Needless to say, my ball was over too. I didn’t exactly fancy slinking back to the party covered in come. And my throat was in a bad way. I probably sounded like Johnny Cash.
Besides, the best thing about the party—the only fucking reason I was at the party—had just made extensive use of my mouth and gone home.
As I hobbled back to my room, I catalogued my aches (mostly superficial) and sorted through my feelings (probably the same). It wasn’t the first time and—assuming I lived the life I fully intended to live—it hopefully wouldn’t be the last that I indulged in some no-strings, no-holds-barred entirely casual sex.
It just happened to be the only time I’d been left so raw by it. Physically and emotionally.
On the other hand, it had also been…impossibly hot.
Maybe the best sex I’d ever had.
And, in some strange way, the truest. The closest to what I ached and dreamed of but didn’t entirely know how to get. Which wasn’t to say I hadn’t messed around, online and off, let the occasional one-night stand be a bit rough with me. Mumbled my “yes, sirs” and tried not to giggle, feeling self-conscious in entirely the wrong sort of way.
It had been different with Caspian.
Somehow I’d trusted him to take from me exactly what I needed to give.
Thankfully Nik was already sleeping, which meant I didn’t have to answer any difficult questions. Questions to which the answer would unavoidably be “I sucked off Caspian Hart.” Wriggling out of my clothes, I flung my boxers into the laundry basket and dived under the bedcovers. It took a while, but I warmed up eventually, and my brain settled down.
It wasn’t like I’d been expecting…well, anything. You don’t give a guy you’ve only just met a blow job and then wait for the proposal.
And, frankly, even the blow job was its own little miracle. Well. Intriguingly above-average miracle. My cock gave a hopeful twitch just remembering. Caspian Hart, the most perfect man I’d ever met, shuddering with passion, clinging to me, and coming apart. And all because of me. I liked to think I was fairly decent in the sack, but I’d never affected anyone the way I did him. Or maybe it was just the change in him. Like watching a stone lion come to life, all fire and claws and thunder.
I put my fingers to my lips. They still felt a little puffy and I traced the edges of my mouth, where he had stretched me wide.
God.
And to think the most I’d hoped for had been a stilted conversation. Sending him off with vaguely positive St. Sebastian’s feels for when the next telethon rolled around.
Admittedly, his exit had been more abrupt than I would have liked, but maybe he hadn’t known how to handle the postcoitus. In case I got clingy or demanding or something. I wouldn’t have. Cuddles were good, breakfast was better, but we were on a balcony at a party and I wasn’t exactly the boyfriend type. I’d tried it, a couple of times, and it had been…fine, but if you couldn’t be a tart at the age of twenty, what was the point of being young, moderately attractive, and armed with a student card that got you cheap beer?
Besides, what else did I need from him, after an experience like that? I was smiling as I snuggled into my pillow. It had been a good night. An extraordinary night. And I was going to think well of Caspian Hart until the day I died.
* * *
Nik got me up the next morning to go to breakfast and I was shockingly discreet. Or hungover. In any case, I didn’t give him any gossip about Caspian. I only said he was hot but aloof and that we hadn’t spoken very much.
Which was basically true.
It was slightly insulting, actually, how quickly Nik accepted it.
I did feel just a little bit guilty about the fact that I hadn’t made more attempts to talk to Caspian about, y’know, fund-raising, but I’d already spent a week on the phones talking the talk, and the dinner wasn’t supposed to be a hard sell. It was meant to get people gently drunk and nurture their nostalgia. I guess I could have at least tried to give him a tour.
Of something other than my mouth.
After I’d put away about a gallon of orange juice and a couple of tons of scrambled eggs, I went casually down to the Lodge to check my pidge.
I didn’t really think Caspian would have left me anything. Flowers? A diamond-studded cock ring? A discreet little note saying, So long, and thanks for all the sex? But there was something in there. An envelope, heavy cream and posh-looking. Not the usual student mail by any means.
I tried not to get too excited.
Except for the part where I got excited.
Imagining an intriguingly dirty arrangement where I met up with Caspian every now and again. Got flown to exotic locations in his private jet to blow him or provide other necessary, um, body services. And maybe sometimes he’d hold me afterward, or we’d go out to dinner, and he’d smoke a cigarette and tell me the things that he didn’t tell anybody else.
Which was when I saw the college crest on the envelope, killing that poor little fantasy before it had a chance to flourish into full-fledged wankbait. Inside, was a neatly typed note inside inviting me to visit the Master at—
Oh shit, I was already late.
I pelted around the quad, through the archways, past the graveyard, and across to Reni, which contained the Master’s office and residence. Up another spiral staircase. And then I was being summoned, panting and sweating and really wishing I’d showered, into the sanctum sanctorum of St. Sebastian’s College.
I’d never been in there before, which I strongly believed to be a good thing, and I wasn’t exactly in the mood for sightseeing. It was the usual Oxford grandeur, cherrywood and dark leather, big arse desk, behind which the Master sat in state. In one of her typically alarming houndstooth numbers.
Dame Frances Cavendish was her name. Her letters, which were embossed on the door and the official letterhead and found their way onto pretty much every collegiate publication, were DBE, FRCPysch, FRCP, FRCPI, FRCGP, FMedSci. No clue what any of them meant beyond “I am better than you, bitches.”
I was fucking terrified of her. Everyone was. She had this scrawny black cat called Pongo (who called their cat Pongo?) with Gollum-like eyes that exactly matched her own. He was rumored to be a demonic manifestation of her will. And he wasn’t here now, which, to my mind, confirmed it.
“Ah.” She showed her teeth in something that, in a human, might have been a smile. “Mr. St. Ives?”
Oh God. I hated the way she addressed everyone with this strained, borderline sarcastic courtesy. “Oi, Shithead” would, at least, have had the virtue of authenticity.
“Sorry I’m late. I didn’t, um—”
“Have a seat.”
I had a seat. It was a small seat. Made me feel like a fucking Goomba. “I haven’t done anything.”
“Oh, but you have, Mr. St. Ives. You’ve been very busy indeed.”
Fuck. She knew about the blow job. Wait. How could she possibly know about the blow job? I stared wretchedly at the rug at my feet, which was emblazoned with the college crest and its (deliciously defaceable) motto Mens Conscia Recti. I didn’t know what to say.
She rose suddenly. She wasn’t a tall woman but, damn, she gave good loom. I just about managed not to cringe visibly. “Would you care for coffee, Mr. St. Ives?”
“N-no thank you.”
Dame Frances was known universally as Damn Frances. Apparently there’d been a typo somewhere once—nobody could remember the details anymore—but the appellation had stuck. She stalked past me to the posh cafetiere waiting on one of the sideboards and proceeded to make coffee in a manner I found subtly disturbing.
It smelled good though. Classy.
And that was probably exactly what Persephone thought when she saw that pomegranate.
“Um, Damn…Dame Frances…can I ask what this is about?”
She turned, cup in hand, and did the teeth thing again. “I wanted to thank you for your work for the telethon.”
Breathing. I suddenly remembered it was a good idea. “Oh, no problem. Anytime. Can I go now?”
“Of course, Mr. St. Ives. I have no intention of keeping you long.” I was halfway to the door for maximum looking like an idiotness when she continued. “You know, you were our most successful fund-raiser. By quite a significant margin.”
“Team effort. Probably nothing to do with me at all.”
“Oh really?”
I nodded frantically.
“Then perhaps you’d better take a look at this.”
I heard the rustle of papers behind me. I couldn’t really run out of the room, however much I might have wanted to, so I sloped sheepishly back to the desk and picked up the document the Master had laid out for me. It was numbers. Lots of big numbers. The sort of numbers that made me feel like I was failing GCSE maths all over again. “What’s this?”
“It’s a full scholarship to be awarded yearly to an exceptional undergraduate experiencing financial hardship.”
“Cool.”
“We’re calling it the Arden St. Ives Scholarship.”
“You’re what?” As ideas went, it was so far out of left field it wasn’t even near the grass anymore. I tried to understand what something like that might mean, but it just slithered out of my brain, unable to connect with anything already in there. The Arden St. Ives Scholarship? Holy fuck. “You don’t have to do that.”
“On the contrary”—her evil cat eyes met mine over the paper—“Mr. Hart was quite insistent.”
“Mr.…wait. Caspian? Caspian did this?” That wouldn’t fit in my brain either. Why would he…Oh fuck, no. I hadn’t asked him for anything. “Why?”
She gave me what, in the heat of the moment, I interpreted as an I know what you did last supper look. “You must have made quite an impression on him.”
I probably mumbled something.
And she probably said something in return.
And then…oh whatever. Everything had vanished into this blur of awfulness where I felt weird and dirty and guilty and used in a way I just hadn’t before.
As if I’d done something bad.
And a little bit like everybody knew about it. Or at the very least darkly suspected.
By the time the Master let me go, with congratulations and good wishes and apparently increased hope for my future success, I was trembly and nauseous with pretending to be okay.
It was mainly shock. And newfound shame.
And a kind of hopeless fury that I’d trusted him and, in return, he’d turned something good into something icky.
Is that how he saw me? Someone who’d had sex with him in order to score a big donation?
God, I’d thought he liked me. He’d made me believe I was safe with him. But all the time he’d seen me as disposable. Someone to be used and dismissed and paid off and forgotten.
I sat down on the library steps and put my head in my hands, the gold and green of the quad smearing into the tears I definitely wasn’t crying.
Jet-setting fantasies aside, I’d known—I’d known right from the first moment I set eyes on him—that I’d probably never see him again. That we wouldn’t kiss or date or talk or do any of the things that most people counted as meaningful. That I wouldn’t be telling my grandkids, or probably Nik’s grandkids, about that enchanted evening long ago when I let a stranger fuck my throat until I came.
But that hadn’t mattered when what we’d done had been special to him in the same odd sort of way it had been special to me. That we’d both trusted and shared and taken and given.
Except now I knew it wasn’t like that: I’d been nothing to him all along.
Which was probably why the last thing he’d said had been Forgive me.
Barely out of my mouth and he was regretting me. Planning to get rid of me. Ensuring he’d never have to think of me again. Turning what we’d done into transaction.
It wasn’t as if I’d never been treated badly before—as the saying went, if you kissed a lot of princes, sooner or later you were bound to sleep with a frog—but it had never been like this. It just wasn’t something you thought to protect yourself against.
Not exactly the whole “having the billionaire you just sucked off donate a scary amount of money to your college’s endowment” because how in God’s name could you prepare for that? But discovering the distance between how you saw something—and saw yourself—and the way someone else did. And feeling cheapened by that distance.
Hurt.
So there I was, struck deep in some unexpected vulnerability, left bleeding by a blow I never saw coming. No pun intended.
It was my own fault. I should have never—
No, wait.
It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t do anything wrong. He made it wrong. And I didn’t deserve to be sitting here feeling like fucking nothing.
And that was when anger made itself my champion. It made me feel strong instead of weak, righteous instead of used. And, through my drying tears, before I actually tried to take action, it looked a lot like courage.
Which was how I ended up on the Oxford Tube, heading for London. Convinced I was going to be able to stand in front of Caspian Hart, look him in the eye, and tell him with terrifying dignity exactly how not okay his behavior was. Genuinely believing that this was something I could do. That it wouldn’t be absurd and embarrassing and futile. That he deserved to feel as bad as I did. And that—most ridiculously of all—I had the power to make him.