The Things That Make Me Give In Read online

  ‘I see.’

  ‘If you find it all so stupid, why teach this course?’

  He doesn’t answer. She has to guess, just as with everything about him.

  ‘She gasped as he parted the lips of her sex, spreading her liquid over every secret fold, exploring her more thoroughly than she ever thought anyone could. Her own hands had never reached such hidden places, because, oh, how wrong it was, how wicked!

  ‘And yet she could not stop him defiling her thus.’

  His eyes gleam at her, on the word ‘defiling’.

  ‘Gently he stroked her, belying the debased nature of this act. She occasionally allowed herself to plead with him to stop, but her own will – so strong and strange – and his dominated her completely. It was something remarkable, to be so helpless in his arms, to be a slave to her own mounting pleasure.’

  Of course there is more. But it’s worse than the parts she has just read out, and it’s one thing to know he’s read them but quite another to speak them aloud. So she waits, and stares at the words, and wills him to tell her to leave.

  ‘Go to the board behind me,’ he says finally. His voice seems to . . . deepen when he does, but it’s hard to tell. Harder yet to understand what that deepening might mean. That he realises he’s doing something wrong?

  He’s about to do something worse, she knows. It’s obvious, even before he tells her to pick up the pen. Though maybe it’s just worse because she obeys, file now closed and pinned back to her chest.

  ‘Write fifty times: “I must write less ridiculous love scenes”.’

  ‘Is that what you think they are? Love scenes?’

  ‘I don’t know, Clara. Do you feel like you’re in love?’

  ‘Just shut up, all right. I’m not doing this, you know.’

  ‘Fifty times. “I must write less ridiculous love scenes”.’

  ‘Don’t you mean fuck? Fuck scenes.’

  There is a pause between her putting the pen to the board and his replying. It’s the heaviest one yet and she feels it pressing on her back – though maybe it’s just his presence that’s pressing, as he stands up behind her. Her legs are trembling and buckling under the pressure, she knows, but God, at least she hasn’t cried in front of him.

  ‘Yes, I mean fuck,’ he says, and then – too alarming to bear – he puts his hand over the curving top swell of her bottom.

  The pen slides up on its own and makes a scything smile of green that isn’t meant to be there. The word scene in her first line is now ruined – she can’t reach most of the shaking mistake to rub it out.

  She is about to turn and say something sharp, but he then pats her bottom. He pats it, and says, ‘Keep writing, Clara.’

  The face she had half-turned to him seems to want to turn back, but she doesn’t know if she can bear that. If she turns back, and keeps writing, what then? What then of flowery words and teachers and students and ridiculousness? This wouldn’t happen in her story. It wouldn’t happen. It’s too sordid.

  It feels heavenly.

  He just strokes her bottom, slowly, ever so slowly and in circles. And when she makes fumbling marks on the board once more, then – oh, then – he begins to ruffle her skirt up, inch by inch.

  Suddenly his mouth is at her ear, his breath as hot as her own insides feel.

  ‘What do all good romance heroines get, Clara?’ he says and for a moment she can’t think. She has no idea. Hand-holding? Marriage? A yacht and three mansions and –

  ‘The hero!’ she says, and then is embarrassed that she has yelled it out, like a little apple polisher. Ever the A student, ever the good girl, and apparently also slightly more than the second-string character.

  Even if he isn’t the hero of anything.

  ‘And tell me, what are the heroes usually like, in a romance?’

  She can feel herself shaking now. He has his hand on the seat of her knickers, her skirt completely pushed up. As she answers, he strokes just one finger into the split of her buttocks through the material.

  ‘Aggressive. Arrogant. Dominant.’

  ‘And the women?’

  ‘Submissive. Pathetic.’

  ‘Is that what you really think? That they’re pathetic?’

  His finger strokes further into the crease, straining against the taut material. She gasps, and writes things that are not words.

  ‘Yes. Yes.’

  ‘And you hate arrogant men, cold men, nasty rotten rakes. You don’t like to write about them.’

  ‘I . . . find it hard. I find it hard to write about . . . dominant men.’

  ‘Shall I yank your knickers down?’

  ‘Yes! Jesus, yes.’

  She tries to find it in her to be embarrassed about the volume of that concession, but all that fills her is the thought of her knickers around her ankles and his big hands on her hips and how wet she is, how utterly wet.

  ‘You like me doing this, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, but it comes out as three separate words, whined and childish.

  ‘You like me doing exactly what you want.’

  ‘I –’

  ‘Because after all, isn’t that what romance novels really are? Women detailing exactly what they’d like men to do and how to be?’

  She moans and twists against his hand.

  ‘They’re just fantasies.’

  He has her knickers pushed to one side now, and is sliding his fingers over one plump aching lip of her sex. She squirms some more, and cannot write at all, and holds her breath for that moment when he will rub his finger inwards and stroke against all the slickness along the seam.

  He leans in instead, and whispers hotly in her ear, ‘Does this feel like a fantasy? Or did you mean to write about someone else?’

  ‘I don’t really know you. You could be like anything – I had other ideas –’

  ‘Let’s start with this one,’ he says, and such a warm pulse of pleasure goes through her that it forces out a sound. The shame of admitting something like that turns in on itself and she feels her clit swell and the wetness that’s about to embarrass her some more spread and trickle into the space he has opened up between her flesh and her knickers.

  ‘How juicy you are,’ he says, and, sure enough, that tensing, embarrassed sensation floods her again. The heat, so supple and lovely and unavoidable, tugging at her pussy. ‘Do you sit in my class, getting as slick as this? Do you scribble down lots of things about firm fat cocks fucking mouths and cunts and arseholes, spurting their come into every hole, until you’re sure you can’t debase your character any further? Or is it all just pretty blossoms of her pleasure and stalks of his manhood? Marriage first, of course.’

  ‘You’ve read what I wrote.’

  ‘I’ve read what’s underneath your writing. I’m guessing that’s all you wrote – the scene that would be on page 197, though toned down, of course. Do you think they’d let you get away with your hero joyously jacking off all over the heroine’s tits, then licking his own spunk from her glistening nipples?’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with keeping things to page 197,’ she says but even so she can feel the real words she wants to say breaking against the waves of such a stupid protestation. No more teasing, she thinks. Don’t tease, just fuck me with your hand, your cock, anything.

  ‘I never said there was. I only wondered what you were really like.’

  His finger finally finds its way between her over-swollen and aching lips, and eases through her creamy slit without a hindrance. Her clit jumps and demands attention, but he isn’t so kind.

  ‘Tell the truth now – do you work up all this slipperiness in my class? Is it my voice or your own fantasies that do it? Tell me what you do when you go home. Do you make it home? Or do you go the bathroom and lock yourself into one of the stalls, frig yourself off with just one hand in your knickers, the other in your mouth while you think about me shafting that tight little cunt?’

  The words she wants to say win, at last. There’s going to be
a tidal wave, she’s sure.

  ‘I want you to fuck me. Oh, God, please fuck me, Professor.’

  He breaks too, then, she thinks. He breathes a sound against her neck, at least, and she isn’t sure it’s because she asked him to fuck her. Really, she thinks, it’s because she called him Professor.

  Like Lord. Like King. Like Sir.

  He rips her knickers down, hard enough to make the elastic scrape and roll against her flexing thighs. She glances up at the lecture-hall door, but no one’s there, and the hallway seems dark beyond. Still, the image of ten people suddenly being there, staring down at them . . . cocks and pussies in hands, maybe, some of them fucking as they watch . . . oh, that’s nice, too. Almost as nice as his idea of how far her characters could go – a cock in every hole, fucking and spurting and making a mess of her.

  She hears him dealing in his usual brusque fashion with a condom – the twang and snap of rubber – and can’t stop wondering why he has one on him. Does he keep them in his drawer, just waiting for wicked students to cross some line? Or were they in the pocket of those dusty cords – the kind of trousers you would never imagine condoms being inside?

  The contrast is jarring, exciting. He grabs her hips too roughly, before pushing in – easing in, really. It isn’t the force of him that makes her smack her hands flat on the board, but the tension of his cock inching into her clenching hole. Her pussy wants to force out the too-thick invader, she wants to push and squeeze until he is no longer jabbing into her, but really that’s bullshit because more than anything it feels delicious to shimmy and tighten around him.

  ‘Ah, yes, that’s gorgeous,’ he says, and it’s worth it just for that. ‘Do you like –’

  ‘I like to hear you talk. I like to hear you talk in class all the time. Say things to me.’

  ‘And once he’d driven his hot prong into her creamy depths . . .’

  ‘No – no, please – say what you like. Say what you want. Don’t tell me about what I’ve written, just tell me what you want.’

  ‘I want to fuck your snatch until you cream all over my cock.’

  ‘Oh, God, yes.’

  ‘And then I’m going to lick your clit for hours and hours without letting you come.’

  ‘Fuck – you bastard, you bastard.’

  ‘Tell me you like me shafting you.’

  ‘I do – fuck my tight cunt! Ream my little pussy, you fucker.’

  ‘Oh Christ, more of that, more.’

  He has hold of her hips more tightly now, and is jerking her almost off the ground with every thrust. It’s not difficult to give him more. It’s not difficult because of course he’s right, he’s right, God, she’s always wanted to change pulsating love blossom to cock and cunt and clit and pussy and tits and, oh, it’s even better than she could imagine hearing his clipped, posh voice using all of the words she never dared to.

  She presses her face against the board and probably smears herself with green ink but cannot care. Someone will come in and see them – him hunched over her, fucking into her while her skirt slops around her hips. How small she must look! And how much like she’s being pleasured so thoroughly that it’s hard to breathe.

  When his hand suddenly reaches around her thigh and then down, and he presses two fingers roughly against her clit – just a press, nothing more – she gags on the sounds her own body wants to make, and jolts against his touch. Her pussy swells and tries to choke his jerking cock, but she doesn’t climax until he says, ‘I’m coming, I’m coming – fuck.’

  And then she has no more words. Just groans and gasps and sighs that mingle together and make a story: the story of her own passion. She wants to write on the board a thousand times: and then she came, and then she came, and then she came.

  ‘Turn around,’ he says, and once he is gone from her she does. She realises, uncaring, that she is lost in him, and so does what he tells her. Skirt still around her hips, knickers hobbling her. Pussy wet and glistening and completely exposed. Her clit twinges looking at him, as uncovered as she is. Lewd and ruffled with his trousers open and his still stiff and latex-covered cock poking out at her.

  ‘What would your heroine say if she didn’t come?’

  Her mind blanks – there’s a reason he’s asking, but she can’t think what it is. Everything is a lesson, but this is a different one.

  ‘What would your heroine say?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she blurts out, and he nods.

  ‘What should she say?’

  Let me fuck Professor Clenham instead of you, oaf, she thinks, wildly, but that isn’t the right answer. She breathes a lick of cool air into her own hair, twists inside her sweaty clothes. Her nipples are too tight and sensitive against the hot wool of her jumper; the aftershocks of her orgasm wriggle through her clit over and over.

  ‘Make me come,’ she says, and then he gives her that bright, odd smile, that flash of something that is perhaps his true self. Perhaps he thinks she hasn’t come already, or maybe he just wanted her to ask. His true self demands that she ask.

  He leans in, and ghosts against her what may become a kiss, some time later. For now it is just a whisper over her mouth: ‘Always ask for what you want, lovely Clara.’

  He sinks to his knees before her, and she leans back against the board. Slow, so slow. She is moving through syrup and everything is alight with its golden glow. When he parts her thighs with his now gentle hands, she sees everything made large: the cuff of his shirt, poking out of his tweedy sleeve. The deepness of his eyes like a well inside herself.

  He speaks as though laced with that syrup, a note of humour in his voice – as ever – but deep with it, resonating with it. The ends of the words trail over her, one after another, linked but not quite flowing, and if it were not for his cool, almost smoke-roughened voice, she knows she would giggle. It would probably be all right to giggle, because the corner of his mouth hooks up as he leans forward and says, ‘He pressed his lips to the flower of her womanhood.’

  Yes, she thinks. Oh yes, press your lips to my cunt.

  He kisses the slick tip of her clit, first, just barely anything at all. It’s a maddening kind of touch. He is even more awful than she could have imagined, and even more lovely.

  I’m going to write a story, she thinks, in which you don’t get to have me until the very last page.

  And then when he licks, the story changes all on its own. She wants him to have her again and again and again on every page, licking and teasing and working her clit with his sultry, sinful mouth. She can almost hear that voice of his stirring against this swelling, aching part of her body, making little circles that don’t quite touch, until she is mad with it.

  She imagines him speaking poetry against her sex, against her slippery, slick slit, against her straining clit. She imagines riding him and being ridden. She imagines nothing at all as he slides two fingers upwards, parting her glistening folds for his tongue. The tongue that presses and flicks and makes her need to sit down. She needs to sit down. She needs to lie down, but instead her begging words come out as: ‘Oh, please, please, suck me, fuck me, oh God, please.’

  In answer, he pinches her clit between his scissoring fingers, and draws his teeth across its tip.

  Her papers fall to the floor. She knows that her legs are spread so widely, so lewdly, and her Professor crouched between. Not even crouched – she is sure he appears like something consuming her, big even when he’s on his knees, his face and mouth hungrily at her pussy. He grips her hips – shoving her skirt up to bare it – and yanks her closer, and she almost stumbles over him.

  Her clit swells and blooms in his mouth. Fresh honey spills over his fingers. She doesn’t even know his first name, and cries out, to her eternal embarrassment: ‘Oh Professor, oh, God, I’m coming!’

  Her whole body thrums once, twice, her clit pulsing wetly with its own strange beat. She thinks she goes up on tiptoe, but his hand at her hip presses her back, back to safety. Back to nothing like safety. She closes her eyes
and tries to hold on to her orgasm even as it dissipates.

  All that’s left is a red face and Brazil.

  She hears him stand up, but keeps her eyes closed. He’s moving around now, tidying himself up, most likely, but she keeps her eyes closed still. She’d be happy to never have to open them again, and yet somehow he makes her, when he straightens her own clothes. He tugs at her skirt, quite sharply, and her eyes jerk open.

  The expression on his face isn’t one she expected. It isn’t one she’s ever seen there before. It’s like a lovely, warm, delicious secret.

  He leaves her skirt alone, and fastens a button on his tweed jacket – as brusque as always. Less brusque when he peels a strand of sweat-stuck hair from her cheek and tucks it behind her ear.

  ‘There,’ he says. ‘Very presentable. Very proper.’

  You wouldn’t have thought that anything had happened at all. Maybe not even after she has asked, ‘What happens now?’

  And he has replied, ‘I have no idea. Let’s see what you write next, shall we?’

  Spying

  I NEVER MEANT to start the whole thing. It wasn’t my fault; I can’t be blamed. He shouldn’t have looked so tempting and gorgeous and like an exotic bird just waiting for me to stare. He shouldn’t have done all those things he did that I couldn’t help watching, like my own personal, private filthy movie.

  I shouldn’t be using the defence of date rapists around the world. It was all his fault, your honour, for being such a damned trollop. If I hadn’t learnt otherwise I would have imagined that he earned his living as a stripper, a stripper who spent his days giving anonymous women lap dances.

  But he isn’t. He’s a photographer. He does the watching, for his living. He watches beautiful women posing beautifully, and probably fucks them afterwards, also beautifully. He probably has secret cameras all over his apartment, and films them doing horny things for him.

  Only that’s me, not him. None of the above is him, probably, and I’m the one who secretly watches someone doing horny things for me. And, all right, I don’t film him. But there have been times . . . oh, there have been times when I’ve been tempted to.