Behind the Mask 2

He pulled his fingers out and lined himself up. The thick head of his cock pressed against me. He held my hips and lowered me onto him inch by inch. The stretch burned in the best way. When he was fully buried inside, we both froze.

"Fuck," he breathed. "You feel perfect."

He started to move — slow at first, then deeper and faster. I held onto his shoulders and met every thrust. The sound of skin against skin filled the room. My moans mixed with his low groans. Every stroke hit that sweet spot inside me and sent waves of pleasure through my whole body.

He wrapped one hand around my cock and stroked me firmly. "Look at me," he said.

I looked into the dark eyes behind the mask, and for a second the room tilted — that same unplaceable familiarity, stronger now, like a word sitting on the tip of my tongue. My chest went tight with something between fear and excitement. But the pleasure was too strong for me to hold onto the thought.

"I'm close," I gasped.

"Not yet." He slowed down, teasing me, keeping me right on the edge for what felt like forever. Every slow thrust made me tremble.

Sweat ran down my back. I was desperate.

When he finally sped up again, I couldn't hold back. I came hard with a loud cry, my body tightening around him as I spilled between us.

He groaned deeply, thrust up into me a few more times, and came inside me. The feeling of him pulsing and filling me made my orgasm last longer.

We stayed locked together, breathing heavily. He wrapped his arms around me and held me against his chest. His heart beat fast under my ear. For a moment, the masked stranger felt strangely safe — safer than made sense, given I knew nothing real about him. Not even his name.

"You're mine tonight," he whispered against my hair. "And I'm not done with you yet."

He proved it. We went again after a short rest — on my back, then once more with me on my hands and knees. By the time we finished, my body was tired, sore, and completely satisfied.

I left the club as the sky started to turn light. My legs felt weak the whole way home. I could still feel him inside me. His touch. His voice.

~~~~~~

I got to school the next day already back in teacher's-favorite mode. Glasses on, hands tucked in my pockets, I moved through the hallway like the person everyone expected me to be.

That was when I remembered the results were out.

I didn't rush to check. I never had to. Grades were the one thing in my life that didn't require luck, only the hours I put in, and I knew I'd put in the hours. So I was on my way to class until my friend caught up to me by the noticeboard.

"Have you seen your results?"

"Not yet. Why?"

He hesitated, which was answer enough. Then he said it plainly, and for a second the words didn't make sense. I asked him to repeat it. He did, slower this time, like he thought maybe I hadn't heard right the first time either.

I didn't believe him. I went to check for myself.

There it was, next to my name, in black and white. Not an A but a D. I had to take off my glasses to be sure my eyes weren't playing tricks on me. How could this be possible?

"Maybe talk to the professor? Sort it out? You know how much you need this for the scholarship," Lucas said beside me, patting my shoulder.

My mind was already moving past it, straight to fury. "Whose class is this," I asked, flat and low. "What's his name?"

He'd barely gotten the name out before I'd already torn the sheet off the board and was walking, fast, toward the staff offices.

I was still holding the paper when I reached the door. I raised my hand to knock and heard the voice come first, through the wood.

"Come in."

My hand froze on the door.

For a second, standing there, something about the voice snagged at me, the exact evenness of it, the way it didn't rise or drop, like the man on the other side had never once needed to raise his voice to be obeyed. I shook my head, annoyed at myself. It was just a voice. Voices sounded like other voices all the time. I pushed the door open.

The office was ordinary. Bookshelves, a desk, morning light through the blinds. The professor sat behind the desk with a stack of papers in front of him, glasses pushed up into his hair, sleeves rolled to the forearm. Nothing about him pulled at any memory, nothing except the ring on his right hand, plain and silver, squared at the edges, catching the light as he set his pen down.

I told myself it meant nothing. Rings weren't rare. It was a coincidence, and I didn't have the patience for coincidences right now, not with a D sitting in my hand and a scholarship riding on every grade above it.

I stepped fully into the office and placed the result sheet on the desk, hard enough that it slid a few inches before stopping against his stack of papers.

"Can you explain this?" I said.