Nocticadia: A Dark Academia Gothic Romance

A sound startled me upright. I looked around the dark space, with a vague awareness that a fire crackled in my periphery. The door ahead stood cracked open. An unseen force compelled me to go to it. I didn’t know what, or why, but as I pushed up from the bed, a tug at my arm sent me backward. I trailed my gaze down the length of my arm to find something silver flashing at my wrist, but my mind didn’t register was it was.

Instead, I tugged. And tugged.

“Lilia,” I heard a voice whisper, and I turned toward the door once again. Stared. Waiting.

The darkness shifted for a form that stepped into the light. A man with a grotesque curve of his spine. The one I’d seen earlier, on the examination table. The eyeless man, whose deep dark sockets held a world of terror. “Come sleep with us,” he whispered. “At the bottom of the lake.”

He hobbled closer.

I tugged at my wrist. “No.”

“It’s time, Lilia. Your mother is waiting for you at the bottom of the lake.”

“No!” I pulled harder, and a sharp pain struck my wrist, but I didn’t care. I needed to get loose! Now!

He inched closer and closer, until he was standing over me. “Lilia!” He gripped my shoulders, and I let out a blood curdling scream.

“Lilia!”

A light flicked on. Something shook me. Hard. I opened my eyes to find Professor Bramwell standing over me, his hands gripping my shoulders.

I snapped my attention toward the door and, finding it closed, choked on the air that arrived too fast.

Just a nightmare. It was only a nightmare.

My whole body trembled, though, the deep vibration rattling my bones.

I didn’t realize he’d asked me a question, until he said, “Lilia,” tipping his head to the side.

“What?”

“Are you all right?”

I cleared my throat, shifting my attention back toward the door to make sure it remained closed and that the corpse was gone. “Yes. I …. I had a bad dream.”

“You damn near woke the dead with that scream.” From the side table, he swiped up the key for the handcuffs and unlocked them, setting my hand free.

I released a nervous breath, still shaken. I’d had visions of the dead before, but something about that guy I’d seen earlier in the autopsy room freaked me out. Probably his lack of eyes. The sight of empty eye sockets made my skin crawl. “Yeah.”

As Bramwell turned away, a restless fear spiraled through me again, and I reached out, grabbing his arm. “Wait. Can you stay with me? Here? Just … just for a couple minutes, until I fall asleep again?”

He lowered his gaze to where I’d grabbed him, staring down at it for a moment. It was then I noticed he had on nothing but a pair of boxer briefs that contained an exceptionally well-endowed package beneath. “Yes,” he said, and I couldn’t help taking in the whole of his physique.

It wasn’t even necessarily ogling the man, but appreciating the utter perfection of his form—his broad, muscled shoulders that tapered down to a slim waist, and that chiseled V disappearing into his briefs. Not overly bulky, he had just enough muscle to make a girl stare without wondering how many hours he spent at the gym.

Gaze trailing over his body brought me staring at the mutilation scattered over his arm and shoulder and a strange black marking just below his collarbone. Not a tattoo. Something deeper that seared the skin and created a horrific groove in his flesh. A branding of what looked to be two crossed medical staffs and a seven, contained in a circle. I nodded toward it. “What is that?”

His lips flattened. “A mistake I made early on in my college career.”

“Like a fraternity thing?”

“Something like that.”

I scooted over to make room, and he rounded the bed to the other side and sank onto the mattress beside me, careful to keep some distance between us. Once settled, he threw the sheet over his lower half, relieving me of that hard-to-miss bulge and those muscled legs of his.

Did he always sleep in his briefs? Or nude? Perhaps he was just being decent around me. Or maybe he slept in more clothes. The fireplace had warmed the room with a sticky heat, and he had slept closest to it, so perhaps it was a matter of comfort for him.

“I would think it’s dangerous to cuff yourself to the bed every night,” he said, interrupting my thoughts.

“I don’t typically use handcuffs. And, usually, I can snap myself out of it quickly. I don’t know why I couldn’t this time.”

“You suffer night terrors?”

At a flash of the eyeless man hobbling toward me, I winced. “Yes. They’re horrible.”

“Paralysis?”

“Sometimes, yes.”

“I did, too, as a boy. Of course, it didn’t take closing my eyes to throw me into nightmares, with the father I had.”

And just like that, the first chip into his past and the mystery of his father. “He was abusive?”

“Forgive me, I shouldn’t have brought that up. I don’t care to talk about him right now.”

Dammit.

With a huff, he eased down onto the bed, jostling the mattress, and faced away.

Disappointed, I turned over and flicked off the light.