CHAPTER 5 - CONTROL

I should have blocked the number – the number I didn’t give him, the number he stole from my phone while I was asleep, which is a fact that should disturb me more than it turns me on.

And underneath the text from yesterday is today’s command sitting in my inbox like a landmine:

"You’re sitting in my lap next time.”

I sit in the back row and wait for him to show up.

This is strategic. This is calculated. This is me taking control of a situation that has been spiraling since a belt buckle woke me up at two nights ago.

The back row is far from the professor, close to the exit, and surrounded by enough empty seats that nobody will be near me when Knox walks in, which means nobody will be close enough to notice whatever he’s planning to do because I’m not naive enough to think he isn’t planning something.

He walks in eleven minutes late wearing the same leather jacket and the same expression he wears every time he enters a room, which is the expression of a man who knows exactly where you are before he opens the door and is just deciding how long to let you believe otherwise.

He scans the lecture hall, finds me in the back row, and I watch something shift in his face that’s not quite a smile but carries the same energy as one.

He walks up the stairs and past every other available seat and stops at my row and puts his hand flat on the desk in front of me.

“Move.”

I stare at him. The professor is already mid-sentence and two students in the row ahead of me have turned around to look at the guy with the tattoos and the leather jacket who’s standing over a girl like he’s about to repossess her.

“Knox, sit down–”

He leans in close enough that I can smell leather and that warm, unnameable thing underneath it, and his mouth is right at my ear when he says, “Sit in my lap or I’ll put you there, and I promise you’ll like my version a lot less than if you just do what I say.”

The lie detector in my body – which has been fully operational and completely useless since the night he walked into my room – knows that I would absolutely like his version. But the two students are still looking and the professor has paused mid-sentence to glance toward the back row, so I stand up and step aside and Knox drops into my chair and spreads his thighs and looks up at me with his arms open like this is perfectly normal, like we’re at a movie theater and he’s saving me the good seat.

I sit on his lap because the alternative is making a scene, and that’s the excuse I’m going with, and I will die on that hill even though my body is already melting against him before I’ve fully settled my weight. His arms wrap around my waist from behind and pull me flush against his chest and I can feel every inch of him pressed against my lower back – hard already, thick through his jeans, and radiating heat that seeps through my skirt and into my skin.

He shifts my weight in his lap. The motion is subtle enough that it looks like he’s just adjusting, getting comfortable, but the angle presses me directly against the rigid length of him and the friction of the denim through my underwear makes my breath catch in a way I have to disguise as a cough.

He does it again. Slower this time, rolling his hips upward in a lazy grind that drags me across him, and his arms are tight enough around my waist that I can’t squirm away even if I wanted to, which I don’t, and I’ve stopped pretending otherwise because my hips are already rocking back against him in tiny involuntary movements that match his rhythm.

His mouth finds my ear and he starts talking, low and constant, this running commentary that has absolutely nothing to do with whatever the professor is saying about post-colonial narrative structures.

He tells me he can feel how warm I am through his jeans. He tells me he’s been thinking about the sound I made when he put his fingers inside me yesterday and that he got hard in his morning lecture just from the memory of it. He tells me what he wants to do to me when we get home tonight in enough detail that my face is burning and my nails are digging into his forearms and I’m biting the inside of my cheek to keep from whimpering because his hips haven’t stopped that slow, devastating grind and the seam of my underwear is pressing against my clit with every pass.

“You’re wet,” he says, and his voice has gone rough at the edges in a way that tells me he’s not unaffected even if he’s better at hiding it. “I can feel it through my jeans.”

I should be mortified. I am mortified. I’m also so close to cumming on my stepbrother’s lap in the back row of a 200-person lecture hall that I can feel my toes curling in my sneakers, and the mortification is just making it worse because every time I think about where I am and what I’m doing my body responds with a fresh wave of heat that makes my inner walls clench around nothing.

The professor turns to write something on the board and Knox thrusts up once and his arm tightens around my waist to keep me from jolting upward.

I cum so hard that my teeth sink into his forearm through his jacket sleeve because it’s the only thing close enough to muffle the sound that tears out of me. He holds me through it, rocking gently now, slow little movements that drag out every last ripple until I’m boneless against his chest with my head tipped back against his shoulder and his heartbeat thudding steady against my spine.

He sits through the rest of the lecture with me in his lap like nothing happened and I can feel him still hard against me the entire time, which means he didn’t finish, which means this wasn’t about him, which means I’m in significantly more trouble than I thought.

After class he walks me to The Grind House and sits in the corner booth and doesn’t order anything and watches me work my entire shift on legs that feel like they’ve been replaced with something less structurally sound than legs. Every time I look over he’s watching me with that steady grey gaze and every time I look away I can still feel it on the back of my neck like a hand.

I’m wiping down the espresso machine when my phone buzzes in my apron pocket.

Tomorrow I want you without underwear. Don’t test me.