A/N: My beautiful friends, I'm so thrilled to finally be posting this fic! I've been talking about it for months so I really hope it's worth the wait.

A couple of things to note: first, I tried to do as much research as possible on American colleges and how the education system works generally, but I'm 99% sure I've gotten some of it wrong. The rest of the technical stuff was based on my time at a British university, so if anything sounds a little weird to you, that'll be why. Let's just accept it and move on as a team.

Also, there's no Henry in this fic. Y'all know I love writing him, but he didn't really have a place here so I've gone without him entirely.

Lastly, these chapters are generally a bit shorter than my normal ones, so I'm going to be doing bi-weekly updates (Sundays and Wednesdays) again, just like the good old days.

I love you lots as always, and I hope you enjoy! xxx

"Someone, I tell you,
will remember us,
even in another time"

— Sappho

Emma knew her shoelaces had come undone, but she didn't have time to do anything about that as she raced down the empty corridor. The lecture hall was within sight and she naively told herself that she'd be able to make it in one piece – but then she stumbled, nearly slamming into the wall, and swore under her breath as she crouched to quickly re-knot them.

The only bright side to the near-collision was that no one else had been around to see it, although that was because she was 15 minutes late to her first class of the semester and everybody had already long settled into their seats.

Emma had been at Boston College for two full years, and yet she'd still managed to get lost. She was always getting lost. The English department was spread out through the labyrinthine halls of the arts building, and every goddamn day she seemed to forget where the hell she was and where she was supposed to be going.

She screeched to a halt in front of the door that she'd been charging toward and glanced down at the note she'd scribbled on the back of her hand: Introduction to 18th-century literature, room 108. She'd copied it off her third-year class schedule that morning after she'd woken up 40 minutes later than planned and then had to wait for her roommate to stop hogging their shared bathroom.

If she'd stopped to think about it for a moment, she might have realised that it was a bit weird for her biggest introductory lecture of the week to be taking place in the corridor that was reserved exclusively for professors' offices. But she didn't think, because it was the very first day of her junior year and she was late and she was a mess. She also didn't knock. She just pushed the door open and decided that sneaking into the back row and sitting down quietly was her best option.

There was no back row, though. She staggered through the door and froze, finding herself faced with walls of bookcases and a vast wooden desk. The room had that English-department smell that she'd come to recognise over the past two years: old, mildewy books that academics refused to throw away; bad coffee from the vending machine down the hall; and freshly printed, ink-smeared paper. There was another smell, though – one of really rich perfume and expensive hand lotion – and Emma somehow registered it way before she noticed that there was someone sitting on the other side of the desk.

Her heart dropped. Two dark brown eyes, which had just snapped up impatiently from the work that Emma had interrupted, looked back at her.

"Oh," Emma blurted out, stepping back to check the number on the door. "I thought… I'm supposed to have a lecture in room 108."

The woman, who was wearing a perfectly tailored jacket and a crisp white blouse that was unbuttoned just slightly further than Emma would have thought acceptable for a college professor, narrowed her eyes. When she tilted her head, her shoulder-length dark hair caught a glimmer of light from the window behind her.

"You probably mean lecture hall eight," she said, and Emma felt a weird twisting in her stomach at the sound of her voice. It came out of her mouth in ribbons, silky and seductive.

That thought looped its way around Emma's brain like a noose, and she totally forgot that she was meant to respond in some way. She just stared.

The woman raised her eyebrows and prompted, "Lecture room eight? L 08?"

Emma blinked. Then she looked down at the smudged ink on her hand and sighed. "Oh."

Move, the voice in her head hissed at her. She was still loitering in the doorway, her hair a blonde tangle around her flushed face, and she knew what any normal person would do next: they'd apologise, make their excuses and leave. But something about the woman's sharp gaze was pinning her to the spot, and as much as she wanted to turn and bail, all she could do was gape back at her.

The woman's expression shifted into one of vague concern. "Are you okay?"

It was a reasonable question, considering Emma was acting like she had a hole in one side of her skull. At least the alarm in the woman's voice finally made her snap back into reality.

"Oh," Emma repeated like it was the only word she knew. "Right. I should… I'll just…"

Without finishing the sentence, she turned on her heel and scuttled out of the room. Three steps down the corridor, she realised she'd left the door swinging open behind her and crept back again, shamefaced, to close it.

Then she sprinted down the hall, half expecting the woman to come after her to check she wasn't some lunatic who had just wandered onto campus. Emma's cheeks were burning, and although she didn't really have the time to dwell on what a complete fucking moron she was – not when she still had to race across campus and find the actual lecture hall before her 18th-century lit professor gave her name a big red 'absent' mark to start the year off with – humiliation was still managing to tangle itself around her chest.

If that woman hadn't been so goddamn beautiful, it probably wouldn't have been so bad – but, as it was, she was potentially the prettiest person Emma had ever seen in real life, and the mere thought of her rolling her eyes at Emma's turned back made her want to curl up in a hole and die.

Emma wondered momentarily if she'd pursed her lips at her. They'd been painted red – not the red of strawberry lollipops or clowns' noses, but the red of really deep wines that 20-year-old Emma wasn't sophisticated enough to enjoy yet. The thought of those lips doing anything at all in response to something she had said made her go hot in a way that wasn't from all her running around.

She was late to three more classes that week, but none of those occasions were as humiliating as the first. She even got hauled out by one professor in front of her entire Chaucer seminar, but it didn't really bother her – she was used to that. She wasn't used to concerned gazes and dark-chocolate eyes.

In Emma's two years at college, she'd been in classes with pretty much every undergrad professor in the department. It was weird, then, that she hadn't bumped into that woman before. She had to assume she was a new teacher that year, or maybe she wasn't a professor at all – she could just be a PhD student using someone else's office to get her work done. Emma longed to go back down that corridor and loiter outside room 108 just in case she would see her again, but she wasn't brave enough for that. She knew that the second they locked eyes, her brain would explode for real.

So instead she kept her head down and did her best to make it through the rest of the week unscathed. She ran into old friends from the previous year and she struggled to get her head back around the complexities of modernist literature. She'd been desperately in love with reading and with words for years, ever since the day the mystery of them had been unlocked in the back of a dingy classroom, and she'd chosen English as her major without a second thought. She'd been disappointed, then, when she'd realised that studying the subject at college wasn't anywhere near as fun as simply sitting down with a book and devouring the world that someone else had created for her. Instead, she'd found herself taking a butt-load of classes on areas of literature that she had zero interest in.

Like classics, she thought dully as she checked her class schedule on Thursday morning. She wasn't sure she could imagine anything worse than having to listen to some crusty old man talk about what the ancient Romans and Greeks got boners over in their spare time.

At two o'clock, she followed a group of people she vaguely recognised from some of her other classes toward the seminar room, and when they all piled in, she deliberately headed for the other side of the room so she wouldn't have to get caught up in making small talk with them before the professor arrived.

There were six lines of desks all facing the front of the room, and Emma settled herself down in the empty second row on the left-hand side. She had no problem sitting near the front because teachers very rarely called on her – there was something about her blonde hair or the fact that she was always chewing on a pen that meant no one ever wanted to listen to her thoughts on whatever topic they were discussing. Instead, she could just lean back and blend into the scenery, comfortable sitting behind the group of literature nerds who she was certain would inevitably turn up and settle themselves down in the row in front of her any minute now.

The only problem was that the professor arrived next, and when Emma looked up, she felt her heart drop down into the pit of her stomach.

It was the woman from Monday. Of course it was. Obviously the universe had seen a glowing opportunity when Emma had gone stumbling headfirst into her office and it wasn't content to just let the hilarity end at that one single event.

If it was possible, the woman was even more stunning that day. She walked so purposefully, with a stack of notes clutched to her chest like armour and her legs long and tan beneath her black shift dress. She was wearing towering heels, which was unusual – there wasn't a single professor in the English department who didn't have a longstanding love for tweed jackets and soft-soled shoes. Emma swallowed hard and watched as she walked in them with her hips swaying and her chin lifted high. The rest of the room kept chattering, seemingly not noticing that a goddess of some kind had just wandered into their breathing space.

Just as she reached the desk at the front of the room, the woman glanced up and met Emma's gaze. She paused. Emma noticed a slight narrowing of her eyes, and she felt herself go hot beneath her plaid shirt.

Then the woman looked away again, her face expressionless, and placed her papers on the desk. When she opened her laptop and started to type something in, Emma dove beneath her desk and yanked her class schedule out of her backpack.

Thursday, 2pm

Introduction to Classics: Literature in Ancient Times

Professor Regina Mills

She wanted to screw the paper into a ball and shove it into her own mouth.

Trying to appear at least semi calm, Emma sat back upright and folded her arms on the table. She deeply regretted sitting in the second row now – Professor Mills was only a few feet away, and already Emma could smell the perfume that she'd caught a whiff of in her office on Monday. It sent a rush of electricity down her spine.

Professor Mills reached up to tuck a strand of silky hair behind one ear. It took every shred of Emma's self control not to moan out loud.

Eventually her professor straightened up and stepped toward the front of the class. The chatter gradually began to die down from all corners.

She waited, her dark brown eyes scanning the room as she took in the cluster of students before her. There were barely 15 people in the class, and Emma suspected that most of them weren't there through a sheer love of ancient Greek literature – the course was a double-term one, and when Emma had been sifting through her class options for the year it had seemed like a pretty easy way of guaranteeing herself a passing grade come the summer. One seminar a week wasn't much compared to some of the other classes she was being forced to attend.

A single look at the unimpressed expression on her professor's face told her that she might have made a mistake in that assumption.

Professor Mills kept scanning the room. Her eyes settled on Emma for another second before slipping over the top of her like a wave lapping against sand. They landed on someone who was still whispering just behind her.

"You," she suddenly said. Her voice was just as dark and smoky as Emma remembered, and she felt her pussy clench around nothing. "What's your name?"

Emma didn't turn to look at whoever she was addressing. She couldn't have dragged her gaze away if the room had caught fire.

A male student cleared his throat from two rows behind her. "August W Booth, ma'am."

Emma watched as Professor Mills' nose wrinkled with sheer disgust.

"August…" she started, tasting the words and obviously not enjoying them. "…W Booth?"

Someone – August, Emma assumed – awkwardly coughed. "That's right."

"Is your name so common that you need to include the W for differentiation purposes?"

Emma quickly looked down at her lap so her professor wouldn't catch her snort of laughter.

"Err… No," August said. "It's just my name."

"I suggest you shorten it," Professor Mills said crisply. "Mr Booth, can I ask why you continued to talk once the class had started?"

"Well. I wasn't aware that it had."

"Did you think I was standing here because I was about to start an impromptu fashion show down the centre aisle?"

Emma bit down hard on the inside of her cheek. When she glanced up, she thought she saw a smirk on her professor's face.

August cleared his throat again and said sullenly, "No. Sorry."

"Good. Don't talk again unless you feel like going to the office to change courses."

The rest of the room had gone stiff and silent, and when she took another step forward, no one breathed. Professor Mills smiled at them and, just like that, with one flash of her brilliantly white teeth, everything in Emma's life felt so much better.

"So," Professor Mills said. Her hands were clasped in front of her and even though she could barely have topped five foot four, she was the tallest presence Emma had ever laid eyes on. "I'm Professor Mills, and this is an introduction to classics. I assume you all know each other already, so let's skip the orientation ceremony and get our anthologies out. We're going to be starting with The Iliad."

Everyone else already had their enormous textbooks waiting on their desks, but Emma hadn't had time to think that far ahead before their professor had walked into the room and turned her brain to soup. She bent under the desk again, fishing out the book that she'd forgotten to buy off Amazon in advance but had thankfully found in the department library two days earlier, and brought it up to the table. When she glanced up, two dark eyes were looking at her.

Sucking in her cheeks to stop them from going pink, Emma forced herself to hold her gaze. Professor Mills didn't look especially impressed, and Emma had to wonder whether what had happened on Monday was suddenly going to become only the second-worst thing to happen to her that week.

But then she turned away, going to the whiteboard. "Who here has read Homer before?"

A flurry of hands shot up. Emma's should have joined it, but her awkwardness had her frozen. Instead, she grabbed her book and busied herself turning to the right page.

"During this first semester, we're going to be acquainting ourselves with some of the classics – Homer, Sophocles, Sappho. If you haven't come across any of these before, I suggest you study up. For the fundamentals class next semester we'll be going into more depth and studying some of the lesser-known poets and tragedians. There will be plenty of reading and I'll be setting a lot of assignments, so if you'd like to leave and sign up for an introduction to children's literature instead, I'll pretend not to notice as you rush for the door."

She had her back to the class and was writing down the main points on the board. She didn't need to look at the room to hold her students' attention – she already knew she had it. Power and certainty radiated from her and the sight of her self-assured posture made Emma want to sink down in her chair and thrust a hand down the front of her jeans.

No one got up – of course they didn't. A few students exchanged looks, but Emma could only keep staring at one very specific person.

Eventually, Professor Mills turned back to them and smiled. She wiped her hands together like she was brushing away the negative energy in the room.

"The Iliad," she said. Pages immediately began rustling. "Someone tell me about the role that women play in this poem."

Emma felt her throat close up. She'd read The Iliad before, years ago, but she hadn't been expecting questions right out the gate. She definitely hadn't been expecting them to come from someone who looked like she'd just wandered off of Mount Olympus herself.

She looked down at her book and grimaced. Emma usually needed more warning before she could dive into a text – especially a complicated one with tiny lettering – and the words were already jumbled across the page.

Sing, Goddess, Achilles' rage,

Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks

Incalculable pain

Emma swallowed hard and tried to focus on what was going on around her.

"No one?" Professor Mills asked with an aggrieved sigh. "The Iliad is often referred to as a predominantly male poem, but strong women play their part in it and shouldn't be overlooked. Who can tell me what happens when Ares comes up against Athena?"

Emma knew the answer to that – Ares ceded to her twice. She knew that was the answer Professor Mills was looking for. But could she open her mouth and say those words out loud?

Could she hell.

The whole hour was an exercise in torture. Emma kept her gaze fixed on her book, not reading it, not absorbing a single word of anything that was happening. She was too busy listening to Professor Mills' cool voice curling through the room to have any idea what was going on, and on the very rare occasions where she felt brave enough to glance up, she was always met with a pair of curious eyes staring back at her from the front of the room. The sight of them sent a shock through her stomach, and Emma went back to exactly what she'd been doing before: staring panickedly at the book, hoping her professor wasn't about to haul her out in front of everyone.

Finally it was 3pm, and Emma heard Professor Mills say, "I'll see you all next week." Rustling started up from around her, and Emma immediately slammed her textbook shut.

She wanted to dive for the door without pausing, but embarrassment was brewing up inside her all over again and she wasn't sure she was strong enough to suck it down. That was twice now that she'd made a complete ass of herself in front of this woman, and she didn't want the rest of the year to go this way. She also really didn't want to earn herself a reputation as the class mute.

She stood up with everyone else and began packing her things away. When she risked a glance at the front of the room, Professor Mills wasn't looking back at her. She was slotting papers into her purse, her dark hair falling in front of her face. Emma shivered, desperately wanting to walk up beside her and tuck it behind an ear for her.

She decided then that she had to say something. She wanted this woman to like her, not to contact the department admin staff and demand that they conduct a psychiatric evaluation of her. If she wanted the rest of the semester to go better than her first week had, Emma had to be brave and go apologise. At the very least, Professor Mills needed to know that she was capable of forcing out a full sentence without stammering.

As everyone else began to file out of the room, Emma slowly hitched her backpack onto one shoulder and started to edge around her desk. Professor Mills had pulled her phone out of her purse and was reading a message with an expressionless face. She didn't notice Emma approaching.

Emma was waiting for a while before her presence was registered.

Professor Mills looked up, her eyebrows raised expectantly. When she saw who was standing in front of her, she blinked.

"Oh," she said, locking her phone with a decisive click. "It's you."

Emma nodded. Even forcing out a 'yes' was apparently beyond her by then.

She swallowed hard, then opened her mouth. No noise came out.

Her professor was watching her curiously, like she was half expecting her to burst into tears. After a few moments of excruciating silence, she leaned back against the edge of her desk and folded her arms.

"What's your name?"

The question shocked Emma enough that she was finally able to say something. "My name?"

"Yes. I assume you have one."

"Emma." Two syllables, and both were shaky. "Swan."

"I see. And what can I do for you, Emma Swan?"

All at once, Emma's knees went week. Professor Mills had curled the name around her tongue like she was savouring it, and she didn't blink as she spoke. She made more eye contact than anyone Emma had ever met.

Emma tried again - she really did. She opened her mouth to apologise for Monday and to apologise for today and to explain that she wasn't a total moron, she was just having a weird few days. The words were all ready on her tongue.

But then the corners of Professor Mills' mouth flicked up in a half smile that told Emma she already found her strangely amusing, and the perfectly formed sentence left her. All Emma could think of was the squeezing inside her chest and the fact that the very tips of her fingers had started to sweat.

Clutching hold of her backpack, Emma turned for the door and all but ran away. The burn of her professor's eyes on her back didn't leave her until long after she had left the room.

It was a rough week. Emma tried as hard as she could to get herself together, but in every single class she went to, her thoughts ended up straying in a very specific direction. Walking around the English department was a terrifying ordeal because she was half expecting Professor Mills to burst out of every closed door just to mess with her, and so she was late to most classes during her second week too because she was so reluctant to go anywhere where she might accidentally bump into her and make a fool out of herself all over again.

Thursday was rapidly approaching, and Emma thought she might die from the anticipation. She could imagine Professor Mills' reaction to her walking through the door again – that amused smile, that dark gaze. The thought of those eyes settling on her again filled Emma up with something that was somehow hot and cold simultaneously. She lay in her bed on Wednesday night imagining it, and it took her a long time to fall asleep. When she finally did at around 2am, she had dreams about long tunnels and dark laughter.

On Thursday morning, Emma woke up feeling like she was going to her own hanging. It's only a seminar, she snapped at herself. Just take notes and don't say anything stupid.

She put on more make-up than normal and carefully styled her hair into fat curls. She was late for her first class.

By lunchtime, any positivity that she'd been clinging onto had completely vanished. She sat in the department cafeteria clutching a latte, her eyes on the giant clock on the wall. She couldn't eat anything because if she did then she would probably throw it up on Professor Mills' desk, just to really round off a perfect couple of weeks, and so she just sat. And sat.

Two o'clock came, and she stayed where she was. Her coffee had gone cold. She knew class had started, but the more she sat there, the more she realised she wasn't brave enough to go to it. She could figure this out next week. She could suddenly grow some balls in that time and waltz into the classroom in seven days looking confident and breathtaking, and she could stun her professor into realising she'd been wrong about her.

She sat a while longer. Just when class would have been about to end, she went home.