Teaching Her a Lesson

Author's note: All characters present for or witnessing any sexual encounters are 18+.

"This is stupid, Mr. Canon. I already did this. Why do I have to do all these pointless little steps? It's a waste of time!"

"We've been over this, Taylor. Part of this is having a respectable final product, yes, but part of it is also mastering the process."

"But the process is stupid. No way is it some sort of real world life skill to put my notes on separate pages, or write a bibliography on every one of them."

"It's a works cited entry, not a true bibliography," I reminded her, "and whether or not it's useful to everyone in the real world, it's useful for some people. Heck, just showing you can follow directions is progress. Whatever you wind up doing, you're probably going to have somebody above you who expects you to be able to do what they ask you to."

"I already have a job, and my manager definitely doesn't make me cite works. Like, ever."

"Oh yeah? Where you working?"

"I'm a waitress."

"Very cool. Where at?"

She made a face. "What, are you stalking me or something?"

I sighed. Try to show interest, treat her like a person instead of a work assignment, and the door slams in my face. "Taylor, that's a very inappropriate thing to say."

"Stalking is a pretty freaking inappropriate thing to

do

, ya know."

No sense trying to force the point. I glanced at the clock. "You have eight more minutes. Try to get it done."

"Yeah, yeah. Whatever."

I returned to my desk and began packing up my take-home work. Rewrites from my third and fifth period, a pile of assignments to enter in the gradebook, and some feedback on a half dozen IEP proposals I needed to finish up. I entered the combination on my briefcase and flipped it open, tucking in the stack of paper and my laptop case. They barely fit thanks to the recent addition of a thin white canister. The latch

clacked

shut as I closed the lid and scrambled the combo.

We'd made it three days without my having to resort to another application of Serenex. There was no chance it was because she'd seen the light. (A she-demon like Taylor Stern was probably blinded by bright lights anyway.) My sense of it was that Officer Barbour had done a good job talking sense into her, or maybe putting the fear of god into the girl. Whichever it was, I made it a point to send Louisa a thank you. Taylor hadn't had another outburst so far this week, probably her longest scolding-free streak in recent memory. I'd had to reprimand her for calling Caroline the c-word, but even then she'd at least looked chastened and muttered an apology without even being told. Progress, even if it was only in the home stretch.

After school these past two days, it had been tolerable, if not enjoyable, relying on more conventional pedagogical tools with her. Yes, teaching her would be easier with the Serenex. We squandered easily ten to fifteen minutes of our daily one-on-one hour on griping and foot-dragging. But this way, the natural way, dodged all that anxiety-inducing and ethically problematic stagecraft that would be necessary to continue the way we'd begun.

I'd certainly had some ideas about how to reintroduce her to the Serenex, but we were better off without it, I was sure. Moral dilemma aside, I had my doubts about whether it would interfere with her capacity to learn. New as the stuff was, the internet had nothing definitive on the effects of prolonged use, and from the one trial I'd put her through, I wasn't sure she even remembered what had happened that day.

Since Monday afternoon's adventures in tedium, Taylor hadn't said word one to me about it. We'd been trapped in a room for nearly four hours since then, half of that with only the two of us, and not a single solitary snide comment. Neither had she repeated any discomfort she'd had about the occasional wayward glance I might have briefly directed her way during it, as she had at the time. I was grateful, of course. There was a part of me that was nervous simply being alone in a room with a student like Taylor, which was to say, a liar and cheater whose hobbies included taking whatever satisfaction I might derive from my job and curb stomping for sport. But despite how affronted she might have felt at the time, there had been nothing since.

Maybe... maybe it made her forget the whole thing ever happened? Wouldn't that be a relief! Though if the Serenex could do

that

, then it could... I could...

No. I couldn't.

I hoped she had simply realized I'd never really done anything untoward -- aside from the Serenex dosing, and maybe one or two unprofessional glances at her derriere -- and was taking her lumps with a modicum of equanimity. With dignity.

"UGH, this is so boring I'd rather choke myself to death on a used tampon," my student groaned.

"It's not supposed to be fun. Not everything in life is."

Her head dropped to her desk in dramatic fashion, a pile of tangled, wavy brownish blonde hair splaying out in a wild mess, a rorschach test of hair. I could hear her forehead banging on the desktop somewhere beneath it all. "Fine," I said after a moment. "Taylor, stop. Stop that. Look, you can go a few minutes early today, OK?"

"Thank god." She was on her feet and out the door in three seconds flat.

I wasn't far behind her. Spending an hour a day with Taylor in my sixth period had been exhausting me all year; an extra hour all alone with her was going to be the death knell of my joie de vivre. Briefcase in hand, I made my way into the hall. Grant High was silent this time of day, a welcome respite. At the far end of the English hallway I could see our custodian Randi pushing her vacuum back and forth, doggedly undoing the damage these kids did to the poor building day in and day out. She looked up and I gave her the customary nod of gratitude; it was unreturned as usual. I couldn't even blame the woman. After all, my being here doing my job only made hers harder, while the reverse was true for her.

My classroom, H121, was right near the junction with the school's main hallway. Then it was that long stroll down the wide, empty corridor to the parking lot before I could finally drive home, unbutton my shirt, and relax for a few minutes before I had to start prepping for tomorrow. Only, as I took a few steps toward said junction, I overheard a pair of voices, and before I rounded the corner, it became plain that one of them belonged to Taylor, and that they were talking about me.

"So you're saying you

didn't

fuck Mr. Canon again today?" said the other girl.

My blood froze in my veins at hearing that, words to give any male teacher nightmares. Even a rumor about that could permanently damage a man's reputation. Taylor, thankfully, felt about the same though, if not for the same reason. "Oh gross. I keep telling you, nothing happened. He just gives me busy work to do. That's it."

"Uh huh, yeah right. Just a little one on one time, you and him, alone, for an hour, him giving you creative ways to bring that grade up."

For a moment, I genuinely wondered how this girl had so accurately guessed my fantasies. "You're a fucking ho, Abbie. I'd flunk out of school and spend a million years in purgatory before I let that old pervy creep fucking touch me."

The sting of the comment aside, at least I knew who she was talking to. Abbie Stern, her little sister. The girl who, according to my department head Meagan, had purposefully dropped a weighty textbook on her classmate's open-toed shoe because the girl had been complaining she wasn't helping with the group project. Her victim, Krista, had gotten a hairline fracture in the toe, but Abbie had sworn so vehemently that it had been an accident that she'd merely been suspended rather than expelled. Or charged with assault. And then, rumor had it, that same afternoon while Krista was still at the hospital, Abbie had sent Krista a picture of Krista's boyfriend (now ex-boyfriend) with his face buried between a pair of unidentified but suspiciously thick white thighs.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Sterns.

A familiar metal slam signified one of them had just shut their locker, and now the voices were on the move, receding down the corridor. "Mhm. Sure. Come on, Tay, just admit you suck dick for grades. A D for a D!"

Taylor made a retching noise. "Oh god, shut up. Forever shut up about that. For one, if I did, I'd be getting an A triple plus. Second, they're E's, and I'm pretty sure they don't give out E's. And C, I don't think he even has a D."

Abbie laughed. "No, so really, how big is it? On a scale from stack of dimes to over-ripe cucumber..."

They were getting harder to hear now, between the growing distance and the encroaching racket from Randi's vacuum. My ears were straining their hardest though. "...told you, he only... just to shut him up... behave in class... owed an apology for jumping..."

My eyes narrowed as the voices faded to inaudible. Something... Hmm. I wasn't sure. Nah, it was nothing.

Either way, I wasn't about to stand in the hallway all night. I peered around the corner and confirmed that they'd already walked through the exit doors, then made my way out behind them. In the distance, a pair of young behinds strode through the lot toward a beat-up red car. From behind, their hair was veritably identical, two waves of thick and unruly light brown tresses. I knew that from any other angle, they were immediately distinguishable. Taylor was tall and athletic, legs and ass packed with lean muscle, whereas Abbie was nothing but curves, the quintessential "slim thick" body. They both had breasts for days, but even there, although they might have about the same cup size, they were distinct. Taylor's rode high and proud on her chest, like they were trying to rise up and escape from her neckline. Abbie's (and I was mostly going by the pictures Taylor had shared of the two of them on my facebook timeline) hung low and wide, dominating her chest with their severity.

Only when my hands touched the metal of the door did I realize I'd just walked several hundred feet blind and deaf to the world on account of the phantom images of two students' bodies. I shook my head, issued myself a swift but stern rebuke, and made my way to my car.

Oddly, despite Abbie's vulgar suggestions and Taylor's unflattering denials, my eavesdropping had put me more at ease. After Monday, I'd been nervous. I didn't really know how she would react. Would she wonder at her own behavior, the way she'd meekly acquiesced? Would she tell everyone about it? Not that anything salacious had happened, but that little writing chore had been fairly juvenile on my part. And yes, I suppose I might have gotten a little too free with where I directed my gaze for a time. But I'd heard no rumors, seen no concealed snickering or unusual looks, not been hauled down to Principal Horen's office to demand an explanation for an accusation.

I'd drugged a student with weaponized lip balm and gotten away with it. The stupidest risk I'd ever taken hadn't blown up in my face. It didn't get luckier than that. If I had brain one in my head, as soon as I got home I'd open up my briefcase, remove the Serenex and spray it down the drain until it was empty, and that would be the end of it.

It would be sort of a waste of money though.

Which was fine. It had been a mistake, and I deserved to pay the literal price at bare minimum.

Though maybe it wasn't safe to dump into the water supply?

Maybe this weekend I could hop online and research a safe way to get rid of it. Yes, that was the responsible thing to do.

I did some soul-searching that week.

The fantasies, I knew, were getting a bit out of hand. They couldn't be unethical, I told myself, if nobody got hurt by them. Taylor Stern was objectively attractive, and I was attracted to her. There, I'd acknowledged it, and the world didn't end. It wasn't even real attraction. I'd been attracted to Candace Salata when she'd started last year. We'd had the same prep period, and our run-ins waiting in line for the photocopier had gone well. Good sense of humor, pretty, shared professional interests. That was attraction. (Then I learned she wasn't into men, which put my feeble flirtations to rest tout de suite. Lucky Louisa.)

No, with Taylor, it was more... physical. She had a body on her, no two ways about it, and she liked to get it noticed. If I wasn't exactly her target audience, I was still in the room for the shows. Plus, there was a sense that for all she put me through, a little fodder for the imagination was the least I was owed. I disliked almost everything I knew about her personally. She was lazy, conniving, deceitful, entitled, and could be one hell of a bully to anyone who got on her bad side. But somehow, all that was part of it, too. That body, on that mind... it was like her sheer awfulness somehow lended me permission to objectify her. Like her dislike for me meant that anything sexual between us would be a punishment. It sweetened things in an odd way, but I couldn't deny it.

So I jerked off. By Thursday, it was up to four times a day. Once when I woke up, rock hard; once when I got home after standing over Taylor's shoulder on and off for an hour with a bird's eye view of her cleavage; once again before bed in an effort to calm those wild dreams I'd been having; and one final time when I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, but couldn't pee until I got it to go down.

Oh, and yes, once during my prep period. Not something I was proud of, but the door had been locked and the blinds closed. Masturbating in my classroom, even if it was empty, wasn't an act I meant to make a habit of, but alone in that room, I couldn't help seeing that white board and thinking back to Monday, watching Taylor Stern bend and stretch and perform menial tasks at my direction... So yeah, five times.

It was, I decided, getting out of hand. For all my lecturing Taylor about discipline, it was high time to display some myself. It was one thing to idly fantasize, but for crying out loud, to have my junk out in my classroom...! That was to say nothing of how much more difficult a time I'd had avoiding noticing the allure of her body during class, and even worse, during our one-on-one lessons.

She'd come to class Friday wearing a "shame shirt," one of the handful of t-shirts Principal Horen had acquired for her ill-considered but ardently defended dress code. Taylor had apparently worn something so revealing that one of her teachers earlier in the day had drawn the line and sent her to the office to change out of whatever it had been and into the shame shirt. Except, Taylor being Taylor, she wasn't about to let herself be reprimanded without being as loud as possible about refusing to learn the intended lesson. By the time she showed up to my class, it was pretty obvious she'd foregone a bra under the white tee, and also that she might have been advised to wear a size bigger. As if trying to prove Horen's point, there wasn't a male in the class who didn't lose half the period to trying to memorize the exact position of those two small dark spots under the sea of white.

Except for me, that is. Not half.

When she came back after school, she was still wearing it, but had had enough. "Can I go back to the office and return this stupid thing before we start? It's itchy A F, Mr. Canon."

"Language. And yeah, may as well. Don't take too long."

"Oh you know me, can't wait to get back to essay-writing, on a Friday afternoon on a sixty-eight degree day in May." But she did leave with a modicum of haste and returned not five minutes later. At which point I realized two things:

First, why my colleague had sent her to the office. The neckline on her black, star-spangled shirt was fairly typical Taylor, a square one that still left at least a couple inches of cleavage in evidence above it. Or it would have, if not for the second realization.

Taylor hadn't bothered to put a bra back on.

Those teenage breasts bobbled and jiggled like Taylor was a one-woman hurricane, chaotic and wild and, where I was concerned, potentially deadly. I gaped as she crossed the room to her desk, as even in profile they displayed more buoyancy than any ten tits ought. As she pivoted to sit, my eyes dove toward the safety of my laptop monitor, and I prayed I wasn't too red in the face to give myself away.

I didn't trust myself at all. For the whole remainder of the hour I avoided so much as glancing in her direction -- mostly, anyway -- and when she left, my peripheral vision strained to drink in another show. But only peripheral.

My heart thundering, my willpower flagging, I had my zipper down before I remembered Randi was apt to come in to clean the room any time now. She usually didn't come in before five, but there was no guarantee. Good god, I'd been so swept away by the sight of Taylor's bouncing breasts that I'd nearly risked exposing myself to a coworker! As I craned my neck to check, I confirmed that Taylor hadn't even closed the damn door behind herself. What was wrong with me?

That was it. No more. I had to put a stop to this and go back to good old-fashioned porn. And no more leggy girls with brown hair and big tits who were hot for teacher, either. No sir. It was time to get rid of the Serenex for good. I waited until the door had closed behind her to take it out of my briefcase. Man, just looking at it got me hard. Harder. How screwed up was that? But there was no denying it. The stuff had to go, and the sooner the better.

If that canister lasted until I got home, I wouldn't be able to pull the trigger. I'd make up an excuse, tell myself I'd come to my senses, promise to do it later with my fingers crossed where my eyes couldn't see them. No, it had to be now. Considering what it was, it couldn't just sit in the trash where Randi might see it and get curious. Instead, I reasoned that maybe if I put it in a smaller bag with some other trash, it would seem like some discarded drink container or the like and nobody would ever be the wiser. Yes, that was--

"Sorry, Mr. Canon, I forgot my chapstick."

Taylor. And those unrestrained boobs of hers. Oh shit.

"Guess that's what they call irony, right?" she said as she crossed the room. Sure enough, there on her desk was the little pink chapstick egg that had started this whole thing off.

The Serenex was sitting out on my desk. Oh fuck.

Don't notice it don't notice it don't notice it don't notice it don't notice it...

"What's that?" Taylor immediately opened the cap and began applying more lip balm. Watching a round pink bulb smear across her lips had been a prominent feature in a great many of those fantasies I had been in the presence of culling.

"What's... what?" I asked stupidly.

She pointed directly at the Serenex as she made her way back toward the door, but still putting the cap back on the chapstick, she was moving far too slowly for my comfort. "That. Is that pepper spray or something?"

"Uh.. yes...?" I cleared my throat. "Yep. Pepper spray. You can never be too careful, right?"

But Taylor was cocking her head to the side, studying it as she drew closer. "Are you even allowed to have that? That's, like, a weapon, right?"

"It's fine, Taylor. Now go on, go enjoy your weekend."

But by now her path had deviated toward my desk. I could see her mouthing the words of the label. "Serr... Serene X?"

It felt like my heart was about to explode in my chest. She'd seen it. She'd read it! A simple google search and she'd know exactly what it was! But she wouldn't, would she?

But if she did...!

I acted without thinking. There was no plan, only panic. "I was kidding, Taylor. Obviously! Like I'd bring pepper spray into a school? How crazy would that be?"

She made a skeptical face. "Then what the hell is it? That warning label is like visible from space."