The Professor

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 (#ua302d615-4fcb-5e50-92a8-226f88b0a3b1)

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 –’