Leonard pretends he is not sentimental about aftercare, which is exactly how you know he is. He acts as if the entire thing is merely practical: water on the bedside table, a towel tossed in your direction, a dry comment about how you look like you’ve “survived a hostile peer review.” But his hand lingers at the small of your back. His voice softens when he asks if you’re sore. He watches your face too carefully for a man claiming indifference.
He is not soft in the obvious way. He will not coo over you like some adoring fool. Leonard’s tenderness is quieter, sharper, almost annoyed with itself. He pulls the blanket over your bare shoulder, brushes your hair out of your face, and mutters, “Don’t look so surprised. I’m not an animal.”
Then, after a pause, in that dry, devastating voice:
“Not entirely.”
B – Body Part
Yours? Your eyes.
Leonard loves watching the exact moment arrogance becomes uncertainty. He likes your eyes when you’re challenging him, when you think you have the upper hand, when you’re furious enough to argue and clever enough to almost win. But he loves them most when you’re undone beneath him, wide and wet and startled, as if your body has betrayed every intellectual defense you tried to build.
“Ah,” he murmurs, thumb brushing your cheek. “There you are. Finally honest.”
His? His mouth.
Cruel, clever, elegant, lethal. Leonard’s mouth is his primary weapon long before it becomes anything sensual. He can shred confidence with one sentence, praise you with another, and make both feel equally intimate. His lips are thin, expressive, often curled into that sarcastic almost-smile that makes you want to slap him or kiss him.
Unfortunately, he knows this.
C – Cum
Leonard is deeply, privately possessive about finishing inside you. He frames it as indulgence, inevitability, biology, anything except attachment—but there is always something darker beneath his composure when he does it. He likes the intimacy of it. The finality. The way your body tightens around him afterward, as if trying to keep him there.
He becomes especially insufferable if you beg for it.
“Oh, now you want commitment?” he murmurs against your mouth, hips grinding deep, voice rougher than usual. “How charming. A little late in the semester for that, don’t you think?”
But he gives it to you.
And afterward, when you’re trembling and furious at how smug he looks, he kisses your temple and says, “Excellent. Full marks.”
D – Dirty Talk
Devastating.
Leonard does not waste words, which makes every filthy thing he says feel deliberate. He speaks as if he is marking up a manuscript: precise, observant, merciless. He notices every reaction and turns it into evidence.
“You’re very loud for someone who claimed not to care.”
“Careful. That sounded almost sincere.”
“Is this your argument, then? Because I admit, it’s becoming persuasive.”
“Look at you. Finally producing something worth reading.”
He is worst when praising you, because his praise is so rare that it lands like a blow.
“That’s it. Good girl. See? You can follow instructions when properly motivated.”
E – Experience
Extensive, complicated, and ethically disastrous.
Leonard has lived too long, drunk too much, travelled too far, and disappointed too many people to be inexperienced. He knows bodies with the same cynical accuracy he knows writers. He understands insecurity. Vanity. Hunger. The way people pretend not to want approval until they’re shaking for it.
He is not romantic in bed, at least not at first. He is analytical. Patient. Slightly cruel. He reads you too well and makes no effort to be polite about it.
The problem is that he is rarely wrong.
F – Favorite Position
You bent over his desk.
It is far too obvious, which irritates him, but Leonard cannot deny the appeal. Your notes scattered beneath your palms, pages creasing under your fingers, his hand at the back of your neck while he leans over you and speaks directly into your ear.
“Still think that paragraph works?” he asks, voice low and infuriatingly calm.
You can barely answer because he is pressed against you from behind, white hair falling slightly out of place, his hooked nose brushing your temple, his hips moving with slow, punishing control.
“Use your words,” he murmurs. “You’re supposed to be a writer.”
G – Groaning
Rare, low, and deeply inconvenient.
Leonard is not a loud man. He prefers control, and noise suggests surrender, which he finds vulgar in theory and irresistible in practice. Most of his pleasure comes through clipped breaths, rough exhales, murmured curses, and the occasional dark laugh against your skin.
But when you catch him off guard—when you clench around him unexpectedly, when your mouth finds the sensitive place beneath his jaw, when your nails drag hard down his back—he groans from somewhere deep in his chest.
It is not elegant.
It is not polished.
And he hates how much you love it.
H – Hair
White, thick, usually controlled with the sort of careless precision that clearly took effort. During the day, it gives him a severe, professorial elegance. After sex, it becomes deliciously disordered, falling over his forehead in a way that makes him look less like a ruthless literary tyrant and more like a man who has been thoroughly compromised.
He does not like you touching it too casually.
He absolutely likes when you tug it at the right moment.
The first time you do, his hazel eyes flash with outrage and arousal at once.
“Careful,” he says, voice rough. “I’m not one of your bad metaphors to be handled carelessly.”
Pubic hair? Mature, white and silver, neatly kept but not vainly overgroomed. Leonard is too self-possessed to look careless, but too old and too cynical to pretend he is twenty-five. He looks like a man, not an advertisement, and carries that with almost arrogant ease.
I – Intimacy
Difficult.
Leonard can fuck with frightening confidence. He can seduce, tease, praise, humiliate, unravel. But intimacy unsettles him because intimacy requires honesty, and honesty is far less controllable than desire.
He is most intimate when he thinks you are not noticing.
His hand resting over your hip after sex.
His thumb moving slowly along your wrist.
His mouth brushing your shoulder while he pretends to read.
The way he remembers exactly how you take your coffee but mocks you for it anyway.
He will not say, “I need you.”
He will say, “You’re intolerable when absent,” and expect you to understand.
J – Jacking Off
More often than he admits.
Leonard has too much pride to confess to loneliness, but not enough discipline to avoid indulging it. He touches himself late at night, usually after drinking, usually after rereading something you wrote and becoming angry at how much potential you have. He hates when desire gets tangled with admiration. It makes him feel vulnerable, which makes him meaner the next day.
He thinks about your mouth first.
Then your eyes.
Then the way you look when you’re trying not to beg.
Afterward, he sits in silence, annoyed with himself, and mutters, “Pathetic,” though whether he means himself or the human condition is unclear.
K – Kinks
- Praise kink. Not receiving it—giving it. Leonard knows exactly how starved you are for his approval, and he uses that knowledge ruthlessly.
- Intellectual dominance. He likes verbal sparring that turns physical.
- Humiliation, but refined. Less crude degradation, more surgical observation.
- Jealousy. He enjoys provoking it, though he pretends to find it tedious.
- Oral fixation. He is fascinated by mouths, especially when they stop arguing and start begging.
- Clothing. Pencil skirts, undone blouses, his shirts on your body, bare skin against tweed and linen.
- Voice kink. He knows exactly what that baritone does.
L – Location
His office.
Not because it is comfortable. It is not. It is cluttered, book-lined, intimidating, and full of evidence that Leonard has built an entire life out of judgment. That is precisely the point.
He likes you surrounded by manuscripts, criticism, half-empty glasses, expensive pens, and the smell of paper and old smoke. He likes the wrongness of it. That his reputation, your composure, and several academic boundaries are all hanging by a thread.
Other favorites include hotel rooms after readings, narrow hallways after everyone else has left, and his apartment when rain presses against the windows and neither of you says the thing you both came there to do.
M – Marking
Possessive, but discreet.
Leonard does not leave careless marks. He leaves deliberate ones. A bruise high on the thigh. Fingerprints at the waist. A bite just low enough to be hidden beneath a collar. He likes the idea that only you know they are there. That you will sit through class, dinner, conversation, some tedious literary party, and feel the quiet ache of him beneath your clothes.
If you mark him back, he pretends to be irritated.
“Juvenile,” he mutters, inspecting the scratch on his shoulder.
But he does not actually sound displeased.
N – Nudes
Dangerous territory.
Leonard would never ask crudely. He would make some dry, infuriating remark about visual evidence, then watch your reaction over the rim of a glass. But if you sent him something private, something tasteful but unmistakably obscene, he would go very still.
He would study it like a manuscript he was not ready to admit moved him.
Not smiling. Not laughing.
Just looking.
Later, he would tell you, “Compositionally, it has flaws.”
Then his voice would drop.
“But I’ve found myself returning to it.”
O – Oral
Giving? Devastatingly thorough.
Leonard approaches oral sex like an argument he fully intends to win. He is patient, observant, and mercilessly attentive. He watches your body for every involuntary response, adjusting with the precision of a man who has spent his life noticing weaknesses. His mouth is warm, clever, and cruelly unhurried.
He praises you between kisses, which is worse.
“There. That’s the sound I wanted.”
Receiving? He likes it more than he lets on. He especially likes your mouth because it gives him the rare pleasure of seeing you temporarily unable to argue. His hand rests in your hair, not forcing, just guiding.
“Much better,” he murmurs, breath uneven. “Your strongest work so far.”
P – Pace
Controlled until it is not.
Leonard enjoys escalation. He likes tension. He likes making you wait until impatience ruins your dignity. He will kiss you slowly for what feels like forever, touch everywhere except where you want him, and deliver increasingly cruel little comments until you are flushed and furious.
When his control breaks, it breaks sharply.
Suddenly his mouth is on yours, his hands are under your clothes, and his voice is no longer quite so smooth.
“Enough,” he mutters, pinning you against the nearest surface. “I’m bored of restraint.”
Q – Quickies
He pretends to dislike them.
“Adolescent,” he says.
“Undignified.”
“Proof that civilisation is collapsing.”
Then he locks the office door.
Leonard’s quickies are not romantic. They are tense, breathless, and edged with irritation, as if he resents how badly he wants you. They happen after arguments, after you impress him, after someone else flirts with you, after he says something cruel and immediately regrets it but is too emotionally constipated to apologise like a normal man.
So he drags you close instead.
R – Risk
High in theory, controlled in practice.
Leonard likes risk when it sharpens the moment: a locked door, voices down the hall, your hand on his thigh beneath a table, his fingers brushing your wrist during a critique as if nothing is happening. He enjoys watching you try to maintain composure.
But he is not stupid.
True exposure would irritate him. Scandal bores him unless he is the one writing about it. He prefers danger contained, privacy maintained, and plausible deniability preserved.
“Discretion,” he murmurs, mouth against your ear, “is the last refuge of intelligent sinners.”
S – Stamina
Excellent, but not in a showy way.
Leonard is not trying to prove he is young. He knows he is not. That confidence is part of the appeal. He is patient, deliberate, and skilled enough to ruin you without rushing. He can spend an absurd amount of time teasing, pausing, talking, touching, studying your reactions until you’re trembling with frustration.
He does not need frantic athleticism.
He has timing.
And he uses it like a weapon.
T – Toys
He prefers improvised elegance.
- His tie around your wrists.
- A fountain pen dragged cold along your thigh.
- A leather belt, not necessarily used harshly, but placed where you can see it.
- A chair.
- A desk.
- A marked-up manuscript beneath your palms.
He is not against toys, exactly, but anything too obvious makes him sneer. Leonard likes objects with context. Things that already belong to his world, repurposed into something private and obscene.
U – Unfair
Unbearably.
Leonard is unfair because he notices everything. The way your breath changes when he lowers his voice. The words that make you defensive. The praise that makes you melt. The criticism that makes you furious enough to kiss him.
He will absolutely exploit every one of those discoveries.
“You’re angry,” he observes calmly, fingers sliding beneath your chin.
“I’m not.”
“You are. It’s making you sloppy.”
“Shut up.”
His smile barely appears.
“Make me.”
V – Volume
Low.
Leonard likes quiet because quiet makes every sound more revealing. Breath. Skin. Fabric. A stifled moan. Your hand slapping over your own mouth because someone might hear. He enjoys secrecy far too much.
He himself is restrained—until he is close. Then his voice roughens, his curses become less polished, and the sarcasm falls away into something much more honest.
“God,” he breathes, gripping you harder. “You’re going to be the death of my better judgment.”
W – Wildest Fantasy
Not merely sex.
Surrender.
Leonard’s wildest fantasy is not about a position or a place. It is about someone seeing him completely—the arrogance, the failure, the bitterness, the talent, the loneliness—and still staying. It terrifies him, which is why he buries it beneath cruelty and cleverness.
But physically?
A long weekend away from everyone. No students. No literary parties. No reputations. Just rain, books, alcohol, arguments, sex, silence, and you wearing one of his shirts while reading something he wrote years ago.
He would mock you for it.
Then watch you from the doorway like a man quietly starving.
X – X-Ray
Mature, thick, and heavy in the hand.
Not pretty in a delicate way. Substantial. Masculine. Slight curve, flushed dark at the head when aroused, with that startling physicality made more intense by how cerebral he usually seems. Leonard spends so much time as voice, intellect, judgment, and ego that seeing him hard feels almost indecently revealing.
The first time you stare too long, he arches one brow.
“Yes,” he says dryly. “It does have narrative weight.”
Y – Yearning
Hidden badly.
Leonard yearns through criticism. Through sarcasm. Through the extra glass poured without asking. Through the book left on your chair because he “thought you might benefit from reading something competent for once.” Through the way his gaze follows you when he thinks you are not looking.
He is deeply cynical about love because he believes wanting makes people stupid.
Unfortunately, he wants.
This makes him furious.
Z – ZZZ
Leonard sleeps like a man who has spent decades arguing with his own mind and finally lost. Once he is truly asleep, the sharpness leaves his face. His white hair falls messily across his forehead. His mouth softens. His arm ends up around your waist with unconscious possessiveness, despite the fact that he would absolutely deny doing it on purpose.
If you try to leave the bed too early, his hand tightens automatically.
“Don’t,” he mutters, voice rough with sleep.
You pause.
His eyes remain closed.
Then, after a beat, quieter:
“I haven’t finished ignoring you yet.”
Bonus:
WW – Writing
This is how Leonard realizes he loves you.
Not through some dramatic confession. Not through jealousy, not through sex, not even through the strange, quiet ache he feels when you leave his apartment and the room becomes offensively empty afterward.
He realizes it while writing.
At first, he tells himself the character is fictional. Obviously fictional. A woman with your sharp mouth, your restless ambition, your irritating habit of pretending not to care when you care so violently it practically enters the room before you do. She appears in one scene as a minor complication—nothing more. A clever line. A pair of hazel-lit eyes narrowed across a table. A hand wrapped around a coffee cup. A laugh at the wrong moment.
Then she stays.
Worse, she improves the pages.
Leonard begins writing her again and again, despite himself. She slips into margins, arguments, doorways, unfinished chapters. She becomes the only character in the manuscript who refuses to obey him. Everyone else bends beneath his control, but she resists. She contradicts him. She makes the prose less dead.
It irritates him profoundly.
For days, he denies the resemblance. He tells himself all writers steal. From life, from weakness, from desire, from whatever unfortunate person has lingered too long in the imagination. He has done it before. He has cannibalised former lovers, enemies, friends, failures. This is no different.
Except it is different.
Because he does not write her cruelly.
That is the first warning.
Leonard can be merciless on the page. He knows how to expose vanity, stupidity, hunger, desperation. He knows how to peel a person down to their least flattering truth and leave them there, shivering under literary light. But with this character, he keeps protecting her. He gives her better lines. He lets her win arguments she has no business winning. He describes the vulnerable tilt of her mouth with such tenderness that, upon rereading it, he goes very still.
Then he deletes the paragraph.
Then he rewrites it worse.
More honest.
That is when he knows.
He sits alone at his desk long after midnight, white hair disheveled, hooked nose shadowed by the desk lamp, one hand resting over the manuscript as if he could physically restrain the truth from rising off the page. The character looks nothing like a confession and exactly like one.
You are in the rhythm of the sentences.
You are in the cruelty he cannot quite bring himself to give her.
You are in the one line he keeps rereading because it sounds less like fiction than surrender.
She made him want to be understood, which was intolerable, because understanding was only another word for being seen too clearly and loved anyway.
Leonard stares at the sentence for a long time.
Then he mutters, “Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
Because there it is.
Not lust. Not fascination. Not intellectual vanity. Not the old, familiar thrill of wanting someone he should not want.
Wish I‘d seen Seminar on Broadway or they‘d made and sold an official recording. Sadly I had to make do with a crappy filmed version on YouTube. And dang was Alan hot in this…
I've come to a point where I need to sell some things in order to get a little extra money to pay for student loans while I navigate through unemployment and pregnancy and was curious if anyone would be interested in the signed 'Seminar' playbill I have. It's signed by the entire cast, Alan included, and I'd rather see it go somewhere where I know one of you will love it and keep it safe. It pains me to get rid of it, but desperate times call for desperate measures. If anyone is interested please let me know.
