Learning Curves (4 page)

She looked up from between his legs and smiled wickedly. “So, do you think I’ve qualified for advanced standing?”

His hips lifted from the sofa as she took him into her mouth more. She ran her tongue, broad and firm, up the shaft before she enveloped him, sucking harder and harder. His hands clenching at the sofa, he trembled and shook at her ministrations until he reached down and pulled her onto the sofa beside him.

“Very advanced. Very standing,” he said, his breathing heavy. “So far this has been a very one-sided lesson. Let’s see if we can’t even things up a little.” His face flushed with passion. “For one thing, you’re still wearing too many clothes.”

He stripped her of her skirt, throwing it onto the heap of their discarded clothing. He pressed a fervent kiss against her panties, and another rush of desire surged through her body.

“The boots, though. Those stay on.”

She couldn’t control the blush that swept over her at his command but he didn’t laugh. In fact, he seemed utterly absorbed in the process of uncovering her body. The ravenous hunger on his face shocked her.

Compared to him, she was so average looking. What could he possibly see that would incite such heat? He hooked a finger on each side of her briefs and wrenched them down over her hips. At the brush of his hands against her body, she lost her train of thought, physical sensation swamping her doubts and uncertainty.

Brandon knelt between her legs. He smiled, displaying an unexpected dimple, and ran a tantalizing finger down her smooth leg. Wrapping his fingers around her booted ankle, he draped it over the arm of the sofa, revealing her slick pink folds to his seductive gaze.

Looking down at her own body, she watched in awe as he slowly stroked the gleaming flesh, brushing against her clit, before oh so slowly sliding his fingers inside. A second finger joined the first. Her body clenched and trembled as the beginnings of an orgasm danced at the edge of her consciousness.

Still stroking her, he leaned in and planted his mouth between her legs, suckling the tiny bud at the top of her folds. With his free hand, he guided her hands to her breasts. Suddenly transported beyond shame, beyond anything but intensifying the maelstrom of incredible sensations, Leanne obeyed, teasing herself even as he teased her too.

His fingers.

Her hands.

His tongue.

The orgasm, when it came, ripped through her like a hurricane, and she cried out in ecstasy.

But he didn’t release her, continuing to lick her, swirling his tongue down, around and inside even as a second wave of release swept over her in torrents. She bucked against his mouth in a jerking, mindless spasm.

“Fuck me! Please, fuck me!” Leanne didn’t recognize the jarring voice, it sounded so foreign and imperious. With a start, she realized she had spoken those words. The only thing she knew, the only thing she cared about, was that if he didn’t take her now, she would implode with wanting.

The coarse words galvanized him into action.

“Please tell me you’ve got a condom,” he begged, his voice hoarse.

Clambering to her hands and knees, Leanne scrabbled for her purse, abandoned in their flurry of lovemaking. Desperately rummaging through it, she hunted for the tiny packet she’d been condescendingly given earlier in the evening by the maid of honor. With a prayer of thanks, she quickly handed him the small square.

She watched as he unrolled it over his straining cock with surprisingly unsteady hands and opened her legs wide in invitation. He plunged deep inside her, thrusting and surging without reservation. He filled her, pumping and stretching her. It felt incredible. Her body began to convulse against his, and she uttered broken words of encouragement.

He strained and surged again. Leanne came apart too and cried out in concert with his incoherent admonition of pleasure.

He sank down on top of her, his weight heavy but not unpleasant, as their breathing slowly returned to normal. An unfamiliar lassitude stole over her limbs.

Wow,
Leanne thought,
if this is what great sex feels like, I finally know what the fuss is about.

The sound of the door opening niggled at her daydream. Her eyes snapped open in alarm, a look reflected in the face of the naked man still lying on top of her.

But there was nowhere to hide, and when the exotic dancers entered the room, Leanne knew the fantasy was well and truly over. Tumbling over themselves in their haste to exit, they apologized. Leanne had to acknowledge that Brandon was doing his level best to shield her from their view but as they backed out the open door, they laughed raucously. “Christ! I didn’t know he had it in him.”

She closed her eyes in shame when she heard the other one guffaw. “Or in her!”

From her miniscule office window, Leanne saw students, well wrapped against the fall chill, hurrying across the quad below. Located in an old, cramped building near the center of campus, the English department was understaffed and overcrowded.

And while she’d tried to make the space a little more cheerful, bringing in a small plant and hanging some funny—well, okay, relatively funny—quotes from great writers, the window remained the only perk in an otherwise awkward space that was sweltering in summer and damp in winter. But Leanne knew that as a graduate student, she was lucky to have secured any office, even this one.

Sighing, she abandoned the view and sized up the thick stack of term papers she’d collected during the last lecture. Determined, she opened one, but before she’d corrected the first run-on sentence, memories of the weekend hijacked her thoughts.

Brandon.

Ever since their wild encounter and subsequent humiliating discovery, she’d undertaken some serious soul searching, asking herself again and again what kind of person would abandon her so-called principles at the drop of a hat—
or a bathrobe
—for a pathetic thrill with some guy she picked up in a strip club. Even if he did have washboard abs and a killer smile.

And was hung like a Greek god…

Her devil-may-care side had chipped in a lot over the past forty-eight hours.

Until Saturday, she hadn’t even known it existed. She’d always played it safe. Done the expected and never strayed outside the lines. Now, she was discovering that she also had a Leanne-cares-a-lot side too.

The aftermath of their encounter had been awkward and tacky. Although the other dancers apologized profusely for their ill-timed interruption, there was no ignoring the subtle signs of approval they telegraphed their coworker. Or Brandon’s stony embarrassment, clearly conveyed despite his near-catatonic silence.

Dressing hurriedly, trying not to meet his eye, knowing the scorn and condemnation she would see in his face, she’d barely been able to look up from the floor. Only as she left the room had he spoken.

“Are you okay to get home?”

She’d turned, perplexed, all her thoughts focused on escape. “I don’t understand.”

“Do you have a way to get home? Will your friends make sure you get there safely?”

She shook her head and tried to overcome the after-effects of their incredible sex. There was no way she could face Gillian and the bombed bridesmaids. She’d rather be drawn and quartered. “No. But I can grab the bus or find a taxi…”

His lips thinned. “You’re not walking alone at this time of night,” he’d said angrily and picked up the radio from the dressing table. “Jay…Jay…come in…”

“Hey, Brandon. What’s up?”

“I need you to do me a favor.”

In the end, the bouncer waited with her out front until the taxi arrived. And when she reached her apartment, she discovered Brandon had also arranged for the fare to be taken care of, the driver making a show of the brightly colored chit he’d collected at the club.

Yet as she lay awake in bed that night, her body still thrumming with the incredible sensations he’d awoken, it hadn’t been his sexual prowess she remembered as much as his thoughtfulness, his protectiveness. He’d made sure she’d been looked after.

Maybe,
she thought,
if I went back to the club, we could meet again…

The notion of returning to the strip club brought her back to earth like a cold dash of water. What the hell was she thinking? Brandon was an exotic dancer; she was an academic in training. The sex might have been great but what would they ever talk about outside of bed? They had nothing in common. Nothing at all.

Now, as she shifted restlessly in her rickety office chair, she knew she had to put Saturday night behind her. She’d been over this and over this all weekend and the conclusion was always the same. So what if she’d had the greatest sex of her life? For him, it was probably just another anonymous sexual encounter. She should treat it the same way.

Trying to muster her willpower, she turned her attention to the next paper.

Bryon’s poem “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” is an important poem because it’s a really romantic poem about Harold and not the crazy sister that Bryon liked to sleep with.

Oh boy. Not an auspicious start, when even the poet’s name was spelled incorrectly.

The office door opened, and Cassandra Murphy, a fellow doctoral candidate and Leanne’s best friend, rescued her from reading another torturous line.

“Tell me again why earning this degree was a good idea,” she moaned as she laid a stack of books on the adjoining desk. “I’m in debt up to my eyeballs—I should be clear of it shortly before retirement—and Julia and I decorate with milk crates while eating no-name macaroni. My comps are in two months and I already feel like flinging myself from the observatory tower.” She threw herself dramatically into a chair. “I have been reading, I am reading, I will be reading.”

Leanne smiled sympathetically. She remembered how harried and emotionally drained she’d felt when she faced her own monumental two-day comprehensive exams last year.

“You’ll more than survive. You’ll blow them all away and get the green light to begin writing your thesis, which will wow the entire academy and make them say ‘Judith Butler who?’”

At the mention of the oft-controversial lesbian theorist, Cassandra grinned.

“I’d be willing to share the stage with her. As long as I get top billing in the conference programs.” Reaching for the shelf where they kept their not so emergency cookie stash, she continued between mouthfuls, “Julia had good news, though. She’s had her abstract accepted for the next MLA conference. It’s in St. Paul.”

For a moment, Leanne was distracted by the great news. Only the best humanities scholars were accepted to present at the Modern Language Association’s annual conference and being chosen was a huge feather in Julia’s cap. “That’s fantastic. I hope you took her out to celebrate.”

“I never need a reason to celebrate with the woman I love.” Cassandra laughed. “But yes, I let her supersize the fries
and
the drink. If that ain’t love, I don’t know what is.” Her eyes sharpened. “Wasn’t this the weekend for the ghastly Gillian’s hen party? Did you end up going? How was it? Really, really awful or just sorta-kinda awful?”

I had the best sex of my life and three orgasms, all within half an hour of meeting a perfect stranger.

“Not bad.”

“Right.” Cassandra snorted. “I’ve met Gillian. Fun and Gillian don’t usually travel together. So, tell me, did the bride-to-be get falling-down drunk and do something tacky and embarrassing? And if she did,
puh-lease
tell me you got pictures.”

“Well, Gillian didn’t…”

“Ooh, that sounds promising.” Cassandra rolled her chair over, straddling it with her long legs. Leaning over its back, her chin resting on her arms, she smirked. “Let me guess.
You
went to the strip club, got wildly drunk and had noisy, kinky, public sex with a total stranger before being discovered in a compromising position.”

“Um…yeah. That’s about the size of it,” she admitted before hastily qualifying her statement by adding, “but I wasn’t drunk.”

Dead silence.

For the first time in their friendship, she discovered just what it took to render her voluble friend speechless. Visibly regrouping, Cass closed her mouth with an audible click before running an uncertain hand through her short, spiky hair, trying to look as though Leanne’s pronouncement hadn’t knocked her for a loop.

“Okay, well, if you’d said you’d had noisy, kinky, public
lesbian
sex, I would have been excited that you’d finally seen the light, but really, sounds like the same old, same old heterosexual routine…” Her voice trailed off as she took in Leanne’s face. Her joking tone disappeared. “You okay?”

Leanne tried to nod but how could she explain to anyone, even her best friend, what she’d been thinking when she couldn’t even explain her behavior to herself?

“Lee? Are you okay?” Cassandra’s voice was sharp with concern and Leanne felt her panic ebb a little in the face of her best friend’s warm care. “Did anything happen that you weren’t good with?”

“No, it was definitely mutual. Completely, totally unexpected but mutual.” She smiled weakly. “I really am good, Cass. I’m just still trying to process it, I guess. It’s not really my style, you know.”

“Gee, really?” Cassandra said lightly, but her dark eyes filled with sympathy as she enfolded Leanne in a warm and reassuring hug.

After a moment, she recovered and lifted her head from Cass’s shoulder.

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.” The doubtful look on her friend’s face didn’t inspire confidence. “Really, I’ll be fine. And unless they start offering degrees in pole dancing at the university, it’s not like I’m ever going to see him again. That’ll definitely make things easier.”

“You got it on with one of the strippers?” Cassandra’s jaw dropped for the second time in as many minutes. Sitting up in the chair, she faced Lee and in a tone that brooked no disobedience said, “Start from the beginning. And don’t leave
anything
out, my friend.”

The monthly faculty social was a motley assortment of faculty, administrators and students typical of most university social events. The rain that had been threatening most of the day finally arrived but despite the poor weather, attendance was good and the Faculty Club filled up quickly, groups of chatting colleagues dotted around the room. Near the windows, a long buffet covered in finger foods attracted a steady stream of visitors. If Leanne had learned anything during her eight years of higher education, it was that the promise of free food would always ensure a lively turnout.

Of course, she really should have skipped out and stayed in her office grading papers, because she and Cassandra hadn’t made much progress on their marking. Truth be told, they hadn’t made
any
progress. Instead, they’d spent their office hours talking, going over the weekend’s events.

It hadn’t been easy telling her best friend all the details and admitting to her reckless behavior, but in the end she had to admit she felt better about the whole situation. Calmer. After all, she was a big girl and if she wanted to have an anonymous but satisfying sexual encounter with a member of the opposite sex, who was to stop her?

So there, Mom.

Cassandra and her partner, Julia, were ensconced in a spirited conversation with another member of the campus GLBT committee, while Leanne made her way along the buffet.

“Ah, Leanne!”

When pretending a sudden indecision between the mini mushroom quiche and the veggie samosas didn’t suffice, she forced a smile and greeted her thesis advisor.

“Professor Armstrong,” she said politely. “How’s the new book going?”

At the mention of his most recent project, the academic’s face brightened. “The usual muddles with the publishers, I’m afraid, but overall, very well if I do say so myself. So, can I buy you a drink?” he joked, gesturing to the modest open bar and chortling at his thread-worn pleasantry, delivered without fail since the start of term.

“Thanks, no.” Her concentration wandered as the professor began extolling the difficulties the publisher kept erecting as he prepared his work for press.

“And I’ve been able to read through the latest chapter you left for me. While I don’t want to monopolize your time when you’re relaxing like this, I have to say, I do have some concerns.”

Concerns?
Her attention riveted again, Lee felt her stomach roll. She knew she’d been lucky when Armstrong agreed to supervise her research—for the past two years, he’d been her principal advisor on her doctoral dissertation—but he was a taskmaster, forever suggesting revisions. But she needed his approbation or she’d never secure the necessary references for a chance at her chosen postdoctoral fellowship, the Walters Prize. The competition was fierce and good enough wasn’t anywhere near the level she was required to be.

Her panic must have telegraphed across her face far more clearly than she’d intended, because the aging academic, whose strong point had never been emotional sensitivity, touched her arm in a show of concern.

“Now, don’t worry. They’re minor revisions, I assure you. Your work is always exemplary.”

This was where she should smile and share a superficial pleasantry but since the weekend, everything felt raw and off-kilter, her judgment suspect and her goals, firm, longstanding and concrete, even more significant because of her unprecedented gaff.

“That’s great news. I—I wasn’t really worried.”

His face cleared and he patted her arm reassuringly. “You’re one of the faculty’s rising stars. I’ve always expected great things of you academically and one of things I respect about you the most, Leanne, is your unwavering focus on a life of the mind. It’s rarer and rarer these days.”

She tried to look pleased at his compliment but his turn of phrase still rankled.
Life of the mind?
She wanted to shout,
“I have a body too, you know. And I like sex as much as the next person.”
But as always, she bit her tongue and simply nodded. And if her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes? Well, Armstrong wouldn’t notice anyway.

“Let’s meet on Thursday. Does eleven o’clock work for you?” At her nod, he continued, “I’ll see you then and we’ll discuss your latest draft.”

He moved away, leaving Leanne alone to survey the room while she munched from her napkin of lukewarm appetizers.

Then she saw someone across the room and the food lodged in her throat. Tall. Muscled. His dark blond hair cut short. A well-worn sweater attested to his likely status as a student. She’d never seen him at any of the faculty events before—she’d remember a hunk like this for sure. But it was less his looks than his smooth, fluid presence as he gestured that reminded her of Brandon when he took the stage.

Whoever this guy was, he moved the same way. With an easy confidence in his body that made watching him a pleasure.