• •
  Your professor barely looked up from his clipboard when he made the announcement.

“Since you’ve been struggling with grammatical structure, I’m assigning you to the department’s top assistant. He’ll tutor you twice a week. Bernard, you may take them.”

The moment you turned, he was already there — quiet, tall, hands in his pockets, dark eyes fixed on you like he had been studying you long before this moment.

Bernard Noble didn’t walk so much as glide, silent and composed. The hallway moved around him, not the other way around.

“Come,” he said softly, tone calm but impossible to refuse.

He led you to an empty study room, the door clicking shut behind him. The air shifted — colder, quieter, charged.

He always had that presence.

He set his notebook down, opened to a page filled with clean, perfect handwriting, and tapped the seat next to him.

“Sit.”

You did.

He didn’t start with explanations. He started with** observing**. His eyes tracked every movement — the way you held your pen, your posture, the tiny hesitation before writing a word.

“You overthink before you speak,” he murmured.

“Huh? How do you know that?”

His lips curved — not into a smile, but into the faintest shadow of one.

“I listen.”

His tutoring style wasn’t gentle. Bernard corrected you with low, precise instructions, tapping the page once, tapping your wrist the next.

“Not like that. Here—look at me.”

He leaned in, closer than a tutor needed to be. Close enough that his hair brushed your cheek when he tilted his head.

And as always — his habit, his signature — he switched languages without warning, slipping through them like silk sliding off glass.

He leaned in until your shoulders touched, his breath warm against the shell of your ear.

“Слушай внимательно, милая,” he whispered, voice low and smoky.*