by Melinda Minx
“What?” I snap.
“Ms. Faria,” he says. “Step outside with me.”
He tugs on my arm, and he doesn’t soften his grip as he drags me toward the door. I see Dr. Woods shoot a jealous look at me as Professor Leeds drags me outside.
When we are clear of the door, he takes me further away from the building. There’s a small little miniature park bordering the building, encircled and walled off by flowers and shrubbery, and he only lets go of me when we reach it and are inside. It’s dark out, and it feels like—for the first time ever—we are truly alone with each other.
“I don’t think your date was happy to see you drag me out by the wrist, Professor Leeds.”
“She wasn’t my date,” he snarls.
“You were going to sleep with her, though, weren’t you?”
“How is that any of your business?” he asks.
I scoff and cross my arms. “I guess it’s not, but you didn’t drag me out here just to say ‘Good Day’ to me, did you? You can’t even say that this time since it’s already evening.”
“What are you talking about?”
He leans closer toward me. We’ve never stood this close to each other. There’s always been a desk between us.
“You always dismiss me,” I say. “Maybe this time I’ll dismiss you then. Good evening, Professor Leeds.”
As I start to walk away, he grabs me again. “Tell me what you are on about.”
I turn back around and look up at him. There’s a real darkness in his eyes now.
“So you don’t want me to go,” I say. “But time is running out, so we can’t keep bullshitting each other. Let’s strike a deal. While we are still in this park, let’s only speak the complete truth to each other.”
I watch his reaction, and see him nod his head ever so slightly.
“You speak first,” I say.
“I just signed a three-year contract with Oxford,” he says. “I’ve worked my whole life for this.”
I shift then ever so slightly closer toward him. Already I can smell his masculine scent, but I want him to know and feel that if he wants me, he just needs to reach out and take me.
“So you’re telling the truth,” I say. “But you also left a lot unsaid.”
“You know—or maybe you don’t—Oxford’s policy on professionalism for its staff.”
“Professionalism,” I say. “What other words are you leaving unsaid by using that word?”
My heart is pounding so hard in my chest that I’m worried I’ll have some kind of panic attack, but I decide it’s now or never, and seize the moment. I reach up and put my hand right on Professor Leeds’ chest, and hold it there. His heart is beating almost as hard as mine.
“Ms. Faria,” he says. “I’m saying we can’t do this. I’d lose everything.”
“You’d have me,” I say, looking into his eyes. I feel my hand trembling against his chest, and I’m too afraid to move it. “That’s worth something, at least, right?”
“I’d have you?” he asks. “You’d stay here? How?”
“I…” I mumble. “I don’t know. I’d transfer, I guess.”
“Oxford isn’t accepting transfer students from the U.S. Without a student visa, you’d have to leave.”
“I can come back for six months as a tourist, and…”
“And what?” he asks. “Then what? I’d lose my job, and you’d have to drop out of university to stay here for six months…”
Despite his harsh words, his strong hand reaches out and covers mine. He presses my hand tighter against his chest. It’s the first time we’ve really touched each other, and it’s so much more than I ever imagined two hands touching could be.
He looks at me for a long moment, then says, “It would be a terrible decision for both of us, but still, I’m trying to convince myself it’s worth it. I’m trying to justify it, because…”
He trails off.
“Because you want me,” I whisper. “And because you know I’d give myself to you, however you want it.”
He moves my hand lower down his chest. I feel it slide across his cut abs through his shirt, and finally it stops on his belt.
“Do you want me to tell you what I’m thinking about right now, Ms. Faria?”
I nod.
“Feel for yourself,” he says.
I slide my hand down, and I feel his hard cock pressing against his trousers. It’s way bigger than I’d expected, and I can feel its pulsing warmly against my hand.
‘Tell me what you’re thinking,” I say.
“I have complicated tastes,” he says.
“Tell me. I want to taste just right for you.”
“You’d have to do everything I say,” he says. “Even if it made no sense. You couldn’t question me, not ever.”
I look at him with a renewed sense of wonder. I think I know what he’s talking about, what kind of kink this is, but it’s never something I’ve ever thought about doing. Hearing him say it in that commanding tone, though, I realize with a sudden urgency that I want it badly. I’ve always wanted it, but I just never knew it until this moment.
“Yes,” I say. “I’ll do it. Whatever you ask of me.”
I squeeze his cock through the material.
“Take your hand off me,” he says.
“But…”
“Off,” he orders.
I let go.
“You haven’t earned it yet,” he says. “You’ve been a bad girl, and I haven’t punished you. Why should you be rewarded for being so naughty?”
Jesus. I feel myself becoming soaking wet, and I want so desperately for him to punish me. Even if it will hurt.
“Punish me then,” I whisper, a tonic of fear and adrenaline and wonder all pumping through my blood so hard that my ears burn hot.
He grins at me. It’s not like before, though. Some kind of darkness has overtaken his gaze and smile. He licks his lips, and my eyes track his tongue’s movement, unable to look away.
His hands move, and I watch as he reaches up to his tie. He pulls at the knot, undoing the light-blue cloth—which looks almost steel grey in the dim night—with slow, steady precision.
He’s taking off his tie. Is he going to take his shirt off, too? Here, in this garden, where anyone could walk by and see us? Does he expect me to do the same?
Just as the fear becomes invigorating, surging through me and overflowing like a flooded river, it paralyzes me. I don’t dare move, and I can only stare at his strong hands as he methodically removes his tie.
“What do you think is going to happen next, Ms. Faria?”
He stares down at me with amused condescension. Clearly I look like a stupid little girl. I pushed for this—I wanted this—and now I’m left tongue-tied and terrified, unable to so much as lift my hands up and away from my sides.
“I…” My voice catches in my throat.
“What would you want?” he asks me.
I feel my cheeks burning as blood rushes through me. I don’t know. The more I think about it, the less I know. I just know that I want him.
“Don’t think, just say it,” he rasps, popping his collar.
“I want…” My mind goes blank, but then it hits me. I speak truthfully, saying exactly what I want. “I just want to do whatever you tell me to.”
He looks ready to pull the tie off, but when I speak, he stops moving entirely.
“That’s exactly what I want, too, Ms. Faria, for you to obey me. I want to dominate you.”
He slides the tie out, and I expect him to just toss it to the ground, or maybe fold it up and shove it in his pocket. Instead, he begins twisting it around his hand like some kind of bandage. He pulls so tightly that I see his large biceps bulging through his shirt. He wraps it around his hand a few times, and then he pulls on the free end. He moves the taut piece of cloth toward me, his eyes going to my neck.
My eyes widen at the tie approaching my neck, and I look at—what was just moments ago a harmless piece of cloth—as if it was
a snake.
“You see?” he whispers. “If I hold it differently, it becomes something else entirely. The object transforms depending on how I handle it. Are you certain you’re willing to obey me? Just like this tie, I will change you, too, Ms. Faria.”
“I’m certain,” I say without hesitation. I can feel the blood rushing through my ears and pounding in my head. I want only to feel him use that tie on me. I want to feel it tighten around my skin.
6
Elijah
“Elijah?”
The voice penetrates into the garden. It’s Rosie’s voice, and she’s only a few feet away. As soon as she turns the corner, she’ll see us.
I let go of the tie, and it goes slack. I quickly pull it off my hand and stuff it into my pocket. I go to flip my collar back down, but I already see Rosie in my peripheral vision.
She steps into the garden, and I decide to flip my collar down even though she’s already looking at me. She’s squinting, and suspicion is painted all over her face in bright colors. Even in the darkness, I can tell she knows.
“I was wondering if you were coming back or not,” she says, her voice cold.
I look over toward Nicole, and if my missing tie and popped collar didn’t already look suspicious, Nicole Faria’s expression must all but confirm everything to Rosie. Nicole’s face is red as blood, her lips are parted, and she’s too shocked to even look embarrassed. Her big breasts are heaving up and down, and she’s panting and licking her lips. She’s just staring wide-eyed at Rosie as if she’s completely perplexed that anyone could infiltrate this garden. As if the walls were magical and impenetrable.
“I suppose you weren’t coming back, then,” Rosie says. “So I’ll leave you alone.”
Fuck. Rosie is faculty at Oxford. This is how career-ruining rumors start. Even if Rosie doesn’t go straight to the administration with this, one word to a friend or colleague would be enough, wouldn’t it?
“Are you going to tell?” I ask.
Nicole begins to stammer. “Nothing...there’s nothing…”
“Quiet, Ms. Faria,” I snap.
She bites her lip, and I feel a surge of anguish. She obeys me already. Even in a situation like this, she obeys. And I can’t have her. Not now, and not ever. It was incredibly reckless to go this far with her. Rosie coming in when she did was probably for the best, because after one night with Nicole, I doubt I could have ever played it safe enough to not get caught. It was always too risky, which is exactly why I didn't touch her all semester.
“Is there anything to tell?” Rosie asks.
“No,” I say. “A brief lapse in good judgement, but I stopped myself in time. Nothing happened. Nothing will happen.”
Rosie scoffs and shakes her head. “This is why I don’t date liberal arts professors. You’re all such clichés.”
I take two steps toward Rosie, and I tower over her. I look down at her with a dark expression, one I usually save for a woman sworn to obey me. It’s a risk that could backfire, but I see the look of awe in Rosie’s eyes as she looks up at me.
“You’re not going to say a word, as it would just make you look bad, wouldn’t it?”
She frowns, but her eyes tell me she’s trying to win my approval. I have her where I want her.
“If nothing happened, or will happen…” Rosie says. “Then what is there to tell?”
“Nothing,” I say. “Nothing at all.”
After I finish talking to Rosie, I step back into the garden to see Nicole standing stock-still, exactly where I ordered her to stand. Why does she have to be so damn obedient? It makes things so much more difficult.
“Professor Leeds,” she says. “You see how well I obey you? I’ll obey every single one of your orders. Dr. Woods will never know...no one will.”
“No one will know,” I say, “because we aren’t doing this.”
I pull my tie out of my pants pocket and wrap it around my shirt collar. It becomes just a man’s necktie again, and Nicole Faria is just my student. I won’t reshape her, and I won’t ever feel her warmth.
I feel the conflict within me burning like fire. I was raised on the romantics, and how can I choose something so dry and stuck-up like my “career” over what could possibly be the perfect woman to suit my complicated needs. Still, for me, no woman is ever permanent. Every woman is a flower to be plucked, and eventually wither from my declining interest.
I try to calm the fire within me by telling myself that the harder choice leads to more suffering. The more I suffer, the better the eventual release. None of the heroes in literature ever got what they truly wanted without a good dose of suffering—without being denied. I willingly choose to deny myself. It means that I am in control.
Then I look at Nicole’s expectant eyes, and I nearly break. I could grab her and taste her. But I couldn’t do just that. As soon as her lips pressed against me, I’d be unable to turn her away again. I’d be like that infamous heroin addict who became addicted from the very first hit. I know myself well enough to know that I’d not be able to give her up once I’d had her. It’s pointless to trick myself into thinking it could only happen once. That I could order her to keep quiet. It wouldn’t work.
I finish re-doing my tie, and I look down at her. In the most banal voice I can manage, I say, “I order you to forget this. This will not happen. You will attend my last few lectures and take the final exam, but you will not so much as look at me. I will not look at you.”
“But—”
“Don’t argue,” I snap. “Just obey.”
7
Nikki
Six Years Later
I never thought I’d see him again.
I obeyed his demand six years ago. I went to the lectures, but didn’t so much as raise my eyes from my notes. Hearing his voice was hard enough.
When I left Oxford, I promised myself I’d let it go. I did, mostly.
I dated guys my age. Normal ones. We had vanilla sex, and I lost my virginity to some guy named Chase. The sex was bad. He told me he loved me, and then he cheated on me, and then I started to suspect that “love” as a pure and noble thing might just not exist.
The closest I ever came to looking up Professor Leeds again was after one unfortunate night out.
I drank too much, and I started talking to some guy named Tosh. I thought it was a stupid name, and he was one of those guys who just seemed to float through life. When I asked him what he did, he told me he “painted, wrote, and lived.”
If there had been any fewer than five drinks in me, I’d have laughed that line off and never given him the time of day.
Drunk as I was, I indulged him.
Soon we ended up back at his place. His living room and kitchen looked like some kind of meth house, but he told me it was just his roommates’ stuff and that they weren’t home.
I almost walked out right then, but when we got to his room, I noticed it was immaculately clean. Then I noticed all the kinky shit. It was hard to miss. There was some kind of wooden board with leather straps pressed up against the wall. There was a full-leather, black bodysuit hanging next to his button-up shirts. It looked almost like man’s skin had been flayed and just hung up casually with Tosh’s work clothes.
He asked me if I liked toys, and I shrugged. Embarrassed to admit that yes, sometimes, I did. Usually when I am alone and want to relieve tension. I’d never considered using them in front of a man.
He opened a drawer full of them. From mostly “standard” thick veiny ones to ones with dicks on both sides. I looked at it all with my mouth hanging open, and Tosh grinned at me.
“So,” he said, “do you want to...play?”
He reached under his bed and pulled out a rope.
It hit me then, though, that no, I didn’t want to play. I wanted to obey. And I didn’t want to obey some weird OCD guy living in a crackhouse who “paints, writes, and lives,” I wanted a real man, one like Professor Leeds, to tell me exactly what to do.
Professor Leeds wouldn�
��t need some weird sex dungeon with a bunch of complicated dungeon shit. Tosh’s entire sex dungeon couldn’t compare to the way Professor Leeds had held that simple tie.
I made some feeble excuses and got out of there, thankful that Tosh didn’t try to hold me there against my will.
It was all vanilla sex from then on. That fantasy of a man like Elijah Leeds wrapping his tie around me—ordering my body to move exactly how he wants it to move—fell back inside me. It stayed buried deeply enough that I never even thought about it. Why think of something that isn’t going to happen? It remained buried with other dark fantasies. Sometimes I’d run those other fantasies through my head, imagining they might happen someday, but I wrote off Dr. Leeds. That one was never to be, and it hurt too much to think about it.
But then everything changed when I tried to find a job during the first semester of my Ph.D. program. I trawled through the listings, and I realized in one glorious moment that fate must be real, because I saw “Leeds, Elijah” in the “Professor” column. It burned as brightly as if written in fire, and I knew that my fantasy would have to come true. Elijah Leeds didn’t come to Pittsburgh to teach. He came here to dominate me.
The interview is on the thirty-fifth floor of the Cathedral of Learning. The Cathedral was built in the early 1900s, but it looks like something that would have been built in medieval Europe. The gothic-style cathedral is over five hundred feet tall, its forty-two stories dwarfing all the buildings around it. A large chunk of Pitt’s classes are held within the cathedral, and it’s apparently where Elijah Leeds’ new office is located.
I cross the grass field leading up to the cathedral and step inside to the commons room. The commons room looks like a place you’d find Christian monks copying bibles with feathered quills and bottles of ink. I walk through toward the elevators—thankfully the building isn’t totally medieval—and hit the button for the thirty-fourth floor.
I’m early for the interview and don’t want to risk Professor Leeds seeing me until I’m walking into his office, just like I used to back at Oxford. I want to catch him off guard.
