The Housemistress (9 page)

This small, sensual gesture makes Rylie gasp and shiver, and while it goes unnoticed by most of the class, there’s one particularly attentive girl who witnesses the entire demonstration: Adel Edwards.

Following a rather unimpressive dinner of vegetarian lasagna in the refectory, Rylie joins Gabby in the house study room for a mandatory hour of silent homework, then the pair retreats to the kitchen for a bowl of ice cream. Other sixth formers are milling about the house, watching television, some still doing their homework, listening to music in the dormitories, or reading.

Done marking Year Nine coursework, Miss Ansell swoops into the common room and takes charge of the television remote, thus preventing the outbreak of war for its possession, but causing an exodus of discontented Upper and Lower Sixth girls to flood the halls when she changes the channel to a marathon of Meerkat Manor.

In the wake of this disruption, Carriveau—now also done with her evening paperwork—has a hard time tracking down the newest addition to her house.

“Oh, there you are!” She pokes her head around the kitchen doorway, finding Rylie and Gabby slathering their ice cream in chocolate sauce. “I’ve been looking for you.”

The two teens start to rise from their chairs, but Carriveau gestures for them to remain seated.

“No, no,” she insists. “I don’t want to interrupt, but Harcourt, I’d like to see you in my study when you’re finished.” Her eyes flit to Gabby, then back to Rylie. “Take your time.”

She’s gone in a flash, and Rylie’s left wondering what more she could possibly have done wrong. Gobbling up her ice cream as fast as her body will allow, she cleans herself up and knocks on Carriveau’s study door less than ten minutes later.

“
Entrez
!” is the welcoming response.

Somewhat shyly, Rylie opens the door and steps inside, finding Carriveau seated behind her desk. With her hair pinned back and her reading glasses on, she looks bookish and conservative, but that changes quite dramatically when she sets her glasses aside and stands up.

She’s shed her jacket, her blouse clinging to every curve. It’s tight around her bust, the lacy imprint of her bra showing through, hinting at the presence of two slightly erect nipples.

This woman is not bookish nor conservative.

She’s a vixen.

“I spoke to Missus Bursnell about changing your enrollments,” she says, leaning on the front of her desk, waiting for Rylie to close the door before she continues.

“It’s bad news?” Rylie assumes, sealing their privacy. “She said no?”

“Not quite.” Carriveau invites Rylie over to the leather sofa. “I’ve been instructed to test your proficiency before I’m allowed to accept you into my class.” She sits on the far end of the sofa, swiveled to face her pupil, leaving a cautious distance between them. “I thought the best way to do this might be”—she hesitates for emphasis—“orally.”

Taste the rainbow.

Rylie can’t help it. That slogan springs back into her head at full force, and to make matters worse, the bowl of Skittles has been placed prominently in the center of the coffee table.

This is tit for tat, she thinks, her cheeks on fire. She’d made Carriveau blush in class, and now this is some kind of private payback.

“Wh … I sh …” She tries to keep her mind away from oral sex. “I … this is … gah.” She blows air through her lips and rests her hands on her knees, determined not to fidget.

Seeing her discomfort, Carriveau laughs and eases up. “Tongue-tied?” She kicks off her shoes. “Not a good way to begin.”

“What do you, umm, want me to speak about?” Rylie recovers herself somewhat.

“Anything, as long as you say it
en français
.” Carriveau tucks her feet beneath herself, causing her skirt to ride up a few more inches. “Tell me about Rylie Harcourt.”

Over the course of the next hour and beyond, they converse in French. Rylie makes Carriveau laugh, not only with her stories, but also by butchering the odd word here and there, mixing up her prepositions, and stumbling over some of the more complex sentence structures. All in all, though, she demonstrates more than enough aptitude to warrant being included in Carriveau’s class, and the conversation flows so easily between them that the true objective of this
tête-a-tête
is very nearly forgotten altogether. Indeed, it’s not until Carriveau finds herself stifling a yawn that she thinks to check the time.

“Goodness! It’s been almost two hours!” She looks twice at her watch, just to be sure it hasn’t stopped. “It’s nearly curfew!”

“Well, how did I do?” Rylie smiles sheepishly. “Am I good enough for you? Do you want me?”

Carriveau ignores the blindingly obvious
double sens
in both of those questions.

“
Ton français est très bon
.” She praises Rylie’s linguistic prowess, telling her how good her French is. “Perhaps you have no need of any private tutelage after all,” she threatens. “You already seem to have a firm grasp of things.”

Rylie’s mind flashes back to the kitchen, cupping Carriveau’s tight
derrière
with both hands, wishing she’d had the nerve to squeeze.

On that note, “My grasp could be firmer.”

Continuing to ignore the lines being fed to her, even though she’s guilty of setting Rylie up for them, Carriveau keeps the focus on language.

“I confess, I’ve enjoyed hearing you speak French. So seldom do I hear my first tongue outside of the classroom. Much less spoken well.” She holds Rylie’s gaze. “
Tu me fais frémir, ma chère
.”

Pouncing on the thinly veiled confession that Carriveau quivers in her presence—veiled in part by way of it being spoken in French instead of English, and partly by slipping it in alongside a legitimate appreciation for linguistic proficiency—Rylie feels brave enough to offer up an admission of her own.

“
Tu es très gentille, Mademoiselle Carriveau
.” She’s riveted by her Housemistress’s plump red lips. “
Quand je suis près de toi, je me sens
—”

You’re very nice, Miss Carriveau.

When I’m close to you, I feel—

Fearful of where that sentence might be going, Carriveau doesn’t let her get any further.

“Oh, my sweet girl.” She scooches forward and presses her palm to Rylie’s cheek. “I’m afraid that you might’ve found a way into my affections already.” She drops her hand to Rylie’s lap, patting her thigh. “But we really must call it a night.”

She slips on her shoes and gets up from the sofa without allowing Rylie any chance to respond, then prepares to show her eager pupil to the door. But although Rylie follows her off the sofa, the hesitant teen doesn’t take any steps forward.

“Is there something wrong?” Carriveau doubles back.

Now seems like as good a time as any to bring up one niggling issue that’s been gnawing at her since last night’s failed flirtation in her cubicle, so Rylie just spits it out.

“
Putain
means whore.” She looks away, scratching at an ink stain on her new cardigan. “You said it when you were helping me with my bed, and I know I gave the wrong impression when I stuck my arse out at you like a baboon in heat, but I don’t want you to think that I’m—”

“I didn’t call you a whore.” Carriveau stops her from digging herself into a hole. “That’s one fairly literal translation of the word, but it’s used primarily as an exclamation in France.” She lowers her voice almost to a whisper, as if afraid that someone else might hear. “Like ‘fuck’, you understand? It wasn’t meant as an insult, only an exclamation of my surprise.”

“Oh.” Rylie works that over in her mind, feeling daft for having fixated on it.

“But still”—Carriveau takes Rylie by the chin and forces her to look up—“I shouldn’t have said it. To do so was terribly unprofessional. Please forgive me.”

Forgiveness comes in a second.

An embrace follows.

Rylie slides her arms around Carriveau’s neck—as she’d tried to do that very morning—and sinks into the French woman’s warm breast with a desperate sigh of longing.

Too shocked to respond appropriately, Carriveau stands rigid, a sharp intake of breath trapped in her lungs. She hasn’t the nerve to reciprocate, nor the desire to push the child away.

“
Qu’est-ce que tu fais
?” she whispers, reaching tentatively for Rylie’s waist. “What are you doing?” She translates herself needlessly, knowing that Rylie understands perfectly well. “This isn’t allowed.” Her hands traverse the contours of the young girl’s body, sweeping around her back, one hand remaining there while the other glides upward to caress her shoulders.

More telling than her words, Carriveau doesn’t force the embrace to end.

“This isn’t allowed,” she whispers again, her cheek pressed to Rylie’s hair.

Emboldened by the lack of a rebuke, Rylie nuzzles her face into the hollow of Carriveau’s neck, inhaling the scent of her perfume.

“You’re so beautiful,” she murmurs, her lips brushing Carriveau’s collar bone before closing over it, laying a single velvet kiss there.

As perhaps was the intention, the flustered Housemistress is so focused on the actions of Rylie’s mouth, the teen’s breath hot against her skin, she doesn’t at first realize that one of Rylie’s arms is slipping slowly from her shoulder, a daring hand sliding brazenly toward her breast. But when she does …

“
Ça suffit
! That’s enough!” She captures the wandering hand, swiftly separating herself from her venturesome new pupil. “You ought to get ready for bed now. We’ve been far too long in each other’s company.” She marches Rylie to the door. “Bed check in five minutes.”

Rylie stands alone in the hallway for a few moments before ascending the stairs. Not sure whether to conclude that her private time with Carriveau ended on a positive note or a negative one, she simply brushes her teeth and goes straight to bed.

From her cubicle, she can see two girls—the same pair as the night before—fooling around, squished into one tiny bed. They’re kissing, giggling, and whimpering, one girl’s hand up the other’s nightdress.

“Boo!” Gabby thrusts her head over the dividing wall to Rylie’s immediate left, flashing a toothy grin. “What did our old mum want with ya? You was in there for ages!”

Rylie shrugs. “Just some stuff about my class enrollments.” She tips her head to the canoodling pair. “Aren’t they worried Miss Carriveau will catch them doing that?”

“Pfft!” Gabby blows a raspberry. “They like to tease her. But if you ask me, I think it’s cruel.”

“Cruel?” Rylie lays her pajamas out on her bed. “Why?”

“After what happened with Kaitlyn? Shit, I’m surprised Miss Carriveau can still bear to look at us, never mind be as kind as she is. I reckon I’d wanna run a hundred miles if I was her.”

Before Rylie can press her to expound on that, the dormitory door opens and Carriveau—her jacket back on and buttoned up—announces her arrival for bed checks.

Seemingly in a rush to get this chore over and done with, she walks briskly down the aisle, hurrying through her goodnights with the odd “Pick that up,” or “You’ll need to clean that in the morning” thrown in for good measure.

When she gets to one conspicuously empty cubicle, she plants her hands on her hips and calls out the girl’s name, drawing the horny teen away from her would-be bedmate.

“Say goodnight and get back to your own cubicle, Richardson.”

The girl does as instructed, giving her lover a long parting kiss, tongues and all, and Carriveau keeps her eyes on them from beginning to end, exploiting her peripheral vision to steal a perfect view of Rylie, topless as she changes into her pajamas.

When Richardson finally slips back into her own cubicle, Carriveau whips her bum with a discarded towel she picks off the floor.

Richardson squeals. “Would you like one of my goodnight kisses, too, Miss?”

For one shocking second, Rylie thinks she just might. Carriveau slings the towel over the cubicle wall, grabs Richardson’s chin, and tilts her head up.

“Watch your mouth, you cheeky girl.” A smile twitches at the corners of her lips and she releases the sassy teen, resuming her nightly arc of the dorm.

At Rylie’s cubicle, she slips a hand inside one of her jacket pockets and fishes out something small, concealing it in her palm.

“So how was your first day?” she asks, stepping as close to the thin yellow line as she dares. “It’s a lot to adapt to, I’m sure.” She takes Rylie’s hand in hers, mimicking a reassuring touch. “It’ll take some time to get used to the boundaries we all must stick to.”

Rylie feels a slip of paper press into her palm, and she holds it there with her thumb as Carriveau withdraws, giving nothing away.

Her heart pounding impatiently, she waits for Carriveau to complete the bed checks and turn out the lights before she dives for her bed. Even then, she waits until the room falls silent—the echo of Carriveau’s stiletto heels departing—before she slides her cell phone out from underneath her pillow and uses its glow to read the secret bedtime note.