The Professor (10 page)

Something is different after that. Not hugely so – he refuses to let me return the favour, and makes me go in the bathroom while he changes his clothes. But he also makes no comment when I emerge in only a towel, and seems generally more relaxed. He hasn’t even put shoes on. I can see his socks, which probably shouldn’t seem strange and new considering he spent most of the morning eating me out.

But there it is all the same.

And when he speaks, the first thing he goes with is this:

‘Well, I suppose we should probably have a conversation. I mean aside from the thoroughly rewarding conversations I keep having with your cunt.’

He even raises one eyebrow in what can only be described as a salacious manner. Dry, and sharp, but definitely salacious. Plus there is that word ‘rewarding’. Oh, that pretty much makes my knees stop functioning. I have to sit down on the bed before I can get anything further out – though when the words come they are good ones.

‘I don’t know. I like the conversations you have with my cunt.’

‘Yes, but they don’t really address some of the questions I have.’

‘So maybe just tell me what they are.’

‘The fact that you are here might be a start.’

‘There is this thing called the Internet. You press buttons on it and it helps you go inside magical flying contraptions. Then they take you to other countries. Either that or a wizard did it. You choose.’

‘I choose you being your usual insufferable self.’

‘I thought you found me amazing and magical.’

‘Unfortunately for me you are both those things too.’

He sighs theatrically, and rolls his eyes.

But when he speaks again his voice is queerly brittle.

‘I can scarcely believe you came all of this way for me.’

‘You say that like it was super hard.’

‘It should have been. I went silent without so much as an explanation.’

‘Did you really think I needed one? That I had no idea why you stopped replying?’

‘Most people have no idea why I do anything at any point, even
with
explanations.’

‘Most people are just not trying hard enough.’

‘That makes them wise, dear one. I can assure you the effort it takes is not worth the meagre reward you shall now find yourself barely enjoying.’

‘I think when you make a mess like that all over someone’s face it would be pretty churlish to describe the enjoyment with the word “barely”.’

He waves one hand, half-flourish, half-dismissal.

‘That was almost entirely an accident.’

‘I see. You tripped and fell face first into my vagina.’

‘Can I get away with saying yes?’

‘You could have done when I first got here. And maybe after you hid in the bathroom for what felt like a thousand years. But definitely not after groping my pussy and making me come all over your face.’

‘That is outrageous – I hardly groped your pussy.’

‘No? Then what did you do?’

‘I briefly brushed you in that general area.’ He pauses then. As though considering how to make a bald-faced lie more plausible – or at least how to offer a better explanation. Sadly, he fails. ‘And, I will have you know, I did it purely to aid you in your rather desultory efforts at masturbation.’

‘I was trying not to wake you. Or make you think I’m a sex maniac.’

‘Our first conversation was about the sex story you had written. You write the filthiest letters and give the hungriest kisses. The ship has sailed. The jig is up. The words “I am easily excited and even easier to get off” are now firmly established in your biography.’

‘I wouldn’t say I was easy to get off.’

‘Really? Under thirty seconds seems a long time to you?’

‘No. But the time it usually takes is. With one guy it took around six months.’

‘I see. I can only assume he had some sort of issue finding really obvious things with his hands and mouth.’

‘I think it’s more that you are just really good at finding things with your hands and mouth. Like insanely good. Frighteningly good, considering I kind of thought you lived like some sort of angry monk.’

‘I would have thought my replies to you had dispelled any such notion.’

‘Yeah, but then the silence and the bathroom thing brought it right back.’

He goes quiet for a long time after that. So long in fact that I start to wonder if the conversation is over. Something outside the window seems to have caught his eye, and it keeps it there. Even when I shift a little closer to him, he keeps it there.

Though that just makes his next words more startling.

‘My issue has never been that I could not relate or express myself sexually to another person – my issue is that my time spent with them was bereft of affection or feeling. And I tell you this, Hetty, because I have no desire to experience that with you. There is a trembling thread between us, thin and fine and fragile, yet still visible to me. And I wish to strengthen it, not destroy it with some tawdry affair we might both come to regret. I do not want to be a Russian novel with you. I wish to have all the other things.’

‘I wish for that too. Though you might have to tell me what the other things are.’

‘Oh, you know, the sort that everyone partakes of. The sort that normal people do all the time without really thinking about it, and always take for granted.’

I wonder then if what he is looking at down on the street below is just that – normal people doing the things they always take for granted. A couple holding hands or a girl leaning on some guy as they make their way home. He might put his arm around her, the move so tender it tugs at him.

I want him to tell me how it tugs at him.

‘Not being that normal, I’m struggling to see what you mean.’

‘Honestly, must you make me say it out loud?’

‘I think I must.’

‘Even if I struggle to know too?’

‘I don’t think you struggle at all. I think you just hate seeming soft-hearted.’

‘On the contrary, I adore seeming soft-hearted. I am simply singularly bad at it. My every effort at any sort of tender behaviour has always appeared awkward, and I know it.’

‘Your letters didn’t seem awkward.’

‘Letters are different. I might think of what I wish to express before I blunder into some ill-thought-out sentiment, most typically spoken in a voice like a haunted mausoleum.’

‘What do you think you said to me that was wrong?’

‘Everything. All of it. Surely you knew that. Surely you know by now. I tell you that you are foolish, that you should go; I turn as silent as the grave and still my intention was to say something else altogether. I always intend to say something else altogether.’

‘Tell me what the altogether is now, then.’

I say the words half-jokingly, expecting nothing at all. He did just tell me that he has trouble expressing his feelings, after all. In fact I think he just told me that he’s never been affectionate with anyone, aside from me. So anything I have been given, everything he does give me, is nothing short of a miracle. I think of his letters and marvel at their rich romanticism, instead of wondering what he will say now. Fondness would be fine here. Mild friendliness would be acceptable.

I’m not prepared for what he finally offers.

‘You must know, dearest. You must know I love you, by now,’ he says. 

And not even in a weary way. In a passionate, heartfelt way that leaves me breathless. I go to speak, and fail at least three times. All that comes out of me is air, and when I finally do force words out they are hoarse with feeling and faint with the effort of getting it out.

‘I think you expressed that pretty well.’

‘Yes, I did rather. Always thought I would pronounce the word wrong, but it sounded almost exactly like it usually does when everyone else says it.’

‘You could have probably hit the L a little harder.’

‘Yes, it caught a little on the way out.’

‘Maybe go easy on the “dearest”.’

‘I do tend to overuse the word.’

‘And also try not to believe me when I make jokes about something that amazing. You should know by now that my only real answer is: I love you too.’

‘Well, I could hardly take such a thing for granted. And even if I were to I still find you exceedingly wrongheaded for ever entertaining such feelings towards me. One would think I were handsome and young and emotionally available,’ he says, and clearly puts every effort into seeming blasé about it.

But the thing is, I can hear something else underneath. I can see it, before he glances away and rests his chin on his fist. His knuckles partially cover his lips, yet I catch a glimpse of them turning up at the corners anyway. I know that that spark in his eyes is delight that I returned the feeling. That he somehow got away with saying it, without it having terrible consequences.

‘You just confessed your love for me while sitting there looking like a Greek god who mysteriously has a penchant for tweed. I think we can safely put to bed the idea that you are distant and hideous.’

‘Oh, really now, Greek god? At least give me something believable to work with.’

‘Practically every statue of a Greek god that I’ve ever seen has your exact features. You’re just missing the disconcertingly wide face and curly hair.’

I see him stop, realisation dawning on his face.

It’s almost as brilliant as the delight, truth be told.

‘Well, be that as it may –’

‘You could just say, “Hetty, well done, that is an excellent point.”’

‘No. I refuse. I am very invested in this self-image and have no desire to let it go. Besides, if you were honestly such an expert you would not think so little of yourself.’

‘I don’t have heavy-lidded eyes the colour of an ocean at the end of the world. Or a brow so expressive it could probably take to the London stage. Or a cleft in my chin that looks like someone kissed you there too long and left a little imprint,’ I say, and immediately want to take it back. I can see him straightening in his chair, and I know, I know, I know he’s going to go hard.

I just don’t realise
how
hard.

‘Yes, but you
do
regularly look at me with that gaze as black and bright as midnight and make me want to throw away every bit of restraint I spent my life carefully cultivating. There are no lips I have longed more to kiss; no hair so wild and dark that I see it in my dreams. Whatever you might say about how I look, you are lovelier. I see worlds in your face, and spend nearly all of my time desperately wanting to go to them.’

I don’t know what to say after that.

Though I certainly don’t intend to blurt out this:

‘What are you waiting for, then? Come to me. Come and fuck me.’

‘I would, but I
just
finished telling you that I wish us to be something more than sex.’

‘We can be. We can do those things. As soon as you figure out how to describe them.’

‘I can describe them. I am simply aware that they sound poor and plain and strange. Like a man who has never seen an elephant attempting to articulate what one looks like.’

‘That actually seems like it’s going to be amazing. I insist you try.’

He sits back in his chair then, in a way that suggests he’s going to take his time coming up with something. He’s going to look at me and consider fully and finally dole out a measured plan. Only he doesn’t. He doesn’t wait at all. He speaks after maybe ten seconds, as though he always had it there inside him. He was just waiting for the courage or the permission, and now he has it he can tell me.

In the sort of voice people use to describe some lovely, far-off place.

‘When I see myself together with you, when I allow myself to fully picture it, the things I see are not typically sexual in nature. More commonly I am accosted by an image of us walking together – we are always walking together, and perhaps it is raining. Perhaps we stop beneath the awning of a shop that sells beautiful cakes, and you turn your lovely face up to mine, and look at me with the same eyes I see gazing at me now. They are full of mischief and tenderness together, as though I mean something as wonderful to you as you do to me. And then you take my hand, in a way no other person has. And I let you, in a way I have never let anyone before. And for the first time in my long and very tiring life, I know that I am at peace.’

I am crying by the time he finishes, though I don’t mean to be. It seems weird to be so upset over something said so calmly, so matter-of-factly. Yet still it remains: my face is wet when he’s done. And my voice when I answer is wavering with emotion. ‘What sort of life have you led that you think that is so ridiculous?’ I ask him.

And he replies with the best possible response I could imagine.

‘I think, my dearest love, that it is a life very similar to your own.’

I expect it to be easy to give him what he most wanted. Partly because it sounds like such a small and slight thing; mostly because the idea itself is pleasurable to me too. I want to go for walks with him. I want to stand outside the shop with fancy cakes in the window, and especially in a country I’ve never been to. All the streets are cobbled and narrow and every third shop is full of chocolate and there are buildings everywhere from fantasy worlds I thought didn’t exist.

But then he quite suddenly takes my hand, and I realise the problem immediately.

I find it just as exciting as his face between my legs. More so, in fact, because he does it in front of other people. I keep expecting someone to stop us, or look on disapprovingly, and when they don’t my heart still refuses to calm down. His fingers feel too enormous around mine. He clasps me too firmly, as if he wants to commit to it as hard as he can.

And he holds on for so long.

Hours, it seems like. He doesn’t even let go when he takes me to a museum. We wander around looking at art, still attached at the hands. By the time we get to an enormous impressionistic painting of a nude couple, my body is the same temperature as the sun. I am sure I must be glowing, and of course it only gets worse standing in front of so much bare, blurry flesh. The whole thing seems to roll and writhe in front of my eyes, so sensuous I start to feel a little faint. I think of asking him how long we have to be purely affectionate for, despite how ridiculous I know that is.

We’ve only been doing this for a day. I should be able to last better than this.

I can last better than this.

I can be patient.

Until I glance up at him and he glances down at me and I see that he’s leaning towards me. I see him coming, as slow and hesitant as someone who has no idea what the answer will be to his question, but is asking it anyway. And I want to tell him to stop, I do. I want to warn him what will happen if he does this. But when I go to do it, nothing comes out. The words cling to the insides of my throat. By the time I manage to shake them loose he is already touching his mouth to mine.

After which there is not really much I can do. His lips are as soft and pliant as I remember. My head is full of words like ‘love’ and ‘hands’ and ‘paintings’ and more ‘love’. The outcome was inevitable: he kisses me, and I try to merge my body with his.

Though I manage to do it slowly, at least. I don’t grab him straightaway with both hands, or stick my tongue down his throat. I put one hand on his shoulder – and only to keep myself steady. He has to stoop quite a long way to kiss me, and even then I have to stand on tiptoe. It’s not an easy thing to achieve.

It requires holding. 

And then the holding becomes grasping.

And the grasping becomes more of a two-handed sort of thing.

And suddenly my two hands are bunching his collar in my fists and my mouth is really open against his and the rubbing thing is starting to happen again. I mean, I’m not humping his leg exactly. But I’m also not far off. My chest is definitely pressed hard against his. I don’t know when my arm went around his neck, but I know it’s there.

I might even be dragging him down a little – an idea that helps me get myself under a little more control. I try to kiss him with less of my mouth. My hand loosens on his collar. I even allow him to breathe for a second, in between kisses. 

Though that turns out to be a bad idea. I expect it to cool things down, you see. I imagine him grateful for my efforts at restraint, my willingness to control myself so we can be the normal people he always dreamed about. But then I see his expression, and wonder for the first time if he really wants to be those normal people. His eyes have lost almost all of that glacial quality they once had. More than that, in fact.

They are the eyes of an animal, wild and unchecked. They are the eyes of the beast he fears to be, and they turn my insides to syrup. A thick pulse immediately starts up between my legs – and that’s before he kisses me again. Oh, God, how he kisses me again. He does it once, softly, so softly.

And then as he pulls back he just licks over my lips.

As though he wanted me to know just how much he needed a taste, how little control he has left, how close he is to doing the lewdest stuff. This time it’s
him
who does the inappropriate things, and they don’t stop with that filthy little lick. He has his hand on my arse, I know he does. He makes it very clear to me when he squeezes it with one big hand. Hard enough to make my heart jolt into my mouth.

Greedy enough that I feel my clit swell and my nipples stiffen. Though I can hardly fault them for it – the way he goes about it is beyond anything anyone could reasonably take. He does it almost curiously, as though he’s never touched a woman like this before. As though it never occurred to him before now that he could, and the discovery makes him a little crazy.

It means he gropes my arse in a public place, thoroughly and explicitly. And then once he has had his fill of me there, he goes even further. He goes so far I think about asking him who he is, and probably would if I could speak. But after he cups one of my breasts I really struggle to say anything at all.

Especially as he does it underneath my T-shirt.

Skin brushes skin, those thick fingers briefly teasing my nipple before moving on. Though they don’t move very far. They just slide over to the other one and toy with that too, while I try to work up the will to check that we are still alone.
Someone must be about to come in and find us
, I shout at myself, but it doesn’t make the blindest bit of difference. If anything it just thickens my blood. It forces my breath to come heavy and fast. And it makes me do something I would never have dared before.

I wait until he seems confident that this is all we are going to do. That I’m just going to stand here and let him pleasure me again, while he goes without. Then I simply reach down and rub over the thing he seems to believe I am unaware of. As though his gigantic erection is half the size and completely invisible, instead of this great heavy thing pushing very obviously against the front of his trousers. In fact it’s so obvious I barely have to touch to get a complete feel of it. I brush my fingers over the uppermost part, and actually make out the ridge around the head.

Much to his utter and complete dismay. Honestly, I’ve never seen anyone go from lascivious to horrified in so short a time. His heavy-lidded eyes go wide. An outraged breath chuffs out of him. And of course his hand comes down over my wrist.

‘No, Hetty,’ he says.

But I have an excellent answer for it.

‘That seems like rather a double standard.’

‘How do you mean? What are you saying?’

God, his tone is so clipped. So strained.

It makes my stomach flip.

‘Well, you are apparently allowed to fondle me in a public place. But I’m not allowed to fondle you. In fact, it’s starting to feel like I’m not allowed to fondle you at all.’

‘There was no fondling. Don’t use that word “fondle”.’

‘Why on earth not?’

‘Because it sounds –’

‘Like you want it?’

His eyes roll up to the heavens.

But he admits it, from between gritted teeth.

‘Yes. All right, yes.’

‘You’re as hard as stone.’

‘That’s not a reason to just give in.’

‘Even though you clearly liked me saying all that.’

‘Of course I like you saying all that. I like you doing all the things you’re doing. I like you being so unbearably turned on that you almost masturbate next to me and have to open a window to cool off and come so hard all over my face that I can still taste you hours later. But that’s not the point.’

‘It feels like the point.’

‘I wanted to go slowly, Hetty.’

‘And I was willing to, until you start kissing me and touching me and generally riling me up to such an extent that all I can think about is sucking your cock in the bathrooms here, until you come all over my face and tits in thick hot ribbons.’

His eyes search my face when I’m done, as though trying to impress on me how bad I have just been or see if I feel any regret. Or, at least, that is what I think he means.

But then he takes hold of my hand, and I realise.

I see it before he even says it, then thrill when he does.

‘Very well then. Come along,’ he tells me.

Before towing me to the nearest bathroom.

He checks no one is inside the ladies before going in – something that astonishes me enough on its own. But then there is the way he goes about, all brisk and businesslike. Every move he makes is far quicker than anything I’ve ever seen him do before. Usually he is deliberate, even slow. He plans things. He measures each gesture out, as though saving them up for a later date.

Here he is the opposite.

He all but pulls me in after him, and when the door swings oh, so slowly shut he puts an impatient hand on it. He slams it closed and holds it there for a second, before snapping the lock with one sharp twist of his hand. As though he hadn’t quite decided prior to sealing us in, but he has now. It’s why he takes a step towards me, too quick. And why he looks at me even more briskly than that, eyes obviously and nakedly trailing all over my body in a way he never let himself before.

Suddenly I can see that he likes my breasts, my hips. His gaze lingers there, almost lovingly – and maybe with a kind of relief. As if he knows he can now. He need not hold back or pretend. I want him to enjoy my body; I love that he enjoys it; it makes my breath come quicker and my heart flutter in my chest.

Though that might be down to the step he takes towards me. He was too fast before; now he’s much too slow. It doesn’t make me think of someone taking their time. It makes me think of a predator, stalking his prey. He turns his head to one side as if assessing me, and once he’s done he says five words that make me shiver: ‘Get on your knees then.’ Just like that, without any softening. No attempt at being polite, or asking my permission. He even starts unbuttoning his trousers.

Much to my great and utter delight. That shiver becomes a constant trembling at the sight of him doing this. And it gets more violent once I do as he says – quite possibly because he puts a hand on the side of my head. He pushes his fingers into my hair, half-stroking and half-doing something else.
Holding me there
, I think, then almost lose my mind. I never in a million years thought he’d really do it. And even if I entertained the notion, even if I thought he might, I expected hedging and tentative touching and my hands on his trousers. I thought I would be the one getting his cock out, near fumbling and obviously desperate for it.

But he is. He is the one.

His hand makes something close to a fist in my hair, tilting my head just ever so slightly up, so the angle is good. And then he just eases it out – the whole thick length of it – and rubs it over my lips. Tells me to open for him, in a tone so low and insistent it reverberates through my body. It makes my clit jerk and pulse and my cunt clench tightly around nothing, and that’s before he works his way into my mouth.

After that, I can barely think straight. Every inch of me feels feverish and flushed, and not just because I’m on my knees in a bathroom sucking Professor Halstrom’s cock. There is also the sheer sensation of him doing it to me. Of him rocking in and out of my willing mouth, slow at first but then less so. Or the sheer size of him, so solid and heavy I have to strain a little to take him. I have to open wide, and even then I can barely accept more than half.

He makes sure I don’t accept more than half. He keeps one hand around the base of it, as though he knows what I’ll do given half the chance. And he’s right to think so. The second he starts to falter a little, I push forward. I take him until I gag and he groans, and not just because it feels good to do it. I take him because I know one thrilling thing well.

He’s close to coming.

His whole body is shuddering with the effort of holding it off. When I swirl my tongue around the head he almost steps back – and probably would have done, if I didn’t have hold of his thigh. I grip it tight, tight, as I work on him, licking and lapping until his legs start to tremble. His breathing goes from harsh and fast to something guttural, something more like moans of pleasure, and when it does I redouble my efforts. I make my mouth sloppy and greedy on his cock, tongue flicking back and forth over the bursting slit at the tip, everything slippery wet with my spit and his precome.

And when that doesn’t seem like enough I push my hand inside my top. I push my top up, in fact. I let him see me teasing and toying with my sharp red nipples; I let him know that teasing and toying with them is not enough. I want to frig my clit as I suck him off – and I do, I do, I do. I stuff my hand inside my jeans in a way I know is much too lewd. I get that I’m pushing past some limit.

Yet somehow I don’t expect it to work.

I don’t imagine him suddenly telling me that he’s going to fill my mouth. But that’s what he does. In fact he goes further than that, so much further, oh, God, I never knew he could go as far as he does. He pulls away just far enough that I can see his hand moving on his cock, firm and fast and determined. And then just as he gets to breaking point, just as that fat, gleaming head swells between his working fingers, he tilts my head back again. He tells me, ‘Get ready to take it.’

Like some filthy fuckboy I once dated – only better, hotter, sweeter because it’s
him
saying that, it’s
him
doing it, it’s
him
jerking his thick prick until hot ribbons of come burst from the tip and over my tongue, my lips, even my tits. Oh, God, I think he actually aims for my tits, too. I think he wants to see that sticky liquid dripping from the tips of my breasts.

And it does. He all but covers me in it. By the time he leans back against the stall door, trembling and spent, I’m an absolute mess. A filthy, dirty, electrifying mess, of the sort that makes my body stutter and my clit jerk against my still working fingers. I feel the slipperiness sliding over one sensitive nipple, and taste it sharp and tangy on my tongue, and everything just starts to go.