Grading On A Curve

"Mia, if you don't put that phone down I am throwing it in someone's drink."

I shoved my phone back into my bag, but the numbers were already burned into my retinas. 3.41. I needed a 3.6 by the end of this semester or the scholarship committee wasn't even going to read past my name.

"There." I held my hands up. "Phone's gone. Happy?"

"Ecstatic." Dani grabbed my wrist and pulled me through the door, and the bass hit me like a wall, a physical thing pressing against my sternum. Lights cut blue, then red, then blue again across a hundred faces I didn't know and a handful I did. "You've been doing math in your head for two days straight. It's Friday. We're allowed to be stupid on Fridays."

"I'm not being stupid, I'm being responsible."

"You're being insufferable, there's a difference."

She wasn't wrong, and I hated that. I let her tug me toward the bar anyway, because some buried, exhausted part of me had been waiting all week for someone to physically drag me away from my laptop. Three papers down. One soul-crushing biology midterm to go. A CGPA that sat right on the knife's edge of either changing my entire life or quietly ruining it.

I ordered something with too much vodka in it and didn't ask what was in the rest.

"To surviving the semester," Dani said, clinking her glass against mine.

"To surviving the semester," I repeated, and meant it more than she knew.

I don't know how long I'd been there, dancing badly, laughing at nothing, letting the noise scrub my brain clean of cell cycle diagrams and grade calculators, when I felt someone's eyes on me. Not in the creepy way. In the way that makes the back of your neck go warm before you even turn around.

He was leaning against the wall near the bar like he'd been carved into it. Dark hair pushed back like he'd run a hand through it and given up trying to fix it. White shirt, sleeves shoved up his forearms, a glass of something amber forgotten in his hand. He wasn't dancing. He wasn't doing anything except watching me, and somehow that was worse than if he had been.

I looked away first. Pride, mostly.

He found me at the bar twenty minutes later.

"You're a terrible dancer," he said, by way of introduction.

"Excuse me?"

"Confident. Enthusiastic. Genuinely terrible." His mouth curved, not quite a smile, something sharper. "It's the most interesting thing I've seen all week."

"That's either the worst compliment or the best insult I've ever gotten."

"Maybe it's both." He signaled the bartender without looking away from me. "What are you drinking?"

"Whatever gets me through finals season without crying in a library bathroom."

"Rough week?"

"Rough month. Rough everything." I don't know why I told him that. I don't tell strangers anything, not really, but there was something about the low light and the way he was actually listening, head tilted slightly, like my exhaustion was the most interesting sentence anyone had said to him all night. "What about you? You don't look like you're having fun either."

"I'm not big on fun, generally."

"Then why are you here?"

"Bad week." He said it the same flat way I had, like we were trading currency. "I needed to be somewhere loud enough that I couldn't think."

"Is it working?"

"Less than I'd like." His eyes dropped to my mouth for half a second, then back up, deliberate, like he wanted me to notice him noticing. "Especially now."

Heat crawled up my throat. I should have laughed it off, made some joke, put a polite three feet of air back between us. Instead I leaned closer, close enough to catch whatever cologne he was wearing, something low and warm that I would later be unable to smell without my pulse stuttering.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Does it matter?"

"Maybe I want to know who's buying my drinks."

"Does it matter," he said again, softer this time, and somehow that landed harder than an actual answer would have.

I should have pushed. I didn't.

We talked for another hour, about nothing and everything, the kind of conversation that feels like falling and you don't notice the ground rushing up until you're already on it. He was sharp in a way that made my brain wake up even through three drinks. He argued with me about a throwaway opinion on a TV show like it was a thesis defense, and I argued back just as hard, and somewhere in there Dani caught my eye from across the room with an expression that said exactly what she thought was about to happen.

She wasn't wrong either.

"I should go," I said, not moving.

"Should you."

"Probably."

He set his glass down. Didn't touch me. Didn't have to. "Come home with me."

It wasn't a question, not really, and I think that's what undid me, the certainty of it, like he already knew what I was going to say and was just being polite enough to let me say it myself.

"Okay," I said.

His apartment was dark and not a single photograph anywhere. I noticed it for half a second before his mouth crashed down on mine. His hands shoved up under my shirt, palms hot and greedy on my bare skin, like he had been imagining this exact moment since he watched me dancing in that cheap blue club light.

I gasped into his kiss. He tasted like whiskey and sin. My fingers twisted hard into his thick hair and I pulled him closer, desperate. His tongue pushed deep into my mouth, stroking mine while he backed me against the wall. One rough hand yanked my shirt higher and cupped my breast, thumb circling my stiff nipple until I moaned.

"Fuck, you're responsive," he growled against my lips. He pinched the sensitive peak and I arched into him. Heat flooded between my legs.

I should have asked his name. I should have been smarter. Instead I reached down and palmed the thick, hard length of his cock through his pants. He was big. Already straining. He groaned low in his throat and rocked into my hand.

Clothes came off fast. My shirt hit the floor, then my bra. His mouth closed over my nipple, sucking hard while his fingers worked my jeans open. He shoved them down my thighs along with my soaked panties. Cool air hit my wet pussy right before his hand was there, two thick fingers sliding through my folds.

"God, you're dripping," he said, voice rough. He pushed both fingers inside me without warning, curling them deep. I cried out, legs shaking as he fucked me with them, fast and filthy, his thumb pressing on my swollen clit. The wet sounds filled the room. My juices coated his hand.

The smart part of my brain, the one always calculating my GPA so I would not fail this semester, went completely silent. For the first time in weeks there was nothing but heat and need and the slick stretch of his fingers inside me.

He pulled his fingers out, spun me around, and bent me over the back of his couch. I heard his belt, the zipper, then the heavy heat of his bare cock slapped against my ass. He rubbed the thick head up and down my dripping slit, teasing my entrance.

"Tell me you want it," he ordered.

"Please," I begged, pushing back against him. "Fuck me."

He thrust in hard, burying every inch in one stroke. I moaned loud as he filled me completely, stretching my pussy around his thick cock. He didn’t go slow. He fucked me deep and rough, hips slamming against my ass, one hand fisted in my hair. Every thrust hit that perfect spot inside me and sent sparks up my spine.

His other hand reached around to rub my clit in tight circles. The pressure built fast, filthy and overwhelming. I came hard around his cock, walls clenching, soaking him while he kept pounding into me.

He wasn’t done. He pulled out, turned me to face him, and lifted me onto the couch. My legs wrapped around his waist as he sank back inside me, fucking me even deeper. His mouth claimed mine again, swallowing my cries while he drove into me relentlessly.

That night I let a stranger ruin me, and I loved every second of it.

He said my name once, low, like he was testing the shape of it in his mouth.

I never got his.

I woke up to sunlight slicing across an unfamiliar ceiling and the specific, full-body ache of a very good, very bad decision. The other side of the bed was empty and cold. I sat up too fast, dragging the sheet with me, and that's when I saw it, half hanging out of a suit jacket thrown over the back of a chair across the room.

A lanyard. A laminated card.

I didn't have my contacts in. I couldn't read the name from here, and some self-preserving animal part of my brain told me not to get up and check, told me to grab my clothes and go and never think about this again.

I got up and checked anyway.

My fingers had just closed around the edge of the card, my eyes straining to bring the blurry photo into focus, when I heard the front door open behind me.