lines of her.
The smooth skin of her exposed calves.
Waxed, he assumes, given the absence of blemishes or razor bumps.
He doesn't know how long he's been staring when he feels it.
The low, aching pressure in his groin, dick pressing against the fabric of his boxer-shorts.
It takes him aback, at first.
Not that he and Gemma have had sex at all in the last few years. But toward the dwindling end of his marital sex life, it'd take atleast two viagra for him to keep it up. Not worth the heartburn, he'd think to himself, as he'd groggily thrust into her while she placated him with an unconvincing performance of pleasure.
Whether it's the drinking or the general ennui is a coin flip - but even the porn he watches with one headphone in some night's as she sleeps with her back turned beside him struggles to keep him at attention most of the time. Frustratedly stroking himself with his own back turned, hoping she doesn't wake up and incite another argument on whether or not his consumption of such content constitutes cheating.
Not that she actually cares.
She just likes to argue.
That's what he tells himself.
The blue-light hits his face as he reaches down beneath the covers, shifting awkwardly onto his side with the laptop now balanced against the mattress.
"Fuck." He groans quietly, barely above a whisper.
He rubs himself idly through the cotton-blend of his underwear, feeling the heat and hardness of his dick, twitching slightly as his eyes find her legs again on the screen.
This is wrong.
Categorically, this is wrong.
She's a Freshman.
Eighteen, ninteen at the oldest.
His student.
This. is. wrong.
That thought continues to circle his mind even as he pries his shaft free, silently spitting into his palm and thumbing at his tip with a shuddering breath.
'What the fuck is wrong with you?'
He chastises mentally as he begins to stroke in grotesquely slow motions. Hips already shifting forward on instinct to meet the gesture.
'She's a teenage girl.'
Something about that, guilt laced, perverted, makes the length of him twitch again beneath the now persistent motion of his grip.
Her face stares back at him, unmoving, on the screen.
'She's your student.'
The thought of her in his classroom enters his mind unpermitted.
After hours.
When even the janitors have long gone home.
Those perfect legs spread for him, that thin frame bent over the lecturn~
He's only been touching himself for a minute, two at most, but the thought is enough to send him over the edge. Silently groaning her name into the pillow as spouts of warm, thick fluid shamefully fill his palm, muscles pulled taut.
The shame fully hits as the panting subsides and his breath comes back to him a moment later.
Cum leaking from between his fingers where his hand is still clasped around the head of his dick.
Her expression suddenly much more judgemental where it watches from the screen.
He slams the laptop shut with his free hand, muttering a string of quiet expletives as he reaches into his bedside drawer for tissue to clean the mess he created.
Tucking himself back into his boxers and rising carefully from the bed with the evidence wadded up in his fist.
The warm-beige of Gemma's shoulders catch the low light of the lamp where she lays in the sheets, rising and falling slowly in sleep.
Mark stares at her. His wife. Eyes fixed on her back as a brief wave of feelings washes over him, contradictory and uncomfortable.
Guilt. Resentment. Contempt. Disgust.
At himself, at her, at what this marriage has become.
What they have become.
But it's gone as quickly as it comes, tiding over to that persistent familiar indifference sat low in chest.
~~~
His palms are too dry from where he washed the filth from his hands with anti-bacterial soap in the bathroom.
The evidence of his transgressions now flushed down the toilet and neatly swept under the rug.
He grips the kitchen counter as the kettle boils, the clock on the wall ticking past midnight.
"What the fuck is wrong with you." He repeats, out loud this time, voice gravelly.
He watches as the boiling water dissolves the coffe granules at the bottom of the mug. Staring into the blackened liquid with a quiet self-loathing.
He doesn't drink it.
Just grips the mug too tightly between his fingers, staring out the window into the quiet suburban night swallowing the yard outside.
Grimacing at his face reflected back in the glass, older than he remembers, greying at the temples and creasing at the eyes. Hollowed out in ways that have more to do with who he is than how he looks.
A stretch of woodland backs onto the row of yards, a thin black seam out there at the edge of suburbia. Black enough to swallow him whole.
The clock ticks on, indifferent. The AC humming. The house settling. It all fades to background noise as Mark sits with the shame-streaked consequences of his actions, and the creeping thought that this may only be the beginning.