Page 90 of The Villain We Tempt

You + Me tonight? - Trev :)

Fuck.

Another romantic overture from the guy I have zero interest in.

“Mr. Cohen.”

I flinch at the sound of Lochlan’s barked tone from the front of the room. He’s still facing the board, but then he slowly turns to face the rest of us and his gaze turns steely as it falls on Trevor sitting in the back of the room.

“How old are you?” Lochlan growls quietly.

Trevor frowns. “What?”

“Yourage, Trevor.”

“Uh…” Trevor’s brow cocks. “Nineteen?”

“You seem a little unsure about that.”

The class titters in light laughter.

“You’re sure you’re not ten?”

Trevor smiles curiously. “I?—”

“The next time you want to flirt with a woman, Trevor,” Lochlan says in a bored tone, “try aiming higher than whatever the fuck worked for you at recess in the fourth grade.”

The titters grow louder. Trevor starts to grin. “No problem, Professor?—”

“By the way, the next time you throw a paper airplane at Ms. Nikitin, I’ll shove it up your ass.”

The laughter comes to a screeching halt as Trevor’s grin drops and my eyes dart to Lochlan.

Trevor clears his throat as Lochlan starts to turn back to the whiteboard.

“With respect, I don’t think professors can speak to students like that, sir,” he says, glaring at Lochlan.

A thin smile ghosts over Lochlan’s lips. “Good thing I’m notreally a professor, then, isn't it?” he says as his gaze swivels to landrighton me. I squirm under the coolness of that icy blue gaze before he turns back to the white board and underlines the words “Hidden Identities” he’s already written on it.

“All of us—you, me, everyone—hides behind a mask of some kind.”

Heat creeps up my neck as a chill snakes up my spine.

“Carl Jung wrote about the concept of the Persona being the mask people wear for the outside world. In fact,personacomes from the Greek wordprósopo, meaning face or mask. Jung also talked about the concept of the Shadow, which is the hidden and often repressed aspects of the self that exist beneath the Persona. You might remember learning earlier in the semester about R.D. Laing’s writings on the divided self being the result of people constructing a false identity to protect their vulnerabletrueself from the eyes of the world.”

I'm sorry,what?

When Lochlan told us he was going to be taking over teaching this class, I expected the narcissistic jock to make us watch highlights reels of his football exploits and somehow try to tie it in with Professor McGrath’s lesson plan outline.

Instead, he’s talking like a tenured professor with forty years of experience.

“Now, tohidden identities…”

My heart lurches into the back of my throat when Lochlan taps the words on the board and turns to level a stony gazeright at me.

My face pales.

How does he know. How the FUCK does he know about?—