Tempting (2 page)

M
onday morning
, class. I arrived early to guarantee a good seat. Front row, dead center, a pair of Maybach glasses hanging from the center of my shirt.

Students piled in, some still reeking of their weekend festivities: booze, sweat and smoke—of the legal and illegal variety. A classmate slid into the seat to my left, bringing with him a cloud of marijuana. He smiled at me, but I paid no attention, tapping the eraser side of my pencil on the blank paper in front of me. My eyes moved to the clock and back toward the door, waiting for Nathan to enter the room. I took in his clean white board, desk free of clutter, chair set perfectly center behind it.

My phone pinged and I pulled it from my pocket.

I
pursed my lips
. Celeste, my sister and Dad’s favorite. She was sixteen years my senior, and about ten steps ahead of me in caring one iota about my absentee father.

I
waited for her response
, expecting her to be her usual bitchy self when it came to the matter of our dear father, a man who abandoned his youngest child, a daughter born sixteen years after his last one.

I
powered off my phone
, feeling my blood bubbling just underneath the skin. It was no use; a powered-off phone wouldn’t stop Celeste’s barrage of messages. But it did turn off the echo of everything I’d done to disappoint her.

The guy next to me coughed, a wet sound, and I barely contained the distasteful curl of my lips as I leaned away. The seat on my right was quickly filled by a female student who, unlike her fellow peers, had actually given a shit about her appearance today. Her hair was smooth, shiny, reflecting the fluorescents like a mirror. Her makeup carefully applied, her clothing form fitting.

It was no surprise that Professor Easton had fans. After all, I was one. A big one. It was a running joke among the students that the shorter the skirt, the more likely for Dr. Easton to ignore you. He was known for being kind of a hard ass, expecting a lot from his students, not only in their classwork but in how they conducted themselves as well.

I pulled out the copy of
On Writing
by Stephen King that had been listed in the course syllabus as required text just before the door opened and the noise in the room silenced.

I didn’t lift my head, but I wanted to. I wanted to see if he recognized me. I was wearing jeans and a crisp white button-up blouse—both a departure from my outfit Friday night. But over the blouse I wore the leather jacket and capping my feet were fuck-me red heels. My hair was piled up in a bun. I looked like the Adele from class last week, nondescript apart from the leather, shoes and eyeglasses that cost more than my first car.

He placed something on the desk, and I raised my eyes just slightly to make out his movements. He flipped open the flap of his messenger bag, pulling items from it and placing them with such control on the desk. His hands moved quickly, but not nervously, as if he had rehearsed these movements a hundred times. When he turned around, I lifted my head and watched him scrawl something across the board.

There was a low murmur across the room as he wrote, the entire class paying attention to what he was writing.

I found myself admiring not just the way his slacks fell off his hips, but the power he had over all of our attention. He wasn’t a man to ask for attention; his very presence demanded it.

I closed my eyes briefly, as the flash of him thrusting above me, eyes piercing mine in the dark, infiltrated my concentration.

The sound of something vibrating across a desk interrupted my thoughts and my eyes popped open, glancing to the left.

All eyes were on the female student two rows back, five seats down, as she hurriedly snapped up her phone and nearly dropped it in her frantic attempts to silence it.

His voice was firm, strained. Goosebumps lit up my flesh when he spoke. “Do you need me to go over Student Responsibilities, Miss…?”

The girl’s face fell, her brunette curls accentuating her pallor. “Ashley. Ashley McInerney. And n-no,” she stammered.

“Apparently you do. Let me enlighten you.”

I touched the glasses hanging on the front of my shirt, feeling like they brought me closer to the man I’d fucked on Friday night, the opposite of the man in front of me.

“All students are expected to turn off their cell phones or set them on silent—not vibrate—during class. No laptop, cell phone, iPad, tablet, etc. use is permitted for the duration of class. This is a writing class. While your final assignments will be typed, you will not be doing any typing in my class.” Professor Easton walked around the room, slowly, completely sure of himself. “In my class you will be
learning
, as is your responsibility as my student. You are expected to conduct yourselves in an adult manner and if you are disruptive, you will be withdrawn.” He pinned Ashley with his gaze and she visibly shrunk deeper into her seat.

“Now, let’s begin.” He walked over to the whiteboard, slammed his palm under the words he’d written.

W
hy are you here
?

H
e turned his head
, eyes scanning the crowd. His eyes passed over me quickly without a trace of recognition. It was if he was just glazing over us, not really focused on any of us in particular.

He pushed away from the board and walked to one end of the room, his hands tucked into his fitted slacks.

“Why are you here?”

The student he asked looked around him, as if expecting the professor’s singular gaze to be focused on someone else.

“Uh…” The student shrugged. “I needed an elective.”

It was if all the air was sucked out of the room with his admission. Everyone sat still, waiting for the professor’s reaction.

He rocked back on his heels, tilted his head so he looked at the ceiling a moment. And then he brought his head down and pointed a finger at the student. “At least you’re honest.” He walked further down the line, pointed to another student. “What’s your why?”

Her answer came quicker, but her tone was less confident. “Because I want to be a writer.”

“No.” His answer was swift. “You don’t
want
to be a writer. You either are or you’re not. You don’t take my class and—” he held his hands, fingers balled into fists, in the air, “—POOF!” he opened his fists, “become a writer.” He shook his head and the girl visibly shrunk into her seat. “Why are you here?” he asked, moving down the line, steps closer to me.

“Because my parents think I can write.”

The professor paused with her answer. His eyes narrowed and he brought his finger to the bridge of his nose, made a slight movement. It was then that I realized what he was doing, something out of habit.

Pushing his glasses further up. Except he wasn’t wearing his glasses. Because they were hanging from my shirt.

Ten feet away. Four students away.

He continued asking people as he moved down, but their answers were dull echoes in the room because all I could think about was the fact that he was coming closer and closer.

The faintest scent of his aftershave hit me when he was two students away.

I took a quiet breath in, inhaling his scent and the memories that came from it. And then I lifted my head just as the slacks came into my view.

I stared up at him and watched as his face changed. From indifference to confusion to awareness, he stared at me for a beat longer than he’d stared at any of the other students.

He turned his head to the left, giving me a view of his chiseled jaw and I watched as he clenched his teeth, the muscles around his mouth shifting, seemingly composing himself. His profile was strong, sturdy, and when his eyes turned back to mine they were devoid of everything.

“Why am I here, Professor Easton?” I prompted, my voice soft. My hand came up to the glasses hanging in my shirt and I watched his eyes follow the movement. One eyebrow lifted in reaction and he flicked his eyes to mine again.

“For you, of course.” My words were breathy and seemed to hold him still in my grasp.

Leaning back in my chair, I tilted my head and said at a regular volume, “I heard you’re a good teacher.” My lips curved slightly, a wry smile beckoning. His eyes were twin storms of several kinds of frustration and I lifted my shoulders a half inch, the picture of nonchalance.

The voices around us were murmured, no doubt people assuming I was just another desperate Professor Easton fangirl, eager for whatever sprinkles of attention he’d bestow upon me. He backed away, turned toward the board, erased the question and began the class as if nothing had been exchanged between us.

But I caught him, more than once, glancing at me, to the glasses hooked on my shirt.

A
lmost four years
had passed like it was ten times that long. That’s the thing about death—you start measuring your days in a way you’d never done before. Like the fact that the first Tuesday of every October was when she and I would go to the farmer’s market and pick out pumpkins and those stupid fucking little gourds she liked to decorate the house with. But now, the first Tuesday of every October just made me want to punch something. I’d done it for three years when it came around, and I was slowly counting down the days until the fourth time it rolled past my calendar. Just one more day that got covered in a thick black x when it dragged to a close. The sluggish passing of time that never bothered me, because it was all I deserved.

Until last week. I’d kept myself out of trouble. I’d refrained from any sort of empty release for almost that long, because if my wife couldn’t be around to breathe the same oxygen as me, then I shouldn’t be able to indulge myself in anything that might make me happy. Might make me forget.

But walking down the hallway of a bar that I didn’t really want to be at,
she’d
ran into me, knocked into me with the subtlety of a rabid nuclear bomb, with her skintight black pants and fake black leather jacket and smirking lips made to drive a man down to his knees. The lips that I had no intention of ever seeing again. Because all I’d needed from her was the perfect moment of oblivion she’d given me; the way she’d let me use her and debase her and bruise her was exactly how I should have introduced my sorely neglected cock after so long of a celibacy.

Never, not in a million years, had I expected to look up and see her. Maybe she’d always been hiding in the rows of blank faces that pretended to pay attention to me. Oh, the female students paid attention to me, they always had. Even when I’d had the bright gold ring wrapped around the third finger on my left hand. That had never mattered to them. But I took it off about a year ago, and the attention hadn’t wavered in the slightest, like they hadn’t noticed it in the first place. And at no point had any of them tempted me.

Not when Ashley McInerney, the nitwit who could never manage to turn off her phone, had offered to blow me under my desk in order to get a passing grade; or when Bridgett whatever-her-name-was leaned over and shoved her admittedly excellent cleavage in my face under the guise of handing me her essay. It hadn’t been the cleavage that clued me in her to offer. It had been the handwritten note slipped between the second and third pages with her phone number and the days her daddy would be out of town on it.

None of them, not even the other four who’d practically laid themselves out on my desk, had given me even the slightest hesitation in kicking them out into the empty hallway. None of them had been worth losing my job over, or worse, desecrating the memory of Diana.

But she,
Add
, if that was even her real name, stared back at me in a room full of people who had no clue that I knew exactly how her pussy tasted and how it clamped down like a vice when she came. That she liked a touch of pain with her pleasure, just like I did. And the worst part was that I couldn’t break her stare, like she’d shackled my eyes to hers so that they couldn’t stay away from hers for more than a few moments.

The rest of class, I don’t even know what the hell I talked about, but nobody was giving me strange looks, so it must have made sense to them. When I told them to read a chapter from the King book and paraphrase it in a way that made sense with whatever work they had in progress, I went to my desk and sat, making sure my eyes stayed far, far away from that middle seat. But without lifting my gaze, I could see her foot swinging at an even tempo.

Her shoes looked like torture devices, starkly incongruous from the sedate clothing she wore, the bright red spiked heel making a slow arc in the air as she kicked her foot back and forth, never breaking rhythm. I opened the flap of my messenger and pulled out the folder for this class, Creative Writing 201—Fall Semester 2015, and flipped to the student roster, following my pointer finger down the large list.

What a fucking idiot, like she told you her real name.

I ignored that sly, mocking voice in my own head and filtered through the names. Only a few were close, Adriane Whitfield, Adele Morello and Addison Brooks, though I’d met Addison once before, so I could rule her out. Filtering out the sounds of pages turning, pens scratching on paper and the occasional cough or whisper, I ran my finger over both names like it would somehow answer the question for me. Like the black ink on the white paper gave any clues as to which one had the same clawing hands and silk-soft skin and perfect tits, the way the right one had a ruby barbell piercing on it that I flicked with my tongue until she was keening beneath me.

Damn it, damn it, damn it.
I rubbed my forehead, banishing those memories to the far recesses of my mind.

She didn’t seem like an Adriane Whitfield; that sounded too preppy, like a girl who was highly unlikely to sleep with her teacher. Giving the paper one last glance, I snapped my eyes up and she was looking straight at me, those moss green eyes lasered onto me in a way that tightened the skin on my scalp and damn it all to hell, made my cock twitch. Breaking her stare, I looked around to make sure nobody else was looking, and they weren’t, thank God.

“Okay, class. Anyone want to tell me what they can apply to their work in progress from the chapter you just read?”

A few hands shot up, the same four that always did when I asked for volunteers, and I nodded my chin at the guy to my left, nodding when he mentioned something fairly insightful. With my mind only half paying attention to what a couple other people said, I looked down at my watch. Only five minutes left, and with her eyes burning through the skin on the side of my face, I dismissed the class.

In my peripheral vision, I saw her slowly stand, making precisely drawn out movements to put her notebook back into a black leather messenger bag.

“Miss Morello?” I said, holding my breath while I waited to see if I’d guessed correctly. She turned toward me, all polite expression on her face, but her eyes glowed with visible triumph. Then she pulled my glasses from where they hung on her shirt, biting one end so that the brown arm disappeared between her bee-stung lips, and walked toward me.

When she approached my desk, I leaned back in my chair, and gave a pointed look at the glasses. Slowly pulling the tip from her mouth, Adele smirked when she tossed them onto a stack of papers. “Yes, Professor Easton?”

Her voice. It was different today than it had been last weekend when she moaned and gasped into my ear.

“Do you have a few moments after this to speak with me in my office?”

“Why? Have I been a bad girl?” she whispered, then slicked her tongue over her bottom lip.

“Knock it off,” I said just loud enough for her to hear me, keeping my face perfectly pleasant in case anyone was looking in my direction. It didn’t really matter, the room had all but emptied out. Nobody stayed late unless they needed to talk to me.

Adele leaned a hip against the corner of my desk and rolled her eyes at me. “I’m just kidding,
Nathan
. And yes, I have time after this. I have a free hour after your class before my next one.”

“You call me that again in this classroom, and I will kick your ass out without a second thought. Is that something I’m going to need to do?”

Surprisingly she straightened, shaking her head. “No. That won’t be necessary.”

“Good. Meet me in my office in ten minutes. Do you know where it is?”

The smile that curved her lips made something sink in my stomach.

“Of course I do.”

Of course she did. I stood, all but dismissing her with the completely unamused look I gave her. It just made her smile grow.

“Ten minutes, Miss Morello.”

“Yes, Professor Easton,” she whispered and gave me a mock salute with two black polish-covered fingers. Adele sauntered away from my desk. Such a cliché word, such a trite description for the way she moved, loose-limbed and long-legged, her hips pivoting to the side with each movement.

Well shit. Now what the fuck was I going to do?