The Fall of Troy

by Dr. Rebecca Sharp

  The next minute of silence was the longest time I’d seen Kev go without speaking as he processed my answer. “Alright, I believe you. I still think you’re gallivanting off into the deep end here but hey, what do I know about women?” he remarked wryly, both of us cracking a smile. “Well, I’ve got to head to class. I just wanted to stop in and make sure you survived the lion’s den. Guess I’ll see you later for some sexy studio time.”

  “Please do not call it that,” I grumbled.

  “With your Professor of Passion,” he jeered gleefully as he walked toward the door.

  “I’m going to strangle you,” I yelled as I chucked a Sharpie in his general direction, hearing it bang off the doorframe and fall on the floor.

  Groaning, my head fell into my hands as I took a deep breath. There were still hours until I saw Léo again and it felt like too long and not long enough.

  I didn’t know what this was I felt for him, but it was getting deeper.

  Tonight, I had a choice. I could either head for shore or hold my breath, hoping… praying… that Léo needed our kind of oxygen just as much as I did.

  When I walked into the room later for our studio session, my container was sitting on my drafting stool. I’d forgotten to take it with me on Wednesday after Léo—Professor Baudin had eaten the chicken parm I’d made.

  “What is that? Why is it on your chair?” Kev demanded as soon as he sat down.

  I opened my bag and tucked the plastic inside. “I brought leftovers the other day for after class.”

  “You never bring food. Why did you bring food?”

  “It wasn’t for me.”

  “Was it for—” Kev broke off and mouthed Léo’s name as he stood and approached from his desk on the far side of the room. I gave my nosy friend a non-committal smile and put an end to round two of his third degree.

  Tonight, Luke was going to give us three different poses with three dramatic expressions. And when I put my pencil to the paper, I didn’t fight against what I felt. Luke’s expression turned anguished, but I felt my own flow onto the paper. The same when he turned distraught, and finally, when he portrayed hope.

  And each time Léo walked by and didn’t make a single comment on mine, my confidence grew.

  Of course, there were delicate boundaries. I was his student. But just because the water could drown you, didn’t mean you should forsake ever swimming.

  At the risk of sounding too much like Dr. Shelly, I wanted to talk to him. Maybe talking to him about this… about us… meant we could find a way to see what it was and where it would go.

  “Hey, Michelangelo,” Kev teased as he poked me with the blunt end of his pencil. “Class is over. Let’s go.”

  My head darted around to see the other two in our group already heading for the door. “Oh. Umm… I-I think I’m going to hang back for a minute,” I stammered. “I want to see if I’m doing better.”

  “Mmhmm.” There was an entire melody to his hum that said ‘sure, you do…’ and it lingered even after he was gone.

  “Professor Baudin,” I called out as he walked toward the door. “Léo,” I yelled again. This time he froze, angrily striding back over to me.

  “You shouldn’t call me that.”

  I gulped and steeled myself for a fight.

  “How did I do?” I glanced down at my sketches.

  “Fine. Better. Much better.” He nodded. “Is that all?”

  “No. I mean, about that, yes.” I crossed my arms and went right for it. “Why did you push me away the other day?”

  He scoffed. “Are you joking? You never should have been anywhere close enough to need pushing. You’re my student. I can’t… I can’t… anything… with you.”

  “Since when have you cared about the rules?” I shot back.

  “It doesn’t matter.” His hand pulled at his hair and I swear the locks lengthened a bit in order to try and placate him. “I thought I could help you but I can’t. I can’t even help myself.”

  He wasn’t fighting me. It sounded like he was, and if I kept pushing, it would certainly look like he was and, in the end, I might even be the one who ended up hurt, but he wasn’t fighting me. He was fighting himself.

  “Let me help you.” I reached for him and he pulled back with a growl, sinking down onto the bench Kev usually sat on. “Let me understand what this is that feels like it’s clawing at the inside of my chest, desperate to get out and run to you.”

  “No,” he lashed out but looked at me like there was nothing he wanted more than to pull me into his arms and devour me. “No, Troy. This isn’t happening. Stay in the class if you want, if you need it to figure out what you want to be, but stay away from me.”

  Clutching my fist to my chest, I tried to squeeze back the torrent of emotions that were crashing over the dam. “And what if I want to be yours?”

  “Impossible.” His mouth twisted down in a sneer, like I’d asked him to turn night into day, and I flinched.

  All the emotions he’d made me face, the ones that made my heart swell with hope right before he cut swiftly through it, burned loathing through my veins. Sadness and hurt smeared over my face like unwanted graffiti, and hope turned into hate.

  He could hate himself for wanting me, but that couldn’t stop it from happening.

  Aux objets répugnants nous trouvons des appas.

  In the things we loathe become the things we love.

  A million things flicked through my mind—ways to hurt him like he’d hurt me. But it wasn’t enough. I wanted to make him feel like I did—to need something so badly that he couldn’t control.

  “You know I saw you that night, don’t you?” I rasped, closing the space between us.

  The first flare of success shot through me when his eyes rose to mine, the color in them now black. Tread very carefully, little girl. I could hear them saying.

  Only I wasn’t a little girl. And I was tired of being trodden on.

  I leaned in close to him and smiled. “You know I watched you that night in the storage room?”

  The room went up ten degrees. Later, someone else could yell at me for my contribution to global warming; I would blame it on him.

  I saw the change in his body. The way his shirt pulled as every muscle hardened beneath it. The way his breath came in harsh and forcefully from his nostrils like he was a bull about to charge. I wanted to look down at his groin. I wanted to see him straining against his pants. But I couldn’t. Looking away would lose the battle—the battle of wills, the battle of desire. Angry. Violent. It was a battle to the death.

  “Did you, ma petite?” he rasped, the very thread of his nonchalance as frayed as his voice. “And what did you see?”

  My lips spread wider, baring my teeth. I liked him like this—when I could see how thin and fragile his façade was. I liked feeling like I had some sort of power over this lion—this wild, angry animal that was caged inside him.

  I rose up straight, my deep breaths bringing my chest to the point of touching his.

  “I saw the way you kissed her, Giselle, like you wanted to punish her for making you do it.” His jaw flexed as I reminded him of his own demons and invited them to the surface, like he’d done to mine.

  I took a small step back toward the platform, my hands toying with the edge of my shirt.

  “I saw the way you touched her,” I continued hoarsely, my hands drifting up to my swollen, aching breasts.

  His jaw should have cracked with the force he put on it as he watched me cup my tits.

  Breathlessly, I continued to speak as I squeezed and kneaded myself through my shirt. “I saw the way you played with her.”

  I pushed my breasts together, knowing they weren’t nearly as big as Giselle’s—a modest B-cup on a good day. Then again, neither of us had been thinking of that woman since this began. Kiss her… touch her… play with her… It was all the way he wanted to kiss me… touch me… play with me. The starving, violent lust on his face confirmed it.

  My shirt
itched against my skin, begging to come off. But this wasn’t a striptease. This was a soul taunt. Eye for an eye. Broken for a broken.

  My fingers toyed with my nipples through the layers. They were so hard and sore. I stared at his mouth—at those unmoving lips and imagined them on me. Sucking me. I licked my dry lips before a moan could escape.

  Slowly—oh, so slowly—I let a hand slide down over my shaking tummy, my shirt clinging to my sweaty palm as it crossed over my waistband.

  He watched me like he’d been starved—starved of me. He watched my hand like he wanted to rip it off for touching what only belonged to him. My palm pressed over my core through the layers of my pants and underwear. I had consumed him.

  “I saw the way you fucked her,” I finished breathlessly as I pushed against my aching pussy, trying to ease it with the pressure it craved. But it was the thrill of victory that had my body pulsing with the need to come. It was the victory of being his sole focus.

  Maybe we were too broken.

  Maybe we were going against the rules.

  Maybe it was forbidden.

  But it wasn’t wrong.

  No one had ever looked at me like this before. He stared not like I was the center of the universe—he stared like I was the universe. I had his attention. I was his only attention. I was the only thing that mattered. And my knees shook with desire that pounded against me because of it.

  “I saw—” I tamped down a wanton moan, “the way you made her—”

  There was a loud scrape and a bang as he practically threw the bench and easel contraption out of his way as he stood. It crashed and slid along the floor as he stalked to me. My hands flew up as I took a step back. It wasn’t quick enough before his hands roughly grabbed my arms and hauled me against him.

  The need that sparked between us wasn’t only the physical one to take, it was the mental one to win, and it was the emotional one to consume. The need between us broke the rules. It broke boundaries. And, when I looked at him, it even defied the laws of physics.

  “Is that what you want?” he growled. “Do you want me to kiss you—to bite you?”

  I didn’t answer—couldn’t—as his lips crashed punishingly to mine. My tongue barely able to graze his before his teeth bit into my lower lip and I felt him draw blood.

  He pulled back with a smile, licking the tinge of my blood from his lips.

  “You want me to touch you?” One hand slid up to my shoulder and the edge of my shirt, a finger tracing lazily down along the neckline. “You want me to play with you?”

  Léo wasn’t a man, he was need and lust and dark desire all rolled into the hot, hard center of my world.

  I gasped as he slipped one finger beneath my shirt and bra and swiped over my nipple. I whimpered, “Y-yes.”

  He was trying to punish me, but the hiss that left his taut lips said that we were both suffering. His hand pulled back and cupped my breast through my clothes. It was something; it wasn’t enough. Still, it broke me. I arched against his hand, pushing myself into his palm and my lower body against his.

  “Oh God, it’s so big.” I thought I’d been delusional, the way I remembered the hard length of him from the other week.

  “You want me to fuck you with it?” he growled angrily, kneading my breast with a pressure that bordered on pain. “You want me to shove it into your tight little pussy, don’t you? Stretch you wide and fill you with my cum?”

  It wasn’t a question, but I said, ‘Yes’ anyway.

  “My cock will break you, ma petite,”

  I shook my head frantically, pressing my stomach harder against that length. “No. N-no, it won’t. I can take it,” I rambled, drunk with need. I had no idea what I was talking about. I’d never had sex. I was probably lying. It didn’t matter. I’d say anything if it meant he had to prove me wrong.

  He smirked dangerously. “No, Troian…” Oh, God. A rush of moisture soaked my underwear the way he said my name. “This isn’t a possibility. I would make sure of it.” My breath caught. “I would fuck you until I broke you.” His head came closer to mine and it felt like his mouth brushed back and forth over my lips with each of the following words. “And then I would keep fucking you until there was nothing left—nothing but dust to blow away on the wind.”

  “And what if I wanted to be blown away?” I whispered, not bothering to try and stop my lip from quivering.

  His jaw locked tight. Restraint was gone, he was only clinging to its shadow. Leaning in to my ear, his other hand now cupping my ass to lock me against him, he asked, “Has anyone ever been there before, Troian?” I shuddered. “Has your sweet pussy milked anyone else before?”

  Shit.

  Double shit.

  I was a virgin. And now, I wished I’d rebelled in that way, too.

  I gulped. “N-no.”

  I felt his warmth leave me in slow motion, like sand dripping through an hourglass that counted down one second. At the end of it, I was empty, and he was gone. Staggering. Away from me even though lust dripped from his eyes, hot and sticky, I felt it on me.

  I watched him fight himself. I waited for the fight to come to me.

  Instead, I got the fall.

  “Take them off,” he rasped as my body still reeled.

  What? I stared blankly at him. My mouth felt so dry—like he’d ripped all the water from me when he stepped away.

  His hard smile grew, like a crack in a sheet of glass, slowly fracturing through my world until everything around me shattered.

  “I know you watched, ma petite. Je sais…” he drawled slowly. “Je sais ce que tu veux. Je veux te donner. J’ai besoin de te donner.”

  I know what you saw. I want to give it to you. I need to give it to you.

  It was official. Everything was sexier when said in French. Hearing him rasp those words was better than an orgasm. At least better than the ones I’d given myself.

  “I also know what you did,” he continued, and my breath caught. Oh, God. No. “I know you touched yourself. Je t’ai entendu. I heard as you came and now I want to see it. Now, you’re going to show me what you did.”

  I felt embarrassed. But I was going to have to dwell on it later, my body was too needy to care. Of their own will, my hands undid my pants, dropping them to the ground. I looked ridiculous. Standing up on the platform in my long-sleeve shirt and black boyshorts. But that’s how he wanted me.

  “Sit.”

  I was beyond fighting his instructions.

  “Now the rest,” he growled.

  Goosebumps covered my skin. My mouth watered from the instinctive need to protest. He was my professor. There was a very distinct possibility he was married. And I was too young for him. The natural thing to do would be to run and report him to every precinct this side of the Atlantic.

  I was unnatural.

  I shimmied out of my underwear, keeping my legs crossed because I wasn’t that confident, while he reached for his leather sketchbook… and a flask? What… What was he doing? What was happening?

  When he looked back, time didn’t just stop. Time no longer existed. What we had wasn’t right. What we felt wasn’t allowed. What we had could only exist outside of the world that we lived in. So, we lived outside it.

  “Spread your legs and show me what you gave yourself that night. Show it to me so I can capture it because it should have been mine,” he said angrily.

  Oh no. He was going to draw me masturbating.

  Wrong. Very wrong.

  It was like porn. But fancier. It was like French porn. Only the French would think about drawing something like this.

  I attempted to shake my head. “I-I can’t.”

  “You will.”

  My head tipped to the ceiling and my eyes scrunched shut as my quivering thighs spread open. When I hazarded a glance, I saw him waiting for me—for my eyes. Holding them before he made me watch as they trailed down my body, half-clad, full-on need. And then his eyes stopped moving; they stopped and stared.

  The tick in
his jaw covered my body with goosebumps. Was he angry or was he aroused?

  I knew what he was looking at. Shaved, clean, pink skin. Swollen and slick. That was always how I’d been, how I’d always taken care of myself, but I’d heard the rumors about the French… and how they don’t like to shave things. I wondered if I’d just solidified in his mind that I was a little girl. I hoped he saw it as exotic; I wanted him to look at me like I was something he’d never seen before. Because that’s what things like this were: rare and unspoken of, dark and dangerous… something that only happens once in a lifetime.

  My body was on edge and on display. And he tormented me. Those long, skilled fingers unscrewed the top of the flask and raised it to his lips. But it was the way he drank that convinced me the only thing he saw when he looked at me was all woman. And I could breathe again.

  “Touch yourself.”

  I felt moisture seep from my pussy and I imagined it was dropping onto the wood of the platform. Biting back a moan, I waited for the embarrassment to pour out of me, once again. The reality was I was sitting with my legs spread-eagle in a classroom with my hot professor’s deep-blue eyes locked on my sex and he’d just told me to pleasure myself. I should be drowning in shame. But I wasn’t. Not when he looked at me like that.

  My hand drifted between my thighs because my body needed it to. Like that night at Rhymes, I needed release more than I cared about anything else around me.

  My finger slid easily between my folds that grew wetter by the minute. I moaned, finally heading toward the climax my body craved. But it was nothing like before because this time, I watched Léo watching me—and that made all the difference.

  He drank and drew as my fingers rubbed back and forth over my clit. My head dropped back again, my support arm shaking as my palm dug into the hard floor to hold me up.

  “Léo…” I begged as I felt myself getting closer.