FICTION – REENA CHALLENGE #385

by Julia Drake (and someone else entirely)

Dr. Eugene Irving Krane did not believe in metaphor, which was why he used it constantly in his head.

Standing before a lecture hall of half-conscious undergrads, chalk raised like a scalpel, he dissected equations with clinical precision. “Symmetry,” he said, “is not about aesthetics. It’s a constraint. A system obeys certain laws until one of them breaks. And that break is where the interesting physics begins.”

Behind him, the whiteboard bloomed with the Higgs mechanism—perfect arcs, cold beauty, tension contained.

Krane saw what his students did not. The math wasn’t sterile. It was tragic. Elegant. Alive.

He was an odd man, even by faculty standards. He collected things. Not stamps or coins—ideas. He had an entire drawer in his office dedicated to obsolete words, sorted by emotional tone: “Words That Die Alone,” “Words That Bleed Nicely,” “Words With No Home.” He took long walks at dawn to photograph patterns of fractured light in puddles and alleyways. And he kept what he privately called an “emotional landfill” — a file full of discarded breakup letters, apologies never sent, and confessions overheard in stairwells. He said they helped him write with precision.

These collections weren’t academic. They were scaffolding for something else—a hidden voice, one that poured all that silent debris into fiction.

From the front row, Tess Ramírez scribbled something in the margin of her notebook and suppressed a grin. She was in her forties, finishing a long-delayed PhD, and possibly the only person alive who would one day use the phrase “quantum betrayal” in casual conversation.

She respected Krane. She also suspected he had no idea how visible his loneliness was.

When class ended, Krane retreated behind his desk, where a stack of problem sets sat dangerously close to a notepad filled with scribbles. Not physics. Fiction. The bones of a scene for Julia: entanglement as metaphor, two characters locked in orbit, never quite in sync. He’d been shaping it since 3 a.m.

He tugged down his sleeves and nudged the pile toward Tess.

“If you could… the thing.”

She blinked. “You’re a world-class communicator, you know that?”

He blinked back. “That was implied.”

Tess rolled her eyes and scooped up the stack, including—unbeknownst to him—a handful of Julia’s latest pages.

—

Later that night, she was grading on her couch, jazz humming from the speakers, half a glass of Malbec on the coffee table. And then she saw it.

A page that didn’t belong.

“They spoke like electrons entangled: each word collapsing a possibility in the other. He didn’t touch her hand, but the air around it bent.”

Tess froze. Her wine glass stopped midair.

Her heart did a weird thing, like an extra beat—or maybe a skipped one.

She flipped to the next page.

“Lina stood in the field, symmetry broken, heart split by the simplest law of decay: what once was held cannot always stay.”

And at the bottom, tight and unmistakable: 
–J. Drake

Her pulse kicked.

No. Impossible.

She’d read every Julia Drake novel twice — dog-eared, underlined, whole chapters bookmarked for reasons she couldn’t explain. Not because they were romantic. Because they were honest. No one in Drake’s stories ever got rescued cleanly. They hurt each other. They tried. They failed better. It wasn’t fantasy. It was familiar.

Tess had never known who Julia Drake really was — just that she’d been through the shit. You couldn’t write emotional wreckage that clearly unless you’d lived inside it.

And now here it was. 
On paper. 
In Krane’s handwriting.

Her first instinct was disbelief. Her second was awe. 
Her third was: Does he even know how hot this stuff is?

—

Tess barely slept. She kept rereading the pages, flipping between disbelief and adrenaline. The idea of confronting Eugene left her nauseous—what if she embarrassed him? What if she was wrong? What if she ruined something by naming it? But the words wouldn’t let her sleep. They weren’t just good. They were true. And she couldn’t unknow that truth now.

The next morning, she didn’t knock. She barged in.

Eugene looked up, mid-sip of coffee, and nearly dropped the mug.

“You’re Julia Drake.”

He froze. Opened his mouth. Closed it.

“You are,” she said. “You’re my favorite author of all time. I thought you were dead. Or French. Or a collective of lesbians.”

Eugene stared at her like she’d just accused him of arson.

“You’re serious,” he managed.

“I’ve read everything,” Tess said, waving the pages. “Twice. I memorized half of A Constant Craving like it was scripture. You made me cry in a Denny’s, Eugene.”

He looked absolutely horrified.

“I was under the impression,” he said slowly, “that my prose was… categorically sentimental.”

“It’s not,” she snapped. “It’s vulnerable. And tight. And unbearably good. God, no wonder you hate small talk—your soul is in six mass market paperbacks and nobody knows.”

Krane went pink. Pink.

“I don’t—it’s not—people in the department wouldn’t understand.”

Tess softened. “I understand. I just didn’t expect my emotionally unavailable science mentor to be moonlighting as the poet laureate of romantic ache.”

Eugene rubbed his forehead. “Please never say that out loud again.”

She grinned. “No promises.”

They sat in silence for a moment, the weight of the secret between them now less like lead and more like gravity—still heavy, but pulling them into orbit.

For Tess, something shifted. She’d always seen Krane as brilliant but unreachable, like a locked cabinet full of equations and rules. But now, she saw the tenderness behind the rigidity. The collector of discarded feelings. The man who couldn’t say what he felt unless it was fictionalized. And somehow, that made her respect him more, not less.

“You ever think,” Tess said quietly, “maybe fiction is the only way people like us know how to feel?”

He looked at her, and for once, didn’t look away.

“All the time,” he said.

—

That night, Julia Drake began a new manuscript. As Eugene typed, he paused over one line and rewrote it three times—not for clarity, but for care.

The main character’s first real moment of connection came in a cluttered office, after a truth slipped out by accident. The other character didn’t flinch. She saw him. Not just the polished surface, but the hoarder of obsolete words, the photographer of lost light, the emotional archivist in disguise. Her name was Teresa.

It opened with a woman named Teresa. Sharp. Unafraid. The first character Eugene had ever written did not need rescuing or permission. She met the main character’s silence with curiosity, not pity.

And for the first time, Julia Drake wrote a love story that didn’t end in silence.

It ended in symmetry.