It begins like vapor, like breath on a cold beaker—Henry sees you through glass first. Not metaphor, but literal: the chemistry lab door, its inset pane slightly fogged by the contrast of air-conditioned precision and the heat of late autumn. He watches your silhouette move with scientific detachment. You’re adjusting a Bunsen burner with the same care some offer dying saints. Fingers nimble, brow furrowed. A soft sniffle. The peek of your tongue at the corner of your lip. He swears the room tilts.

His hands are inked—his shirt sleeves rolled up to the forearms, smudged with graphite and whatever madness he pressed into the pages of his leather-bound notebook before sunrise. The one labeled only with your initials. He has catalogued every hour you wear that cyan scarf. Counted how often your pinkie twitches when lecturing about ion exchange.

You wear color like a rebellion. Today it’s a vivid vermilion frock, buttoned neatly to the throat. Like you’ve tried to civilize yourself against what the world might pull from you. But Henry sees it—the neckline stiff with modesty, but your hair rebelliously curled over your collarbone. The muscles in your neck tense when you speak. You are restraint dressed in fire.

He is at the threshold—both in posture and in life. Guest lecturer. Ghost in a corduroy coat. No one remembers hiring him, but no one questions it either. He appears in rooms like he bled through the wallpaper. Like he’s always been there.

Today, he’s not on the roster. But he’s here.

You don’t see him yet, too absorbed in pipetting with the graceful precision of a dancer performing a sacred rite. Henry sees in you a woman building something alchemical—something neither student nor peer has any right to observe.

But he is not either of those.

He moves like mist—silent and sure. When he speaks, it's not from across the room, but near your shoulder.

“You always wear vivid colors when you teach stoichiometry.”

You turn, blinking owlishly. He sees the confusion. The slow flicker of cognition. You sniffle, not from nerves, but habit. He catalogues that too.

“Pardon?” Your voice is low, soft-edged. Made for lullabies and metal concerts alike.

“I find it fascinating,” he says. “As though the vibrancy keeps your students awake. Or perhaps—it’s camouflage. You burn too brightly for them to see you clearly.”

You laugh, uncomfortable, unsure. He doesn’t. He only steps closer, until the desk is the only sanctum between you. The polished surface reflects a warped version of your face—your large hands curled over a clipboard, his ink-stained fingers resting on a leather-bound volume of Donne’s poetry.

“I’m not flirting,” he says quietly, reverently. “I’m reading.”

Your eyes widen. His voice is velvet and venom—beautiful, dangerous, impossible to argue with. “I’ve been reading you for weeks. You sniffle when you lie. You suck your lower lip when you’re about to correct someone. You hate slow walkers, but you’ll let a student stumble through an answer just to see where they land. You’re... unbearable. And extraordinary.”

There’s a pause. He leans forward slightly, as though confiding a secret not meant for daylight.

“I would burn libraries for the chance to pin you against this lab bench.”

A gasp shudders from your throat, involuntary and soft. It is not consent. But it is sound. And he devours sound.

His hand lifts—only to brush a stray curl behind your ear. His thumb lingers at your jawline, tracing the slope of intellect and softness.

“You’re not just chemistry,” he whispers. “You’re combustion.”

And with that, he leaves. No final look. No trailing scent. Just the echo of leather soles and the sharp scent of smoke from a too-long-extinguished Bunsen burner.

But you’ll feel it later—when your fingers tremble over your lecture notes, and you realize one page has been replaced.

A line from Paradise Lost, in elegant, ash-dark script:

“Her virtue and the conscience of her worth, that would be wooed, and not unsought be won.”

Underneath, in crimson ink:

—H. M. W.

And beneath that, smaller:

Fiancé.