This one's a change for me. It's in a different category than my previous work. And it's currently a one-off short story. I see some potential in it for more—either elaboration or continuation—but I haven't decided yet whether I'll do either.
I value your comments and feedback. Circumstances permitting, I'll respond to either—eventually.
—CarlusMagnus
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The Norns had woven the web of my weird, and there could be no escape. She walked into my classroom on the first day of classes in August of 1994. She caught my eye immediately.
I didn't know, then, that my doom had come upon me. I didn't even suspect. It was a first-semester advanced calculus class of about twenty students. I was to be the professor; she was to be one of my students. I was fifty; she was twenty-three. I was a stuffy, pompous, foolish, middle-aged (to be charitable) man; she was a vibrant, unaffected, judicious young woman.
It was her body that attracted me, naturally. (Double meaning fully intended.) I've just admitted to being an old fool, and what could be more foolish than for a mathematics professor of nearly thirty years' experience teaching to allow the physical attributes of one of his female students to influence him?
An academic I am and have always been, but my experience did extend to things outside the ivory tower—including women. I was a mathematician, not a monk. Nor was I a saint—certainly not a saint!
There had been young women when I myself was young and a student, and there had been older women when I myself was older. Some of those women were beautiful; some of them not. Some of them I'd bedded; some of them not. Some of them I'd loved; some of them not. Some of them had loved me; some of them not. The four divisions hadn't been the same, needless to say. Except maybe for the last two. When I was younger, those two had lined up with each other almost perfectly—but the wrong way!
I'd been married to the one exception to that alignment at the beginning of my academic career—back when I was a young Ph.D. Married briefly. Disastrously. Oh, we'd been deeply in love with each other—before that marriage, and during it. And, sad to say—indeed, almost too sad for words—after it. That we loved each other had made our breakup exquisitely painful for us both. In spite of the pain—or maybe because of it—our settlement had been amicable. In fact, I still lived in the house that she and I had bought early in that ill-starred marriage. As part of that settlement, I took sole possession in return for a few years' monthly payments to compensate her for her share of the small equity we'd built in it.
But the only other good thing either of us could say about that divorce was that there were no children whose lives our disaster would blight.
She'd needed more from me than I could supply. I was a young man dedicated to an academic life—a life of doing research in an obscure and esoteric corner of mathematics. Research, essential for earning tenure, requires devotion—even more devotion than a spouse requires. As it turned out, my mathematics didn't leave enough of me for a wife.
There had been other women after the divorce, but there'd been no more love—not on my part, anyway. I had discovered, back when I was a graduate student, that university language departments (particularly, and fittingly, the
Romance
language departments!) were full of single—and libidinous—women. It was a discovery that had served me well as a young man and continued to serve me after my divorce. The most recent connection had been a couple of years ago with a woman, about my own age, in the French Department.
None of those attachments had lasted for more than a year or so, and they all ended without rancor. In some cases an end to a relationship had probably been a good thing; in others, maybe not. But I'd been burned, and I wasn't going to be burned again. After all, a cat that sits on a hot stove will not do so again. But it won't sit on a cold stove, either.
And then…
And then
she
walked into my classroom.
I fell in love with her—immediately! Well, I fell in
lust
with her immediately.
I'm not sure why. Objectively speaking, her appearance wasn't especially striking—she was an average-looking, healthy young woman. Her body had all of the standard female equipment, of course, and it seemed to be in the usual places on a moderately athletic figure. Her clothing wasn't particularly revealing—though it wasn't particularly modest, either. But there was an air about her—something in the way she carried herself that spoke to me, saying
I am Femininity!
Falling in lust with a female student had happened to me before. It's something of an occupational hazard. University professors, even of a male-dominated subject like mathematics, encounter quite a few stunningly attractive young women in the normal course of their work. After all, the campus of any university of reasonable size is populated largely by young people—thousands of young people—at least half of whom are women.
Where there are that many young women, it would be surprising if there weren't quite a few very sexy ones. Some of those young women, including some of the sexy ones, come to the offices of male professors and suggest—sometimes subtly, sometimes not—that they are willing to do
anything
in order to get a good grade. Or, in some cases, just to get a passing grade.
It must be understood that when they say
anything,
they really mean
anything but study.
Why do I call that an occupational hazard? Because there's nothing more hazardous to a professor's occupation than getting caught trading a fuck for a grade—unless it's enjoying the fuck but not delivering the grade.
Sex, like any other worthwhile activity, requires that, in order to be very good at it, one exercise discipline and practice thoughtfully. The young women who want to take the easy route to a grade are precisely the ones who are trying to avoid discipline and practice. That is, they're exactly the ones who're likely to be bum lays. So the odds are that what some of us call
quim pro quo
(meaning
if I, the
pro,
can stick my
quo
into your
quim,
then you'll be happier with your grade
) isn't really worth the risk.
I'd understood all of this from the time I'd first started teaching as a graduate student working on my doctoral degree. So I'd managed to resist the temptation to fuck with any students.
But then
she
walked into my advanced calculus classroom, and I was smitten. She took the center seat in the front row and looked up at me where I sat on the corner of the desk at the front of the room. And she smiled at me.
It seemed a perfectly innocent smile, of the kind we all exchange with each other when we meet someone we've never met before. If there was guile in it, or seduction, I didn't see it. Later—much later—she denied that there had been any of either.
In the daze that resulted, I said something like "Good morning."
Her smile deepened and she returned my greeting: "Good morning, Professor Harrison." Her voice, which, really, was just an unexceptional female voice, resonated with something deep in my groin.
As she spoke and I resonated, the bell in the clock tower just outside the classroom building tolled the beginning of the class hour. Maybe I should have sent to know for whom that bell tolled.
But it was time for the class to begin, so I read the roster aloud, calling off names and trying to form connections between names and faces. After half a dozen names, I came to "Fiore, April."