Submitting To Professor Kent
I stood in the hallway of Kirkwood Hall, or 'professor row' as the other students called it. My thumb drew incessant circles in my sweaty palm as I paced small circles near the wall between two offices.
I can't do this. I can't do this,
repeated in my head as the moment grew larger than me.
Just breathe Amber...
The other college students that flocked the halls made me want to blend in with the bland beige walls and abstract prints framed between each office so that I could disappear altogether. Every woman that passed seemed more gorgeous than the next. Their outfits were more put together than mine, their tummies were more trim than mine, and their hair glistened and bounced with their every step. I adjusted my white blouse and a navy blue plaid skirt that dangled to my knees. My clothes selection was a remnants of habit after six years of private school (this despite the constant teasing I received at the hand of my suitemates and her friends).
What made it worse was when the college boys stole their lingering looks my way, but that wasn't anything new. College guys were so immature and desperate, they'd masturbate to a bookshelf if it looked like they had breasts. I knew I wasn't ugly, but that was part of the problem. Combing my blond hair back behind my shoulders with my fingers, I adjusted my black backpack on my shoulders. I had received more comments than I liked about my pouty lips, creamy skin, or just brutish comments about breasts, but it all drew eyes I didn't want.
I don't want anyone looking at me;
I thought and felt a twist in my belly as if I was back in his classroom.
Except his...
Shaking the thought from my head, I scrambled to take off my backpack and unzip it--drawing even more eyes. Buried in the front pocket was my inhaler. Professor Kent wasn't like my other professors. I didn't... look at him the same as the others. I felt the humiliation simmer inside my chest, threatening to drown me. I had always had a thing for older men. I knew it was wrong. Call it 'daddy issues' or the price of growing up in a broken home, but the level of lust and... infatuation I developed for certain men twice my age had aways been an issue I've tried to conceal.
Imagine the stares I'd get if everyone knew how much of a freak I really was?
I took two quick puffs from my inhaler. That's when I saw him. Professor Kent was an attractive man in his late thirties with thick dark golden brown hair faded on the sides with short bangs across his forehead that bounced when he walked. At six-foot-four, he towered over me standing, so when I looked up from a kneel over my backpack, he loomed over me like a giant.
His interrogative eyes studied me as he approached his office like a test question that awaited to be unpacked and undressed. Cocking his head to the side and making one lock of his bangs move to the side, he smiled with a squinted eye.
"Are you waiting for me?" Professor Kent asked.
"I, um, no--"
"Amber, right?" he asked and gestured up and to his left as if he stood in his lecture hall. "You sit in the back row on my left. Psych 101 class."
I smiled nervously and felt my panties adjust between my thighs as I moved. He
knows my name...
"Uh, yes, yes, um," I said, quickly tucking my inhaler in my bag and zipping it up. "I, um, don't want to bother you. Sorry," I muttered with my eyes on the ground as I turned to leave.
"Nonsense," he replied, putting his key in his office door. "Come in, we'll talk. I insist."
My stomach complete a somersault and I felt my heart beating in my ears like a war drum. It was true I had sat meekly quiet in the back left of Professor Kent's Psychology 101 class for almost an entire semester now. My first semester at university, actually. Like my other classes, I haven't uttered a word in a single one, but speaking wasn't necessary for doing well in school. That was why I loved school so much. Leaving high school with a 4.0 GPA, I sat primed to receive straight As in all 19 credit hours I took this semester with one exception.
Psych 101...
"The presentation is worth half your grade," Professor Kent said evenly. "We went over this in the syllabus."
My stomach twisted, and I tried to shrink under his heavy gaze but had nowhere to hide, unless I tried to go under the desk. It didn't feel right to have a presentation to be worth so much of my grade. I can, and did, receive over a 100% on every single quiz and exam in the class, but will still fail if I didn't give a thirty-minute presentation to the class. Ten minutes about myself and my background, followed by twenty minutes about Behaviorism psychology and how it's used in modern practice.
"Yes, sir," I mumbled, barely parting my lips.
"I didn't hear you," my Professor's voice said almost as if it was a demand.
I adjusted in my seat and straightened. "I'm sorry. Yes, sir," I squeaked a bit louder. I have always suffered from crippling social anxiety. My mother's solution was to fill my medicine cabinet full of drugs in middle school and the refilled orders are still there now that I'm in college. They take the edge off my panic attacks when I have them, but little else. Getting up in front of a class of a hundred students and Professor Keny in order to give a thirty-minute speech was torture. Coming to my professor's office hours was difficult enough. In class, his piercing gaze felt undressing even as I hid amongst the crowd. The thought of sitting alone in an office before him was crippling. I had spent all night considering just dropping out of the class entirely, but doing so would fail me as well.
And all it would take is one failed class for me to lose my scholarship... then if I wanted to go to college, I would have to ask my father for money... I will never do that...
The panic in my chest fizzled like a freshly opened soda that had been shaken. "Is there another way? Can I, maybe, write out my speech? Or record my speech and play it?"
Professor Kent grimaced, flattening his lips as he let out a long sigh. He leaned back in his leather seat and I couldn't help but glance at the way the gray button-up shirt he wore grabbed at the muscles of his shoulder and biceps. I inverted my knees together subconsciously. Like I was afraid he might somehow see through the large red oak desk that separated us, through the skirt that dangled over my knees and light blue panties I wore beneath it, and could see the drip of drool that fell from my sex. And for a terrifying second, I thought he could. My Professor's eyes narrowed on me and his eyebrows closed together in concentration on something briefly as he cocked his head to the side.
No, how does he know? Can he smell my pheromones?
But his inquisitive look quickly vanished and was replaced with a soft and welcoming smile that made me want to say yes to anything he said next.
"Beth," he leaned forward, and I tried to lean further back, but my backside was always pressed against the chair. "You're a very bright young lady. I know you know everything that you need to present, but the presentation isn't just about knowledge. It's about speaking, confidence, taking control," the Professor extended a firm hand towards his door as if the classroom was on the other side of it. "Dominating that classroom and selling yourself. That's a big part of life in the real world. If I let you
not