This story disappeared from Lit when the author dropped off. It was one of my favorites and I had a copy so I tweaked it to match my kinks and am resharing with the community. Thanks to asecretdream for the original! -Alan
The stairwell leading up to Professor Parson's office seemed to darken as Lucy Hancock rounded onto the final flight. It wasn't the lateness of the hour that caused her heart to tremble -- she had met with many professors during their evening office hours without a qualm -- but the subject matter. Economics! Oh, how that subject had become the bane of her existence at college. Each step upwards increased her feeling of dread, and even though she knew it was illogical to feel it, she couldn't escape it.
For some reason, the perverse graphs and buzzwords of economics just made her head spin, and she hated to deal with it. Lucy knew that it wasn't that she was a bad student -- on the contrary, she was a scholarship student who should be on the Dean's List this semester. Or at least she would be, if only her other classes counted.
If I don't fail Economics!
she thought to herself. She had never failed a subject in her life, and her full tuition scholarship depended on not failing. She couldn't fail!
"So why can't I pass this damn final!" she involuntarily mumbled out loud.
The stairs ended, all too soon, and she was at his door. She glanced at the window beside it in a futile effort at delay, and caught her reflection. She was still wearing her required college uniform -- a new innovation that sought to bring back an "old time" curriculum and feel to the school. Her pressed white shirt stood out brightly in the dark window, curving to follow her bust and hips and starkly contrasting with her vivid red hair that cascaded over the shoulders. She was wearing a lacy white bra underneath that gave her support and, in the right light, provided a hint of sexiness. The mid-thigh-length pleated skirt was nearly invisible and created the stark contrast with her slim pale legs and white stockings that ended just below the knee.
Well, at least the white shirt and white stockings make my skin look a little darker
. The curse of a real redhead - she never tanned. But overall, she was pleased with her appearance, and smoothed the skirt out and straightened her blouse one last time in an absently nervous way.
She gave a tentative knock with the vague hope that he was not there. Her hopes were not met, and he called out for her to come in. Taking a deep breath and settling her features into what her mom called "pleasantly attractive smiling" she opened the door and went inside.
Professor Parson stood up and welcomed her into a chair across his large mahogany desk. His bright blue eyes and dark brown hair framed a face that was both strong and kind. He was wearing what he almost always wore -- brown slacks and a navy-blue collared shirt with an aquamarine tie. The only consolation of having to wear her uniform, she thought, was that all the men had to wear slacks and a tie.
Well, that and I look
rather hot in this outfit
she thought to herself with a mental grin.
Professor Parson was both her favorite and least favorite professor. She liked him personally, and he was funny and ran the classroom well. He always was engaging, moved the class along and they had fun without getting lost in side subjects and jokes. He had a reputation as one of the best teachers on campus despite his age and newness to the school. Yet all that in the classroom didn't translate into understanding for her. Truly, the subject matter ruined the class for her. She had known that Economics would be hard for her based on her experience with it in high school, and had chosen Professor Parson out of the several professors who taught the class based mainly on his youth and reputation as a great teacher.
He was a new professor to the college, having been hired straight out of grad school to teach in the Economics department. She knew he was smart, too, because he had graduated high school at 16, and finished college and his graduate degree in only six years. Since Lucy had taken a few years off to help run a youth camp in California before coming to college, she was actually only 3 years his junior even though he was a professor and she was a twenty-one year old sophomore in college.
Despite their similarities in age, the subject remained an impenetrable morass for her, and each bi-weekly quiz and ramped up her stress level as the scores came back lower and lower. She had shifted from frustrated to angry to dread to horror as the class devolved into bizarre graphs and strange phrases like "marginal externalities" and "Pareto optimization" that made no sense to her. The final yesterday had been pure agony, and she was sure she had messed up the statistical regression analysis and calculation of the equilibrium point for the guns/butter supply & demand curve graph. It sorta made sense today, but during yesterday's final it had seemed like Greek to her.
Hmpf
she thought, sitting down,
Greek is easier to understand than this stuff
. She was hoping to find out her score and see if there was some sort of additional work she could do, if necessary, to keep a passing grade.
"Hello, Ms. Hancock, what can I help you with?" He asked. His blue eyes peered at her through reading glasses, which he slipped off. "Since class is over, I thought you would be headed for home by now, like everyone else."
"Well, sir, I've been thinking about the final yesterday. I think I made some pretty basic errors because I was sorta scrambled in the testing room, I guess I wasn't feeling that well. It is going to bother me all summer long, and I couldn't stand the thought of waiting until July to find out my grade. I was hoping you could tell me how I did," she replied.
She held off on the extra work question, with the quiet but small hope in her heart that it wouldn't be necessary. It isn't like she wanted to volunteer to write a paper over summer break!
"As you know, it is against school policy to tell students their grades before the report cards are sent out. However, I think that is a rather juvenile restriction considering you are an adult. Also, I've watched *ahem* observed you this semester, and I know both how hard you have been working at this subject and that it does not come easily to you. I haven't reached your final test yet, but tell you what -- give me ten minutes and I'll grade it right now, and we can discuss it."
"Oh, yes, please, thank you" she said with her third best smile. Her mom had always told her to save the others for the big requests, and it was advice that had served her well. Her mother, a beauty pageant queen who had snared the local BMOC and enjoyed a pleasant lifestyle of status and wealth, had worked hard to ensure that her daughters were trained in the same way she was on how to snare a man. Lucy hadn't understood how odd her mother' attitudes were until high school when she found out that the girls around her had absolutely no idea how to seduce a man to do what you wanted. They all thought you had to give them a blowjob or let them feel your boobs. Amateurs. A true woman can use the hint of possibility to motivate a man to do what she wants.
She watched him sort through the pile in front of him until he pulled one up with her familiar tight handwriting on it. He slipped on the reading glasses again, pulled out a red pen, and began reading her answers. At first she watched him with an intensity of a hawk, waiting for the pen to dart down and mark something incorrect. Even though the final had been twenty pages long, much of it was pictures and graphs, so it shouldn't take too long, or so she hoped. He read through the first page without making one red mark, and her heart beat easier. He glanced up at her, held her eyes for a moment, smiled, and turned the page.
The glance caught her attention. Why look up? She hadn't said a thing. She hadn't moved. She hadn't made a sound. And why the smile? Did that mean she was doing well, or something else? And what did he mean by saying that he had been watching her all semester? Why had he coughed and switched to saying 'observed'? Had he been crushing on her?
The thoughts distracted from the grading and made her look at him in a different way.
He
is
cute
, she thought to herself, and quite funny. She liked dark hair and blue eyes, and he had them in spades. She knew a couple of the other girls in her class had picked his class because he was 'dreamy', but she had been more worried about understanding the subject rather than having something nice to look at in class.
Not that I didn't watch his tight rear on occasion as he wrote on the white board. A girl's human, after all
.
She watched the top of his head, the way his muscular shoulders and arms moved as he graded her final.
Quite dreamy, actually
. She remembered one particular class where the air conditioning had broken on a warm fall afternoon, and she had been sitting in the front row as usual. She had unbuttoned her shirt dangerously low, both to relieve the heat and to tease the guys in the class by deliberately showing her ample cleavage. She thought she had seen Professor Parson eyeing her breasts, but she wasn't sure. She had found herself purposefully leaning forward, as if to pay better attention, but in the process using her arms to make her cleavage even more prominent and give him an eyeful. She had secretly wanted to catch him admiring her. She liked it when men couldn't help but focus on her, then got embarrassed when she made eye contact after, letting them know that she knew what they were doing. That they were lusting after her.
Unfortunately, he never did look -- or, at least, not so that she could catch him. It had disappointed her that day, and the chance hadn't come again.