Page 3 of Misadventures with a Professor
A very valiant effort.
I fail, of course.
Her teeth chatter as she says, “Th-Thank you! My phone wouldn’t work in the rain, and I thought I memorized the way, but it all looked different once I actually got here, and then the rain made it so hard to see—” Her own shivers break apart her words, and for some reason this makes me unaccountably annoyed.
“Here,” I say gruffly, shrugging out of my jacket and putting it over her shoulders. She’s flapping a hand in protest, but her hand stills as soon as the dry, warm interior of the jacket touches her shoulders. She practically folds herself into the jacket then, doing this thing where she rubs her cheek against the collar, and I know it’s to get dry—I know that—but fuck if it doesn’t look like she’s nuzzling into it. Like a kitten against the warm palm of its owner.
“Thank you,” says the girl, her eyes wide pools of deep blue. I notice with a strange curl of satisfaction that she’s not shivering as hard now.
“Why don’t you have a jacket?” I demand again, knowing I sound surly but refusing to care. Everyone else in my life has written me off as a miserable bastard and they ignore me as such—this girl might as well learn too.
At that, her mouth forms into a defensive little moue. “It’s June,” she says. “I shouldn’t need a jacket in June.”
I stare at her like she’s insane, which maybe she is.
“And the bare feet?”
“My feet got wet,” she says, as if this is an entirely adequate explanation. “I didn’t like it.”
“You realize they’ve gotten even wetter without shoes.”
“It’s better this way,” she insists, waving her shoes at me. Once I see them, I have to agree. I don’t see how anyone could walk in those across the width of the shoe shop, much less along slippery, uneven pavement.
“I hope whoever you’re meeting sends you home in a taxi,” I mutter.
“Oh, I’m not meeting anyone,” she says.
“What?”
She reaches up to brush a wet strand of hair off her cheek, but I beat her to it. I don’t know why, but it’s instinctive, like breathing, like blinking. Touching her.
My fingertips linger on her cheek after I brush the hair aside, and she stares up at me with something too close to trust. I drop my hand.
“I only have one night in London,” she says, all that trust and big-eyed nuzzling replaced by something matter-of-fact and utterly practical. “And I spent days researching where to go for a drink tonight. It had to be within walking distance of my hotel, it had to have several five-star reviews on multiple restaurant rating sites, and it had to be established enough to have regulars but new enough to be trendy. The Goose and Gander met all of those requirements.”
Well, that’s where research will get you. An obnoxious hipster cave of Edison bulbs and reclaimed wood.
“And why that specific criteria?” I ask, but I’m already peering back out into the rain, wondering if it’s let up enough that I can send this crazy, shivering girl on her way. Get back to my night. My night in a dry bed with my book, alone.
Somehow it doesn’t sound as appetizing as it did just a few minutes ago.
“Oh,” she chirps, like she’s pleased I asked. “I wanted to find a man to sleep with.”
It takes a moment for her words to unfold in my brain, and I’m still staring at the rain when her meaning becomes clear. An unpleasant bolt of something hits me with a muffled thud.
My head swivels slowly back so I can look at her. “Excuse me?”
Her face is animated now, all red lips and high brows and dark lashes in the shadowed, rainy night. “Well, I have a plan, and I think it’s a very good plan, but unfortunately my circumstances are narrowed to this one night in particular—”
“A plan.”
She nods, that pleased look again, like I’m her star pupil.
Fuck that. I’m the professor here, and I have the sudden urge to tell her so. To press her against the wall and put my lips to her ear and murmur all the ways she’ll respect my authority and experience.
My cock responds to the image, straining full and heavy at the thought of touching her. Teaching her. Punishing her.
“You see,” she says, totally oblivious to the deviant lust pounding through me, “I really need a man with a willing penis—or I suppose I should say a willing man with a penis, but when I say it like that, it sounds very dismissive of non— You’re scowling again.”
