CHAPTER 12 - PRECISE

“I wanted to ask about the syllabus,” I say, which is a lie so transparent that we both know it’s a lie but the fiction of it gives us both something to stand on.

He doesn’t look up.

His pen continues its path across the paper and I stand in his doorway feeling entirely out of my depth, and the silence between us is different from the silence in the classroom – like the air in the room has thickened around the fact that we’re alone and the door is open and his cologne smells like woodsmoke and something darker that I can feel settling into my clothes the longer I stand here.

“The syllabus is on the course portal, Ms. Cross. Is there anything else?”

His voice is even and professional and completely devoid of anything I could point to as inappropriate, and that’s what makes it so devastating – the total control, the refusal to give me anything to react to, the way he keeps his eyes on his papers like I’m not worth the effort of looking up, which makes me want to do something so drastic that he HAS to look up, and I don’t examine that impulse because examining it would mean acknowledging what it is.

“No,” I say. “Sorry to bother you.”

I turn to go and his voice catches me at the door.

“Close the door on your way out, Ivy.”

Not Ms. Cross. Ivy. My name in his mouth sounds different than it sounds in anyone else’s – heavier, like he’s pressing it between his teeth before releasing it, and the way he says it makes my stomach flip because there’s something proprietary in the pronunciation, something that says I CHOSE to use your first name and we both know what that means even if neither of us will say it.

I close the door and walk down the hallway and I’m flushed from my chest to my hairline and I don’t understand what just happened except that I went in there wanting to be seen and he saw me and now I wish he hadn’t because being seen by Dominic Voss feels like being opened.

The walk home is twenty minutes and I spend every second of it replaying the way he said my name and the two-second eye contact during the lecture and the rolled sleeves and the watch catching the light, and by the time I reach the apartment I’m confused and aroused in a way that has nothing to do with Knox.

My mom is in the kitchen when I walk through the door, standing at the stove stirring something that smells like garlic and warmth.

“How was Dominic’s class?” she asks, and the casualness of the question nearly takes my knees out because she has no idea that I spent the last forty-five minutes of it watching his forearms and replaying the way he said my name in his office like he was unwrapping it.

“It was fine,” I say, and my voice sounds normal which is a miracle of engineering.

She crosses the kitchen and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear the way she’s done since I was small, and her fingers are warm from the stove and she smells like home and I want to cry because she is standing in front of me being the best version of herself, and I am keeping secrets that would undo her from the inside out.

“Love you, baby,” she says, and turns back to the stove.

“Love you too, Mom.”

I’m halfway down the hallway when I see Knox waiting. He straightens up when I walk toward him and his nostrils flare and something crosses his face that I’ve never seen before.

He crosses the room in two strides, and his hands are on my waist before I’ve put my bag down and he’s steering me toward his bedroom without speaking.

He sits on the edge of his bed and pulls me between his knees and his hands shove my skirt up to my waist with a roughness that’s new, with an urgency that tells me this isn’t about desire right now but about something older and more primal, and before I can ask what’s wrong his mouth is on me.

No warning.

He pulls my underwear to the side and his tongue drags flat and hot from my entrance to my clit and my hands slam down onto his shoulders because my knees buckle on contact.

He’s done things to me with his hands and his voice but his mouth is something else entirely.

His tongue is precise in a way that shouldn’t be possible, finding the exact spot on the left side that he pointed out during the voice-command session and pressing against it with a focused, relentless pressure that makes my vision blur within the first thirty seconds.