Page 30 of Misadventures with a Professor
I wake up sore between the legs and happy. The kind of happy that has no real reason to it. The kind of happy that suffuses your blood before you even open your eyes. And when I do finally open my eyes to summer sunshine and Oliver’s neatly furnished room, I’m smiling.
Before I’m even all the way conscious, I know he’s gone. But I’m not upset by it—I’ve noticed that he takes himself on punishingly long runs most mornings; and anyway, I’m glad I get to have this very, very girlish moment to myself. The moment where I roll over and smell the sheets and squeal inwardly to myself.
Oliver fucked me again.
And more than that—he’s been wanting me as much as I’ve been wanting him. Every glimpse I stole of his eyes and aristocratic mouth, he was stealing similar glimpses of me. He was wanting me, craving me…listening to me finger myself night after night in vivid torment.
The thought makes me curl and blush with agony—agonized shame and agonized delight. To be caught doing such things is beyond humiliating, and yet to know that those same things aroused and haunted him fills me with a smug feminine pride. To know that the person you want wants you back?
It’s like a pure life arrowing right through the middle of me. Like I’m entirely new. An entirely new Zandy—not one who’s too much but one who’s just the right amount.
Just right for a man like Oliver.
The thought makes me blush anew with how stupidly juvenile it is, with how many unspoken hopes are woven through it, and I push myself out of bed to get away from it. From the wanting more, from the wanting things that Oliver almost certainly won’t want to give. Sophisticated—I still need to be sophisticated.
So I have my best sophisticated face on as I go downstairs after I shower and dress. I enter the kitchen looking the perfect mix of cool and sultry, prepared to have a cool and sultry breakfast and…
Oliver’s not here.
Probably still on a run, I think, but I deflate a little bit. Which is dumb.
Why am I acting so dumb?
Chiding myself, I make a cup of tea with the kettle—see, I’m learning—and then decide to get to work. That will please him, I think, to come back and find me at my desk. Maybe it will please him enough to let me have his cock again…
But then I go into the study, and he’s there, and his very presence reverberates through my bones like a gong’s been struck. The bent head, still proud, still haughty, even craned over his work. The long, strong fingers and the carved swells of muscle pressing against his shirt as he breathes. Those eyelashes so long on his cheeks and the prismatic eyes themselves.
Eyes like I’ve never seen before I met him. Eyes as complicated and mysterious as the man they belong to.
I offer up a shy smile, my heart going a million miles a minute. I’m not sure what to say or what to do; all of this is completely uncharted for me. What do all these sophisticated, sexual women say to their lover-slash-bosses the morning after a tryst? Hello? Or perhaps I’m wet just from looking at you. Can we do it again?
But I can’t be a sophisticated, sexual woman. I can only be Zandy. So I beam at him. “Hi,” I say, giddily and somewhat lamely.
His mouth tugs down in a scowl. “Glad to see you’re ready to start your work for the day.”
“I didn’t have my alarm set. I was…”
I was sleeping in bed with you, I want to say, but something stops me. His expression maybe, growing colder by the second, or the way his beautiful hands have gone still over his notebook.
Zandy that I am, I can’t help but try again. “I slept so well, though. Last night was—”
“Last night was a mistake,” he cuts me off. His voice is glacial, the words sharp enough to cut me with their corners. “And it won’t happen again.”
It takes too long for his words and their meaning to make sense in my mind, but once they do, I think I’d rather be drawn and quartered. I hate being so expressive, I hate it, and I hate that he can probably see the whip-cut of his words across my face. I duck my head so he can’t see the shame, the hurt, the confusion.
Keep your dignity, Zandy, because it’s the only comfort you’ll be able to hang on to.
“Of course,” I mumble, making my way over to my desk while trying not to let my tears fall. Trying not to let my mind race with the inevitable questions. The whys.
Am I not pretty enough? Thin enough? Cool enough? Was I bad in bed? Was it terrible sex and I had no idea because I’m so inexperienced? Or, oh God, what if I did something embarrassing in my sleep? Clung to him or drooled on him—or worse?
“You’ll find a credit card on your desk,” Oliver says to the side of my face once I’m seated. “For archival materials. Like I said before, there’s no budget. Use what you need.”
And those are the last words he says to me all morning.
My first jobs were as research assistants to my father’s friends and of course to my father himself. Since the age of fourteen, I’ve spent summers and winter breaks running photocopies and flagging promising entries in annotated bibliographies. I’m used to working in rooms with humans so deep in thought that they forget I’m there. I’m used to working in silence.
This is different.
