Teach Me by Lola Darling

wanted.
    I
shiver. Focus. I
log onto my laptop and refresh my inbox.
    1
new message from J. Kingston.
    My
heart leaps into my throat, threatens to choke off my air supply. A
Request, says the
subject line. Cryptic, much?
    Is
this about our meeting just now? Is he going to ask me to stay away
from him? To drop the class? Maybe I should. Maybe it would be easier
on both of us.
    Or
is it the opposite kind of request?
    Visions
of the so-not-appropriate variety dance through my head. I envision
everything this email could say. Harper,
meet me in my office in ten minutes. Wear a shorter skirt this time.
    Harper,
I can’t
stop thinking about how good you taste.
    Harper,
I made you come harder than you ever have before, and in public, no
less. Care to get on your knees and return the favor?
    Unfortunately,
the moment I click open the message, I realize it’s
not that kind of email. For one thing, he’s
CCed our entire poetry class.
    I
trust you are all hard at work on your Heaney essays, he
starts, with no preamble. Straight to the point. I’d
like it, if it wasn’t
so presumptuous. He only gave us the assignment this morning, and
it’s ten o’clock
at night now. We’re
not allowed to have other classwork? Or sleep?
    I
reign in my annoyance and keep reading.
    When
you submit them, do so in print and leave off any identifying
information. You may turn them in at my office mail slot. The due
date hasn’t
changed—5PM
on Wednesday.
    See
you all next Monday.
    He
didn’t sign the
email, either. It reads like he wrote it hastily, though I can’t
imagine why. Paper submissions? Maybe he’s
just old school. I still have a couple professors back home who ask
for all our assignments printed out, though they’re
usually a lot older than Jack— Professor
Kingston —seems
to be. He’s got to
be thirty, max. Maybe even younger. It’s
hard to see past the chiseled jaw and two-day stubble enough to tell.
    But
why the anonymous thing? That seems weird. Doesn’t
he need to know who wrote which essays in order to grade us?
    Unless . . .
    I
bite down hard on my lip, suppress a sudden smile.
    Unless
he doesn’t
trust himself to pick the best essay. Unless
he’s worried he’d
be tempted to select—or
not select—a certain
student for reasons other than her academic ability.
    But
which one is it? Based on the way he ran from me just now, I’m
leaning toward the latter. He wants to not choose me, to keep me as
far away from him as possible so he can forget that last night ever
happened.
    But
maybe not. There’s a
chance, however small, that he’s
tempted, too. That he remembers our lips molding together, a perfect
match, our bodies hot against one another’s,
with the same burn of lust that I do.
    If
I can make him feel like that with my body, then surely I can win
over his mind, too.
    Just
like that, finally, the perfect essay topic pops into my mind. I
close my inbox, open a new document, and start to write.

 

Jack
     
    Monday
comes simultaneously too fast and not fast enough. I holed up for the
weekend, after my last graduate seminar ended Friday morning, and
tried my damnedest not to think about Harper Reed. Not to think about
the irresistible way her mouth forms this little moue when she’s
distressed. Not to think about how that mouth, which felt so hot
against mine in the confessional, would feel if I buried myself in
it. I try not to think about her firm arse, either, or the sweet,
sharp taste of her pussy as I tongued her senseless. She clenched so
hard when she came, I can only imagine what it would feel like to be
inside her for that moment.
    Okay,
so not thinking about her doesn’t
work so well. At least in between taking more than my fair share of
showers and getting my hand exercise in, I have plenty of work to
distract me. I busy myself speed-reading the Heaney essays.
    Some
of the forty-seven submissions were easy to weed out. Honestly, how
did some of these people make it to third year of uni at Oxford