Page 31 of Misadventures with a Professor
Every moment feels amplified, as if it’s under a jeweler’s glass, and every noise seems to quake through the room with geologic force. Even the burble of the river outside the open window is deafening. When I set down a handful of books and one drops on the floor, it’s as if I’ve knocked the house over.
The air between us thrums with unhappy electricity, and it takes all morning for me to get to a point where I think I might not cry. How can he be so cold? How can he be so cruel?
And how—how—after all that I’ve scolded myself, could I have still gotten attached? Gotten all happy and hopeful and…I don’t know…oxytocin-y?
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I make him lunch as usual, and he eats it blindly as usual, and I hate how I still crave something from him in this moment—a compliment or a grunt of approval or anything. I hate
how I still want to be his good girl. His teacher’s pet.
It’s after lunch that I find the note.
It’s in a pile of books under an ottoman, and despite the entire terrible morning, I can’t help but give a cluck of librarian censure when I find them. The books have been shoved under the ottoman so haphazardly that a few pages are bent up, and one of the leather-bound volumes has a permanent dent in the spine. With a sigh, I gather the neglected babies to my chest and carry them over to my desk, where I’ll catalog them for the database.
Which is when the note slips out.
I set the books on my desk and go back to retrieve it, painfully aware of how Oliver’s eyes are not on me, aware of how studiously he ignores me. It burns, that rebuffing, burns like I’m being dipped in scalding water, and I know I have the red cheeks and swollen, tender heart to prove it. I try to ignore him back, pretend I don’t care that the only man I’ve ever had sex with seems to hate me, and I scan over the piece of paper as I walk back to my desk.
Usually these loose bits of paper are receipts, if not from Oliver’s purchase, then a previous owner’s purchase from years back. Other times, it might be one of Oliver’s own notes—a quick scrawl about why he bought the book or a more detailed write-up outlining the contents.
But instead of Oliver’s messy, spiky hand, I see words in pretty and symmetrical loops, written in the kind of pen that leaves little flourishes at the end of every word.
Oliver,
You hardly ever remember the things you say in bed, but I do. I hope this is proof.
Your girl,
Rosie
My stomach twists, hiking itself up into my chest.
There’s no mistaking the subtext to that note. There’s no miscategorization. No shelving this on the wrong shelf. This Rosie, whoever she was, was Oliver’s lover.
Or is still his lover, a quiet voice warns me. How would you know?
There’s no date on the note, although it is the tiniest bit yellowed in one corner, which is to be expected if it’s been stuck in a decaying book for any length of time. There’s also no real way of telling which book the note fell out of, although I do notice that all the books from this pile deal with the subculture of Victorian erotica.
I flip through one of them and find my breath tangling around the twists in my stomach.
Lots of spanking in here. Lots of it. Drawings and photographs of women bent over, their petticoats all rucked up in heaps around their waists. Stories of wives and debutantes and schoolgirls getting disciplined, sometimes in very erotic circumstances and sometimes in simple morality tales.
What had Oliver told this Rosie in bed that prompted her to buy these things for him? Had he been talking about research as they nodded off toward sleep? Or had it been something more intimate? Did he play the same bedroom games with Rosie that he played with me?
Of course he did, that voice says. You think he just decided to spank a stranger without ever having done it before?
The whole thing—the professor and his good-girl game—is obviously Oliver’s kink, and I might have been a virgin until just a week ago, but I was a very well-read virgin, and even I know that kinks don’t just pop up overnight. Oliver must have done it with other women, which somehow nettles me more than thinking of him merely fucking another woman.
A bitter envy poisons my blood, and I walk over to his desk and drop the note onto the page he’s reading.
“I found this,” I say. “Looks important.”
It’s almost worth my own pain to see the flash of anguish in his eyes.
“Can I expect to find more things from Rosie?” I ask, too upset to care that I’ve finally succeeded in sounding very aloof and reserved right now. “Would you like me to set them aside or save them for you to look through?”
Oliver picks up the note, his jaw working to the side, his hands so still that he might be a statue of himself. Then he gives the note a vicious crumble and drops it in the small trash can by his desk. “Don’t bother,” he says shortly. “I don’t want to see them.”
