The Things That Make Me Give In (2 page)

She herself can never know what the Professor is thinking.

She steps back slowly and stands before him for judgement.

‘You wrote something else for me – how kind of you.’

Judgement is very cruel. She tries not to let her swallowing be audible.

‘I –’ she starts, but the rest won’t come. Her face isn’t just the colour of that red hair now. It’s beyond that, more like the puce dress worn by the woman on the cover of
The Lady and the Bastard.
It gets worse when he leaves the side of his desk – very properly, very brusquely – and seats himself behind it. Now it’s like an interview. Now it’s as if she has been arrested, and it’s time for a confession.

‘Perhaps you might explain yourself,’ he says, after an agonising moment of nothing but handcuffs and jail time. He sits back in his chair – still straight-backed, however – and assesses her with his cold lizard eyes. Electric sparks! They’re reptilian, plain and simple.

Of course, she cannot explain herself. She clutches her work to her chest and hopes her abject fear will force him to have mercy. Surely he can see fear like this? It must look as though she is melting.

‘No?’ he says, and raises one ever-mobile eyebrow. ‘Then read some of that lovely work out for me, Miss Shore. Let’s have some entertainment, to pass the time.’

She flicks her wavering gaze up to the door of the lecture hall. Someone is bound to come in and save her – this can’t be allowed. Maybe
he’ll
be arrested.

‘No, I –’

‘No?’
He laughs, and it’s a bizarrely bright thing on his closed-down face. ‘But both of us are quite aware of what it contains, are we not? How can you have any objections?’

‘Because . . .’

Because it’s
humiliating.
It’s roasting her insides alive with its levels of humiliation. She wants to cry just to give the heat some outlet, but the tears won’t come. God, what a rotten, evil bastard he is.

‘Come now. Start at the beginning of the excerpt – I assume it’s an excerpt from a longer work? No matter. How did it go? He parted her velvet thighs . . .’

Her eyes want to close but if she lets them she knows she might miss him doing something even more awful than this. He might come towards her. Look right down on her, so small and weak and feeble. And then maybe she would swoon in his –

Words snap to her tongue, quite suddenly. She hadn’t known they were boiling and scorching down there inside her with all the rest of it, but it seems they are and they want out. Not even her suddenly gritted teeth can stop them.

‘He
parted
her
velvet
thighs and
gazed
at the centre of her
womanhood
.’

She saws out every second word or so as though cutting through bone.

He doesn’t respond, however. She imagines laughter from him that would then let her storm out, but he doesn’t give it. He just sits there – long enough that she can at last realise what he’s doing.

Waiting for her to continue.

It takes an interminable amount of time for her to do so, and at no point does she reflect that she could just leave, now. Instead she starts reading, because it seems like something to fill up the silence, the waiting, his strange, patient gaze.

Of course she still expects the mocking to come, and squirms to think of it – and indeed it does come. But it’s not in the form she expects.

‘Clara could scarcely believe what the man in front of her was bidding her do. His rampant manhood reared –’

‘Cock.’

She almost drops the open file. He remains as impassive as ever. He might as well have said ‘Tuesday’.

‘What?’

‘Use “cock”. Use “cunt”. There’s more power in words like
those, don’t you find? More straightforward. Less silly. And you’re not really a silly sort of girl, are you, Clara?’

‘I feel pretty silly now.’

‘Then use “cock”, and feel less silly.’

‘Can I stop reading now? There’s only more of the silly stuff.’

‘Don’t be defensive. You must want me to hear it, or you wouldn’t still be here.’

‘Oh, it’s that old argument, is it?’

She’s pretty sure a smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. But he’s quick to close it down.

‘Is it a bigger cliché for me to say you want it really, or for a student to hand in the wrong thing by accident and have her teacher
catch her at it
?’

It was the hot water before. Now it’s cold. It soon goes back to hot, however.

‘Silly, Clara. To give them names so close to real life, too. I’m
very
disappointed. Your essays showed such promise.’

‘You gave my essays C and B grades!’

‘And I’m sure that made you very angry, very angry at cold, horrible me.’

‘You’re not –’ she starts to say, but, oh, thank God, she stops herself. Clearly, however, she hasn’t been thanking God hard enough, because he knows anyway.

‘Not
really
cold? Warm on the inside? Passionate somewhere deep in my tortured soul?’

‘I hate you.’

‘I know you do. Read on.’

She hates him even more for knowing she will.

‘– like a beast and she turned her face away, shamed by her own burning . . . pussy . . . more than by the sight of his . . . jutting . . . erection.’

‘Better. Fewer adjectives.’

‘“You will love this,” he breathed, and though she could not admit it in any part of her, she knew it to be true. A hot slick throbbing had begun in that secret place between her legs, and
the dastardly Lord Clemmings knew how to take full advantage.’

‘Dastardly? Is he, by any chance, a rake? And she’s a virgin, of course. But she has a hidden harlot’s heart and he really loves small children and little puppies and –’

‘Just stop it, all right. I’m fully aware of how ridiculous this is.’

‘I see.’

‘If you find it all so stupid, why teach this course?’

He doesn’t answer. She has to guess, just as with everything about him.

‘She gasped as he parted the lips of her sex, spreading her liquid over every secret fold, exploring her more thoroughly than she ever thought anyone could. Her own hands had never reached such hidden places, because, oh, how wrong it was, how wicked!

‘And yet she could not stop him defiling her thus.’

His eyes gleam at her, on the word ‘defiling’.

‘Gently he stroked her, belying the debased nature of this act. She occasionally allowed herself to plead with him to stop, but her own will – so strong and strange – and his dominated her completely. It was something remarkable, to be so helpless in his arms, to be a slave to her own mounting pleasure.’

Of course there is more. But it’s worse than the parts she has just read out, and it’s one thing to know he’s read them but quite another to speak them aloud. So she waits, and stares at the words, and wills him to tell her to leave.

‘Go to the board behind me,’ he says finally. His voice seems to . . . deepen when he does, but it’s hard to tell. Harder yet to understand what that deepening might mean. That he realises he’s doing something wrong?

He’s about to do something worse, she knows. It’s obvious, even before he tells her to pick up the pen. Though maybe it’s just worse because she obeys, file now closed and pinned back to her chest.

‘Write fifty times: “I must write less ridiculous love scenes”.’

‘Is that what you think they are? Love scenes?’

‘I don’t know, Clara. Do you feel like you’re in love?’

‘Just shut up, all right. I’m not doing this, you know.’

‘Fifty times. “I must write less ridiculous love scenes”.’

‘Don’t you mean
fuck
? Fuck scenes.’

There is a pause between her putting the pen to the board and his replying. It’s the heaviest one yet and she feels it pressing on her back – though maybe it’s just his presence that’s pressing, as he stands up behind her. Her legs are trembling and buckling under the pressure, she knows, but God, at least she hasn’t cried in front of him.

‘Yes, I mean fuck,’ he says, and then – too alarming to bear – he puts his hand over the curving top swell of her bottom.

The pen slides up on its own and makes a scything smile of green that isn’t meant to be there. The word
scene
in her first line is now ruined – she can’t reach most of the shaking mistake to rub it out.

She is about to turn and say something sharp, but he then
pats
her bottom. He pats it, and says, ‘Keep writing, Clara.’

The face she had half-turned to him seems to want to turn back, but she doesn’t know if she can bear that. If she turns back, and keeps writing, what then? What then of flowery words and teachers and students and ridiculousness? This wouldn’t happen in her story. It wouldn’t happen. It’s too sordid.

It feels
heavenly
.

He just strokes her bottom, slowly, ever so slowly and in circles. And when she makes fumbling marks on the board once more, then – oh,
then
– he begins to ruffle her skirt up, inch by inch.

Suddenly his mouth is at her ear, his breath as hot as her own insides feel.

‘What do all good romance heroines get, Clara?’ he says and for a moment she can’t think. She has no idea. Hand-holding? Marriage? A yacht and three mansions and –

‘The hero!’ she says, and then is embarrassed that she has yelled it out, like a little apple polisher. Ever the A student, ever the good girl, and apparently also slightly more than the second-string character.

Even if he isn’t the hero of anything.

‘And tell me, what are the heroes usually like, in a romance?’

She can feel herself shaking now. He has his hand on the seat of her knickers, her skirt completely pushed up. As she answers, he strokes just one finger into the split of her buttocks through the material.

‘Aggressive. Arrogant. Dominant.’

‘And the women?’

‘Submissive. Pathetic.’

‘Is that what you really think? That they’re pathetic?’

His finger strokes further into the crease, straining against the taut material. She gasps, and writes things that are not words.

‘Yes. Yes.’

‘And you hate arrogant men, cold men, nasty rotten rakes. You don’t like to write about them.’

‘I . . . find it hard. I find it hard to write about . . . dominant men.’

‘Shall I yank your knickers down?’

‘Yes! Jesus, yes.’

She tries to find it in her to be embarrassed about the volume of that concession, but all that fills her is the thought of her knickers around her ankles and his big hands on her hips and how wet she is, how utterly wet.

‘You like me doing this, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ she says, but it comes out as three separate words, whined and childish.

‘You like me doing exactly what you want.’

‘I –’

‘Because after all, isn’t that what romance novels really are? Women detailing exactly what they’d like men to do and how to be?’

She moans and twists against his hand.

‘They’re just fantasies.’

He has her knickers pushed to one side now, and is sliding his fingers over one plump aching lip of her sex. She squirms some more, and cannot write at all, and holds her breath for that moment when he will rub his finger inwards and stroke against all the slickness along the seam.

He leans in instead, and whispers hotly in her ear, ‘Does this feel like a fantasy? Or did you mean to write about someone else?’

‘I don’t really know you. You could be like anything – I had other ideas –’

‘Let’s start with this one,’ he says, and such a warm pulse of pleasure goes through her that it forces out a sound. The shame of admitting something like that turns in on itself and she feels her clit swell and the wetness that’s about to embarrass her some more spread and trickle into the space he has opened up between her flesh and her knickers.

‘How juicy you are,’ he says, and, sure enough, that tensing, embarrassed sensation floods her again. The heat, so supple and lovely and unavoidable, tugging at her pussy. ‘Do you sit in my class, getting as slick as this? Do you scribble down lots of things about firm fat cocks fucking mouths and cunts and arseholes, spurting their come into every hole, until you’re sure you can’t debase your character any further? Or is it all just pretty blossoms of her pleasure and stalks of his manhood? Marriage first, of course.’

‘You’ve read what I wrote.’

‘I’ve read what’s
underneath
your writing. I’m guessing that’s all you wrote – the scene that would be on page 197, though toned down, of course. Do you think they’d let you get away with your hero joyously jacking off all over the heroine’s tits, then licking his own spunk from her glistening nipples?’

‘There’s nothing wrong with keeping things to page 197,’ she says but even so she can feel the real words she wants to say
breaking against the waves of such a stupid protestation.
No more teasing
, she thinks.
Don’t tease, just fuck me with your hand, your cock, anything
.

‘I never said there was. I only wondered what
you
were really like.’

His finger finally finds its way between her over-swollen and aching lips, and eases through her creamy slit without a hindrance. Her clit jumps and demands attention, but he isn’t so kind.

‘Tell the truth now – do you work up all this slipperiness in my class? Is it my voice or your own fantasies that do it? Tell me what you do when you go home. Do you make it home? Or do you go the bathroom and lock yourself into one of the stalls, frig yourself off with just one hand in your knickers, the other in your mouth while you think about me shafting that tight little cunt?’

The words she wants to say win, at last. There’s going to be a tidal wave, she’s sure.

‘I want you to fuck me. Oh, God, please fuck me, Professor.’

He breaks too, then, she thinks. He breathes a sound against her neck, at least, and she isn’t sure it’s because she asked him to fuck her. Really, she thinks, it’s because she called him Professor.

Like Lord. Like King. Like Sir.

He rips her knickers down, hard enough to make the elastic scrape and roll against her flexing thighs. She glances up at the lecture-hall door, but no one’s there, and the hallway seems dark beyond. Still, the image of ten people suddenly being there, staring down at them . . . cocks and pussies in hands, maybe, some of them fucking as they watch . . . oh, that’s nice, too. Almost as nice as his idea of how far her characters could go – a cock in every hole, fucking and spurting and making a mess of her.