The Professor

CHARLOTTE STEIN

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright

Mischief

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London, SE1 9GF

www.mischiefbooks.com

An eBook Original 2015

Copyright © Charlotte Stein 2015

Cover design: Head Design 2017, cover images: Shutterstock.com

Charlotte Stein asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780007579501

Version: 2017-08-22

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Epilogue

About the Publisher

Chapter One

I know immediately that I’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake. I can tell before I search through my folder for the essay I should have handed in, and instead find it still in there like a protruding tongue. Though once I see it and know for sure, I still pretend I did something else. I probably dropped a different piece of work on his desk. I gave him the one I did on Romanticism for Professor Pacheco, I tell myself.

But that essay is still in the folder too.

The only thing that’s missing is the story.

The filthy, appalling story that no one should ever see, never mind Professor Halstrom. Why did it have to be Professor Halstrom? Everything would have been fine if I’d just given it to squat, flustered little Garwood, or the guy who teaches linguistics and looks like Rory McGrath. They might never have mentioned it at all.

But I know he will.

He never lets anything go. He once made the captain of the football team cry for failing to hand an essay in on time – or so the legend goes. And I believe the legend, because that is exactly how terrifying Halstrom seems. His gaze is as flat and still as the surface of an undiscovered lake, yet oddly penetrating with it. I always get the impression that he sees absolutely everything about you in one stroke, yet finds you so dull and disappointing he can’t quite muster any emotion in his eyes.

He just takes you in, then spits you out.

And that’s not even the most intimidating thing about him.

No, the most intimidating thing is his enormity.

Every other lecturer at Pembroke is normal sized. They all look like academics, from their hunched, narrow shoulders to their neat little shoes. Occasionally you’ll come across one with a pot belly or maybe an unnervingly large head. But none get anywhere close to Halstrom. He must be somewhere north of six foot five, despite how ridiculous that number sounds to me.

Every time I leave his lecture hall I think, No, he can’t be.

And then I return and see him towering over the tallest guy in the class. He’s talking to Ricky Callahan when I next slink in, and the disparity between them is shocking. It gives me a little jolt to realise that even a champion rower with a bull neck and a fondness for tight shirts looks small beside Halstrom.

But it remains true – and not just in terms of his height. His shoulders are so broad they nearly eclipse Ricky completely. When he turns to pick something up off his desk they strain the seams of his suit, and his chest does the same to his waistcoat. One day he will bend down too quickly and rip right out of all of that tweed.

Like a werewolf, I think, tearing off his human skin to reveal the man beneath.

Then quickly force myself to think about something else. Melissa Gorlinski is applying sticky red nail polish to her squat little nails, and I try to train all my attention on that. I watch the brush swishing back and forth – the strokes slow and steady at first but then with more impatience – and will myself to be hypnotised.

It doesn’t work, however. No matter how hard I try I keep imagining what he looked like when he opened what he thought was my essay. Did he blanch at the first ‘cock’? Or did he just raise one of those too thick and too dark eyebrows? I think it might be the latter, but doing so doesn’t help me in the slightest.

If anything it makes it worse. His brow is curiously mobile, for someone with a face like a slab of stone. In fact it often seems to say things that his eyes and mouth won’t. If someone answers him back in class, his eyebrows register the fury or the shock. They almost kiss in the middle of his forehead, in this oddly querulous way, while the rest of him maintains complete control.

I expect it was the same when he read that part about her wet and aching cunt. The one that makes the blood surge in my face whenever I remember it. Why did I have to be so graphic? It seemed a good idea at the time, in the fever I often get into while writing. But now it feels like the height of bad manners. He will say I did it deliberately, to try and get some sort of reaction from him.

Even though I’m not that kind of person at all. I never raise my hand in class, in case it turns out that I’m wrong. I rarely argue a contentious point in my essays, for fear that I’ll get an F instead of my usual B. Sometimes I see other students outside my bedroom window, glittering in gaudy costumes for some fancy-dress party that seems to be always going on, and I wonder how they dare. Don’t they care about being laughed at? Don’t they mind that they might fuck everything up?

I guess they don’t.

But I do. It’s why my body floods with relief when he tells us we may pick up our essays at the end of class. Somehow I’ve been spared, even though he never spares anyone. It was only a couple of weeks ago that he filleted Thomas Brubaker’s essay ‘Why Feminism Is Dumb’ for the edification of the entire class. He read out excerpts and licked his finger with a flourish before turning pages, teeth almost snapping around the most deliriously poisonous comments.

I even remember one of them now: ‘It seems Mr Brubaker labours under the misapprehension that women are put on this earth to wipe his arse for him. Would that he had done so himself with this essay, and spared us all the horror of having to hear a single ghastly word of it.’

Yet he lets me go without any punishment? It seems incredible, considering how much more appalling my story was. I never said feminism was dumb, but I did describe a penis in extensive detail. That to me seems ripe for his brand of brutal criticism, but when I pass his desk and pick up my essay he doesn’t even raise his head. He just keeps scratching out words in the leather-bound book he always carries around with him, as I file out with the rest of the class to my freedom.

Or at least, I think it’s my freedom.

I get as far as three quarters out of the door when I hear him say:

‘My office at five, Esther. Do not be late.’

His office is at the very top of the Haverforth building, which is a problem all by itself. I see it looming in the distance and almost turn back right then and there. On a good day it looks like the ruins of some haunted house, from a film where everyone dies at the end. But in the middle of this dark November day it seems at least ten times worse.

The whole front of it seems blacker, and more wasted, as though someone set it on fire not long ago and now only a husk remains. And though I could have sworn it had windows before, I cannot make a single one out. There is only blank, sooty stone and then more stone than that, until finally it gets to the crazily jagged roof that most resembles a set of demonic broken teeth.

And it gets no better inside.

His office is at the very top of a rickety, winding staircase – so rickety in fact that I worry that I might go through the wood every time I stand on one of the steps. I find myself watching my feet, but watching my feet hardly helps me at all. Now I can see the strange dusty darkness that is revealed whenever my weight parts one section of wood from the other, and none of that seems comforting.

I practically cling to the banisters for support, only the wrought iron is just as warped and unstable as everything else in here. At one point I could swear something bends, like toffee left out too long in the sun. Paint flakes off on my hands, as fine and papery as spider webs and just as disturbing. All of this is disturbing. I actually let out a sigh of relief when I get to the hallway at the top.

Even though it is barely a hallway at all.

It’s really more of a box, with a ceiling that slants so violently I have to wonder how Halstrom ever gets to his door. He must have to oil himself then squeeze through on his hands and knees – a ridiculous image I try to shake as soon as it enters my head. It makes me think weird things like I bet he’s really hairy under his clothes, and I just don’t want those thoughts to be there when he comes out.

I want to be cool, and calm, and proper. And I manage it, too. I sit on the single crumbling chair beneath the one window, hands folded neatly in my lap, expression completely neutral. Every inch of me perfectly tidy and carefully covered, so as to not give the wrong impression. And then the door abruptly opens, and all my efforts are reduced to dust. I might as well have worn stockings and suspenders. I should have painted my mouth red – after all, red is how it feels when I take him all in. I see his flat, still gaze and his broad shoulders and his enormous hands, and I finally understand.

He is handsome.

How did I not realise before that he was handsome? I suppose it hid behind the lugubrious features and the excessive tweed, but it announces itself now. It accosts me, viciously. I have to glance away because I can feel the colour rising to my cheeks – and not just because I enjoyed the look of him.

Because of what I’ve done.

I didn’t just hand in a filthy story to my Professor.

I handed it in to my deeply and unnervingly attractive Professor.

And now I have to speak to him about this somehow. I have to go into that tiny office and discuss penises at length and in great and varied detail, even though I can barely answer when he asks a simple question.

‘Was it your intention to sit out here all evening?’ he asks, and I just about manage to shake my head. How I stand I have no idea, and especially when I see what he intends. He doesn’t disappear inside to let me in. He stands there and holds the door, so that I have to almost go under his arm. My hip brushes some oddly electric part of him, the contact static-y and squirm-inducing.

And the scent of him…

It gets me right in the face, rich with what must be tobacco yet is sweet and oddly familiar at the same time. Like a place I used to go to or a person I used to know, I think – until I see his office. Then I understand why it means something to me. I get it completely.

It’s the smell of ink and paper. It’s all over him, like an animal who recently rolled in books. Though how could it be otherwise, when his office looks the way it does? Every available surface is covered in paperbacks and hardbacks and leather-bound classics. They flow like papery waterfalls off straining shelves and touch the ceiling in teetering stacks. Barely any light penetrates the tiny room, because what does get through has to squeeze between the spines of several dozen novels.

It’s like stepping into a book labyrinth.

One wrong turn and I’ll be lost for ever in literature.

A fate that sounds markedly better than the one I can expect here. He asks me to sit, but doing so is impossible. The only chair in here is the creaking, broad-backed old thing he takes, beneath the window. My options are the desk that runs all along the wall beside us, or a stack of books. At a pinch I could go out and get the chair from the hall, but doing so would pose another problem.

The only available space for it is about an inch from him. Our knees would probably touch if I managed to wedge it in there. Every time he moved I would feel him, and I can’t let that happen. I’m already sweating and red-faced. My limbs are watery and nothing is working right, and it gets worse every time I notice something new about him. Like his sideburns, too thick and too heavy and all amazing. And the scars that feather up from underneath his starched collar.

As though he really did burst out of his suit-skin once.

He rampaged across some malevolent, ink-black moors.

The ones that only exist inside me.

‘Maybe I should just stand,’ I say, finally.

But he dismisses the idea with a wave of his hand.

‘Oh, I should think you will be here long enough to need one. There is a stool behind the stack of Dickens novels to your right. Draw it up, and we can begin.’

Begin what? I think, over and over, yet none of the words reach my mouth.

I just do as he suggests, primed for an exasperated noise from him every time I make a mistake. I send books sprawling to the floor and bang the leg of the narrow stool against some solid part of him, wincing all the while. It doesn’t even occur to me that he hasn’t made a sound until I sit down. Then I dare to look at him, and find no irritation or amusement.

On the contrary – his gaze is as flatly assessing as ever.

Like an anthropologist, cataloguing me for later.

‘Now, to the matter at hand. Or should I say the problem?’

‘If there is one you have to know I didn’t mean to cause it.’

‘So then you handing in this piece of work was unintentional.’

‘Completely unintentional. It was just an accident.’

‘You accidentally handed in an erotic story.’

He doesn’t so much as raise an eyebrow, but I hear the amusement in his voice. It’s dark and deep and way down at the back of his throat, but it’s definitely there.

‘I know it sounds ridiculous, Professor –’

‘Utterly absurd, but really whether you deliberately did this deed or not is rather beside the point, don’t you think?’

‘I have no idea. I don’t know what the point is. I spent all night trying to guess.’

‘And what was your very best attempt?’

I hesitate. Partly because this conversation is strangling me.

Mostly because telling the truth might make this happen:

‘That you wanted to give me a real roasting.’

‘I see. And by roasting you mean insults, that sort of thing.’

‘Pretty much, yes. In fact no, exactly that.’

‘You thought I was going to tear a strip off you.’

‘It had occurred to me that you might.’

‘Well, to be honest I have half a mind to.’

He glances away as he says it, as if I’m not worth the full weight of his contempt. I only get half-measures. Other, more important students are permitted full explanations and disappointed looks. He doesn’t make them twist in the wind as he builds up to whatever this is going to be – though maybe they would never twist in the wind anyway. They probably don’t find it hard to breathe, or make bloody semi-circles in the palms of their hands. They don’t have to brace themselves, the way I do.

By the time he finishes his thought I’m wincing away from him.

I practically flinch at the first word – but I’m a fool to do it.

‘Do you have any idea how irritating it is to spend three terms assessing your mediocre nonsense, when you were capable of producing work of this calibre? Endless interminable essays written in the most pedestrian style possible…I ought to put a piece in the newspaper. “Student Deliberately Bores Lecturer To Death. Motivation as yet undetermined.”’

I mean, did he say ‘calibre’ there? Is ‘calibre’ good?

I think so, but it’s awfully hard to tell when your mind has just slid sideways. It takes almost everything I have to respond to him, and when I do I know how I sound. Stuttery and flustered and focusing on completely the wrong thing.

‘That isn’t…I didn’t deliberately bore you to death.’

‘Ah, so that was accidental too.’

‘No. What? No, no. I just –’

‘You slipped and fell into twenty pages of codswallop about Remains of the Day. Or did you come up with that load of old bollocks about duty being more important than passion in your sleep?’

I think my mouth drops open. The ‘calibre’ comment was bad enough.

But to have the boldfaced nerve to claim that.

‘But you said that was what it meant. You said duty was a passion of its own, and underlined it seventeen times on the board in permanent marker. Professor Tate complained!’

‘Professor Tate is an insufferable ignoramus.’

‘That doesn’t change the fact that you just criticised me and berated me for something you yourself actually believe.’

‘Ah, but that is the exact problem, Miss Hayridge. Just because I believe something does not mean that you are obliged to do the same. It seems to me that you spend a great deal of your time telling people exactly what you think they might want to hear, and doing things exactly as you think might best please them, instead of daring to be as brilliant as you quite possibly are.’

I go to say something when he’s done with this little speech. Something as hot-headed and outraged as my comments a moment ago. No, that isn’t the case at all, you don’t know anything about me, I think, but by the time the words get to the tip of my tongue I can’t let them emerge.

Shock wipes them out, and leaves only the weakest words behind.

‘I don’t believe passion is more important than duty.’

‘I see. So you think he was right to throw his single, tiny, glimmering chance of happiness away to be a butler for a Nazi.’

‘That’s a really uncharitable reading of the book, Professor. He had no idea he was the butler of a Nazi. He thought they were all wise and doing the right thing and besides – maybe he wouldn’t have been happy. Did you think about that? He might have hated being married to her. He might have come to despise her, once away from everything he knew.’

‘Yes, I’m sure you’re right. Never loving or being loved sounds like a marvellous way to live your life,’ he says, and now that amusement is back. Thicker though, this time. Harsher, somehow, and with a slight twist to his lips once he’s done speaking.

Not quite a bitter sneer, I think.

But almost.

‘He loved his work.’

‘Did his work love him? Did it keep him warm at night, do you think? Perhaps in those long hours he spent reading about other people enjoying the delight of a romance, he comforted himself with the thought that tomorrow he might polish the silver.’

‘This is the complete opposite of what you said in your lectures.’

‘But not the complete opposite of what you’ve expressed in this story, Miss Hayridge. This story is all but bursting at the seams with passion. It’s clear in both its themes, and in the way you chose to address them – not in the milky, meek tones of someone who wants to coast by unnoticed in a class they most probably find dull, but in a raging beast of a voice that refuses to be quiet, no matter what the consequences might be.’

I don’t know when he started leaning towards me. I only know that he is much closer by the time he gets to those last heart-pounding words. He must be, because I can see so many new details of that incredible face. Like the tiny tick of a scar right through the bow of his upper lip, so fine you could never see it from any distance away. And his eyelashes, far darker than the hair on his head and too long for someone so masculine. They look the way most people’s do when rain hits them, spiky and suddenly thick.

Beautiful, I think.

Then want to look away, before that one word shows on my face somehow.

It probably already has, when I think about it. My attraction to him is so visceral, he could grasp it with both hands and squeeze.

Downplaying it is of the utmost importance.

‘It’s just a silly smutty story.’

‘Do you really believe so?’

‘It has the word “cock” on page two.’

‘And that qualifies it as silly, does it?’

‘It qualifies it as smutty, at the very least.’

‘I could find you a dozen award-winning books right now that have that word in them. Though I suppose that is the issue, is it not? When men write about sex in boring books about recapturing their lost youth, they are invariably rewarded with praise. When women do it they are laughed at and ghettoised until a student who finally produces a piece of work worthy of my attention only gives it to me by accident.’

He says ‘accident’ the way most people say ‘appalling nightmare’. I can practically feel how offended he is that I really did just mess up – as though he can see how close I came to never being here and never doing this and shudders at the thought. It’s strangely the best thing anyone has ever said to me.

But also the most terrifying.

Probably because he then cracks his knuckles and rolls his shoulders, like someone about to fight me. And his brisk tone, when he speaks again, absolutely reflects that.

‘Now, to the business at hand.’

‘There is more business?’

‘Of course, Miss Hayridge. Surely you do not believe I brought you here to commend you for finally giving me work I might be satisfied with, but would then let you go on your merry way without another word? Dear me, no, that will never do. No no no, we have a great deal of work to do, Miss Hayridge – work we shall continue every day at five from now until I deem it done.’

He glances up at me when I don’t reply. Eyes suddenly lit in a way they’ve never been before, one brow just ever so slightly raised.

‘Unless you have something better to do?’ he asks, and for just a second I think about lying. Out of habit more than anything – when people say things like that to me I usually do. I have to, if I don’t want to seem small and pathetic. Everyone else has such exciting lives, filled with endless mixers and lock-ins and barbecues. The students who live across from my flat above a shop once played miniature golf on their roof terrace. A guy was arrested the other day for stealing a penguin from the local zoo.

The most I ever did was come here and stay.

But the thing is, with Professor Halstrom…

Why would I not say?

‘Not even one tiny thing.’

Chapter Two

He tells me to bring him something new the next time I come. ‘If you have the time,’ he says, but I think he already knows I do. He knew everything else, after all. He knew things I had no idea about myself. I thought I was absolutely fine going on as I did before. Pretending to smile when people told jokes I didn’t find funny. Holding my tongue when I wanted to say something weird. Always sensible of my clothes that are just a bit wrong and my hair that never quite looks like everyone else’s, full of stories I tell myself I don’t want to share, even as they press against the seams of my skin.

But he exposed it for what it is:

A ridiculous sham, created by a coward.

Even after all of that I still try to pull the wool over his eyes. I take him the tamest story I have, full of hints instead of flesh-and-blood descriptions and characters hiding behind high collars. There is nothing graphic or full-bodied about this one – though I somehow convince myself that he will like it anyway. That this one is better, tighter, cleaner.

It’s almost a shock when he lashes me with a sharp look, two minutes into reading. He hasn’t even gotten to page three. There are twenty more to go, but he stops, one eyebrow quirking up at the very outer edges, a certain sort of feigned confusion all over his face.

‘Would you mind explaining what this is?’

‘You said to bring you a story. So I brought you one.’

‘I think you will find that what you have brought me here is a slice of white bread. And saying that, quite frankly, is an insult to bread.’

‘I thought you’d like it more than the other one.’

‘Now you’re just intentionally lying to me.’

‘I’m honestly not. This one just seemed less inappropriate.’

‘I see. And what did you think was inappropriate about the first one?’

‘You know what was inappropriate about the first one.’

‘I am afraid I don’t. Please feel free to elaborate for me.’

The worst part about him saying that is not the words themselves. It’s the gestures that accompany it. The way he sits back in his chair, as though settling in for this imaginary show. One hand poised on the arm as though holding a non-existent marking pen, the other spreading and splaying in a sort of flourish that almost seems familiar now.

I’ve seen him do it before, at least. He does it when he wants a student to make an utter arse of themselves – which I am absolutely not going to do. I take a deep breath and grit my teeth, then just lay it all out for him in as clear and practical terms as possible. No obfuscation. No fluttering. Straightforward and firm, as though I am a different person who understands the word ‘poise’ and the word ‘practical’.

‘All right. All right. I would just really rather not hear you say “penis”. I feel mortified that I even said “penis” in front of you. I can barely call you anything but Professor and you refer to me as Miss Hayridge. Every time we talk it feels like we’re meeting for the first time at the Netherfield ball, which just makes penises seem really, really not OK to discuss.’

I sit back, satisfied that I’ve made my point.

Only he has this other one to raise, that I didn’t even think of.

‘Did you just reference Pride and Prejudice in a conversation about penises?’

‘What? What do you –’

‘Netherfield, from Pride and Prejudice.’

‘It was just the first olde-timey event that came to mind.’ I pause then, suddenly very aware that I have to make this seem like the height of reason, instead of what it is already becoming in my head. We made a pass at him, somehow, my mind whispers frantically, and I am not sure I can call my mind wrong. I can only cover it all over, with another rushed and probably ill-advised comment. ‘I could have used something less romantic like the one from The Way We Live Now, but I think Felix Carbury snogs Marie Melmotte there so that probably seems just as bad.’

‘You believe Carbury’s false overtures to Marie are as bad. That somehow his opportunistic greed and lazy attempts at winning her are on the same romantic level as the greatest love story in the English language.’

I don’t know what flummoxes me more. His astonishingly perfect deadpan or the fact that he admitted something was a great love story. Before today I wouldn’t have thought he knew what love was. I definitely would not have believed he would see it in Austen’s work. He’s supposed to call it ironic. He should talk about it like he did Remains of the Day – though then again those thoughts were just lies.

Who knows what else he makes up on a daily basis?

‘I like the way he woos her, even though it’s all just pretend.’

‘And you honestly tried to argue that duty is more important than passion?’

‘In hindsight that was completely ridiculous of me.’

‘No more ridiculous than thinking I cannot handle a penis,’ he says, and then I have to stop for a second. Aside from the fact that I’m sweating and sort of breathless in a way people only usually get after being swept into someone’s arms, he just said that.

And he said it pointedly, too, in a way that makes me wonder if…

‘Oh. Oh. I had no idea, Professor, I thought –’

‘Lord, I was not admitting my homosexuality, Miss Hayridge. Please refrain from sharing that theory around the canteen – people do that enough as it is.’

‘People share things about you around the canteen?’

‘The latest, I believe, is that I have an insane ex-wife locked in my attic, despite having neither an ex-wife nor indeed an attic.’

‘So you have never been married then.’

Now it’s his turn to look startled.

Only slightly, of course. One side of his mouth twitches, and his eyelashes sort of flicker in a way that could be read as a tiny widening. But the thing is, slight twitches and tiny eyelash flickers are enough, for someone with a granite face.

‘I am not sure what relevance that has.’

‘No relevance at all. I was just curious.’

‘And you think being curious about my dull life will serve you well.’

‘Considering this is the first time I ever dared ask anyone so terrifying such a direct question about anything I’m going to say yes.’

‘You find me terrifying, Miss Hayridge?’ he asks, and I honestly can’t tell.

Is he sincerely wondering, or just messing with me?

His slightly raised right eyebrow suggests the former.

But the strange new glint in his eye suggests something else.

‘You’re seventeen feet tall with a chest that could probably deflect bullets and a voice that might be capable of commanding the winds. You know everything about everything – including things about me that I barely even realised myself. And when you get angry, your anger lies in wait like a cobra, then strikes someone dead before they even know there is any danger. Yes, you are terrifying, Professor. But I should probably also say that no one has ever made me feel more like I’m worth something than you did yesterday, so whether I’m still afraid is certainly up for debate,’ I say, completely breathless by the end and half sure I shouldn’t have said it. It skirts way too close to I find you attractive.

Though the fact that it does only makes his next words more unexpected.

‘Perhaps it would not be if you knew why I have never been married.’

He speaks so calmly, as though referring to the weather.

Instead of the secret mysteries of him that no one can ever know.

‘Is it because you’re secretly a werewolf?’

‘What on earth would make you think such a thing?’

The scars and the bursting fleshiness, I think.

But refrain from saying, to my eternal relief.

‘It was just the first silly guess I could come up with.’

‘So you would rather discuss silly things than reality.’

‘I would rather live in silly things than reality. I bet you would too, if it meant you could admit to me that you were a fantastical creature rather than whatever the actual thing is,’ I say, though don’t expect it to hit. No, Miss Hayridge, I am the very model of practical thought, I imagine, and instead get this long silence. This long silence, coupled with a ton of intense staring. Almost like he’s searching me for something.

Some lie or sense of how I came to such a conclusion.

Because I’m right. I’m so right his voice drops to a husky whisper when he responds.

‘Unfortunately, the only world we have is this one.’

‘Why do you think I like writing stories so much?’

‘Writing stories will not change that fact.’

‘No, but it feels like it does, for just a little while.’

‘Perhaps you are merely avoiding the truth.’

‘You say that like it’s a bad thing.’

‘It is if you forget to live in the meantime.’

‘I would willingly sacrifice being friends with people who don’t seem to like me anyway and parties at places I don’t really want to go to for worlds I create myself.’

‘And when you wake up at forty and realise that’s all you have?’

‘Is that what you did, Professor?’

He draws back then. Glances away.

Changes the subject.

Oh, God, he changes the subject.

As though the subject sets him on fire.

‘We are both reasonable adults, are we not?’

‘I think I just about qualify as reasonable.’

‘But you are most definitely an adult, and an intelligent and insightful one.’

‘I don’t feel intelligent and insightful when you say things like that to me.’

‘You think I condescend to you. You think this is mockery.’

‘No. I think flattery of any sort turns my insides to jelly.’

‘I assure you flattery was not my intention. I tell you the truth, nothing more.’

‘That only makes it worse, quite honestly. I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say a kind word to anyone, and certainly not when you really meant it.’

‘My regard is hard won and easily lost, I freely admit.’

‘Am I losing it as we speak, Professor?’

‘I wish you were.’

Something happens after those four words escape out of him. He seems to jerk, as though struck, and for a moment the strangest expression dominates his face. It reminds me of the look people get when they wander into the wrong room by mistake, even though neither of us has moved an inch. And when I go to say something more to him, he turns away. He picks up the pages beside him and begins riffling through them, so briskly and professionally I can honestly believe there was nothing more to it.

Even though his voice when he finally speaks is just a little tight.

‘Before we go any further, I want to make one thing abundantly clear. Nothing I do or say will ever be anything other than the rightful attention a teacher may pay a student, no matter what words we may have occasion to say to one another or discuss. Is that understood?’

‘I never thought otherwise, honestly.’

‘Then from this point on we may proceed with perfect objectivity and professionalism? We may look upon your work as work, and not pay undue attention to the acts therein described?’

‘Yes, of course. I never meant to imply we wouldn’t.’

‘No question of impropriety?’

‘None at all.’

‘And you are capable of conducting yourself in such a manner.’

‘I am,’ I say.

Perhaps in that moment I even believe it. I am calm, as he goes through the rules for this. My heart isn’t hammering. My hands aren’t trembling. Everything he tells me seems to make a lot of sense.

Until he speaks, and then all I can think is:

I was right to not want him to say rude words.

‘Excellent. Now then, perhaps we can begin by examining where you went wrong here: “His cock is a tree root, heavy and thick – too heavy in truth for my tightly closed sex. He has to force his way into me, pushing and twisting until I give, his own slickness the only thing easing the way. Still though, oh, still it sings through me, to have him fill me like this. My body stutters with the pleasure of it before he moves, sweet enough that I could call it a climax. Certainly it undoes me far more expertly than anything I have ever given myself.”’

I take my time responding, in part because I have no real answer for him.

But also because everything he says renders me mute. I go to speak and only air comes out of me. All the words in the world fall down inside my body – though that might be a good thing. The ones that occur do not seem appropriate. They seem to focus a lot on the sound of his voice, rather than the point. I keep replaying the roll of his tongue around the R at the start of ‘root’. The almost slick click of his teeth around the C at the start of ‘cock’. It takes me an absolute age to come up with anything.

And when I finally do it’s rubbish.

‘I have no idea.’

‘No clue at all?’

‘Not even a tiny one.’

‘So it is your honest belief that a woman can come through such rudimentary penetration? No attempt at arousing her, no mention of any previous ministrations that might allow her lover to sink in, softly and slowly and smoothly?’

He gestures with his hand, but I don’t see what the gesture is.

I try to avoid looking directly at it.

Or at him.

Or at anything that ever existed since the dawn of time.

‘Well…it…I…that was just…’

‘On page four you describe the following: “I run my tongue over him slow, slow, savouring the taste. It is too bitter to love yet still I am greedy for it. When he bucks into my mouth I welcome it – that sense of him using my mouth to sate himself.” Yet I see no corresponding scenes depicting her being readied for this.’

‘It just seemed more realistic that way.’

‘If realism was your aim then why have her achieving orgasm over so little? You said yourself that you wished for a new world entirely – so take it. Don’t linger in these half-measures, hampered by the tawdry reality of teenage boys who barely care if a woman is enjoying herself or not. Go the whole way. Show me how you believe she might be made to moan. Give me reasons for her cries of pleasure.’

His voice is bold, suddenly. Too loud and big. It swells to fill the room.

My voice when I answer is faint and faded – as if left too long in the sun.

‘What sort of reasons do you think there should be?’

‘To begin with: her clit is her primary sex organ.’

‘I see, so you want me to…’

‘I would like to see him lick it, at the very least.’

‘You would like that. You would like him to lick it.’

‘Indeed, yes. You spend a good three pages lovingly describing a woman sucking cock. I feel some similar attention to her quim might be warranted.’

I have to take a breath, then. A long, deep breath of air that I wish was fresh. As it is I just get a lungful of his book smell, now heavy with an undercurrent of something else. Something that seems suspiciously like deodorant working overtime to mask the scent of a body glossed with sweat – though there are no real signs of anything of the sort, on the surface. On the contrary: he seems completely composed and unmoved. He sits back in his chair with one hand ever so lightly resting on my work. Brow entirely untroubled; eyes as still yet sharp as ever. He could be talking about his elderly grandmother.

No, no, it’s me who is drenched.

Me who is probably filling the room with the sweet-thick smell of something faintly perfumed. Though really, could he blame me if I have? He said ‘clit’, as casually as others would say ‘cauliflower’. He trimmed it down to something you might grunt during a good hard fuck, and followed it with something that sounded like he might personally want it.

He wants to lick, I think.

Then struggle even harder to come up with a response. He’s waiting, now. Tapping his fingers on those papers impatiently, while I imagine his tongue curling around that very thing. Around my clit, around my quim. God, did he really say ‘quim’?

How am I supposed to cope with him saying ‘quim’?

‘I will bear that in mind.’

‘At the very least show an awareness on the page that it exists. Show me how it feels to have her clit swell at the thought of him taking her.’

‘I could try. I will try.’

‘Give me her fingers sliding through her slippery folds, stroking over herself as he fills her and fucks her – let me see her dissatisfaction with his attempt at making her climax, when she knows she needs more, so much more. She strives for more, on the page. She aches for it.’

‘Yes. Yes. OK, yes,’ I say – too impatiently, I know.

But what else can I do?

He keeps saying things.

Christ, the things he says.

‘She is no longer willing to accept so slight an offering.’

‘No, of course not. No, why would she ever?’

‘She wants to come hard – with as much abandonment as he does.’

‘That seems reasonable to me.’

‘And when she does it…’

‘Yes?’

‘Tell me how her back arches.’

‘Yes, yes, I will.’

‘Tell me how she tightens around him, how her clit seems to burst beneath her fingertips, how her belly clenches as though a great fist has taken hold of it. Tell me all these things and then begin again, with all the ones I cannot possibly know, as a man. For you see, there is your advantage, Miss Hayridge. You may fully articulate what it is to be a woman, exploring what pleases her best. Never overlook that, in service of realism that is really only a reflection of male pleasure and male desire. The true reality is whatever a woman actually feels, and not what men have been erasing for the last thousand years.’

He has said many arousing things throughout this conversation. Most of which left me speechless, or at the very least unable to say more than a few breathless words. But none have the impact of that. It hits me hard, somewhere deep and low down. For the first time I fully acknowledge that I’m not just warm between my legs, or flushed through the cheeks and throat and chest. I am aroused, fully and completely. My pussy is as wet as it’s ever been; my nipples are two hard points trying to press through my bra and shirt and jacket. Every part of me is trembling, to the point where it must be visible.

But if it is he gives no sign.

He gives no sign of anything. He still looks completely calm about all of this. There is no flush in his cheeks. No tremble to his hand. I know there isn’t, because when he abruptly hands me a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover I see how firm and steady his grip is. And his tone when he next speaks is almost offhand.

Like it just occurred to him that we should finish up here.

Rather than it being a necessity, as it currently is to me.

‘Now, for next time I should like you to read some of the sex in this and note down all the ways where it goes completely wrong. Both because I want it to be absolutely clear that even great writers can fail on the details, and because I believe you are perfectly aware of what may be missing from your story – you simply have not had occasion to address it. Does that seem acceptable to you?’

It shouldn’t, considering the state I am now in. I should stop here, I know. Tell him that I have other engagements; explain that I feel I have learned enough now. The chance of me embarrassing myself is getting too close. Who knows what I will do during our next meeting, if the word ‘clit’ puts me so on edge?

Yet when I open my mouth, all that comes out is this:

‘Of course, Professor.’

Chapter Three

I am well prepared for the next session with him. The book has been annotated and circled and marked. I have thoughts on it to discuss with him, and questions to ask of him, and serious points to make – almost as though we are a real Professor and student, meeting to further my education. Which we are, we are, we are. There is no almost about it. It is an absolute fact, and I would do well to remember that.

I do remember that. As soon as I sit down opposite him, I open my satchel. I get out the copy of the book he gave me, without thinking once of how I fell asleep – with those pages spread over my face, so I could smell their papery smell and be reminded of certain things. And though I look at him, I avoid any part that might have once struck me as pleasant. His eyes, his mouth, the way he sits. The sheer bulk of him, crowding out every rational instinct and thought.

I even ignore new little details that shouldn’t matter at all.

That don’t matter at all. That never matter at all.

Like the fact that his trousers are checked today. Very faintly, and in big squares of the sort men in the nineteenth century favoured, but still. They seem strange on him – even a little wild. And his cufflinks, his usually plain silver cufflinks…they are gone and have been replaced by ones set with blood-red stones. Rubies, I think, but I could never say for sure.

Because I don’t care.

I only care about the work.

‘So I looked at Chatterley and have to say – I think it’s better than you give it credit for. Here look, this line: “He hated mouth kisses.” It might not explicitly state that he did it between her legs but what else could he possibly mean?’ I tell him, just as bright and breezy as can be. I even manage a little shrug of my shoulders and a finger-point at the passage.

Only to be dragged back to hell by the deep, dark rasp of his voice.

‘Did what between her legs?’

I look at him then, though I know it will be a mistake. And it is: his gaze is as challenging as his words are, nearly flat but with just the finest hint of something else. Amusement, my mind whispers – though I try to shake it off. I answer him with the words ‘kissed her’, in a calm and even tone.

But he just pushes harder.

As though he knows that I’m close to breaking.

‘Kissed her how? Kissed her where?’

‘Kissed her…kissed her clit.’

The word sizzles through me as hotly as it did when he said it.

Hotter, because for one moment I see a flash of something in his eyes. A brightness that dies as soon as it appears. Or at least I think so – he turns away before I can tell for sure.

‘I see. And you are prevented, as he might have been, from saying this?’

‘I just said it to you now!’

‘But not in your writing.’

‘All right, yes, that much is true.’

‘You have every opportunity open to you to say what Lawrence was either too ignorant or prohibited from actually saying. You can give perspective that many cannot, that indeed many would kill for.’

‘Would you kill for it, Professor?’

‘In what way exactly? What do you mean?’

His tone is so sharp suddenly that I look up from the spot I chose to focus on – a postcard pinned to the wall of a woman with hair as black and shaggy and thick as my own. And I’m glad I do, too. I get to see his eyes narrow, as though I made an accusation of some sort. I made him feel guilty, despite never intending to do anything of the kind. I didn’t even think about what the question might mean.

Until he reacts like this to it.

Like I said would you kill to know my thoughts, instead of anything more innocent.

‘I mean, would you like to be able to perfectly describe what women desire?’

‘I have no desire to ever write anything at all.’

‘No, not in terms of writing. Just in terms of how you feel.’

‘You honestly believe I have any kind of feeling about anything.’

‘A week ago I would have probably said you were made of granite.’

‘A week ago you were obviously far wiser than you seem to be now.’

‘Because I believe you might be made of flesh and bone?’

‘The granite guess was a great deal closer.’

‘You say that, but you have just spent hours and hours of your time trying to convince me that I should let imaginary women experience pleasurable sex.’

His eyes spark again – more obviously now.

So obviously it makes me shiver.

‘That hardly says anything about my emotional state.’

‘You don’t think so?’

‘I rather find it my civic duty.’

‘I see. In what way?’

‘I find it of vital importance that men are not permitted to go away believing a woman can orgasm from the most basic of attentions. Or worse: that it doesn’t matter if she orgasms at all.’

‘That almost sounds like passion. Not really a civic duty.’

‘Not at all. Not in the least.’

‘Are you quite sure, Professor?’

He pauses before answering – though I’m glad he does. My heart is hammering too hard for me to carry on doing this for much longer. I feel as though it might be showing – that it might be juddering visibly through me. In fact, it seems to be going harder than when he spoke to me about sexy things.

Or so I think, until he says the sexy things again.

Quite abruptly, as if he understands what will happen when he does: I will lose focus. I will stop asking him questions he maybe doesn’t want to answer.

And he’s right.

‘On page fourteen you write about him coming in her mouth,’ he says.

Then I forget every single thing we were speaking of before. I forget the delicious idea that he might feel, beneath his cold, calm exterior. I forget how tense he suddenly looks, how bright his eyes suddenly are, how his hand goes to his tie as though checking it’s still there. The only thing I know is that he just said ‘coming’.

And is about to say more.

‘I think it’s lacking. It seems to me that you shy away from the idea at the last moment – as though you cannot quite bear to include such a crude thing in your story. In fact, several times I had that impression. That you wrote, “I taste him on my tongue” when what you really wanted to say was something far more visceral, and explicit.’

‘No, honestly, I –’

‘Something like: “He floods my mouth.”’

‘That…OK, that…seems like…’

‘Or perhaps: “He glosses my lips with his come.”’

‘I suppose I…I mean –’

‘Or what about: “His cock swells, thick ribbons surging from the tip to stripe my face and my throat, each one hot enough to sear and so slick it sets my senses on fire. Everywhere it touches seems suddenly more sensitive, more alive, and especially when it gets to the tip of my tongue. The taste of him is bitter and sweet at the same time; the idea of him filling my mouth enough to set my own sex on edge.” Though of course I would defer to you on how it feels to have a man come all over your face and tongue. What do you think, Miss Hayridge?’

I think I need to escape, now. Before he goes any further. Before I go any further, because oh, I so desperately want to. There are words on the tip of my tongue, filthy, impossible words, just reams and reams of unadulterated smut that I never fully dared express before. Not even to myself, while alone, with no one else around to ever see it. As though to even think it is a source of shame – so God knows what it would be if I expressed it out loud here and now. If I said to Professor Halstrom, of all people, that what I really want to say is:

I want you to do it.

I want you to come all over my face.

I want you to make a mess of me, to ruin me, to fill my mouth with fat, fierce ribbons of jism. I want to use the word ‘jism’ and see your face change, the way mine undoubtedly did when you said ‘quim’. And I want to do it all here, now, in this book-filled room with a door that barely closes, so that when you push me down to my knees and fuck into my mouth with your heavy cock I can thrill at the thought of anyone walking in at any moment. I can imagine us being caught doing the most illicit thing you can possibly dream up, and have you finish in my mouth all the same.

‘Miss Hayridge?’

I stand up too fast. So fast in fact that I knock over a stack of books to my right – though I don’t stoop to set them right. I don’t even gather up the pens that spill from my bag when I launch it on to my shoulder, or make calm and deliberate apologies of the sort I know he expects. Instead I simply blurt out that I need the bathroom, like a total fool, and head for the door before he can protest.

By the time he speaks again I’m out in the hall, breathing air that somehow seems eight hundred times fresher and cooler. It shouldn’t be – the ancient radiator on the wall is kicking out heat high enough to singe hair and the space is even smaller than I remember. But it remains the case, all the same.

Until I hear him.

‘Miss Hayridge, are you quite all right?’

He says it through the door, but through the door is too much. I jolt as if he shouted ‘fuck’ right in my face. Suddenly my heart is in my mouth again and my breaths are coming too short and too fast, and then I’m barrelling down the stairs in a way that seems inadvisable on the staircase to hell. Three steps from the bottom I almost trip over my own feet. My teeth snap together around my tongue and I taste blood.

But even that doesn’t change how I feel.

My body is more primed than it usually is after three hours spent writing the sex stuff that he just read out. I’m seething with it, bursting with it; every inch of me is crammed with a pulsing heat that I can’t seem to stop. I stand in the cool, blue and thankfully empty bathroom for twenty minutes, yet still feel the same at the end of it. Even after I splash my face with water, my hands are still trembling. My cheeks are still flushed – and I know this because I see them in the cracked mirror above the sink.

I’m stained bright pink from jaw to hairline. Lower than that, in fact. I unbutton my shirt to my bra and it’s all over my chest and throat too. Even my lips look a shade darker and a touch plumper, as though I’d spent the last two hours kissing and kissing someone.

And my eyes…

God, what must he have thought about my eyes?

They are fair near gleaming, and quite obviously not with the thrill of debate. They seem wild, even to me. They seem like the eyes of someone who needs to fuck, right here and now. Who wants to be bent over the sink and have her skirt hiked up, knickers tugged down just far enough to get access to her wet and ready cunt. Because I am wet, and I am ready – so much so that he would probably comment on it, if he knew.

Look at you, so greedy for it, he might say, and then oh, yes, then he could just…

Do what he described.

Slide in smooth and slow.

Fuck me until I groan and buck against him.

Not that it would take very long. I am on the edge right now, just standing here thinking about it. Imagining the push of his cock, the expression on his face – heavy with lust, lips parted – and all the other things he would say, oh, fuck, the things he would say. If he can talk like that in so calm a context, what would he be like in a sexual one? Would he give me a running commentary on what he’s doing? Tell me that I am so slick and tight, confess that he wants to come over my tits, groan in my ear that he loves feeling me climax around him? I think yes, but probably only because I’m delirious.

Somehow in the middle of these thoughts I’ve put a hand inside my shirt, right here in the middle of a public bathroom. And I don’t stop there. After a second I push under the cotton just to get at one stiff little nipple, the sight of it so rude I know I should stop. My reflection isn’t just wild any more – I look like a dirty slut, fondling herself frantically, feverishly. So eager to come that nothing can stand in the way of it, not even the idea of someone catching me like this.

If anything, that idea just spurs me on. I think of a bunch of people I barely know bursting in, and I just have to pull up my skirt. I have to. My clit is one big sweet ache, and when I rub over it with two eager fingers it gets better. It gets worse. It makes me throw my head back and gasp – loud enough that anyone just outside the door could hear me. They are going to come in and catch me, frigging myself with all the abandon of Lady Chatterley fucking her burly gamekeeper.

More than that, in fact, because I use the real words.

I say it as it is: my cunt, my clit, my slick little slit. I work them all until my thighs tremble and my head goes back and I know, I know I’m going to come. I’m going to do it all over my hand right here, while imaginary people stand and watch. Those cool, bright, amazing people that surround me every day, bored to tears by everything I am, suddenly open-mouthed and horrified and just dying to ask what drove me to it.

And when they do, I think, as my orgasm crests…

When they do I will tell them truly:

Because my Professor talks dirty to me.

Chapter Four

I think of a dozen ways to tell him why I didn’t return to his office. None of them seems adequate. The only real option is never going back to his office at all, but even that poses problems. He will stop me the next time I try to leave his class, I know he will. He might stop me before. Discuss it loudly and clearly in front of everyone, until I collapse under the weight of my own mortification.

Explain now why you spent seventeen hours in the toilets, I imagine him saying.

I can even see that little flourish he often does with his hand. The one that looks like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, only the rabbit is your dignity and the hat is him slowly strangling it to death in front of you. Certainly it feels as if some part of me is being suffocated, when I next see him.

Though that might be because I don’t expect it. I’m still struggling to come up with a good excuse. I think I have time to get around the fact that I masturbated in the ladies while thinking of him. Time to arrange my face into an innocent shape, to lie without looking away and blushing – then I run across the quad to the old soot-streaked archway between the science labs, searching for shelter from a sudden downpour.

And there he is.

He had the same idea as me, it seems. He wanted to see if he could wait it out in the shade of those great black bricks – though he was faster to it than I was. By the time I get there my hair is plastered to my head, clothes heavy and dark with the deluge, every inch of me bedraggled. But he looks like he just stepped out of the pages of a catalogue from the 1930s. His dark hair is dry and swept neatly across that amazing brow. The cuffs of his shirt are a crisp one inch from his jacket, and his shoes are buffed to a high mahogany sheen. He even has a cigarette lit, and as I watch he kisses it to his lips with the ease and deftness of long habit, then lets the smoke curl out in slow, lazy waves.

I think it might be the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. It stops me dead about a foot from shelter, too blindsided by it to go any further. Which is unfortunate, because he thinks I have other reasons. He sees me frozen in the rain, and the hand holding the cigarette drops to his side. His expression shifts – from the usual still surface of a lake to something else. Something struggling, I want to say.

But I dare not. His words are enough on their own to make me breathless.

‘If you had no wish to continue you needed only to say. I realise my manner is off-putting to many.’

‘It wasn’t that, it wasn’t that at all, your manner is…’

‘My manner is what?’

‘Good.’

‘You’re the most awful liar.’

‘That wasn’t a lie.’

‘Of course it was. You blink about a thousand times whenever you fib, and attempt to look at almost anything except my face.’

‘Maybe I do that because your face is really fearsome.’

Or like staring at the sun too long, I think.

Then have to glance away before it burns my eyes out.

‘Maybe you do, but my point still stands.’

‘About your manner?’

‘About you lying. You were going to say another word entirely.’

‘What word would you guess, if you had to?’

‘“Cold,” perhaps. “Aloof,” almost certainly.’

‘It was neither of those.’

‘That, at least, was the truth.’

‘I told you the truth before. I just made it a less silly sounding word.’

‘Perhaps I should be the judge of what is silly.’

‘All right. I was going to say lovely.’

He whips a look at me at that, as though to catch the telltale signs of lying before I squirrel them away. It doesn’t seem to reassure him when he finds none, however. His eyebrows lift too high in the middle, giving his gaze this oddly raw look. Like I ripped a strip off him by using that word. Now he would do anything to get it back, including this big bunch of sudden bluster:

‘Yes, you were correct. It is very silly indeed – almost as silly as being out in a thunderstorm with barely a stitch on. Where is your jacket, for goodness sake? You could at least have worn a cardigan. Your arms are turning blue,’ he says, so many words spoken in so oddly tender a fashion that I lose count of them. I fall headfirst into them. The way his tone goes up on the first syllable of ‘jacket’, the steeper tilt of his eyebrows, now verging on querulous, the softness of that ‘blue’ on the end…I can hardly stand it.

Though the worst part about it is not the words, spoken too quickly and too sharply and too everything. No, the worst part is that, when he’s done with them, he traps his cigarette between his teeth, and starts taking off his jacket. Roughly, jerkily, like it hurts to do it.

God knows, it burns a hole through me.

‘Oh, no, Professor, that – no no –’

‘Please be quiet. I am in the middle of behaving decently. It so rarely happens it deserves at least some respectful silence and gracious acceptance,’ he says.

But I can’t give him even that much. My acceptance isn’t gracious. My silence isn’t respectful. Instead it seethes with a brutal awareness of every tiny thing he does, from the sparking sensation of his thumb running around the inside of the jacket collar, to the shock of the sheer size of the thing when he snaps it closed around me. You could fit two of me inside its warm confines.

Warm, I think, with his body heat.

And oh, God – heady with his scent.

Honestly, it’s a wonder I understand the language he uses when he next speaks. His hands are still almost on me when he does it. My own hands are lost inside his sleeves.

How am I meant to concentrate?

‘Are you going to tell me the real reason you neglected to return?’

‘I would really rather not, if I can get away with it.’

‘You can.’ He leans down, sudden and shocking. More so, when I realise why: to take me into his confidence. To be conspiratorial with me, as though we’re intimates. ‘But don’t tell anyone. I don’t want it getting out that Professor Halstrom is going soft in his dotage. Next thing you know I’ll have students spending years in bathrooms left, right and centre.’

‘I think “dotage” might be a little bit strong.’

‘That’s only because you haven’t seen me with my trousers down. I have an arse like a dying question mark,’ he says, followed by me waiting for my desire to wither away.

It should wither, after that. It should make it easy to sneer.

But it doesn’t. I have to fight with my last breath to get the next words out.

‘I take back what I said about your manner being lovely.’

‘I thought you might eventually,’ he says, a laugh somewhere in the back of his throat.

I wish I did not love that laugh. I wish I hated him. I do hate him. I will hate him.

‘Your manner is completely gross. And absolutely seething with bullshit. I already know that you’re thirty-one.’

‘Thirty-one? Wherever did you hear that? I’m nine hundred and twelve.’

‘I knew you were a werewolf. All the signs were there and now the final proof.’

‘Werewolves don’t live to be nine hundred and twelve.’

‘Spoken like someone with inside knowledge.’

‘Inside knowledge of what?’

I try to stop myself answering. Things are going too far. Our conversations are too fast, like a death-defying ride at a ruinous fairground that might at any moment fling me off.

But the words just keep coming.

My hands keep gripping the bar that barely holds me in.

‘Werewolf society.’

The sound of his laughter is startling, like a roll of thunder inside a tiny room. It cracks off the old stone walls, bold as brass and completely inappropriate for someone like him. He should have a strained, half-dying thing. A sound that has to fight to get past his teeth, or else no sound at all.

And I think he knows it.

The rain hasn’t stopped, but he still clears his throat and claims it has. ‘We should go about our business while we can,’ he says, and I am forced to agree. If I say no he might think I want to stay here talking to him all day, when I would swear on a stack of Bibles I don’t. I even prove it a second later when I go to walk in the opposite direction and he calls out to me.

‘Where on earth are you going, Miss Hayridge?’ he asks.

And I swear my stomach drops. My heart lurches against my ribcage.

He means business, as in more talking to him.

More saying of the things that made me masturbate in a public bathroom.

In fact, he confirms it a second later.

‘My office is this way,’ he says.

Then I simply have to follow him, to meet my doom.

Chapter Five

The first thing he does when we get to his office is light a little gas stove – both for the heat and for the kettle he sits atop it. No electric for him, of course, and instead of teabags he has tea leaves and strainers and other items I’ve only ever read about. I watch him go about the business of making it with the same fascination heroines probably experience over wizards doing magic. Wide-eyed and unable to move from the corner I’ve chosen, half-wondering what mystical thing will happen next.

The jacket was weird enough.

The conversation was worse.

The tea makes my teeth chatter. And then there is the seat I notice – not the same thing from before but a real soft-backed and inviting-looking chair. He went out and got something better for me, I think, then immediately try to dismiss the idea. He probably just realised it was inadequate for any student. Perhaps he gives Earl Grey to everyone. Most likely he uses his handkerchief to dry everyone’s hair for them.

It just doesn’t feel that way, when he does it.

It feels like the air grows thick and close, the moment he tells me to turn around. He barely has to do anything for me to sense him – the crackle between us reveals everything. It sizzles as he reaches for the rope of my hair, and louder when he lifts it.

The way he squeezes the water out of it is best though.

Tightly, so tightly my scalp will be tender later. It will remember his hands on me, long after this moment has dwindled down to nothing. It might be the only contact I ever get, after all. Just this one hint of how strong he really is and how big his hands are, followed by the strongest wave yet of his deep, heavy scent. Oh, God, that deep, heavy scent. I suppose the rain has made it more pronounced. Or it could be the lack of jacket. Without it he seems almost bare, despite the waistcoat he keeps on.

I can still see so much more, regardless. I can see how oddly narrow his waist is, how broad his chest. It strains against the material whenever he moves, and he moves a lot. He stretches up to dry his own hair, and fusses with his cuffs, and bends to buff his shoes, all the time twisting and turning and bending in a way that seems far too flexible for someone like him. It feels too flexible for someone like me.

Though I promise I do my best not to look. At the very least I try to look in a manner that doesn’t convey outright hunger. I keep my mouth tightly closed and my eyes a normal size, hands clenched tightly inside the sleeves of his jacket. And when I manage to breathe, I do it in a slow and steady and normal sort of fashion.

Even though smell is now devouring what little air there is in here.

And the way he looks at me after, as though he knows what I’m thinking. He knows how he looks, and what it does to me. He must – nothing else could explain his expression. If he could set me on fire with his eyes I think he would. Contempt is probably on the tip of his tongue right now, to the point where I cringe when he goes to speak.

But that only makes it more shocking when he tells me this:

‘You should take off the T-shirt you have on, before you catch your death.’

He makes it sound like advice. Like he’s talking about a word I misspelled or a concept I didn’t grasp. My brain even tries to turn it into that at first. I feel sure I must have misheard or misunderstood, and consider asking him to explain.

Not that it helps when he does.

‘Fasten the jacket up and remove your wet clothes,’ he says, and all I can think is that now I will have to sit in his office with nothing on under this overflowing tweed. More than that: I will have to do it while he sits across from me in a state that seems even more naked than that. Every second that goes by brings new details: he wears those bands around his arms to keep his shirt in place, shiny and constrictive-seeming. He has no belt, and no belt loops, and there is something in his pocket – something that makes a strange heavy outline in trousers that now seem too tight.

Though I doubt I will ever know what it is. I have more pressing matters to deal with – like taking off my T-shirt while he watches. Because he does, without a single hint of evasion or interest. Almost like he’s proving something to himself, or proving something to me. I don’t care if you strip, his flat gaze seems to say. It doesn’t matter to me if your breasts are bare beneath that jacket.

The slight parting of his lips is probably just a coincidence.

As is the heaviness of his eyelids, and the sound of his voice when I finally slide the wet material out from underneath the jacket. ‘Hang it on the door,’ he says, so faint I have to strain to hear him. Hoarse, too, though that could be my imagination. Most of this seems like my imagination anyway. The real Professor Halstrom would never ask me to do this. He would never give me his jacket in the first place.

In a second, I will wake up.

And I want to, because otherwise I have to cope with the way his face changes when I start on my jeans. He tries, I think, to behave as though that doesn’t matter either. But I just don’t think he expects it to happen. He thought I would stop at the shirt, and when I don’t everything goes slack, like someone cut the strings that hold up his features. He goes to say something, only his mouth no longer works.

He can’t even raise his hand to stop me – but even if he did it would be too late now. I’m committed. If I go back on it the whole thing will only seem more suggestive. And really, what does it matter? The jacket hangs almost to my knees. I have underwear on, underneath. It doesn’t have to be any worse than the top.

But it feels like it might be once we’re sitting down.

He can see so much of my bare legs, pale and plump and smooth. They damn near gleam in the low light, in a way even I can hardly take my eyes off of. I keep glancing down and being surprised by them, by how small they look compared to his, by how vulnerable they seem suddenly. If I part them even a little it will seem like the rudest thing in the world – like I want him between them.

I even imagine it. Behind my eyes, I see him lifting me on to his desk, spreading my naked thighs with one hand. My knickers are just these little flimsy cotton things – he could yank them down with very little effort. Shove the jacket up so he could get at my pussy, then do all the things he wants me to describe in my stories. Lick my aching clit, taste my wet pussy.

More than just plain wet, really. I can actually feel it, every time I move. I can feel it even when I try to stay still. Some arousing thing happens – like the insides of this jacket slithering over something sensitive – and everything seems to swell between my legs and grow slicker. At one point the silky material brushes over one stiff nipple, and the heated wash of wetness is like nothing I’ve ever experienced.

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