The Professor (16 page)

He kisses me like he wants to say something with that contact, and he does. I hear it. I feel it. The moment his lips part against mine I get everything I never could from just words. My soul thrills as much as my body does, in great sparking waves that seem to go on and on. More than that, better than that, because when he finally pulls away – as breathless as I am and as desperate – he lets me see him. He gives me all of himself, without thinking twice about it. He simply stands there so I can take it all in:

The neverending slide of his thighs, as heavy as I thought they would be but twice as strong. They make me think of men in the 1930s running gruelling marathons, even though I feel fairly sure he never does anything of the sort. His idea of exercise is reading two books back to back, yet that dense muscularity is still there. I see it in the grooves either side of his groin, as clearly defined as any athlete’s. I see it in his chest, far firmer than I had thought but just as burly.

If I hit him there, I feel fairly sure it would make a satisfying
smack
. In fact, pretty much anywhere in his body would make a satisfying smack. His arms are lengths of thick rope; his shoulders so big I can barely believe I got my arms around them. He turns a little and I see shoulder blades like slabs of stone – though naturally I know he doesn’t do it for that. He does it for the scars, his brutal and beautiful scars, rolling in whorls and curves and spirals over his shoulder and down his back. Like the strap of a satchel he forgot to put down, I think, then want to be better than that. I need to be better than that – to describe it as well as the writer he thinks I am. But the thing is, when faced with it I only want to say the words that
he
thinks are best. I want to do what he needs me to do. To look on him with eyes that he finds the kindest, the sweetest, the most loving.

It’s why I meet his gaze instead of lingering long, and oh, I am glad I do. Everything is there in those once unfathomable oceans, as clear as if he had written it out for me. He puts it in capital letters across some imaginary chalkboard, and I follow them gladly. I stoop to lift my robes over my head, and then my clothes beneath, and when I fail to do it fast enough I see that I was right.

Because he helps me.

He pulls at everything I have on until we are both just a tangle of discarded clothes and clumsy limbs, so eager to feel each other all at once that nothing quite goes where it should. I stumble over his foot and he gets my T-shirt all wrapped up in my hair, and getting to my bed doesn’t make it any better. Now we seem to be kissing each other everywhere all at once, which really does not work at all.

Apart from in the utter bliss department.

God, when I feel his naked body press against mine…

I pretty much forget my own name. I forget
his
name. I go to gasp it, and all that comes out is a rush of air and some nonsensical sounds. That’s OK, though. That’s fine. Because when he says mine the same thing happens. His tongue trips over the double Ts and makes a mess of the Y – and to be honest I have never in my life heard anything so sexy. Whatever I was feeling before doubles. My whole body seems to prickle, suddenly alive in a way it hasn’t been since he was last with me like this.

And, by God, I welcome it back. I hardly knew how much I missed the heat he puts in me, until I feel it blooming low down in my belly. Until it makes me greedy and grasping, hands on his cock before I can stop myself, tongue suddenly as filthy as I could ever imagine it being. ‘I want you to pin me beneath you, drown me with your body, fill me with your cock until my cunt is overflowing with you, until I come so hard you feel me like a fist around your full fat length,’
I tell him, some of me still waiting for him to hesitate.

But he doesn’t.

He goes further than that, in fact. Oh, Lord in heaven, I can hardly stand how far he goes. Just the sensation of being spread out is enough – he makes me lie with my hands above my head and my body stretched taut. And then he covers me, completely. His arms curve over and around mine, those big fingers tangling with my own so tightly. I feel the fur that covers his belly brushing me in the same place, and the strange near smoothness of his thighs pressing mine apart.

It almost hurts to accommodate him.

But that
almost
is where the pleasure really lies. It’s in the strain along the lengths of each of my inner thighs, and the effort it takes to loop my legs around his. I feel it when he dips to kiss my lips, and for a moment the full weight of him is on me. He saturates every inch of me, right down to the parts I barely knew existed.

And it is
glorious
.

As though I am really drowning in him, if drowning in him is a thing that thrills me to my core. I shiver over it, and moan because of it, and when he leans down to claim my mouth again I come fairly close to biting him. I just can’t help it. Everything is too much and not enough at the same time, and when those two feelings clash I go a little crazy. I touch him in too many places and kiss him much too fiercely – or at least I do until I feel what he is doing between my legs.

After that, the whole world narrows down to that one sensation. I forget my kiss-seared lips and the sense of him over me. It doesn’t matter that his body is pressed to mine on my bed. All I can really feel is the drag of his cock through my slick folds, at first so slow and teasing I want to tell him to stop. But then he rubs the tip right over my clit, and I do more than
want
to tell him.

I say it straight: please, no.

Then thank God that he doesn’t listen. He keeps going until I try to buck beneath him, and fail so miserably it makes me want to laugh. I can hardly get anywhere at all, with him so heavy on me. I try to lift my legs a little higher, and only manage a sort of mild squirm.

Not that I mind. It means that he has to help me, when I want to move around. He has to get his hands under my arse and sort of lift me a little, until I’m in the exact right position to feel him driving into me
there
oh, there, oh, God, when his cock urges against me right there. When he holds me just so as though he
knows
,
and then rolls his hips.

At first slow and soft but then hard enough to jolt me.

To make me scream – too loud for the sleepy little village I live in. To be honest I think it would be too loud for the middle of Tokyo. I make sounds I didn’t think I could and cry out too desperately for good sense, yet don’t care one teeny tiny little bit. I want everyone to hear me. I want
him
to hear me.

And he apparently wants me to hear him.

He groans so close to my ear I feel it vibrate all the way down me. It has this sort of chain effect on my body – starting with my too tight nipples then on down to my tensing belly and then finally, oh, finally I feel it in my clit. It circles me there like his fingers, like his tongue, until I can sense it starting to shudder through me. My pussy clenches around his cock, so fiercely I fear I might be hurting him.

But if I do, it is the delicious sort of pain. The sort that makes him twist on top of me, teeth bared and eyes dark with pleasure, every inch of his body going into a desperate attempt at really
fucking
me. He wants to do it hard, I can tell. He wants to hammer into me until my teeth rattle. Only the more he succeeds the tighter my cunt tightens around him, until all we can both manage is a sort of desperate push-pull.

Not that it really makes any difference. If anything, the pleasure is sweeter because of it. It starts smaller and neater, somewhere just south of my belly. And then it starts to bloom ever outwards, each time more insistent and more intense until finally I’m shaking with it. I’m shaking all over and he is shaking all over and I know then that it is the same for him.

We are never going to survive our orgasms.

We don’t survive our orgasms. I die, and I know he does too. His groan is like some great beast being stabbed in its side. And his words, when they come, are not reasonable. They do not make any sense. I hear something that could be ‘Hetty’
and something that could be ‘yes’
and something that could be ‘fuck’. Then stop trying to decipher it altogether. I have to stop, because my own orgasm has me in its grip.

It gets a hold of me, so sweet and good I sob over it.

Though it is the aftermath I like best. When both of us are breathless and glossed in sweat, half-satisfied and half something else. Something that will probably always be hungry, like that beast I thought he was beneath a veil. Like the beast
I
am for him, and always will be. He is my love and my desire made flesh.

Even if I try to hide it just a little.

‘So what do you want to do now?’ I ask, as casually as I can.

Only to have him answer with all the care I just disguised.

‘Never waste another second of my life pretending I don’t want to spend it with you.’

Sundays are always my favourite. Funny, really, considering how much I used to loathe them. It was never the thought of the Monday that was coming, though. Not the thought of a school week coming, with all the things other normal kids usually hated. I never hated school, even when it was fraught and full of people who loathed me. No, I hated the day
itself
. I hated hour upon hour in our family home, trapped with two adults who often seemed to see me as some sort of alien, intruding on their space. Always trying to escape into books they would rather I didn’t read, and avoid saying things I know they wouldn’t like.

The only good Sunday I ever remember having was the one when my father was sober for almost the whole day, and took me to the library for a special treat. But now, every Sunday is sweeter than sin. I always wake to the sound of the typewriter – the one he insists on using despite how little sense it makes. Every word he writes has to be retyped on my laptop, before he can send it to his editor.

Yet I never really resent it.

Oh, I complain and moan and make fun of him. I call him a dinosaur, and threaten to throw the thing in the lake. ‘The K doesn’t work,’ I tell him. ‘It looks like you typed “pee” when you meant “peek”.’ But really, there is nothing in the world sweeter than that sound as I wake up. Well, nothing aside from his words in my ear. Sometimes they come in the middle of the night, when he cannot sleep and the fire is licking at his skin and all he can do is bury himself in me to make the pain go away.

It’s OK, I tell him, to let someone else make the pain go away.

But there are other times, lots of times, when those words come just because he wants them to. On Sunday mornings, it is
always
because he wants them to. He will see my hair spread over the pillow – like a black flame, in his last book, and a tangle of dark brambles in the one before that – and say something even more beautiful than all of those words together.

Beautiful to me, at least.

Though I suspect it would be filthy to anyone else who heard. ‘I cannot stop myself thinking what that rope of hair would look like wrapped around my fist, as I urge you to your knees,’ he says to me, and, by God, I gladly go. I go for all the other ways he chooses to seduce me, too. The flower he trails over my spine as I lie bare in the steamy heat of a midsummer afternoon. Or the confession he gives me in the middle of our evening meal, sitting outside in the dimming light of day.

‘When you left for England, I thought it would be easy to let you go. I thought I could just return to the safety of my life, and instead I slept in unwashed sheets for a month, knowing that they still smelled of you.’

But it is always the most explicit things that get me the hardest. Like when we are at a party at some fancy place, with his editor and my agent and everything around so glossy and golden. There are ice sculptures and frosted fruits and canapés I can’t pronounce. Canapés
he
can’t pronounce, much to my amusement. And just when I think nothing could be more amazing than this, he leans down to tell me he wants to taste himself in my mouth.

Just like that, in earshot of a dozen elegant people.

Though it barely feels any different, when we are alone. On those Sunday mornings, oh, those Sunday mornings amidst the rubble of breakfast and newspapers. He will tell me that he can still taste my cunt on his tongue from the night before, when we pressed each up against the books of some library that belonged to a writer we can’t now remember. ‘His name was Julian,’ I might say, ‘Julian,’ but we both know I’m only thinking of what will happen next.

He always wants another taste, to make sure it is really what he thinks.

But the best part is always all the places I get to kiss him. He lets me map out his body with my mouth, now, and rarely flinches when I do. Oh, sometimes his heart is heavier. Sometimes the fire is still fresh on his skin, and he hides from me just a little more than he did the day before. However, I know those times are fewer now. I see them fading away, when he comes out of the bathroom in only a towel, or asks me not to avoid it quite as diligently as I did when we were both still raw.

‘I want to feel you everywhere,’ he says to me.

‘Even when it hurts.’

So I kiss him where they are fine and threadbare, and kiss him where they are thickest. I follow the map they make over his shoulder – sometimes with my hands and sometimes with my mouth and always with his eyes on me as I do. I know his eyes are on me, even when I am not looking his way. I feel them now all the time, like a steadying hand on my shoulder. Like a slow, soft caress over my back, of the sort he always gives me when he zips me into a beautiful dress.

And I know that he feels the same, when I look at him. I know he feels every word before I say it – even the ones I want to keep inside. The scary words, like ‘Am I enough?’ and ‘Are you OK?’ and ‘Can we make it through to the other side, without falling into the fires our lives have made?’ But when I do, when the doubts come and the night closes in around us…when I feel gauche and small and he feels too closed off and too battered by circumstances and too old, oh, he always feels so
ancient
…

He always brings us back with this:

The some place else altogether is here.

The some place else altogether is here.