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Content Warning: This chapter contains profanity.
Note: This chapter will be a bit longer in length.
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I sat cross-legged on my bed, laptop balanced precariously on my knees, as I typed his name into the search bar for what felt like the tenth time today. Dr. Mikkelsen. That's all I had to go on, the name he wrote on the whiteboard in perfect, almost mechanical handwriting. The man who had been inside me less than twenty-four hours ago.
I leaned back, biting the inside of my cheek as I stared at the screen. The results loaded in a flurry of links, articles, and professional pages. There he was. His face stared back at me in a high-resolution headshot. The same sharp cheekbones, that slightly sharp nose, the faint smirk that hadn't left his lips during the entire lecture earlier today.
"Holy shit," I whispered, scrolling down the page.
Dr. Mads Mikkelsen wasn't just some random professor who happened to take over my psychology class. No, of course not. That would've been too easy. He was an award-winning psychologist and researcher, hailed for his groundbreaking work on the neurological underpinnings of human behavior. He had degrees from universities I couldn't even dream of getting into; Oxford, Yale, and some prestigious European school I couldn't pronounce without choking on my own tongue.
But the kicker? He was loaded. Like insanely rich.
One article boasted about his contributions to the field of cognitive psychology, specifically in uncovering how trauma rewires the brain. Another detailed his creation of some company, a startup specializing in psychological AI technology, that sold for millions of dollars a few years back. He was published in every major scientific journal you could think of, and his name came up in articles about major advancements in behavioral therapy.
So, the obvious question was: What the hell is someone like him doing teaching at my random university in New York?
I scrolled deeper, clicking on an article about some psychology conference in Paris where he was the keynote speaker. There were photos of him on stage in a crisp black suit, his expression unreadable as he addressed a packed auditorium. The caption read: Dr. Mads Mikkelsen discusses the human mind's darkest impulses.
Yeah, no kidding. He probably is one of the darkest impulses.
Then there were the awards. Holy shit, the awards. Some fancy gold-plated thing for lifetime contributions to psychology. Another one for new discoveries in neurocognitive studies. I wasn't even sure what half of them meant, but they all screamed elite. The kind of accolades you'd expect for a man at the peak of his career, not someone who decided to downgrade to a low-profile teaching gig at a mid-tier university.
