David Miller sat alone in his office, the silence pressing down on him as heavily as the stacks of papers that surrounded his desk. A week had passed since that night—since Sophia had fled, leaving behind nothing but the echo of her hurried footsteps and the fading warmth of her touch. He tried to return to his routines—lectures, consultations, grading dissertations—but no matter how hard he worked, his thoughts circled back to her. His student. His Sophia. Her thesis, nearly finished, still lay on his desk, yet she herself had vanished into the shadows.
He had called her, at first cautiously, under the pretense of discussing her defense. Then more urgently, with every unanswered ring. Her number was unreachable. Messages remained unopened, the cold emptiness of unread checkmarks mocking him. Even his emails—first formal, then increasingly personal, asking if she was safe—went unanswered. It was as if she had dissolved into the evening air, leaving him only with silence.
Every morning, when his eyes opened, she was the first thing he saw: her dark curls spilling across her shoulders, her eyes—blue as storm-lit seas—glimmering with defiance and fragile longing. Every night, he tossed in bed, haunted by the memory of her lips on his, her fingers trailing fire across his skin, her whisper claiming him: You're mine.
He cursed himself for weakness, for letting her claim such power over him. Yet she lingered everywhere. In the smell of old books. In the creak of a bicycle passing by the faculty building. In the suffocating stillness of his office.
And then came the sharper ache—anger turned inward. How could he have hurt her so carelessly? How could he have pushed away someone so extraordinary, so fierce, so achingly sincere? To tell her it had to stop—what a fool he had been. Even if he had to end it, he should have found words filled with tenderness, with admiration. Words she deserved. What was she feeling now, after being rejected so harshly? How could he do that to her—how could he break a soul so alive?
But what choice had he? He had asked her to stop, and she had not listened. She was unstoppable, fearless, charging straight into him with all her passion. Of course—a woman like her, bold, intelligent, sensual—she had likely never been denied before. If only she hadn't pressed so hard, perhaps he wouldn't have uttered those cruel words.
Yet, if she was truly fearless, why did her eyes hold such vulnerability? That fleeting look of terror in their unfathomable blue depths. No—he had wronged her. This was the girl who had sat in his lectures with shining eyes, who never missed a seminar, who hung on every word about Plato and Aquinas when others found them dull. The girl who had written a master's thesis of brilliance, as though it belonged in a doctoral defense. The girl who blushed and lowered her gaze whenever his lingered too long.
Such a woman might exist only once in the world. And he, a fool, had hidden behind duty, behind propriety: This isn't allowed. Serves him right if she never looks at him again.
He began searching for her. At first, quietly—asking colleagues, students. No one had seen her. She hadn't attended lectures, hadn't entered the library, hadn't answered in the university chats. Even Anna, the friend she sometimes met for coffee, frowned and muttered that Sophia had seemed unlike herself lately, but offered nothing more.
Desperate, he checked her social media. No updates. Only old photos—bicycle rides, campus events, frozen in time. He reread her thesis, line by line, searching for some hidden clue. The work was flawless, ready for defense—yet its perfection terrified him. Sophia wasn't the kind of woman to abandon something unfinished.
By the end of the second week, control was slipping through his fingers. He wandered the campus, eyes scanning every figure on a bicycle. He walked the street leading to the university—the one she must have taken that night. He imagined her flushed cheeks, hair streaming in the wind, the rhythm of her body moving with the pedals. But the street was empty, and the emptiness gnawed at him.
At night he returned to his hollow apartment, poured whiskey into a glass, and let meaningless videos play on YouTube. What did it matter what he watched? What did it matter how he lived? If he was never to see her again, what did anything matter at all?