The Professor (8 page)

I am wrung out after I send it to him. There are damp circles under my arms again and my teeth are chattering – though not from the cold air. I never opened the window the way I told him I did. Once I started typing I all but raced to the end, barely pausing to breathe, never mind anything else. I’m still panting minutes later, and as roasting as I was when I wrote that I wanted him to fuck my arse.

God, did I really write that I wanted him to fuck my arse?

Part of me wants to immediately open my sent emails box and read over it again, just to see. But I stop myself before I can. If I do, I might follow it with something foolish, like emailing him again to tell him that he should disregard it.
I sent you a message meant for my Aunt Flora
, I could say, then decide to close my laptop just to be safe. I will not be ashamed. I refuse to be ashamed. Not even if he replies with hatred and scorn, or never replies again. In fact, if he never replies again, I shall go about my life as though he never existed. I already am, ten minutes later.

I take a nice cool shower, and eat some dinner.

Then I sleep for a few hours.

And if I do so after I put my hand between my thighs, well, that’s OK. If I think of him and rub there I can’t fault myself. He is something to be thought of; he looms large in my mind. I see him reading and raising an eyebrow – worse, I see him reading and fucking another student – and pleasure throbs through me.

As though any shame I do feel is a spike in my veins.

But none more intensely than when I see his message waiting for me.

He sent it ten minutes after I sent mine to him
.

For a long time after reading his letter I simply sit there, staring at the screen. I can hardly do anything else – shock has rooted me to my chair, and the aching heat rolling through my body just does the rest. I think it might have turned my leg muscles to syrup. My breath is coming in short gasps, and they get worse the more I linger on every word he said. I keep flicking to the most impossible ones: ‘come-slicked’ and ‘cunt’ and ‘take’, and, even when I manage not to, other things occur to me:

Like the idea that he came up with this scenario.

A scenario where a man forces four orgasms out of a woman in his office – like the one we sat in – and fucks her on his desk – like the desk he had – and enjoys it so deeply he can find the wherewithal to express that enjoyment, in full and frank detail. It beggars belief, considering his attitude to us. But then maybe he believes he only skirted the issue. He never completely suggested that he would do that to me, or that he has ever wanted to. He kept it in the realms of a fantasy. 

Any basis in reality is really up to me to imagine.

And I do imagine it. I think of him as he was, staid and buttoned up, thinking of me with my legs spread on his desk – just like I wanted. I think of him unbuttoning his trousers, so that he might make use of my wet and willing pussy. Not like the men I’ve been with before, shoving into me roughly, but easing in, sliding in just as he described. Slow, so slow and so sweet…would it really be as sweet as he suggested?

The feel of my own fingers suggest it’s a possibility. I push them inside my sticky panties as I sit there, and just let two of them curl inside. Just a little, just a tiny amount – but a tiny amount is enough. The second I do it my cunt clenches around the intrusion; it blooms under the sensation of being penetrated. Before I know it I have three in all the way up to the knuckle, legs spread so wide I should feel lewd. I should want to stop and go to my bed and do all of this under cover of darkness, like usual.

But if I did that I wouldn’t be able to read as I fuck myself.

I wouldn’t be able to see those words, while I rock against my hand, moaning and gasping and getting close enough to make me sob. All I need is a little more, just a little more, I think, and I could really do it, and that’s when my email pings. When I read the one line he has written:

I expect him to fall silent, after that. I plan for it. I brace myself, and yet when the silence comes I like it no better than if I had barely known it would come at all. Three times I write to him to say he did nothing wrong. And three times his failure to answer is a nagging hole that nothing will fill. There are no books interesting enough, no classes immersive enough. Someone from linguistics actually speaks to me in a casual, friendly way, but it doesn’t excite me the way it once would have.

Instead I glance at my watch without meaning to, half-thinking of the computers in the library that I could check my emails on. By the time I look back at her she’s busy being friendly to someone else – someone more receptive than me. Someone who isn’t thinking about her once-was-Professor, and all the ways she could make him see that everything is fine. Everything is absolutely all right.

If you want to go back to the beginning again
, I write,
we can go back to the beginning. Pretend that I never talked about how much I want you and you can say the same, and everything can be as it was. We will just talk about books and more books and being a werewolf. Tell me about Bruges, tell me about the weather in a far-off place, describe the exact texture of the food. Tell me anything, except reasons why you should now be quiet and I should simply accept it. I can’t accept it. I won’t accept it. I refuse to live a life of settling for second best, of meagre pleasures, when there is so much more to be had.

You have taught me that.

Will you go back on it now?

Yet even after I send, there is still nothing. It will always be nothing from now on, I know. It has to be me who is bold, me who is equal to the task, me who overcomes all obstacles. I have to be some other girl, who can do impulsive things like buying a plane ticket to Bruges. I have the money to do it – I have the money to do almost anything I want, in truth. It’s just sitting there in my account, waiting for me to use it on something other than a cheap flat and an even cheaper education. Funny really: when my parents told me I could never have this or that or go anywhere or do anything, all I thought of was the glamorous life I would one day lead. Yet now that they’re dead, and I can do whatever I want…

I always stop just short. I seem to have gotten smaller, not bigger. Poorer, not richer. Always coasting, coasting, coasting, never taking any chances. But I want to take this one. I can do it. It’s just a matter of taking each individual element at a time. First, I buy the tickets. Then I pack a bag. I tell my mentor at Pembroke that I’m taking a short break, and after that all I have to do is go to the train station, the airport, the train station again. Simple, I tell myself, simple.

And it is.

In fact, the only terrifying part about any of it is getting to an apartment at the top of stairs as dark and narrow as a walk through haunted woods, after walking through a station that looked like the insides of a ruinous cathedral, and making my way through streets that smell like winter and warm chocolate, and realising that through all of that I never stopped to really think that he would be terrified to see me.

Because he is, quite clearly.

He looks as though someone just slapped him. All the strength runs out of his face, in a way that looks heart-chokingly familiar to me. It is the same expression Bobby Macklin got, when I walked in on him and Becky Turner. So much so, in fact, that I have the strongest urge to look around him into the apartment beyond. When I do, there will be a sullen girl in a tube top sitting on his couch. Only it will be worse this time, because with Bobby I kind of knew I was just one of many.

But with Halstrom I never thought I could ever be.

It would make everything a sham – not just the letters, and his conversations with me, and the kiss, but his reticence. His reluctance to do anything with me. It was all just a put-on to get me to put out, I think, and once I have, I come pretty close to just running right back down the stairs. This is the bit in the book where the girl learns the truth about love. The reality of a philandering Professor.

In a second I’ll go home and write depressing poetry about being a woman.

I even have it planned in my head – a hundred ways to say the word ‘black’.

But I never get to any of them. I don’t even write the first line, about a soul that is filled to the brim with darkness, or some other ridiculous thing. Because the moment it occurs he does what no one in depressing novels about men recapturing their lost youth ever does.

He crosses the distance between us, and lifts me into his arms.

I think he wants to stop kissing me almost as soon as he begins – like before in his home. The trouble is, stopping is not as easy as it was then. The parameters of our relationship have shifted, and he knows it. He wrote those filthy words. He wrote the romantic ones too. And he read every one that I wrote to him, without a word of protest. To tell me no now would be utterly ridiculous. 

But he tries. He tries as I run my fingers over his back, not outside his jacket but underneath where everything is oh, so hot. His hand goes to my arm and sort of shoves at it – though all he succeeds in doing is pushing me back against the wall just inside his flat. Our feet tangle together, briefly. Somehow I end up almost off the ground with my leg hooked around his.

At which point I have to wonder: is this how these things happen?

Do people just stumble into these incredibly passionate moments, while trying to do something else? He goes to ease me away from him again, but the same thing happens. We just end up more deeply entwined. His mouth goes to my jaw, my throat, my collarbone, the second he attempts to move away from my mouth. One of his shoulders is now free of that tweed, even though I definitely didn’t shove it off.

And I think…

I think he might be making sounds.

Not moans exactly, no, not quite that far. More like groans of despair and frustration, with the occasional breath he takes too long to suck in. Yet even so, every time I hear one of them I go weak and hot all over. I can feel my nipples stiffening under my far too silky bra, and the place between my legs is swollen and aching. It’s almost straining against my underwear, before we’ve so much as said a word.

And it gets worse when his mouth moves back to mine. This time his kisses are deep, and wet, and hot. His tongue eases in and out of my mouth, in a way I could never mistake. He wants me to think of his cock doing that exact same thing. He wants to show me how he would take me – so slow and easy, until my whole body is boneless. Until I come all over him, shuddering and gasping and oh, God, God, God, the thought alone is almost enough to make me do it. At the very least I know I’m moaning, and possibly shaking.

Though I don’t quite realise how far gone I am, until I feel his hands on my hips. Stilling me, I think, stilling me, because oh, Lord, I was rocking against him. His thigh is pretty much between mine, and I was rubbing my pussy all over it. I glance down and can actually see that I was doing this – my skirt is up around my hips and my cotton panties are completely visible.

Everything
is completely visible.

I can see the wet seam of my sex through the material, so lewd looking I should really be ashamed. And especially when he abruptly steps away. That clearly tells me he saw the same thing. That he knows I’m so wet it’s all over my underwear, and wants to get away from it as soon as possible. Yet, strangely, once he has I have no urge to pull my skirt back down.

Instead I think about putting my hand inside those soaked knickers. Right now, right while he stands there staring at me with those wild eyes. 

But I’m glad I don’t.

Because he decides just then that he needs the bathroom.

And disappears inside for around a thousand years.

I have no idea what to do, other than wait. Well, wait and explore a little. There isn’t much to see in his tiny one-room flat, but all of it is so fascinating it takes me a while to explore it anyway. I peek in his cupboards in a kitchen so tiny he must barely fit in it, and find food that looks like it could never belong to him. Cans of syrupy fruit, of the kind you usually give to kids. Jars of terrible-looking pickles, as if he is having a baby he never told me about. Cheap salty crackers and tins of herrings; lots of milk and bread and cheese that would make my stomach growl, if I wasn’t too churned up to eat.

Still, I think about it all long afterwards. I think about his burliness, his fleshiness, that point he made about being louche. I find the whisky he must have drunk as he answered me, on a tiny desk below the only and very sooty window, and the robe he said he wore, hung behind the front door. It smells like him, that robe. I press my face into it and get great waves of him – though honestly I don’t intend to do what I do. I think to myself that I have time, that I’m not that tired, that I will put it back in a second.

But then I wake up in darkness, with his robe almost over my face. I must have lapsed into an exhausted sleep while trying to cram that smell down into the roots of my body, and now I’m in deep trouble. More than deep trouble, in fact, because the faint glow from the street lamps outside reveals that the bathroom door is open. He has come out, I think, and I desperately try to hide the robe and make myself presentable. Somehow my skirt has rucked up in the night.

And the sight it presents is not an innocent one. I can tell that much, even in the darkness. I can see the difference between the wet part of the material and the dry, and my sex is still straining against the material. I can almost make out the split between the puffy, pouty lips, in fact, so lewd-looking I pray he didn’t see it. He might have gone out, I think. He might be fleeing the country as we speak.

Or he could be lying next to me.

Oh, yes, there is definitely
that
option.

I turn in the middle of tugging my skirt down, and my arm brushes something solid and warm. So solid and warm I could never deny what it is – but I still try to. I glance over there like it must be nothing, and get a face full of him before I’m ready. My heart almost runs right out of my body. I have to cover my mouth to stop the gasp, and not just because of the shock of it.

There is also the thrill that goes through me, to find him there.

To find him lying there next to me, as though it barely troubled him to do so. And yes, sure, he is curled on his side, almost as far away as he can get without falling off the bed. His back is to me, and he’s fully dressed. But that hardly seems like the point, when his thigh is pressed to mine. When I can feel the heat coming off his body and make out that sweet book smell, all of it so overwhelming I stop trying to straighten myself altogether.

He probably saw me like this anyway.

I bet he saw my soaked knickers, my exposed stomach, the hand I might have had over one of my breasts. The hand I
definitely
had over one of my breasts, because the nipple is nearly sore from
something
. I must have worried it in my sleep, I think, then I get the strongest jolt of excitement yet. Partly because I suspect he might have watched me, then laid down anyway.

Partly because I wonder for one illicit second if
he
did it.

If he looked down on me and saw those tight points poking through my top, and just wondered for a moment what they felt like. How I would respond if he circled one with his fingertip. If I would arch my back and moan in my sleep, eager even in unconsciousness to get more. He might have even given me it, once he realised how greedy I was.

Bent to ghost over it with his lips.

Or to lick – oh, God, what if he licked me.

I would die, I would dissolve, I would drift away on a sea of bliss. I already am, just thinking about it. That sweet ache is starting up between my legs. The urge to rock against the bed is becoming hard to resist – and so are a lot of other things. Suddenly I can’t stop thinking about running my hand over his back, just to feel the great heavy slabs of his shoulder blades. Or what about further down? The hollow at the base of his spine is so tempting, so sweet looking.

And he would never have to know.

He probably wouldn’t even realise if I went lower. Ran the back of my hand over the frankly glorious curve of his arse, maybe rubbed a little, maybe squeezed a little…oh, God, I want to squeeze a little. I want to just dig my nails in until he wakes, or worse. Bite him there. Make him feel me, make him want it, make him so hungry for it he just turns right over and pins me to the bed. Shoves my legs apart with his, unbuttons his pants one-handed. And then he could just, oh, he could just fuck into me. Push his cock into my wet and willing cunt, until I moan and beg him for more. And I
would
beg him for more. At this point I don’t think anything would be too much.

If he turned me over onto my front and took my arse, I would accept it. If he got me up on my hands and knees, spat between the cheeks of my arse then forced his cock into me there, I’d accept it. I already am accepting it, in my head. I picture myself pushing back against him, so eager to feel him splitting me that I don’t care how sluttish I look. All that matters is that he fucks me and fills me and comes hard inside me, so thickly I feel it running down the insides of my thighs.

He makes a mess of me, in a way I know he would never in real life. I doubt he will ever fuck me at all, even if all the lights are out and everything is very quiet and he barely touches me. The most I think I can ever hope for is what is happening now: him lying next to me, while I do my best not to masturbate over a thousand things I shouldn’t be thinking. Because I know I shouldn’t be. It’s only making things worse. I would like to think my hand is on my rib cage, but it quite plainly isn’t.

I’m cupping my own breast – and not even over my bra.

My hand is underneath, and very close to playing with one stiff nipple. Just a little, just enough to ease the frustration – but of course when I give in it only makes things worse. I rub my finger over the tip, and all I can think of is him doing it. I think of him licking his fingers first, and after that I really start to lose it. Suddenly I seem to be pinching that tight peak, instead of just rubbing it lightly. And I don’t know when I made my fingers wet, but they are.