Bound and Determined (20 page)

your attitude. I thought I could train that out of you—and maybe I could have,

but you want everything right the hell now, instant gratification, and this isn't

about that.” He was pacing the room now, quick, angry steps, looking like a cat

about to spit and rake sharp claws into soft flesh. “You want a quick fuck, a

good, hard climax that blows you away? That's easy. Go to any club or bar and

looking the way you do, you'll get picked up and get a nice stiff cock to play

with and service with someone who can't believe his luck even if he's not quite

sure why you're waiting to be told what to do. It won't scratch your itch for

long.

“Or go back to the club where we met and I can guarantee you'll walk out

of there with someone, but it'll be easy, so fucking easy, and part of you never

wants easy. That's the part of you that I—” Owen paused and turned to look

directly at Sterling, gray eyes opaque, blank. “I could tell you to strip down for

me, go up to my room, bend over, and give you what you want. There are

nights when the only way I can get to sleep is by jerking off picturing that in

my head because you've gotten me so turned on. But if I did, it would end any

chance of making this work, and I won't do that. I won't.”

The thought of the scene Owen had described made Sterling's anger

waver, but just for a few seconds. Then it was back, full force. “Only because

you got this idea in your head of how this was supposed to work and now you

won't let it go!” He felt his hands curl into fists, and he wished he had

something to hit—there was no way, ever, that he'd hit Owen, but right then a

punching bag would have been nice. “I can't do this. You can treat me like your

property, and I can even like it, but you're the one who's being selfish because

you won't let either of us have what we want, and there's no reason for it. You

don't think I'm smart enough to know what I want or need—you don't respect

me, and I won't be with someone who doesn't respect me. I'm sorry, Owen,

because I lo—”

In horror, he heard what he was saying just in time to stop himself.

He'd been in love with Owen for weeks, but telling him that would make

things worse, not better. And even if this was over, there was no point in

making it worse.

“I'll see you around,” he said, and turned to go.

It wasn't until he'd slammed the door behind him and was halfway down

the path, littered now with brown leaves crunching under his feet, that he

stopped listening for Owen's voice calling to him to stop, wait, come back.

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There wasn't any point; Owen wasn't going to beg him, was he? That was

Sterling's thing, and he'd tried it, and it just hadn't fucking worked.

Bound and Determined

83

Chapter Seven

“Yes, I can take your ten o'clock class,” Owen said without thinking, giving

Shari Temple a sympathetic pat on the arm. She looked like hell, her brown

eyes red-rimmed and her nose unpleasantly moist and raw from being blown

continuously. “I've only got a few more papers left to grade, and I'm sure the

little darlings won't mind another day before the ax falls on them.” He tidied

the scattered papers into a neat pile. “Go home, and don't come back until

you're better.”

“I wouldn't have come in today,” she said thickly, “but Admin said they

couldn't—” She broke off to sneeze sloppily, and Owen averted his eyes from

the cleanup that followed. “Sorry. They said they couldn't get a substitute in

until tomorrow, and I said I'd try, but I can't
breathe
and—”

“I'll do it,” Owen repeated soothingly. “Just tell me what you want me to

cover, and then go home and dose yourself up with some nice, lemon-flavored

drugs.”

He hoped that he'd managed to avoid the worst of her germs, at least. It

was a few days after Halloween, the ground threatening frost every evening but

warming well into the high sixties by afternoon. Typical New England weather,

Owen thought—it couldn't make up its mind.

Which reminded him of Sterling, just as most thoughts had for the past

week and, if he was being honest with himself, all the weeks since they'd met.

He couldn't shake his distress at the way Sterling had walked out that night

and had no interest in setting aside his irritation. The boy was spoiled, had

been brought up being given everything he'd wanted, and still expected the

world to hand it to him on a silver plate. Sterling didn't care about anyone but

himself and what
he
wanted.

It was easy to push these thoughts to the forefront of his mind, ignoring

all the little things Sterling had done that proved them wrong. The pound of

gourmet coffee he'd brought Owen the week before, somehow having

remembered Owen waxing philosophical about its quality on a previous

evening. The night he'd been late, needing to be punished—something they'd

both enjoyed, of course—because he'd stopped to catch a dog that had slipped

its collar and left its owner, an eleven-year-old girl, crying distraught tears at

the side of the road. The care with which he'd been selecting Christmas gifts for

his mother and sister even though the holiday was two months away, setting

aside the little money he earned scooping ice cream and blending shakes at the

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ice cream shop downtown, endlessly debating the merits of one gift over

another until Owen tuned him out entirely.

Sterling was spoiled and selfish, and Owen was well rid of him.

“This is what we were supposed to discuss,” Shari said, interrupting his

thoughts with a book and handful of papers shoved into his hands.

“Shakespeare's “Sonnet 20,” among others. That should be fun.”

“Go,” Owen told her. “Go home. Rest. I'll handle everything.”

It was a measure of how distracted he was that he only remembered that

she was one of Sterling's teachers after she'd gone, leaving the wastepaper bin

clogged with soaked Kleenex. Which was ridiculous; he had Sterling's schedule

memorized, along with his own, knew his assignments and when they were

due, had often postponed a session to wait for Sterling to finish writing a

paper, his laptop on the dining room table, a tall soda, heavy on the ice,

dangerously close to it. Sterling had said how much he'd been enjoying Shari's

classes, and Owen had wished that there was a way to pass on the compliment

and regretted that there wasn't.

He glanced at his watch. Time to brush up on the sonnet, but no time to

find another person to take the class. Shari had given a quiz two weeks before,

earning a slightly less complimentary comment from an indignant Sterling,

who hadn't been expecting it. The spanking Owen had promised him if his

grade was poor had replaced his pout with an expectant sparkle—not the

reaction Owen had intended, which was shortsighted of him to say the least.

Owen didn't feel too guilty about potentially rewarding bad work. The quiz had

already been taken, and what was done was done—and he knew Sterling; his

grade would probably be respectable. It had been excellent, in fact, prompting

Owen to replace the spanking with a blindfold, some cuffs, and an assortment

of items that left Sterling's skin awake and sensitized to the point where he'd

come with a hoarse yell when Owen had dripped ice water onto the head of his

cock, the first touch it'd gotten.

Afterward Sterling had curled up against him, still trembling, holding onto

Owen with all his strength. “God, what you do to me, the way you make me

feel…”

Owen bit his lip hard and leafed through the book Shari had left with him,

relieved to find a sheet of notes tucked into it at the relevant page.

The classroom was one he hadn't been in for several years, but it was next

to one of his regular classrooms so finding it wasn't a challenge. When Owen

entered the room, half the desks were already occupied by students who looked

mildly surprised to see him come in and walk to the desk. They were quiet,

though, murmuring among themselves, and he took advantage of the few

minutes before class officially started to look over Shari's notes.

He'd never taught Shakespeare, though he felt confident he could handle

one or even a dozen classes. He might not be an expert the way Shari was—he

was a fan of short modern stories, himself—but he prided himself on being a

well-rounded scholar.

Bound and Determined

85

He kept half an eye on the clock, and when the minute hand hit twelve, he

stood up. “Hello,” he said pleasantly as all attention in the room turned to him.

“Some of you know me—I'm Professor Sawyer—and all of you know that I don't

belong here. Unfortunately, Professor Temple has a bad cold, and I'm taking

over just for today.”

Just then Sterling came slouching into the room with an apologetic look

on his face, a look that changed to upset and then to a sullen one as he slid

into a seat.

Owen ignored him. Sterling wasn't late enough for him to make an issue

over it, and the less interaction they had, the better. The natural confidence he

had—and Sterling wasn't the only one with a dash of arrogance, which Owen

would be the first to admit—made him view the hour to come as a challenge

instead of a threat. That attitude was helped by the fact that he trusted

Sterling, even an angry Sterling, to be discreet.

“Professor Temple tells me that you've been working your way through the

sonnets. The sonnets from one to one hundred and twenty-six concern an

unnamed gentleman referred to as…?” Owen picked out a vaguely familiar face

in the crowd, a woman who'd been in the same freshman class as Sterling.

“Miss Bowers?”

She cleared her throat, long silky hair falling over her face, its reddish

shade matching her cheeks. “Umm, the Fair Youth?”

“That's correct.” Owen glanced down at the book he held, copies of which

lay unopened in front of most of the students. “If you'll all turn to page fifty-

four, I've been asked to make today's lesson about the twentieth sonnet. I'll

confess that I'm not familiar with it, so perhaps we can all learn something

today, which is what we're here for, of course.”

There was the expected ripple of ironic amusement at his mild attempt at

humor. Freshmen were too nervous to smile, sophomores and juniors too cool,

but by their senior year most of the students had relaxed and discovered a

vague tolerance for the people who might help to determine their future.

“Maybe one of you would like to read it aloud so that we can get an idea of

what the sonnet's message is, and then we can break it down and see what's

hidden between the lines. This is Shakespeare; few people could pack as much

meaning into a superficially simple line, and removed from him as we are by

both time and geography, it's sometimes difficult for us to get a joke or an

allusion that would have been crystal clear to a contemporary reader.”

Owen looked around the lecture room for a victim. He didn't want the

poem butchered, so no one at the back, smothering yawns, and he wasn't in

the mood to have it enunciated painstakingly by someone who'd memorized in

an attempt to score points, so he avoided eye contact with the bright, eager

students in the front row. He'd just settled on a young man with a reasonably

intelligent look on his face when Sterling spoke, his voice cutting through the

background hum as people found their places and flipped open notebooks.

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“'A woman's face with nature's own hand painted,'” Sterling recited, not

looking at the open book in front of him at all; Owen wondered when he'd

memorized it, though not why. There was no point in interrupting him—that

would only make it clear to the rest of the class that Owen wasn't in control.

Better to allow it.

Sterling slouched further in his seat as he went on, his thighs relaxed and

spread far apart. As he reached the third quatrain, he lifted his gaze and met

Owen's, a haughty little smile playing about his lips and a challenge clear in

his eyes. He finished reciting the sonnet and grinned triumphantly.

“Thank you,” Owen said, giving Sterling a dismissive nod while he cursed

the long dead Shakespeare and the germ that had felled Shari. An hour spent

discussing a love poem from one man to another? Oh, this wasn't going to be

awkward…

Sterling had read the sonnet beautifully, his voice clear, expressive,