Page 46 of Fundamentals of Being a Good Girl
But my dick is submitting a memo that it’s a fan of this right now. Me at the board and Maddie with her hand raised. Me standing, her sitting. Me able to see the braless, perky tits move under her shirt as she tries to raise her hand higher.
“Yes, Ms. Kowalczk?”
“Counterargument: no one has to know that you’re screwing your nanny.” I make a face at her, and she rushes on. “Not the agency, not anyone who would think it’s prima facie unethical. Plus, is it that unethical when you didn’t know I’d be your nanny when we met on my birthday? Surely there’s some nuance in there.”
“I’m very glad you brought up your birthday,” I say, and then Itap-tap-tapthe glass next to item number three. “Because this is a very important one.” I underline each of the six words I wrote there. “You. Are. Too. Young. For. Me.”
Maddie stands up and takes a few casual steps toward me. I don’t back away—I don’t want to give her the satisfaction—but I can’t control the hot, primal quiver in my muscles as she steps close enough that she has to tilt her head back to peer up at me.
“Counterargument: I’m twenty-six.”
“Counter-counterargument: I’m thirty-five.”
“So you’ve got an upstairs ibuprofen bottle and a downstairs ibuprofen bottle, so what?”
“I’m not sold separately, Madelyn.” I use the dry erase marker as a pointer and point at the ceiling. Upstairs, where my entire world is either sleeping next to a dog or doing FaceTime karaoke. “I’m a dad, apet frog–leveldad, and I’m an ex-husband, and I’m also in a deeply unhealthy relationship with my university. At twenty-six, you should be young and carefree and fucking equally young and carefree people who don’t have goldfish crackers wedged between their couch cushions. Also, it’s just... wrong. I’m nearly a decade older than you.”
Maddie finds the dry erase marker in my hand. Steals it with a graze of her delicate fingers.
“I,” she starts, uncapping the marker and writing on the board under my last reason, “just got out of the world’s worst engagement, where my fiancé’s aspirations dictated every phase of my future and every mundane aspect of my life, down to the brand of reusable water bottle I carried. The literal last thing I want is another scenario where my life is forced to fit around someone else’s. I don’t ever want that again, in fact. So I’m not asking you to go steady; I don’t want to file taxes together. I just want you to fuck me until I scream.”
On the board, in the pretty handwriting endemic to popular girls of every generation, Maddie has writtenjust sex, nothing elseand now she underlines thenothing elseseveral times.
And then under my second reason, she writes:No one has to know.
And then under my first, she writes:Living together means you can have my pussy for breakfast every morning.
Time seems to slow and stretch, an infinity of shock, of erotic revelation, and I stare at the graceful handwriting, the precisely kerned letters ofpussy, and everything is falling away, everything except that word, that image, the memory of her taste.
Everything except the idea of waking up, walking to her room, and treating myself to her sweet cunt before the day begins. Going to campus with my nanny still on my face.
I’ve taken hold of the marker, I’m pulling it away from her as I crowd her up against the glass board. The wordpussyis right next to her ear.
“You’re not paying very good attention to the lesson, Ms. Kowalczk.” I clamp the marker horizontally between my teeth so I can use both hands on her waist to spin her around to face the board. I put her hands up on either side of it and then take the marker and writeit’s a bad ideaunderneath everything else and then circle it.
She turns her head so that I can see the side of her face—slightly snubbed nose, high cheeks, a mouth that looks even fuller in profile. “But what if it’s a secret bad idea?” she whispers. “Our little secret? That you can’t stop fucking your nanny? That you need to use her to keep your cock warm when the nights get cold?”
“Jesus Christ,” I breathe, pressing my forehead to her silk hair. “You’re killing me.”
“You know what I think?” she murmurs. “I think for all your talk of behaving, of good manners, Bram Loe is actually very, very bad. And no one knows it but you. And now me.”
I’m shaking my head no against her head. I’m a good guy now, but there was a time when I wasn’t. There was a time when I thought breaking the rules was a good thing, the right thing, if they were bullshit rules that shouldn’t exist in the first place. There was a time when I did dangerous things, when Ilikedthe danger, when danger felt as comfortable to me as repotting a plant or sketching while sitting in front of a mossy rock does now.
When I stopped, I stopped because I was tired, because living my actual life in the daylight started to make more sense than fighting for an abstract future in the dark, and there was a part of me that felt relief at beinggoodagain. I’d been a good kid, a good teen, and it was the detour into malfeasance and vigilantism that had been the aberration, and I was going back to the Real Bram, who’d always wanted to follow the rules to begin with. But sometimes... I wondered. Late at night, or on long drives, or in greenhouse reveries, I wondered if I could really think of myself as inherently good when I’d slippedso easilyinto being bad. And right now, I don’t feel inherently good at all.
Right now, I want to have my nanny’s pussy for breakfast every morning.
Fuck it. Why shouldn’t I have this? It won’t hurt anyone, it doesn’t change anything, and don’t I deserve this? Doesn’tshe? I have nothing that’s only for myself, just like Ali pointed out, and Maddie’s owed lots of non-focus-grouped depravity—as much as she wants—and so what if it’s reckless and wrong? It’ll be sex and nothing else, it’ll be our secret bad idea, and maybe none of it matters, the reasons for doing it and the reasons for not doing it, because I was never going to be able to resist Madelyn Kowalczk anyway.
This has been inevitable since the moment she stole my parking spot.
Chapter Sixteen
Bram
Idrag in a deep breath, a lungful of jasmine-scented academic, and then I slide a hand to the nape of her neck and pull her away from the wall. I guide her over to my desk.
“Professor,” she says in a low voice. “What are you doing?”
