🖤 *Chapter One: "Ink and Wine"*
Melanie never sat at the front of the lecture hall — not until Professor Miguel Salazar walked in that first day with a stack of old books and grief tucked behind his dark brown eyes.
She had heard things. Rumors in the hallway. That he was brilliant. Cold. Widowed.
But when he read Neruda aloud like every syllable hurt him to say, something inside her — something she didn't know she was carrying — leaned in.
Every Tuesday and Thursday at 10:45 AM, she became someone else. Someone softer. Someone seen.
"Melanie Davis," he said her name for the first time two weeks later, eyes flicking over the top of his glasses like a line of verse. "Stay after class."
Her heart beat louder than the classroom chatter.
She stayed.
"Your analysis on *The Waste Land*," he said, stepping closer, "was… unsettling. In a good way."
"Thanks, I think." She crossed her arms, but didn't step back.
"You understand despair better than most students your age," he said, voice low. "Like someone who knows what silence tastes like."
Melanie didn't answer. Just stared.
"Would you," he continued, slipping a piece of paper across the desk, "be interested in reading something unpublished?"
Her fingers brushed his as she picked it up.
*Elena's Journal*, it read.
"Your wife?" she asked.
He nodded, once. "She wrote poetry. A lot like yours."
She should have run right then.
---
That night, Melanie sat on her bed with the notebook in her lap, pages filled with aching lines and scribbled pain. Elena wrote like she was bleeding — all soft vowels and bitter truths. She didn't sleep.
By the next class, she had memorized one of the poems. Miguel watched her from the lectern, his hand tightening around a pen as she quoted it aloud during discussion.
"You remind me of her," he said, when they were alone again. "Not just your words… your fire."
And when he kissed her in the shadow of his office door, it felt like falling into something sacred and selfish all at once.
But even in the heat of it, some part of her wondered —
Was it *her* fire he wanted…
Or Elena's?
Melanie wasn't in love.
At least that's what she told herself every time she left Miguel's apartment with her lipstick smudged and his wife's poetry still echoing in her head.
They didn't talk much after — not about them. Only about books. About T.S. Eliot and grief. About what Elena had written on page 43 of the journal, about longing being a kind of violence.
Once, Melanie asked him why he kept the journal if it hurt so much to read.
Miguel just said, "Some pain isn't meant to be healed. It's meant to be repeated."
She didn't know what he meant until the fourth time he kissed her and whispered, "You sound like her when you cry."
That was the first time she felt it — the splinter.
She laughed it off in the moment, but her heart didn't. It clung to the words like a bruise.
---
Three weeks later, he didn't show up for class. No email. No substitute.
Just silence.
And Melanie? She panicked. She didn't want to — she wasn't *that* girl — but she *was*.
So she walked to his office.
The door was slightly open.
Inside, she found him asleep in his chair, tie loosened, half-empty bottle of wine on the desk, and her notebook — not Elena's — open in front of him.
Her poetry. Her voice. Her pain.
Used like a drug.
"Miguel," she said quietly, but he didn't stir.
There it was again. That feeling — not desire, not love. Not even betrayal. Just… erasure.
She closed the notebook, gently, and walked out.
That was the last time she waited for him.
---
Later that night, needing air, Melanie wandered into a place she'd never gone before — a small bar off-campus where music lived in the walls. Gritty. Loud. Raw.
That's where she saw him.
On stage, bathed in red light, a cigarette tucked behind his ear, his guitar moaning like it was bleeding.
*Hobie.*
When their eyes met, it wasn't poetry.
It was *electricity*.
He didn't smile. Just stared like he already knew every word she was about to say — and didn't need to hear a single one.
Melanie sat down, still tasting Miguel's silence, and listened to Hobie tear the night open.
This wasn't the story she thought she was writing.
It was better.
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