A Dance for Him (8 page)

“Touch yourself,” I suddenly hear him say, his voice hoarse and urgent in a way that I’ve never heard before. “I want to see you touch yourself.”

I’m only too happy to oblige, given that I’m maddeningly horny at this point, and I get on my knees, supporting myself with a hand on his thigh.

A wonderfully muscular thigh …

It’s incredibly exciting knowing that he has an even better view of my naughtiest parts now, and it seems like the perfect time to pull aside my g-string and slide a finger into myself. I’m so wet it sounds positively obscene - not that the moan that escapes my lips is any less so!

I play with myself for a bit before I turn round and look at him.

He’s
very
flushed, and he’s handling his cock as he’s staring at me and my crotch with a strangely focused expression …

God, he’s so hot. Even though we’re not touching at the moment I can feel the body heat emanating off him … The sexual tension in the room is palpable.

The room smells of sex in any case, given that my juices are flowing down my inner thighs, now that my cleft’s no longer covered by that skimpy shred of satin …

I redouble my efforts as I think about what it would be like if he were to grab me and fuck me senseless, and it doesn’t take me long before I come, in a trembling, wet, pleasurable mess.

He
comes too, as I do, and as I hear him grunt I feel more than one spurt of his seed hit my ass cheeks.

Sebastian Morland’s seed …

I turn around and smile at him as I return to his lap.

“I hope you liked that, Dr. Morland,” I murmur in my sweetest voice - I’m feeling tender,
very
tender towards him, and given what happened last Saturday I don’t think it’s unreasonable to hope for round two, especially since he’s still semi-hard at the moment.

For all I know, at the rate we’re going, I might actually lose my virginity tonight …

But he doesn’t quite respond the way I’d hoped.

He does smile, but it’s a tight little smile, no longer what it was when he was beaming at me earlier, and there’s a new tension in the air, by which I don’t mean the good, sexual variety.

“Thank you, Ms. Lytton,” he says, back in polite mode. “That was quite lovely. Would you like a cup of coffee before you go?”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

She’s looking at me, aghast, before she blushes furiously and springs from my lap as though it were scalding her.

“Thank you, Dr. Morland, that won’t be necessary,” she says, her voice so measured that it’s obvious she’s trying to hide her agitation.

Fuck.

“Ms. Lytton - Paige -”

“Do you mind if I change in your bathroom?” she interpolates, before I can say anything else.

“Please go ahead,” I reply.

“Thanks,” she says curtly as she grabs the bag she brought with her and makes off for the bathroom.

Fuck!

I’ve clearly offended her. Which I most certainly didn’t mean to.

I mean, I could have let her stay, I suppose.

It’s just that, once I came and my mind cleared, I couldn’t help but feel that I was exploiting her.

It’s not exactly like I’ve never been aware of that aspect of the offer I made her, but up till now I was always able to rationalise everything. I was going to help her, protect her from the unwanted attentions of Caleb, keep her safe.

But under it all, this is really all about something quite different, isn’t it?

It’s about lust and obsession …
My
lust and obsession.

Does that make me any better than Caleb?

Well, I suppose I’m a bit more polite about it, and I do actually care about her a great deal, whereas he clearly doesn’t, but when all is said and done I also want to give her a good, hard fucking, make her scream my name and beg for my cock.

Is that
so
different, really?

I feel like I’m degrading her somehow …

I mean, it’s one thing to degrade a woman
for her pleasure
in a BDSM scene, and I’ve certainly never had trouble with that. But this isn’t a scene, it’s a financial transaction.

I’m basically paying my best student, whom I also illicitly desire, to get me off.

There’s something about that that just doesn’t seem right …

Ah, she’s just come out of the bathroom.

“Ms. Lytton, I-”

She looks at me, her expression withering in its distance, as is her body language - she’s heading straight for the door, keeping away from me as far as possible.

“Goodbye, Dr. Morland. See you in class. No, please don’t walk me out, I’m fine, thank you.”

And just like that, she’s slipped out. My adorable sylph. Fuck. My one ray of sunshine in academia.

Because I can’t say I ever
really
wanted particularly to teach. I mean, I get decent reviews, although half of them go on and on about my looks, which is tiresome and embarrassing to say the least …

That said, I don’t think I’m a bad teacher, quite on the contrary. But teaching was always something I just fell into - or rather was nudged into by dad, who was an academic through and through.

He was always a bit of an eccentric, more or less gave up his inheritance to do what he loved, which was teaching and writing about English literature - granddad wanted him to take over the family firm, but he wasn’t interested, though he’d have made far more that way.

I don’t think granddad ever quite forgave him for that, even though they eventually got back on speaking terms - he was bypassed in granddad’s will, though I was taken care of in a separate trust fund.

But he never cared about that sort of thing. Neither did mom, who was also a professor, albeit in the psychology department.

And so I grew up in academia, drifted into working on a PhD, during which years I wrote my novel as well.

Then I did what all of my classmates were doing, went to the MLA conference, sent out resumés, got offers from a couple of places.

Three days later I got an offer from an agent as well, and that was pretty much it for my writing career.

I hadn’t thought the book would be that big, and that instantaneous a success, but it was, and after that the creative writing department offered me a joint appointment as well.

Dad was overjoyed, I think he thought that that somehow legitimised my fiction writing, which I suspect has never seemed entirely respectable to him.

Such an irony, given his love of literature.

I suppose anything written after the guys who were big in the 1960s isn’t really literature for him any more, critics be damned … especially if it sells, like my book did, ha!

But I’ve always thought it says it all that I haven’t written anything substantial, just the occasional short story for the New Yorker, ever since I started teaching.

At least, not until I met her …

She was so charming. I have to admit I didn’t notice her the first day of class, except in a generalised way:
OK, so Paige Lytton is the little blonde, serious-looking, the only one of the girls who’s not making eyes at me. Excellent
.

Then she started answering questions in class, and it became obvious that unlike most of her peers she actually had a more than adequate grasp of the material, that she was someone who actually had
ideas
.

Good ideas, at that.

I started noticing her, saw how her eyes would shine when she was talking about something she cared about. She wasn’t just taking the class for a requirement, or just to gawk at me, she was actually interested in the books she was studying.

By the time she turned in her first assignment (so well-written, so original, so witty), I was utterly smitten.

Around that time she started showing up at office hours a lot, at first I was under the impression she wanted to talk about books with someone who would understand her, until she started returning my gaze with soft, wistful eyes, and not backing away when I moved closer.

God, the way we used to stare at each other in my office! … On more than one occasion I felt almost dazed when she left.

Dazed … and horny as hell.

Not that I expected anything could come of it, but it was great to fantasise about her. I felt a bit bad about it, but after all it’s not like I was actually doing anything.

And then I saw her in that club …

I’m definitely not accustomed to having my worlds collide with each other.

That’s true whether it’s my fantasy life and my real life, or for that matter my kinky preferences and “real life”.

I used to frequent BDSM clubs way back when I was in graduate school, and was actually quite popular as a dom. I then gave that all up when I started dating a classmate whom I was in love with, but who’d made it very clear from the start that she wasn’t kinky in the least.

Which I thought was fair enough.

The irony is, at the time, I think I might have been happy enough with her, even then. On the contrary, she was the one who dumped me for a guy who was more conventional. She felt safer with him, she told me - said that that way she need never worry about him feeling that she was inadequate, because she felt that in the long run I would have ended up resenting her.

I don’t know if that is necessarily true, but it was probably all for the best. I don’t think I’d now get involved with anyone unless they were on the same page as I was. The annoying thing is, I’ve stopped going to BDSM clubs, since the combination of well-known writer and college professor would make me perfect blackmail fodder. And poor old dad would never live that down, ha!

It certainly doesn’t help that these days I haven’t been able to think about anyone but the infinitely winsome Ms. Lytton …

Fuck.

CHAPTER TWELVE

It’s not till I get home that the entire impact of what happened hits me.

I’d been numb while I drove home, thinking that I just had to keep going, that I couldn’t feel, didn’t have time to feel, couldn’t afford to feel.

Then I tore up the stairs, staggered into the apartment, dropped all my stuff on the tatty old second-hand couch, and got myself a cup of coffee.

And
that
did it.

Would you like a cup of coffee before you go?
he asked me - I can still remember how he sounded when he said it, in that smooth, cultured baritone of his. So polite and correct as always. Irreproachable. And yet it was obvious he wanted me to leave.

I feel like I’ve failed, somehow, and that’s not something I’m particularly accustomed to.

There’s a part of me which keeps thinking: why did we have to run into each other at the club? And why did I have to say yes to this whole stupid idea?