CHAPTER 4 - TEACHINGS

My jaw aches when I chew my toast and every time it does I feel a pulse between my legs that has no business existing before 8 AM, and I've been checking the clock since I woke up because he said "same time tomorrow" and that means tonight, which means I have approximately fourteen hours to figure out how to be a normal human being in the meantime, which is going poorly because I've touched my swollen lips six times since I brushed my teeth.

Knox wasn't at breakfast. His door was closed when I passed it, and his motorcycle was gone from the driveway, and I told myself the relief I felt was because I needed space to process and not because I was disappointed, even though my stomach dropped when I saw the empty parking spot and that's not what relief feels like.

I sit in my morning lecture in the front row with my textbooks arranged and my pen ready and my hair pulled back in a ponytail that I'm choosing not to think about in the context of how it felt wrapped around his fist, and I am going to be a normal college student today. I am going to take notes and pay attention and not think about the way he said open in that low, steady voice like he was giving me directions to somewhere I'd always wanted to go.

The professor starts talking about Romantic-era poetry and I write the date at the top of my notebook and underline it twice and this is fine.

Knox Voss walks in ten minutes late without a notebook or a pen or a single indication that he's here for any academic reason whatsoever, and every resolution I made in the last forty-five minutes evaporates like water on a hot engine. He's wearing a black t-shirt that's tight enough across his chest that I can see the tattoo on his collarbone through the fabric, and his jeans sit low on his hips, and he scans the room the way a predator scans a field – not looking for a seat, looking for me.

He finds me immediately. Walks directly past thirty empty seats in the back row and drops into the chair beside mine in the front row and his thigh presses against my thigh and he doesn't adjust it, doesn't move even a centimeter to create the kind of polite distance that normal people maintain, and the heat of him bleeds through my skirt and into my skin and I stare at my notebook so hard the lines blur.

Five minutes pass. The professor is discussing “meter” and “form” and my notes are getting progressively less coherent because Knox's hand has just landed on my thigh under the desk, heavy and warm, his fingers resting on the bare skin between the hem of my skirt and my knee.

I grab his wrist. He doesn't look at me. His hand slides higher.

"You were so good last night." His mouth is close enough to my ear that I can feel the warmth of his breath and nobody in the row in front of us can hear him but my entire body responds like he shouted it through a megaphone.

My grip on his wrist loosens because my fingers have apparently switched sides and are no longer working for my brain, and his hand slides the rest of the way up my thigh and his fingertips brush the edge of my underwear and I am going to die in an 8 AM poetry lecture and they'll put it on my tombstone:

She came to class and then she came in class.

His fingers push my underwear to the side and find me already wet and he makes this quiet sound through his nose like he expected it but is satisfied to be proven right, and then he's sliding two fingers through my folds and circling my clit with this lazy, practiced pressure that makes my hips shift forward in my seat before I can stop them. The professor is talking about “enjambment” and I couldn't define the word right now if my degree depended on it because Knox is working me under the desk with the patience of someone who has absolutely nowhere else to be.

I grip the edge of the desk with both hands and my pen rolls off and clatters on the floor and the girl two seats to my left glances over and I am frozen in a full-body clench of terror and arousal while Knox reaches over with his FREE hand and casually turns a page of my open textbook like he's following along with the lecture. The girl looks back at the professor. I exhale through my nose and Knox's fingers speed up as a reward for keeping quiet and I hate him with every atom of my being that isn't currently on fire.

He slides two fingers inside me without warning and curls them forward and I bite down on the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste copper because the sound I almost made would have ended my academic career and possibly my life.

He pumps them slow and deep while his thumb works my clit in tight circles, and the wet sound of it is obscene enough that I'm certain the guy in front of me can hear it and is just too British or too awkward to turn around, and I'm gripping the desk so hard my knuckles have gone white and my thighs are clamping around his hand and my vision is tunneling.

I break. Silent and shaking and biting my cheek so hard I'll have a mark there for days, and the orgasm rolls through me in waves that make my whole body lock up and then release in this full-body shudder that I disguise as a cough.

Knox doesn't stop until he's worked me through every last aftershock, and then he slides his hand out from under my skirt and wipes his fingers on his jeans like he's cleaning off engine grease and leans back in his chair with his legs spread and looks at me with those grey eyes and says, quiet enough for just me:

"You're sitting in my lap next time."

Then he stands up and walks out of the lecture hall fourteen minutes after he walked in, and I sit in my chair unable to move for ten full minutes after the class ends because my legs are not currently accepting instructions from my brain. The girl two seats over asks if I'm okay and I say I'm fine and she says I look flushed and I say it's the heating and she nods and leaves and I sit there marinating in what just happened until my phone buzzes in my bag.

Unknown number. I didn't give him my number. I never gave him my number.

You left your underwear wet. I could smell it from across the room.