The Professor

‘A week ago you were obviously far wiser than you seem to be now.’

‘Because I believe you might be made of flesh and bone?’

‘The granite guess was a great deal closer.’

‘You say that, but you have just spent hours and hours of your time trying to convince me that I should let imaginary women experience pleasurable sex.’

His eyes spark again – more obviously now.

So obviously it makes me shiver.

‘That hardly says anything about my emotional state.’

‘You don’t think so?’

‘I rather find it my civic duty.’

‘I see. In what way?’

‘I find it of vital importance that men are not permitted to go away believing a woman can orgasm from the most basic of attentions. Or worse: that it doesn’t matter if she orgasms at all.’

‘That almost sounds like passion. Not really a civic duty.’

‘Not at all. Not in the least.’

‘Are you quite sure, Professor?’

He pauses before answering – though I’m glad he does. My heart is hammering too hard for me to carry on doing this for much longer. I feel as though it might be showing – that it might be juddering visibly through me. In fact, it seems to be going harder than when he spoke to me about sexy things.

Or so I think, until he says the sexy things again.

Quite abruptly, as if he understands what will happen when he does: I will lose focus. I will stop asking him questions he maybe doesn’t want to answer.

And he’s right.

‘On page fourteen you write about him coming in her mouth,’ he says.

Then I forget every single thing we were speaking of before. I forget the delicious idea that he might feel, beneath his cold, calm exterior. I forget how tense he suddenly looks, how bright his eyes suddenly are, how his hand goes to his tie as though checking it’s still there. The only thing I know is that he just said ‘coming’.

And is about to say more.

‘I think it’s lacking. It seems to me that you shy away from the idea at the last moment – as though you cannot quite bear to include such a crude thing in your story. In fact, several times I had that impression. That you wrote, “I taste him on my tongue” when what you really wanted to say was something far more visceral, and explicit.’

‘No, honestly, I –’

‘Something like: “He floods my mouth.”’

‘That…OK, that…seems like…’

‘Or perhaps: “He glosses my lips with his come.”’

‘I suppose I…I mean –’

‘Or what about: “His cock swells, thick ribbons surging from the tip to stripe my face and my throat, each one hot enough to sear and so slick it sets my senses on fire. Everywhere it touches seems suddenly more sensitive, more alive, and especially when it gets to the tip of my tongue. The taste of him is bitter and sweet at the same time; the idea of him filling my mouth enough to set my own sex on edge.” Though of course I would defer to you on how it feels to have a man come all over your face and tongue. What do you think, Miss Hayridge?’

I think I need to escape, now. Before he goes any further. Before I go any further, because oh, I so desperately want to. There are words on the tip of my tongue, filthy, impossible words, just reams and reams of unadulterated smut that I never fully dared express before. Not even to myself, while alone, with no one else around to ever see it. As though to even think it is a source of shame – so God knows what it would be if I expressed it out loud here and now. If I said to Professor Halstrom, of all people, that what I really want to say is:

I want you to do it.

I want you to come all over my face.

I want you to make a mess of me, to ruin me, to fill my mouth with fat, fierce ribbons of jism. I want to use the word ‘jism’ and see your face change, the way mine undoubtedly did when you said ‘quim’. And I want to do it all here, now, in this book-filled room with a door that barely closes, so that when you push me down to my knees and fuck into my mouth with your heavy cock I can thrill at the thought of anyone walking in at any moment. I can imagine us being caught doing the most illicit thing you can possibly dream up, and have you finish in my mouth all the same.

‘Miss Hayridge?’

I stand up too fast. So fast in fact that I knock over a stack of books to my right – though I don’t stoop to set them right. I don’t even gather up the pens that spill from my bag when I launch it on to my shoulder, or make calm and deliberate apologies of the sort I know he expects. Instead I simply blurt out that I need the bathroom, like a total fool, and head for the door before he can protest.

By the time he speaks again I’m out in the hall, breathing air that somehow seems eight hundred times fresher and cooler. It shouldn’t be – the ancient radiator on the wall is kicking out heat high enough to singe hair and the space is even smaller than I remember. But it remains the case, all the same.

Until I hear him.

‘Miss Hayridge, are you quite all right?’

He says it through the door, but through the door is too much. I jolt as if he shouted ‘fuck’ right in my face. Suddenly my heart is in my mouth again and my breaths are coming too short and too fast, and then I’m barrelling down the stairs in a way that seems inadvisable on the staircase to hell. Three steps from the bottom I almost trip over my own feet. My teeth snap together around my tongue and I taste blood.

But even that doesn’t change how I feel.

My body is more primed than it usually is after three hours spent writing the sex stuff that he just read out. I’m seething with it, bursting with it; every inch of me is crammed with a pulsing heat that I can’t seem to stop. I stand in the cool, blue and thankfully empty bathroom for twenty minutes, yet still feel the same at the end of it. Even after I splash my face with water, my hands are still trembling. My cheeks are still flushed – and I know this because I see them in the cracked mirror above the sink.

I’m stained bright pink from jaw to hairline. Lower than that, in fact. I unbutton my shirt to my bra and it’s all over my chest and throat too. Even my lips look a shade darker and a touch plumper, as though I’d spent the last two hours kissing and kissing someone.

And my eyes…

God, what must he have thought about my eyes?

They are fair near gleaming, and quite obviously not with the thrill of debate. They seem wild, even to me. They seem like the eyes of someone who needs to fuck, right here and now. Who wants to be bent over the sink and have her skirt hiked up, knickers tugged down just far enough to get access to her wet and ready cunt. Because I am wet, and I am ready – so much so that he would probably comment on it, if he knew.

Look at you, so greedy for it, he might say, and then oh, yes, then he could just…

Do what he described.

Slide in smooth and slow.

Fuck me until I groan and buck against him.

Not that it would take very long. I am on the edge right now, just standing here thinking about it. Imagining the push of his cock, the expression on his face – heavy with lust, lips parted – and all the other things he would say, oh, fuck, the things he would say. If he can talk like that in so calm a context, what would he be like in a sexual one? Would he give me a running commentary on what he’s doing? Tell me that I am so slick and tight, confess that he wants to come over my tits, groan in my ear that he loves feeling me climax around him? I think yes, but probably only because I’m delirious.

Somehow in the middle of these thoughts I’ve put a hand inside my shirt, right here in the middle of a public bathroom. And I don’t stop there. After a second I push under the cotton just to get at one stiff little nipple, the sight of it so rude I know I should stop. My reflection isn’t just wild any more – I look like a dirty slut, fondling herself frantically, feverishly. So eager to come that nothing can stand in the way of it, not even the idea of someone catching me like this.

If anything, that idea just spurs me on. I think of a bunch of people I barely know bursting in, and I just have to pull up my skirt. I have to. My clit is one big sweet ache, and when I rub over it with two eager fingers it gets better. It gets worse. It makes me throw my head back and gasp – loud enough that anyone just outside the door could hear me. They are going to come in and catch me, frigging myself with all the abandon of Lady Chatterley fucking her burly gamekeeper.

More than that, in fact, because I use the real words.

I say it as it is: my cunt, my clit, my slick little slit. I work them all until my thighs tremble and my head goes back and I know, I know I’m going to come. I’m going to do it all over my hand right here, while imaginary people stand and watch. Those cool, bright, amazing people that surround me every day, bored to tears by everything I am, suddenly open-mouthed and horrified and just dying to ask what drove me to it.

And when they do, I think, as my orgasm crests…

When they do I will tell them truly:

Because my Professor talks dirty to me.

Chapter Four

I think of a dozen ways to tell him why I didn’t return to his office. None of them seems adequate. The only real option is never going back to his office at all, but even that poses problems. He will stop me the next time I try to leave his class, I know he will. He might stop me before. Discuss it loudly and clearly in front of everyone, until I collapse under the weight of my own mortification.

Explain now why you spent seventeen hours in the toilets, I imagine him saying.

I can even see that little flourish he often does with his hand. The one that looks like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, only the rabbit is your dignity and the hat is him slowly strangling it to death in front of you. Certainly it feels as if some part of me is being suffocated, when I next see him.

Though that might be because I don’t expect it. I’m still struggling to come up with a good excuse. I think I have time to get around the fact that I masturbated in the ladies while thinking of him. Time to arrange my face into an innocent shape, to lie without looking away and blushing – then I run across the quad to the old soot-streaked archway between the science labs, searching for shelter from a sudden downpour.

And there he is.

He had the same idea as me, it seems. He wanted to see if he could wait it out in the shade of those great black bricks – though he was faster to it than I was. By the time I get there my hair is plastered to my head, clothes heavy and dark with the deluge, every inch of me bedraggled. But he looks like he just stepped out of the pages of a catalogue from the 1930s. His dark hair is dry and swept neatly across that amazing brow. The cuffs of his shirt are a crisp one inch from his jacket, and his shoes are buffed to a high mahogany sheen. He even has a cigarette lit, and as I watch he kisses it to his lips with the ease and deftness of long habit, then lets the smoke curl out in slow, lazy waves.

I think it might be the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. It stops me dead about a foot from shelter, too blindsided by it to go any further. Which is unfortunate, because he thinks I have other reasons. He sees me frozen in the rain, and the hand holding the cigarette drops to his side. His expression shifts – from the usual still surface of a lake to something else. Something struggling, I want to say.

But I dare not. His words are enough on their own to make me breathless.

‘If you had no wish to continue you needed only to say. I realise my manner is off-putting to many.’

‘It wasn’t that, it wasn’t that at all, your manner is…’

‘My manner is what?’

‘Good.’

‘You’re the most awful liar.’

‘That wasn’t a lie.’

‘Of course it was. You blink about a thousand times whenever you fib, and attempt to look at almost anything except my face.’

‘Maybe I do that because your face is really fearsome.’

Or like staring at the sun too long, I think.

Then have to glance away before it burns my eyes out.

‘Maybe you do, but my point still stands.’

‘About your manner?’

‘About you lying. You were going to say another word entirely.’

‘What word would you guess, if you had to?’

‘“Cold,” perhaps. “Aloof,” almost certainly.’

‘It was neither of those.’

‘That, at least, was the truth.’

‘I told you the truth before. I just made it a less silly sounding word.’

‘Perhaps I should be the judge of what is silly.’

‘All right. I was going to say lovely.’

He whips a look at me at that, as though to catch the telltale signs of lying before I squirrel them away. It doesn’t seem to reassure him when he finds none, however. His eyebrows lift too high in the middle, giving his gaze this oddly raw look. Like I ripped a strip off him by using that word. Now he would do anything to get it back, including this big bunch of sudden bluster:

‘Yes, you were correct. It is very silly indeed – almost as silly as being out in a thunderstorm with barely a stitch on. Where is your jacket, for goodness sake? You could at least have worn a cardigan. Your arms are turning blue,’ he says, so many words spoken in so oddly tender a fashion that I lose count of them. I fall headfirst into them. The way his tone goes up on the first syllable of ‘jacket’, the steeper tilt of his eyebrows, now verging on querulous, the softness of that ‘blue’ on the end…I can hardly stand it.

Though the worst part about it is not the words, spoken too quickly and too sharply and too everything. No, the worst part is that, when he’s done with them, he traps his cigarette between his teeth, and starts taking off his jacket. Roughly, jerkily, like it hurts to do it.

God knows, it burns a hole through me.

‘Oh, no, Professor, that – no no –’

‘Please be quiet. I am in the middle of behaving decently. It so rarely happens it deserves at least some respectful silence and gracious acceptance,’ he says.

But I can’t give him even that much. My acceptance isn’t gracious. My silence isn’t respectful. Instead it seethes with a brutal awareness of every tiny thing he does, from the sparking sensation of his thumb running around the inside of the jacket collar, to the shock of the sheer size of the thing when he snaps it closed around me. You could fit two of me inside its warm confines.

Warm, I think, with his body heat.

And oh, God – heady with his scent.

Honestly, it’s a wonder I understand the language he uses when he next speaks. His hands are still almost on me when he does it. My own hands are lost inside his sleeves.

How am I meant to concentrate?

‘Are you going to tell me the real reason you neglected to return?’

‘I would really rather not, if I can get away with it.’

‘You can.’ He leans down, sudden and shocking. More so, when I realise why: to take me into his confidence. To be conspiratorial with me, as though we’re intimates. ‘But don’t tell anyone. I don’t want it getting out that Professor Halstrom is going soft in his dotage. Next thing you know I’ll have students spending years in bathrooms left, right and centre.’

‘I think “dotage” might be a little bit strong.’

‘That’s only because you haven’t seen me with my trousers down. I have an arse like a dying question mark,’ he says, followed by me waiting for my desire to wither away.

It should wither, after that. It should make it easy to sneer.

But it doesn’t. I have to fight with my last breath to get the next words out.

‘I take back what I said about your manner being lovely.’

‘I thought you might eventually,’ he says, a laugh somewhere in the back of his throat.

I wish I did not love that laugh. I wish I hated him. I do hate him. I will hate him.

‘Your manner is completely gross. And absolutely seething with bullshit. I already know that you’re thirty-one.’

‘Thirty-one? Wherever did you hear that? I’m nine hundred and twelve.’

‘I knew you were a werewolf. All the signs were there and now the final proof.’

‘Werewolves don’t live to be nine hundred and twelve.’

‘Spoken like someone with inside knowledge.’

‘Inside knowledge of what?’

I try to stop myself answering. Things are going too far. Our conversations are too fast, like a death-defying ride at a ruinous fairground that might at any moment fling me off.

But the words just keep coming.

My hands keep gripping the bar that barely holds me in.

‘Werewolf society.’

The sound of his laughter is startling, like a roll of thunder inside a tiny room. It cracks off the old stone walls, bold as brass and completely inappropriate for someone like him. He should have a strained, half-dying thing. A sound that has to fight to get past his teeth, or else no sound at all.

And I think he knows it.

The rain hasn’t stopped, but he still clears his throat and claims it has. ‘We should go about our business while we can,’ he says, and I am forced to agree. If I say no he might think I want to stay here talking to him all day, when I would swear on a stack of Bibles I don’t. I even prove it a second later when I go to walk in the opposite direction and he calls out to me.

‘Where on earth are you going, Miss Hayridge?’ he asks.

And I swear my stomach drops. My heart lurches against my ribcage.

He means business, as in more talking to him.

More saying of the things that made me masturbate in a public bathroom.

In fact, he confirms it a second later.

‘My office is this way,’ he says.

Then I simply have to follow him, to meet my doom.

Chapter Five

The first thing he does when we get to his office is light a little gas stove – both for the heat and for the kettle he sits atop it. No electric for him, of course, and instead of teabags he has tea leaves and strainers and other items I’ve only ever read about. I watch him go about the business of making it with the same fascination heroines probably experience over wizards doing magic. Wide-eyed and unable to move from the corner I’ve chosen, half-wondering what mystical thing will happen next.

The jacket was weird enough.

The conversation was worse.

The tea makes my teeth chatter. And then there is the seat I notice – not the same thing from before but a real soft-backed and inviting-looking chair. He went out and got something better for me, I think, then immediately try to dismiss the idea. He probably just realised it was inadequate for any student. Perhaps he gives Earl Grey to everyone. Most likely he uses his handkerchief to dry everyone’s hair for them.

It just doesn’t feel that way, when he does it.

It feels like the air grows thick and close, the moment he tells me to turn around. He barely has to do anything for me to sense him – the crackle between us reveals everything. It sizzles as he reaches for the rope of my hair, and louder when he lifts it.

The way he squeezes the water out of it is best though.

Tightly, so tightly my scalp will be tender later. It will remember his hands on me, long after this moment has dwindled down to nothing. It might be the only contact I ever get, after all. Just this one hint of how strong he really is and how big his hands are, followed by the strongest wave yet of his deep, heavy scent. Oh, God, that deep, heavy scent. I suppose the rain has made it more pronounced. Or it could be the lack of jacket. Without it he seems almost bare, despite the waistcoat he keeps on.

I can still see so much more, regardless. I can see how oddly narrow his waist is, how broad his chest. It strains against the material whenever he moves, and he moves a lot. He stretches up to dry his own hair, and fusses with his cuffs, and bends to buff his shoes, all the time twisting and turning and bending in a way that seems far too flexible for someone like him. It feels too flexible for someone like me.

Though I promise I do my best not to look. At the very least I try to look in a manner that doesn’t convey outright hunger. I keep my mouth tightly closed and my eyes a normal size, hands clenched tightly inside the sleeves of his jacket. And when I manage to breathe, I do it in a slow and steady and normal sort of fashion.

Even though smell is now devouring what little air there is in here.

And the way he looks at me after, as though he knows what I’m thinking. He knows how he looks, and what it does to me. He must – nothing else could explain his expression. If he could set me on fire with his eyes I think he would. Contempt is probably on the tip of his tongue right now, to the point where I cringe when he goes to speak.

But that only makes it more shocking when he tells me this:

‘You should take off the T-shirt you have on, before you catch your death.’

He makes it sound like advice. Like he’s talking about a word I misspelled or a concept I didn’t grasp. My brain even tries to turn it into that at first. I feel sure I must have misheard or misunderstood, and consider asking him to explain.

Not that it helps when he does.

‘Fasten the jacket up and remove your wet clothes,’ he says, and all I can think is that now I will have to sit in his office with nothing on under this overflowing tweed. More than that: I will have to do it while he sits across from me in a state that seems even more naked than that. Every second that goes by brings new details: he wears those bands around his arms to keep his shirt in place, shiny and constrictive-seeming. He has no belt, and no belt loops, and there is something in his pocket – something that makes a strange heavy outline in trousers that now seem too tight.

Though I doubt I will ever know what it is. I have more pressing matters to deal with – like taking off my T-shirt while he watches. Because he does, without a single hint of evasion or interest. Almost like he’s proving something to himself, or proving something to me. I don’t care if you strip, his flat gaze seems to say. It doesn’t matter to me if your breasts are bare beneath that jacket.

The slight parting of his lips is probably just a coincidence.

As is the heaviness of his eyelids, and the sound of his voice when I finally slide the wet material out from underneath the jacket. ‘Hang it on the door,’ he says, so faint I have to strain to hear him. Hoarse, too, though that could be my imagination. Most of this seems like my imagination anyway. The real Professor Halstrom would never ask me to do this. He would never give me his jacket in the first place.

In a second, I will wake up.

And I want to, because otherwise I have to cope with the way his face changes when I start on my jeans. He tries, I think, to behave as though that doesn’t matter either. But I just don’t think he expects it to happen. He thought I would stop at the shirt, and when I don’t everything goes slack, like someone cut the strings that hold up his features. He goes to say something, only his mouth no longer works.

He can’t even raise his hand to stop me – but even if he did it would be too late now. I’m committed. If I go back on it the whole thing will only seem more suggestive. And really, what does it matter? The jacket hangs almost to my knees. I have underwear on, underneath. It doesn’t have to be any worse than the top.

But it feels like it might be once we’re sitting down.

He can see so much of my bare legs, pale and plump and smooth. They damn near gleam in the low light, in a way even I can hardly take my eyes off of. I keep glancing down and being surprised by them, by how small they look compared to his, by how vulnerable they seem suddenly. If I part them even a little it will seem like the rudest thing in the world – like I want him between them.