Page 35 of Misadventures with a Professor
And the answer is that I don’t know, and it bothers me.
“Why are you ashamed of what you like?” Zandy asks softly, dreamily, like someone on the cusp of sleep.
I tense around her, the question taking me by surprise. Once again I’m struck by how easy this is for her, by how she can just ask and talk about these things like they’re not…like they’re not taboo. Like they’re not twisted.
She senses my reticence and turns toward me, tilting her head up so she can see my face. “Oliver?”
I open my mouth and close it, the words just as elusive as they were earlier tonight.
“Was it Rosie?” Zandy asks, and she’s so fearless, so brave, and it suddenly seems important to tell her so.
“You have so much courage,” I murmur, stroking her cheek. “In your shoes, I’d never be able to ask about a lover’s former flame.”
Zandy blinks up at me in a very endearing manner. “I’m very plucky.”
“I was going to say pugnacious. Or perhaps pesky.”
She laughs, as always, at my surliness, and I melt a little. I want to be brave and happy like her; I want to—I don’t know—reward her, I suppose. Not like a professor rewards a student but how a lover rewards his lover. Vulnerability for vulnerability. Strength for strength.
Honesty for honesty.
“We met at the university I work for,” I say finally. “We met, and it seemed like, oh, I don’t know, all those stereotypes about falling in love. Like the world grew a thousand times bigger.” I successfully keep most of the old bitterness from my voice, but there’s enough that Zandy still notices, a little line appearing between her eyebrows. I reach over and smooth it with my thumb.
“Was she the first person you ever got kinky with?” Zandy asks, and again that word kinky, like it’s just a word and not a rebuke. Not something I’ve tortured myself with in the years since Rosie left me.
“She was.”
Zandy runs her hand in lazy circles over the muscles of my chest, playing slowly over the lean ridges of my abs. It feels impossibly nice. “Did she like it? The kinky stuff?”
“At first,” I say, and the words leave me heavily. “At first. It was new to me—all of it was new. I was only just realizing what I liked and what I needed, and I think it became too real in the end.”
“Because you were her professor?”
“I wasn’t her professor,” I reply. “She was mine.”
Zandy’s fingers still on my skin, and I can tell I’ve surprised her. “She was?”
“We met as I was studying for my PhD. I’d like to say that we restrained ourselves until such a time when a liaison was ethical, but that would be a lie.”
“You wouldn’t be the first couple to start that way,” Zandy says, and it warms me a little bit to see this young thing trying to comfort me. “So were the roles reversed? Did she do the spanking?”
There’s a hint of a tease in her voice, and I give her a mock-stern tweak to the chin. “I always do the spanking, Miss Lynch. And I think the reversal of our power dynamic in the classroom is what excited her at first. For her, it was novel. To me, it became necessary.”
I find that I miss Zandy’s hand moving over my skin, and I wish she’d keep stroking me as I talked. Even with her, the first person I’ve felt a desire to open up to in years, it’s not an easy story to tell. “We had about a year together. And then she got pregnant.”
Zandy stiffens in my arms. “You have a child?”
“Miss Lynch, listen when your professor is talking.” It’s the closest I’ve come to a joke around her, and the answering smile on her face is worth everything. I resolve to do and say whatever I have to in order to make her smile more often.
“I was dazed when she told first told me she was pregnant,” I continue. “Too dazed to be either elated or terrified, I think, but I offered her everything I could. I offered all of my support. I offered to quit my PhD program or transfer to another university so that I could marry her. I was ready to give up any part of my life I had to in order to make it work.”
“And what did she say?”
“That she wanted a paternity test,” I say, and in my mind, I can still see us arguing in that dimly lit flat, the rain pouring outside and the blank expression on Rosie’s face.
“What?” Zandy asks.
“The baby wasn’t mine,” I explain.
