Monday morning, I sat in my office with headphones in, finally getting started on some of the work I’d been neglecting for weeks. Some of my students, a brown-noser sophomore girl in particular, had been whining about lack of access to their grades, and that was the last thing I needed on my conscience. I was already abusing my power as a professor.
The least I could do was fucking grade work like I was supposed to. I was on a roll, four papers in, when I heard the sound of a knock at my office door. I yanked out my headphones just in time to see the door swing open. Gina Grant was standing on the other side, wearing a slim grey wool skirt that emphasized her narrow waist. She raised an eyebrow at me and walked in, dropping into a chair.
“Mind if I sit for a minute?”
“You already have,” I said coolly.
Gina smiled. “Will, there’s no need to be so icy with me,” she said. “But my goodness, you’re clearly dealing with a lot here.” She snatched up one of my papers before I could stop her. “You’re looking over old work, yes?”
“Yes,” I lied through my teeth. “I ... have my suspicions about one of my students, that she might be plagiarizing. I thought looking over older work would help.”
Gina nodded. To my relief, she set the paper back down on my desk. “That’s not a bad idea,” she said. She leaned back in her chair and crossed her long legs at the ankle. “So, how was your weekend?”
I gritted my teeth. “Not to be an ass,” I said, implying exactly the opposite. “But I have a lot of work to do, and I came in early this morning just to catch up.”
Gina smiled. There it was, I knew she was fucking with me.
“Of course,” she said smoothly as she rose to her feet, still smiling.
“Oh, by the way, how’s your favorite student doing?” Gina asked innocently. She paused with one hand on the door. “Things going well?”
“I beg your pardon?” A cold sweat broke out over my body and I clenched my teeth together. Fuck, what was going on? Impossible, horrific scenarios began to fill my mind. Peter telling Gina that he ‘knew’ about the two of us – and then, because she’s no idiot, her figuring out that I’d lied.
Her figuring out that I was involved with someone at Oakbrook ... just not her.
Fuck, I thought as alarm bells began to ring in my head. What the fuck am I going to do?
“Your favorite student,” Gina repeated.
“I don’t have a favorite student,” I said. “I do my best to treat them all the same.”
The look in Gina’s eyes made me think that she hadn’t bought my story, not at all.
“We all have favorites, Will,” she said. “Come on – I know how it is. We all like the smart ones best ... well, not all the smart ones.” She raised an eyebrow and I realized that I was holding my breath. “The smart ones who aren’t assholes, at least.”
I was thinking about Eden – Eden, who fit the bill that Gina was describing.
Eden, who was more than just my favorite student.
“Not me,” I said finally. “I try to keep a good distance from the kids,” I said, emphasizing the word kids as much as I could without being overwhelmingly obvious. “I know that some of them see me as different because I’m not an old man, so I feel like I have to reinforce boundaries often.”
Gina blinked at me – clearly, she hadn’t been expecting that.
“Well, if that’s why everyone thinks you’re so cold, I understand,” she said. She paused for a second and I thought she was finally going to leave but instead, she crossed her arms over her narrow chest and looked at me.
“Gives you something to think about, doesn’t it?” Gina asked finally.
“What does?”
She smirked at me. “Just that someone can say something and mean another,” she replied.
When she left, I tried hard not to sigh in relief. I didn’t know what the fuck was up with her – was she onto me and Eden?
Or was she just toying with me, jealous because I hadn’t wanted to date her?
Academia may have been a perfect little bubble, safe and protected from the rest of the world. That was what had drawn me into it in the first place.
It wasn’t like a regular corporate job, though, and I was beginning to wonder if I hadn’t made a deal with the devil by choosing to be a professor.
The day seemed to take forever. I was in a mental fog for hours after my conversation with Gina. I even looked for Peter, to nudge him and ask if he’d just happened to mention anything about what I’d told him over the weekend. The secrets and lies were spiraling out of control and my life had felt like a mess for so long that I wasn’t sure I would ever feel right again. I usually looked forward to the end of the semester, but now I had another predicament entirely to worry about: what Eden would do.
And what I would do if faced with the prospect of losing her.
Worst of all was one other possibility, so horrifying that I nearly threw up when it entered my head. What if Peter hadn’t said anything at all?
What if, after I had been so cold to Eden at the grocery store, she had gone in search of a friendly female friend to confide in? What if she’d told that blasted roommate of hers?
Or worse – what if she’d gone straight to Gina, friendly lady professor Gina, and told her everything? Told her that I’d taken advantage of her sweet young body?
I wanted to believe that she hadn’t – that she wouldn’t be capable of doing something like that, much less thinking about it.
I was so paranoid, though, that it made thinking rationally difficult. Eden was smart, especially for her age. But she was twenty-fucking-one years old, and I knew from past experience that people her age weren’t always ... capable of making the right decisions and thinking of the big picture.
It was my fault, of course. I’d been the one who had finally pushed things over the edge, given in to the insane attraction that I felt for her.
And I would be punished.
I knew I deserved it, but it didn’t seem to make the prospect any less horrifying. I just hoped that after everything had gone to hell, Eden would still have a good life. She’d find someone young, someone her own age who would love her and take care of her.
It was maddening that I was already jealous of her hypothetical future husband, but my cold intellect could only get me so far. Where Eden was concerned, I was a regular American man: hot-blooded and horny.
The jealousy would just have to be my punishment for ruining her life.
By the end of the day, I felt nearly sick to my stomach. I’d exhausted every scenario in my head, tried to go over everything that could possibly happen if someone were to discover Eden and myself. Thinking about it made me so stressed out that I was practically vibrating with nerves.
When I left campus, I knew exactly where I was going. I crossed the muddy fields and the streets separating Oakbrook from the rest of the world and went straight to Eden’s apartment complex. Walked up the stairs. Knocked on the door.
When she opened it, she was wearing jeans and a loose sweater. Her eyes were huge, as always, and she parted her little pink lips.
“Are you alone?” I asked.
Eden nodded, and that was all I needed. Stepping into her apartment, I crushed her into my arms and kissed her deeply.
Eden’s response was immediate and delicious. She moaned and purred into my mouth, spreading her round legs wide and rubbing her crotch against my thigh. We stumbled backwards, still holding onto each other, our mouths tearing and exploring and kissing so deeply that it felt like the two of us had become a single person.
“Oh my god, I missed you,” Eden moaned. She broke the kiss and arched her back, exposing her plump, pale neck which I immediately began to kiss and suck and lick and bite. She whimpered and purred, running her hands through my hair, pushing her chest against mine. I could feel her stiff nipples through that sweater and knowing that she wasn’t wearing a bra drove me insane with desire. Sliding my hands up her shirt, I cupped and pla
yed and pinched with her nipples. Eden moaned and cried out and I rolled her stiff little peaks between my fingers, toying with them, loving the way her delicate skin puckered at my touch.
“That feels so good,” Eden purred. She kissed me voraciously and pulled her sweater up and over her head, then dropped her hands to her front and fumbled with the snap of her jeans. Grunting and squirming, Eden tugged the denim down her thighs and I was immediately hit with the fragrance of her sweet young pussy.
She’s been wanting me and waiting, I realized, growing harder by the second. Lust exploded inside of me and I growled, grabbing onto Eden and yanking her cotton panties down her legs. I dropped to my knees and buried my face in her pussy, spreading her ripe lips with one hand and fastening my mouth around her clit. When I began to suck, Eden went wild. Her whole body trembled and shook with pleasure and she screamed my name, spreading her legs and standing on unsteady feet as I ate her delicious, musky pussy. Juices dripped down my lips and chin and my cock was throbbing – if I didn’t fuck her now, I knew I would burst.
“Will,” Eden moaned when I pulled away. I wiped my face on my shirt, then fumbled with my pants and yanked them down. My cock sprang free when I pulled down my boxers and I grabbed Eden and turned her around so that she was facing the wall. With both hands on her delectable ass, I spread her cheeks and slid my cock straight into her waiting pussy. She was so warm and wet and tight that I groaned as I began to fuck her, sliding in and out and slamming my body against hers.
Eden shook and gasped, writhing and moaning in my arms. I had her nearly pinned to the wall and I bit and sucked the back of her neck, savoring the taste of her salty skin. I spanked and grabbed her, moving my hands to her front and scooping her tits up, massaging her nipples until she cried out loudly and moaned. Our bodies writhed and moved together in a perfect, frantic rhythm. When I could feel that I was close, I moved my hand lower and lower and began to rub Eden’s clit, brushing my fingers over her sensitive surface until she shrieked with pleasure and twitched against me. Her pussy clenched my cock, gripping it as the force of her orgasm unleashed in her delicious body. We were soaked with sweat as I bucked against her, groaning and gasping as I began to come.
“Oh, fuck,” I muttered through clenched teeth. “Baby, you feel so fucking good!”
Eden pushed her ass against me, humping my cock and taking every inch like a champ. The sweet release felt so good, better than anything else, even better than usual – I had been so stressed that my lust had been building all day and I hadn’t even realized it. Coming in Eden’s sweet body brought me crashing back down to earth, brought me right back to the real world once again.
With my breathing hard and ragged, I pulled out and yanked up my boxers and pants. Eden was shaking as she reached for clothes and began to dress with fumbling hands.
“Will,” Eden said softly as she turned to me. “What was that?”
I didn’t reply, only made for the door. Coming over like this had been incredibly risky – we’d fucked in the foyer of her apartment, for god’s sake! – and now, I was terrifically frightened that her roommate would come home and see us flushed and sweaty and smell the musky sex scent that hung in the air like perfume.
“Will, wait,” Eden said. She reached for my arm but she missed and I didn’t step closer. “I want – I need – to talk to you,” she pleaded. “Please, don’t go.”
When I stepped into the fading sunshine, it was hard to believe that I had only been inside for a few minutes. The intense quickie with Eden had cleared my mind ... and now, I was exhausted.
I was in also in way over my head, with no clue or sign as to how I was going to swim to the surface and regain control over my life.
27
Eden – Tuesday
I was now, officially, more confused that I had ever been in my life. I wasn’t sure what had happened the day before – after Will had left, despite my pleas to talk, I had actually pinched myself to make sure that I hadn’t dreamt up the entire encounter.
No, it had been very, very real. My thighs were wet and sticky and warm from my juices and the friction of our bodies rubbing together. I was still heaving and shaking from the intense orgasm that I’d had – more powerful than any other orgasm had ever been. Will had come deep inside of me, and my neck was sore from where he’d bitten me.
I should have been happy. Will had proved that he still wanted me ... or at least, still wanted my body.
But as things between us were getting physically hotter, they were also getting harder to read and understand. I didn’t get it – back at the brewpub that day, I had really gotten the sense that I was getting to know Will, the real Will, not the cheerfully cold professor who the students of Oakbrook lusted after.
And ever since then, things had been so much more complicated. Maybe it was naïve of me to think so, but I didn’t think it was because of the hot, intense sexual encounters that we had been illicitly sharing.
It had to be something else, something deeper. Something that was holding Will back from telling me the truth about his feelings for me and what he really wanted from me and from the future. I wasn’t an expert on relationships, but from everything that I had always read, sex was supposed to make things more intimate, not less so.
Maybe I was being foolish by thinking that just because we weren’t talking, there wasn’t anything between us. Either way, it was driving me crazy and I knew I had to do something about it soon.
But what? I couldn’t exactly go to Petra and ask her advice – she would look at me like I had three heads. Or worse, she’d be angry that I’d kept the secret from her for so long. For once in my life, I wished that I was one of those girls with a whole gaggle of friends – a big group of girls who could give me advice on my hair and tell me how to lose weight and what they thought when Will looked at me a certain way or ignored my request to talk. Because my mom was a single mom, I’d always been wary of talking to her about my personal life ... not that I’d ever had much of one. Growing up, we’d never really talked about sex or anything like that. She’d bought me a book when I was eleven that talked about how women got pregnant, and that was about it.
The last thing I could do was call her up and say, hey mom! I’m dating a professor!
I put my head in my hands and sighed. No matter how many times I thought about it, no matter how many times I circled around my options, none of them seemed like a viable solution. And if Will kept refusing to talk to me except for what he wanted sex, how would I deal with that?
It wasn’t like I could just show up at his house again and demand to be let inside and sit on his couch and tell him the truth: that I was falling in love with him, and that I wanted to be with him for real, not in secret. When I thought of the first time I’d gone over there, I wanted to die with shame. He’d practically yanked me off my feet to hustle me inside, and I’d thought at the time that it had just been because seeing me made him so happy that he had to have me, right then.
It was a strange thing – part of me was beginning to wonder if Will wasn’t deeply uncomfortable with his own emotions. It was true that he clearly had spent years building up a wall between himself and the rest of the world, but I had always just thought that was an illusion, the kind of thing he maintained because he was so worried about his reputation as a professor.
Now, I was starting to think otherwise. Worst of all – and I knew this was a terrible reaction to have – it just made me want him even more. It made me want to get to know him and his tender side, to cradle and nurture that and watch him get more extroverted and warmer with love. I’d always heard that it was impossible to change people. But love itself was impossible.
If love couldn’t fix the problems of the world, what use was it?
I bit my lip and sighed. As much as I hated to admit it, I wasn’t thinking about the problems of the world and whether or not love could fix them.
I was only thinking of me, and Will, and the fact that the two of us seemed to
be on a crazy, wild rollercoaster together.
It was Tuesday morning, and I had been lying in bed for two hours – when I’d woken up, it had still been dark outside. Now, the sun was struggling mightily to peek through a heavy layer of grey clouds. The weather had been getting warmer over the last few weeks, just another sign that spring was coming faster than I ever could have imagined, but I could tell from peering out my window that today was going to be gusty and cold and grey.
I shivered, pulling my duvet higher until just the tip of my nose and my eyes were exposed from the blankets. I was so tired that my head ached, but it wasn’t like I could even try to go back to sleep. Will’s class started soon, and I had to get my butt to campus if only to turn in a paper.
I got up and started putzing around my room as I got dressed, hunting for the books I’d need. I dawdled and delayed, even spending ten minutes in the bathroom trying to tuck my hair into the perfect messy knot.
“Morning,” Petra called from the kitchen as I emerged, fully dressed and carrying my bag.
“Morning,” I called back. Things had been weird between us ever since that day when I’d burst into tears. I hadn’t been spending much time in the living room, and neither had Petra.
Maybe after the semester was over, things between us would reach some semblance of normalcy once again.
“You doing okay this morning? Want coffee?” Petra asked.
I nodded. “I just have to turn in a paper,” I told her. “And then, I don’t know. I might just come home.”
Petra’s brows knitted together with worry and she nodded. “Okay,” she said. “Well, have a good one.”
Ouch, I thought. Have I really been shutting her out for so long that she’s stopped asking?
My heart sank as I realized that was true. That realization, combined with the crappy weather outside, put me in a rotten mood and by the time I got to campus I was ready to sit down and say, screw it. I stomped up the stairs in the Liberal Arts building until I got to Will’s classroom, where I was the last one inside.
Forbidden First Times: A Contemporary Romance Collection Page 118
