A Good Student

A friend of mine says that a woman's biggest fear is abandonment and a man's biggest fear is responsibility. I don't know if I believe that, but I suppose that's as good an explanation as any for why I was living alone at the time I met Emma. I was twice her age and had had my full share of relationships of all shapes and sizes, and while I'd found them kind of interesting in a morbid kind of way, I'd come to accept the fact that I was pretty lousy at them. I was a spectator, not a participant, and it seemed best that way. To be honest, I was selfish, irresponsible, immature. I still am and suppose I always will be. I was no longer looking to change.

No matter how my relationships started out, they always seemed to end up the same way, as a burden and an imposition. I know that living with someone and loving them is a co-operative effort, a two-way street, but for some reason it seemed that the things I had to give up and sacrifice in order to keep the peace were never worth it in the long run. I was married twice, once for two and a half years, then, twelve years later, for four, and in both cases my wives had big plans for me. I couldn't live up to them. I tried, but making her happy by making myself miserable didn't seem like sound emotional economics.

They tell me that I probably wasn't really in love then—that when you love someone, you'll do anything to make them happy. I don't buy that. In fact, that seems like a pretty good working definition of slavery to me, but this is the kind of stuff I would hear from women, who seemed to have the moral high ground when it came to definitions of love and relationships. They certainly seemed to know what they were talking about, so I tended to keep my mouth shut and avoided the whole subject.

When I met Emma, then, I wasn't really looking for anything, or if I was, it was maybe the exact opposite of what was generally accepted as a normal relationship. If anything, I wanted to strip away all that jockeying for moral superiority and sense of social obligation and get down to the raw, primal genital imperatives of male-female attraction. I didn't want to get into a situation where I'd have to meet her friends and listen to her music and get involved in her life any more than was necessary, and I didn't want to impose all my crap on her either. I wanted to be her lover, not her friend, and meet in that place where our bodies and minds felt nothing but raw animal pleasure. From there we could see where the emotions led us and see if we couldn't develop some kind of arrangement that wouldn't get all suffocated under a mess of domestic trivia and crushed by interpersonal fatigue syndrome.

I wanted to see how long the two of us could keep this thing at the boiling point without getting overcooked.

Of course, it's impossible to have a sexual collision like Emma and I had that night in my office and come out of it emotionally unscathed. I spent that entire weekend sitting around in my loft in my cut-offs, thinking about her and aching. It was hotter than hell but I wouldn't even turn on the AC because that meant closing the windows and that felt like cutting myself off from her somehow, as if she might be sending me thoughts and pheromones on the breeze from way up in the burbs wherever she lived, so I just drank bottled water and sweated and remembered the feel of her skin and the way her muscles trembled against the ropes as I fucked her and she came on my cock. I could still smell her sex in the sweat of my body.

My novel was almost finished and it was entirely bullshit, I could see that now. The intensity of emotion I'd felt with Emma made me realize how false and contrived everything I'd written was. Yes, sex is sex and always intense. Sex deals with immediate sensation and literature deals with abstract ideas and they really can't be compared, but it was becoming clearer to me all the time that ideas were what you played around with when you couldn't get any sex. Intellect is pretty much maybe 80% the mind trying to figure out how to get the body laid. Whether it's writing books or solving quadratic equations, it's all loneliness and we're all stuck with it.

So I sat around and obsessed about Emma. She was upsetting all my theories. I mean, it was only sex after all, sex isn't the same as love. The problem is, I know what sex is, but I'm never sure about love. My own personal guide to love is that it's measured by how much I want to be with someone. By that definition, I was pretty much wildly in love with Emma.

I had her number and thought about calling her, but the last thing I wanted was to bother her. It wasn't just a case of not wanting to look uncool or needy, but it also went against my new non-relationship relationship rules. Besides, I was supposed to be the Dom, and in my ignorance at the time I thought that meant that I should be cold and aloof and unfeeling. That was nonsense, but what did I know?

At eight I went out to the bar down the street to get a beer and some cool air, and when I came back there was a message on the phone.

"Hi, it's me, Emma. I was just bored and wanted to talk but it was nothing important, and I guess you're out. You can call me if you get home like before eleven or so. Bye."

My hands were shaking when I sat down and picked up the phone. She got it on the third ring. "Hi, Emma? It's me. Conner."

"Oh, hi." She sounded a little fuzzy, sleepy, but came alive at the sound of my voice. "It's nice you called me back. I didn't think you would."

"Of course I would. Why wouldn't I? How are you, Emma? Everything okay?"

"Mmm, yeah. I guess so. Just bored."

It was the first time we'd spoken since I'd walked her to her car after tying her wrists to her ankles and fucking her raw on the desk in my office at the community college where she was in my poetry class. The event hung between us like a huge weight we had to cautiously feel our way around.

"Bored? Me too. You should have come over here. I could have found something for us to do"

I could hear her sly smile over the phone. "Oh? Like what?"

"You know what."

"No," she teased. The sound on her end changed, as if she'd cupped her hand around the phone or moved it closer to her lips. "Tell me," she whispered. "I want to hear you say it. Please?"

I couldn't resist. She made me want to do it, and the words just spilled from my mouth before I could stop them, my voice low, my urgency real. "I want to fuck you, Emma. I want to tie you up and get my cock inside you and make you take it, every fucking inch. I want you to come for me till you can't stand it any more. You understand?"

I heard the dry sound of her breath. "Oh God," she said. "No one's ever talked to me like that before."

"Do you like it?" I was already getting hard.

"You must think I'm horrible," she said. "A real slut."

"I don't think anything like that."

She didn't say anything for a while, and then: "Conner, I have to tell you something. I've got a boyfriend. We're engaged. Well, almost engaged."

I'd already suspected as much. A girl like Emma doesn't go around unattached. I'd thought I was above it and wouldn't mind, so the brief stab of hurt surprised me but I pushed it down. I had no right to it.

"Congratulations," I said.

"Doesn't that make you hate me?"

"No. What does that have to do with me?"

She was quiet for a while, then said, "He's really a great guy and he's got a great job. We're just waiting for him to finish his training. He's with—" and here she mentioned some outfit I guess I was supposed to have heard of—UniServe or TeleCom or UniTel or something— "and he's doing three months of training in Atlanta. Then he'll be assigned to San Diego and we'll probably move out there. If we get married here first then the company will pay to move me too, but I'm not real sure yet. I don't know if we'll get married here or there, or maybe somewhere else, like in Mexico, you know? I mean, I'm not really sure of the details yet, but I thought you should know."

"Un-huh. And when's he done with his training?"

"About six weeks."

Silence. I wasn't sure what she wanted me to say. I had no plans for her that extended beyond the length of my dick. I was determined not to lie about that.

"He doesn't know about me," she said. "The kind of things I like. I mean, I tried to get him to do some of that stuff but he just laughed. He couldn't believe I was serious. He thought it was sick, 'cause I guess he's kind of straight. That's not good, is it?"

I shrugged but she couldn't see it. "You're not married yet, right?"

"No."

"Not even engaged."

"No. Not officially."

"Do you love him?"

The pause. The fatal pause. "I think so. He comes back and sees me every couple of weeks."

"Well what do you want me to do, Emma? You want me to not see you anymore?"

"No," she said. "No." There was no pause now. "I just thought I should tell you."

"Un-huh. Well, it bothers you. I can understand that, but you're an adult, honey, and you have to decide what you want to do. Just let me say that I don't want to interfere with your happiness or your life. I have no intention of asking you to break up with your boyfriend or do anything else you don't want to do. This is a physical relationship, Emma, physical and sexual, and beyond that, I don't expect anything from you and I'm not asking for anything. I want your body, Emma. I want you as my lover, that's all."

I was surprised to hear my own words, so clear and unambiguous, so reasonable.

I was even more surprised to hear the response from her lips a few heartbeats later—the hurried whisper, almost a sigh: "God! Why does that make me so hot?"

*****

We didn't talk much more that night. A roommate came home and she didn't want to use the phone, and we hadn't yet exchanged e-mail addresses. I didn't hear from her again until the Monday night before class.

"Hi, it's me, Emma. Did you miss me?"

"Like the sky misses the stars." I smiled, and in truth I had. The last phone call had only increased my desire, and now that I knew she loved being talked to over the phone, I let the words pour out of me. "I miss the feel of you on my cock, your body writhing against mine, your hair in my hands, the way you shiver when I shove my dick into you, the blinding ecstasy as I jet my come into your hot pussy."

I laughed as I heard her catch her breath. She hadn't been expecting anything like that. "Am I going to see you after class?" I asked.

She suddenly grew grave, her voice quiet. "Oh God. I don't know, Conner. I really don't know. I've been thinking about all weekend and I don't know what to do."

I felt like an idiot for my dirty talk and it came out as coldness. "It's your decision, Emma," I said.

"Well, 'Gather ye rosebuds while ye may'."

"What?"

I recited: "

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying: And this same flower that smiles to-day Tomorrow will be dying.

Robert Herrick, seventeenth century poet, 'To the Virgins, to Make the Most of Time"

"I get it," she said. "But I'm not a virgin."

"Oh yes you are," I replied. "More than you know. A lot more than you know."

When she walked into class on Tuesday it was impossible to tell from her clothes what her decision about us had been. She wore a white cotton boat-neck top and a short denim skirt, unusually casual attire for her, and I didn't know if that meant she was comfortable with me now or she just didn't care. She kept her sunglasses on during class, but again, that might have meant she was hiding from me or it might have meant she was trying to conceal her lust.

In any case, I'd already decided to try and ignore her as much as possible during the lecture. What else could I do? But at the same time it was impossible not to be aware of her and what had happened between us. Thankfully, I'd rescheduled things so the lecture was an easy one for me, just playing recordings of various poets reading their own work. It was legitimate— wanted the kids to hear the poems as the poets heard them when they wrote them, the cadence and music of the language, something that doesn't always come across on the printed page—but I didn't have to do much. I'd have the students read a poem to themselves from the handouts, paying attention to how they heard it in their heads, and then put on a recording of the poet reading it in his or her own voice—the elderly, scratched brogue of Yeats, Eliot's eerie prissiness, the roiling madness of Ezra Pound, the ecstatic jazz of Kerouac, Gregory Corso's exuberant word salad, Edna St. Vincent-Millay's repressed and sublimated sexiness. The words rolled out and at the end I just turned down the lights and played recordings at random and we sat and listened. The power of the spoken word seemed to turn the cold auditorium of that third-rate community college into someplace special—a kind of campsite or temple or clearing under the stars where magical things happened, where evanescent feelings were captured and preserved in words and things were shown to us that we'd otherwise never see.

The poetry ended, the voices faded away, and the silence seemed like vacuum left in the room, as if a big train had just passed by. In the silence, I could hear someone softly snoring from one of the upper row but I didn't mind. These kids worked hard. Most of them had jobs. Sitting there and listening, I was reminded of why I'd chosen to try and be a writer myself, and I was proud, and that didn't happen very often. I had goose bumps on my arms.

I didn't want to break the spell by turning on the lights, so I just stayed where I was and announced, "That's all for tonight. Class dismissed."

I turned off the CD and the class gathered up their things and shuffled for the exits. I looked up and saw Emma sitting in her usual place, four rows up. She was slumped slightly in her seat as if she'd been thrown there, as if stunned. Her shoulders were back, and even in the darkness of the hall the shadows of her erect nipples were visible against the thin white fabric of her top. Her sunglasses were pushed up on her head and she was looking directly at me with a weird intensity, as if trying to cast a spell on me or maybe just capture my attention. Beneath the table her knees were spread apart quite plainly and her denim skirt was hiked up to mid thigh. It was too dark to see all the way up her skirt but there was no mistaking that gesture. She was offering herself to me, awaiting my instructions.

The room emptied as took my time, winding up the cord on the CD player, putting my notes away. Emma stayed in her seat, motionless until the door closed on the last student and their voices faded in the hallway. I looked up at her.

"Are you staying?"

"Do you want me to?"

"Yes," I said. "Very much."

I put the CD player away beneath the lectern. "Lock the doors. Take one of those folding chairs and jam the legs under the push-bars"

I'd discovered this trick on my own. The doors could still be forced from the outside, of course, but I liked the feeling of added security and of being locked in, and I liked the idea of making Emma do the locking. The cleaning crew didn't do this side of the building on my class nights anyhow, so there was little chance of our being discovered.

She stood up and smoothed down her skirt. I watched the tight roll of her ass as she climbed the broad stairs towards the back and almost disappeared into the darkness near the exits, then picked up a chair and slid it into place. She turned, pushed her hair back behind her ears, and started walking back down.

"Slowly," I said, my voice echoing in the empty room. "Walk slower. I just want to look at you."

I could adjust the lights from the podium, and I set them now so the auditorium was in complete darkness. There was only the spotlight over the podium and on the whiteboard behind it. Emma walked slowly down the steps, her shoulders back, her eyes flickering from the steps before her up to my face to see my reaction as I watched her in the simple act of approaching me, and act that was suddenly full of portent. She was getting excited. I could sense it from her, the way she had to restrain herself as she stepped down the stairs, pausing at each one, and the sense of power I felt was turning me on just as much as the sight of her. She was bringing herself to me at my command, and the very act was arousing us both, alone in that vast empty space.

She descended the last stair and came to the podium and I was going to talk to her, ask her if she'd made her decision, when I realized it was best not to say anything. She was here. What else was there to say? I looked into her eyes and took her hand and brought her close to me, so close I could feel the warmth from her body and smell her, so close that our bodies touched. I let the impending kiss hang in the air for what seemed like forever, till the tension became too much, over-ripe and swollen, and then I brought my lips down on that hot mouth and took her sweetness.

Emma doesn't kiss so much as she somehow surrenders with her mouth, with her breath, with her whole body, and my first thought was to pity the man who didn't fall in love with the delicious sin of that mouth. Her surrender brought forth a surge of male hormones in me, a rush of blinding sexual desire that made me feel like a conqueror—an emotional acceleration that turned me into an animal who seized her hair and held her mouth to mine like it was fruit of the desert. She shuddered before my onslaught and melted against me, and the more I took, the more she wanted to give until I felt like I was ready to crawl into her mouth and have her from the inside. She drove me insane.

Call it love or call it lust but it was good enough for me and it was more than good enough. It was exactly what I wanted and it was exactly what Emma wanted taken from her. I pushed her back until I had her pressed up against the whiteboard, never breaking that kiss, and I grabbed her wrists and held them against the board to let her know I owned her now and she was under my control. I leaned against her to show her how hard she'd made me. It was her fault she was being treated like this.

The whiteboard was covered with my own scribbles of poetic emotions we'd been discussing—love, hate, joy, fear, sadness, anger, desire, shame—and now I held Emma against it and worked her white cotton top up over her naked tits as she turned her face to the side to gasp for breath. She grabbed my hands to try and stop me and I shook her off angrily and grabbed her wrists again and pressed them against the board.

"You know the rules," I growled. "You don't touch me without permission!"

"I thought we were just going to talk," she said fearfully. "Someone could still come in."

"I don't give a fuck who comes in. When we're together I'm in control. You don't touch me or interfere, understand?"

She nodded and I went back to lifting her top over her tits. I wanted her naked and exposed under that spotlight, pinned against that whiteboard, but the top was snug. Halfway up I slid my hands under her breasts and ran my thumbs around her nipples and kissed her again, and again Emma opened her mouth to me in submission, closing her eyes and sucking on my tongue with meek supplication. Her nipples were wildly sensitive in a way I didn't remember from last time, possibly from being braless all evening, and rubbing my thumbs against them caused her to push her hips out at me and moan into my mouth. When I pinched them she gave a little shriek.

I knew I was going to fast for her, making her confused and dizzy with my sudden attack, but I liked it this way. I shoved her top up and lowered my head and took a nipple into my mouth, sucking it and lashing it with my tongue. She knew now she wasn't allowed to touch me, but she didn't know what to do with her hands, so all she could do was hold them up and squeeze them into frustrated fists or spread her fingers wide—lovely fingers with beautiful nails, the kind of nails that got a lot of attention. The shine of her nails got to me. For some reason they made me want to bite her breasts. She was all so perfect. I squeezed her tits in either hand till the nipples stood out then I licked and nibbled them till she hissed like a cat, arched her back and gave a little cry.