Shipwrecked & Horny: A What Could Possibly Go Wrong Bad Boy Romance (Bad Boys After Dark Book 10) by Gabi Moore (39)

“Oh, Michelle, could you please see me after class today?” he said.

Words, they taught us in my Beginner’s Creative Writing Class for Adults, have meaning. Sometimes, some words can even have many meanings, and when you’re anxious like me, you learn how to read every possible meaning of every possible word.

I know everything there is to know about words. I know how to tell people off for using future perfect continuous tense incorrectly, I know the etymology of the word “mutilate”, and I know how to spell bureaucracy without cheating. I know that “I’m sorry” can sometimes mean “I hate you”, and “marry me” can sometimes mean “I give up.” It’s all in the context, you see, which is another thing my Beginner’s Creative Writing Class tells me.

“You’re reading too much into things” my exasperated friends tell me almost daily, but no, you can never read too much, into things or out of them, and when Mr. Cain asked to see me after class, well, there’s a whole universe of things that that could mean.

“Sure, no problem.” I said.

Mr. Cain smiled and nodded once, then continued nagging the corner of an old book that was resting in his lap.

If you look closely enough, there are words in everything. Take Mr. Cain for instance. His bleached white collared shirt says “yes sir” but his hairy forearms and five-day stubble say, “I’m a modern-day Hemingway, stand back while I engage in ennui and self-inflicted but romantic alcoholism.”

Maybe you think I have a crush on Mr. Cain. Well, so what if I do? It’s practically unavoidable at this point. There’s fate, and then there’s something even stronger: narrative necessity. I simply had to have a crush on him, you see. I was the plucky but maladjusted loner and he was the brooding and artsy teacher-type who was going to seduce me and awaken my inner slut. Tale as old as time.

He was crinkling up his eyebrows at the book, as though this would help him squeeze out more insight from the words on their pages.

“What makes this passage so visceral, though? What really jumps out at you?” he asked the class.

Mousy Linda cleared her throat and said, “The author is speaking to all five of our senses. She talks about the smell of the soil, the feeling of the air …so it’s all about, like, the body…”

She trailed off as Mr. Cain turned his grizzled gaze to her. It was pretty clear to me that poor Linda was totally not the heroine of this story.

“Right…” he said, gesturing for her to continue. “But what else? Take that further. Let’s develop that idea.”

Linda withered a little more. Nobody raised their hands.

“I think,” I say into the quiet room, “that she wants to show in this piece that the body is speaking. That the conversation is carrying on, but the message is now transmitted through the body itself. Words can have lots of different meanings, but in this passage she’s not interested in words anymore, she wants to show the body, as it is.”

Mr. Cain stops nagging the corner of the page and looks at me. He nods just once.

“Yes, I like that. The body as text. Good.” He nods again and changes his tone, looking back into the pages. “It’s certainly a common interpretation, but thank you for that, Michelle.”

Common? I look down at my arm resting stupidly on my lap. Common. Somewhere around last year, I had decided not to cover up my scars anymore. Yes, I know, self-harm is very 1990, but I was doing Troubled Teenager long before anyone else, I promise, and now there was nothing to do but own the many pale scar lines climbing all the way up my arm …especially when it got as hot as it was today.

I traced a finger over them; they were old calibrations from a time past when I measured my pain in a very different way. When I had ratcheted up all the way to the end of my arm, and had no more room to go, I had had to change my instrument. These days, I tried to use words to cut, instead. Words are sharper, and the wounds they leave sometimes never heal. Though everyone is happy I am 10lbs heavier and significantly less cut up (ha ha!) than I was before. The truth is, nobody knew just how truly lacerating some of the words I used on myself every day were. My body also spoke, except it said “broken” and “dirty” most of the time.

When Mr. Cain said the words “common interpretation,” I had quietly felt the word “stupid” cut into me a little, like a tiny sword. I sat in silence for the rest of the lesson, smarting. The hour drew to a close and I thought about saying something nasty about Linda’s cardigan, then thought better of it.

What on earth did Mr. Cain want to talk to me about? Having a crush on him suddenly started to seem a little inconvenient.

If I had a dollar for every time some angsty child came into my class and tried to impress everyone with her Tumblr poetry …well, I wouldn’t have to teach some dead-end writing class for extra cash in the first place.

The trouble with students like Michelle is that they’re desperately immature – and completely unaware of the fact.

Michelle was a thoughtful, subtle writer and created strikingly refined characters in class …but she was also twenty one years old. And no amount of talent could change that fact.

I’ve been writing for years. The old Middle School style melodrama and overwrought dialogue? It was a good thing she was pretty, because there was no way I would put up with that shit if she were otherwise. Michelle played the disturbed waif particularly well, but to be honest it didn’t quite suit her. She was too voluptuous underneath her ratty black clothes. Too robust. Her skin was a little too rosy looking, despite how bitchy she sometimes was to the other students, or how insulted she felt when I gave her a less than brilliant grade for one of her compositions.

I looked down at her assignment in my lap, and my “C” looped round with a big red ring. In hindsight, this wasn’t an entirely fair grade to give he. At the time, I thought it my duty, as an older man, to point out her haughtiness, bring her down a peg or two and truly help her with her writing. I had no idea that within a matter of a few months it would be her showing me a thing or two about writing …but I’ll get to that in a moment. At that point, was I inventing excuses to talk to her alone? I couldn’t say. But I was her senior (by a hell of a lot) and her teacher.

Did I have a crush on her? Well, that’s entirely beside the point. She dutifully stayed behind class and I noticed she was wearing, as usual, an outfit of only black and some junky Goth jewelry. She smelled like lilacs.

“Michelle, thanks for staying. I …wanted to discuss this short story you submitted last week,” I said, relishing the tension this seemed to create. I stroked my beard contemplatively, deciding this would heighten the drama a little, too.

“Oh?” she said.

“It’s an unusual choice …erotica,” I said, hating that she had made me say the word.

She looked out of the window. I was struck anew by how incredibly young she looked. The lower curve of a surprisingly full breast pulled at the cotton of her shirt, but she was sitting bunched up, tucking her body away. In all my years teaching this class, no student had had the guts to voluntarily submit something like this. It felt like a cry for help. Or a massive “fuck you” …I wasn’t sure which.

“It’s …well, it’s brave, I’ll say that much.”

She flashed her dark brown eyes over at mine and then out towards the window again, ignoring me and looking very much like she was sulking. I felt like a pervy headmaster who had called in a naughty student and we were in the first few scenes of a low-budget porno. Jesus, I hated this dynamic.

“Would you like to share why you decided to go with this topic? I’d really like to understand the reasoning behind this story.”

I suddenly felt like a school counselor instead. I felt a headache coming on.

She pouted a little, and kept ignoring me, with that teenage audacity that thinks any disagreement is proof that the person simply can’t “handle them.” I was getting irritated.

She finally spoke, flicking a slice of dyed black hair out of her eyes.

“You told us in the beginning of the class that we were here to express ourselves, and that there were no rules. So, I wrote what I wanted to.”

I bet, in her mind, she thought she had really showed me. How could I tell her that her juvenile scratchings had in fact embarrassed me, but not for the reasons she thought? Fine, the kid gloves, if you’ll pardon the expression, were off. We were here to learn, after all. If I weren’t hard on my students, they’d never learn anything.

I exhaled loudly and tried to seem as bored as possible. “Well, I’ve made quite a few suggestions and corrections, especially to this second bit over here. You switch tense a lot, but don’t worry, that’s a pretty common mistake to make, especially as a beginner. Plus, I’m not really sure you understand the meaning of the word “portentious,” maybe look that up when you get home. I’ve made some other suggestions at the end here…”

Girls like Michelle have one-trick-pony identities. Getting away with things because she was a hot girl who nobody “understood” just wasn’t going to fly in my class. This wasn’t a game to me. And I didn’t take kindly to girls who submitted nasty diary entries and called it art. Nope, she was going to have to try a lot harder than that.

She flushed a peculiar shade of red and looked as though she was about to argue back with me, but bit her tongue. She quickly took the assignment from me and stuffed it into her bag, then mumbled something and left.

She had beautiful eyes and almost mind-numbingly distracting breasts, it was true. But she was a mediocre writer. If she wanted to impress me, she had to do a hell of a lot better than that.

I wanted to tear that stupid assignment into a million pieces. The word “common” was still ringing in my ears. I had to be honest: I did not expect that reaction. I mean, I expected he’d want to have a word with me about what I’d written – that was kind of the point – but I’m embarrassed to admit I didn’t foresee that he would go on about my tenses or vocab after …well, after all the things I wrote.

I’m not sure why I was compelled, right at that moment, to open my laptop and start writing again. I was dog tired, it was late and I needed to get up early tomorrow for work, but it didn’t matter. I furiously tapped the keyboard.

“The Teacher and the Taught” appeared at the top of the page. Good. What did he know anyway? I’d show him. Not only would I get the technical details perfectly correct, I would make the story even more outrageous. I looked again at the screen. Too obvious. I backspaced it all and wrote instead, “All of Me, Twisted.” There, it had a nice ring to it. I’m no idiot. I know exactly where his eyes had been roaming as we sat alone in the classroom that afternoon, nothing but my filthy piece of writing between us. I know it, and he knows that I know it.

It might have been my imagination, but there was something different about Michelle by the time the next class rolled around. Her clothing was tighter, and there seemed to be less of it. Or was I just imagining things? Maybe I had been a little too hard on her. Maybe I didn’t need to be quite so brutal with the red pen. She was so young, after all. I have to admit I was curious to see what she would come up with as her second draft.

We sat in our usual circle, and the students settled in. We started, as we did with every lesson every week, by having each person read out loud a section of a piece they were working on. We’d then take turns to weigh in, giving some feedback on flow, on word choice. True, it was sometimes cringe-inducing, but I wanted every student of mine to know that to create art was to be vulnerable, to be exposed. It wasn’t always pleasant to be criticized.

Linda read a paragraph from her Victorian memoir-style piece – a snooze for all involved but she was fairly competent when it came to describing crinolines and provincial dramas, so I couldn’t fault her much. The guy sitting next to her said his piece and the dutiful students took turns offering feedback. Then it was Michelle’s turn.

She opened a folder she had resting on her lap and retrieved a crisp sheet of printed paper. She started to read; it was a short horror story she had started at the beginning of the course, one with a suspiciously sulky heroin and an outbreak of contagion in a small town. As she read, her dark hair fell in a curtain over her eyes, and at the end of each sentence she paused and inhaled, her ample chest rising and falling softly in the slightly-too-small bodice of her black dress.

Should I say I wanted to speak to her again after this class? Why not? She’d have to obey me. I could whip out my red pen again and scribble even more corrections all over it, just because I could, just to see her squirm. I quickly stopped this train of thought. Why was I letting her get to me like this? I’ve made my mistakes in life, sure, but if there’s one thing I don’t do, it’s let girls like this get to me. She had tried to get a rise out of me with that ridiculous story she submitted. Well, if she wanted to play that game…

“Michelle, I think you’ve shown us that you have that piece pretty well-covered.”

She stopped reading and stared at me, a little surprised. A fake garnet ring glistened on her finger.

“Since we don’t have that much time today, why don’t you share that other piece with the class and we can give you feedback on that instead?”

The color seemed to vanish from her already white face as her panicked eyes locked on mine.

“The other piece, you know the one,” I said with careful indifference.

Her lower lip seemed to tremble visibly. Where she had been cocky a moment before, now she seemed smaller, incredibly vulnerable. In a flash, I felt horrible for being so cruel to her …but then again, I had the feeling she didn’t quite mind it.

“Um… which other piece? This is the only one I…” she began but I loudly cut her off, “Yes, the other piece you’re working on, the erotica piece” I said with emphasis.

These words had a powerful effect on the other students, who all turned to her now with a renewed intensity. She swallowed hard, then pulled another sheet of paper from the folder, the look of horror on her face slowly hardening and becoming defiance.

“Ok, sure,” she said, trying to match my casual tone.

For a few moments, the air was as silent and heavy as it had ever been in that room. In a pitiful voice and with all the confidence she could muster, she began reading the opening paragraph of her piece. I sat back in my chair, secretly thrilled that I had dominated her so easily. I hated being manipulated, but if she wanted to play at this game, well, then I would call her bluff.

It was as though every inch of my skin had caught fire. I was blushing so hard I thought I might faint – was he really going to make me do this? Why? You know, I can appreciate a good story. I can see the irony – I had wanted to make him a little uncomfortable with this story, to shock him, and now he was throwing it back in my face. Every word, I soon realized, had probably been written with him in mind, and those same words were now coming out my mouth, here, in front of all the other students, and I felt like I wanted to peel off my burning skin and run away from it forever.

How dare he?

I had done the same thing to my High School English teacher. I had submitted a “creative writing” piece dripping with expletives and graphic descriptions of all the many, many ways a tempting young Lolita character could seduce and ruin a married man. I had detailed the maddening allure of her forbidden pussy, the way she teased, asking to be put in her place, half daring, half begging to be disciplined for her behavior. And when I breezily dropped that paper onto his desk, I knew without a doubt that I had him on a string for the rest of the school year. He didn’t need to know that I was still technically a virgin, or that I would never in a million years do anything like that …but the control thrilled me nonetheless.

I had half expected the same easy reaction with Mr. Cain, yet here I was, looking like an idiot. I had always relished the idea of being “punished” …but this wasn’t quite what I had in mind. There was nothing I could do. I had to read it.

I worked my way through the first awkward paragraph. It was, I realized, a very similar story of temptation and debauchery. Maybe I was the predictable one?

“He threw her mercilessly against the bed, standing over her for a moment, making sure she understood that she was completely, utterly at his mercy. Slowly, he pulled off his leather belt, one loop after the other, and stood tall; letting it hang at his feet like a weapon, buckle wrapped firmly in his fist. Every part of her body pulsed with anticipation…”

I looked up, inwardly cringing, every student hanging onto my words with a mix of panic and amused fascination.

“Don’t stop,” Mr. Cain, said. He knew what was coming next in the story. And all at once I understood what was happening. This wasn’t embarrassing to him at all. Oh no. In fact, he liked it. He wanted to see me humiliated and exposed like this. I stared at him, disbelieving. I had totally underestimated him. Good move, sir. But now it was my move.

I cleared my throat and returned my gaze to the page, paragraphs crammed full of “cock” and “cunt” and other words that seemed that they would be further gasoline to my burning skin just to utter them. But I flicked my hair from my face, sat up straight and spoke clearly. I barged through the next few lines; not only did I not avoid the filthy parts, but I emphasized them, holding each dirty word a little longer on my tongue, relishing the descriptions, taking my time to describe the heroine’s swollen, glistening hole, the hero’s throbbing cock, the sweaty abs, the moans, the grunts.

Some of the students were giggling under their breath. Others were stunned into silence. The more I read, the more gloriously I felt that I just didn’t give a damn. In the final paragraph, the heroine is roughly bent over a boudoir stool and is begging for mercy, begging the hero to fuck her senseless, or not to, depending on how you interpreted it.

“Two hot, wet tears rolled down each of her cheeks. Her wrists burning in their restraints and her legs spread wide to him, she choked back a sob and pleaded, ‘be gentle.’ But at that moment he took his enormous -”

“Ok, that’s enough, let’s stop there,” Mr. Cain burst in suddenly.

“You want me to stop?” I said, teasingly.

“Yes, I think we’ve heard enough,” he said. The color dropped entirely from his cheeks.

“But I haven’t gotten to the good part yet. The part where he fucks her in the ass.”

His face had the expression of someone who had just been slapped. All eyes were now on him, waiting to see what he could possibly respond to this.

“Ok, but I think we do have some idea now of…”

“No, it’s OK, I want to,” I said easily. “After all, it’s this part that I was having really trouble with.”

With an electrifying realization, I noticed a fat bulge in his pants. Ah, so that’s where all the blood went. I was on a role. I had no idea where I had found the courage, but here I was, turning the tables on him, and it felt fantastic.

“It’s just that I find that writing these kinds of scenes can just be so ...” I flickered my gaze teasingly over his crotch. “So … hard, you know?”

Something like anger was simmering on his face.

“Unless of course the other students don’t want me to continue reading…?” I asked, the biggest hurdle of audacity already overcome. When the class offered only feeble nods and shrugs, I carried on reading, gleefully.

With each word, Mr. Cain grew more visibly shaken. He was holding a notebook on his lap so tightly his knuckles had gone white, but I knew what was going on beneath it. I knew, and I loved it. The heroine in my story was fucked within an inch of her life, and I paced luxuriously through the tale, savoring every last drop and morsel. By the time I reached the end of my sordid tale, my protagonist lying cum-splattered and crumpled over a chair, the mood in the class had completely changed – probably forever.

I spoke the last word, returned the sheet to the folder, closed it gently and crossed my hands over my lap like a good little schoolgirl. There.

The tension in the class had swollen, risen along with the story and was now released, but the students were thoroughly rattled and had turned their shocked faces to Mr. Cain, somehow sensing that more than one line had been crossed today, and wondering what he was going to do about it.

He cleared his throat and shifted in his seat awkwardly.

“Yes, well. You see, the trouble with this sort of thing… what you have to remember, Michelle, what you have to keep in mind… it’s kind of a delicate balancing act with the tension, you know… and the tension in this piece…”

He trailed off, the irony of tension not being lost on him or the students. He angrily glanced at his watch. We still had fifteen minutes to go.

“Ok. Well. We don’t have much time left so let’s just call it a day today and I’m sure we’ll all have some feedback for Michelle’s piece next week…”

I had the feeling he was trying to say that it was “common” but with a little triumphant flutter I realized he wouldn’t dare. Not now.

“I do think, Michelle, that you should come and see me after class, though,” he said.

My entire face was prickling with anger. This whole thing had gone on too far. I should have been the adult in this situation. I should have nipped this whole thing in the bud. Dirty slut, I thought, and instantly regretted it. But there was no denying it. She was sexy, she was talented …and she was absolutely toying with me. I hadn’t for a second believed she would follow my bluff, but she had done it easily, and made me look like a fool in my own classroom.

Without thinking, I had asked to see her after class, but realized with horror that it may have come across as a pleading invitation rather than an admonishment. But was it an invitation? I put the thought out of my mind. Little harlots like Michelle may have the upper hand in shock value, sure, but this wasn’t my first rodeo, and if she was going to be arrogant, well, I had full liberty to penalize her harshly till she understood: I don’t allow girls like her get the best of me. Never.

The class had cleared off, most of them barely waiting till they had reached the door to burst into excited chatter about what the hell they had just witnessed. Inside the class, though, I had bigger problems. Michelle sat in front of me, upright and self satisfied as a queen who’s just laid waste to barbarian lands. She said nothing. She didn’t have to.

“That’s quite the stunt you just pulled,” I said, in my harshest voice.

She feigned a look of surprise.

“Stunt? But you asked me to read that story…”

“Don’t interrupt,” I snapped.

She shrunk back a little.

“That story is absolutely, completely inappropriate for this class. That’s obvious. We’re here as a class to learn about composition, to learn about the mechanics of writing…”

“Was there something wrong with my tenses again?” she asked, in a voice so sickly sweet I wondered if she really thought I was buying it.

“No, no, not at all, the writing’s fine …it’s actually quite good…” I began but then realized I had lost my opportunity to humiliate her by claiming her grammar was faulty.

“So then what’s the problem?” she asked.

Her big wet eyes stared plainly at me, and she clutched her folder to her chest, pressing together her plump, white breasts. Could she see that she was turning me on? The thought made me irrationally angry.

“The problem is your writing …it just lacks pacing. It lacks restraint.” My mind snagged on the word “restraint.” All at once, an image of her flashed into my mind, one where she was the heroine of her own story, tied up, splayed on a chair, legs spread wide open… is that what she wanted? Is that what all of this was about?

“Without any restraint, the story just happens all at once. You need to let things develop slowly. To build tension. And the title. “All of me, twisted” is just… it’s just so clichéd, you know? It sounds like a country song or something. There’s just no building up. You just jump right into the sex, without laying the stage, without setting up the stakes.”

I felt more comfortable now in my old role as know-it-all teacher, patiently asserting my superior knowledge, guiding her out of her amateurish ignorance. The trouble was, it was all bullshit. Her story was remarkably paced, and the tension was perfect. This, too, made me irrationally angry.

“So… there’s not enough tension?” she said, looking a little confused.

“Nope.”

“I need to build things up more slowly?”

“Yeah, exactly.”

She looked away for a while, with eyes that looked as though they were brewing something. She briskly got up from her chair and set the folder to one side. Absentmindedly, as though she was doing nothing more than thinking about what she would have for dinner, she sauntered over to one corner of the room, where my desk was. Slowly, she put one palm and then the other onto the table surface, then leant backwards, giving her ass a little wiggle.

“So, when my main character is standing like this, waiting, I should make sure the guy just doesn’t come over and fuck her immediately?” her eyes twinkled.

It seemed like she had said “fuck” a million times in the last hour alone, and yet the word still had some electricity in it. I said nothing.

“I guess I should make it so that she really begs for it, really has to wait and wait …and wait…” She arched her back and dropped her head loosely forward, letting her dark soft hair fall softly between her hands.

The air thrummed.

After what seemed like eons she spoke again, “You’re right of course, I guess I get impatient. I see the whole story in my head and I just want it to get to the juicy bits already, you know? But …tension…” she said, now rolling a pen up and down the length of the desk with one coquettish finger.

I couldn’t let her know about the almost painful ache in my pants, and the feeling that if I budged as much as an inch I would explode right there and then. I opened my mouth to speak, to say something smart and reasonable and moderate, something that would let her know that I was still in charge here, and she was just a silly girl playing with things she didn’t really underst--

“Tension!” she said in a theatrical voice, interrupting my thoughts. “In my story, I just want them to have sex, and lots of it. But you’re right, that doesn’t make sense. So, for example, if it was I writing this story,” she gestured loosely to the air between us, “then we would be having sex already. I’d be over there on the table, already halfway to my second orgasm by now. But what do I know? That’s why I’m in your class, right? To be taught…”

I sat mute, watching. She seemed to be enjoying herself. She was tiptoeing a very, very fine line and knew it. She really was a master of pacing, I thought, and inwardly thanked myself for creating such a competent student.

“Instead, I have to think of a way to introduce more tension. To show the reader what the stakes really are. They want it, but they can’t have it,” she said dreamily, talking to some distant point outside the window. “The characters in my story, I mean, not you and I,” she smiled, flashing a teasing glance at me.

She turned away from the desk and sidled over to me. In the same way that honey pours from the jar almost unbearably slowly in the beginning, but then falls all at once in one heavy, luscious blob, she slid up to me slowly and then all at once was standing close, really close, so close that I swear I could hear the silky rasp of her breathing.

“So I’ll change my story. I’ll have them get close to it, you know. Really close. But they won’t fuck this time.” The word zinged again; something about the way it sat in her little mouth meant it never grew stale, always sounded shocking, unexpected. Her heavy eyes were even darker close up, and so liquid they seemed to reflect every last scrap of light in the room. Her hair smelled musky; the tiny links of a silver chain rolled over her delicate collarbones as she spoke. She had an almost old fashioned build; the kind of over-the-top feminine hourglass that made old-school cartoon characters turn into wolves with tongues that unroll to the floor. Her breasts really were uncommonly full and heavy, and seemed all the sexier for being paired with a sweet, innocent face that seemed unaware of the effect of all the voluptuousness below. Why was she hiding such a beautiful body in such ghastly clothing?

“Maybe the girl will lean in really close, like this…” she began, moving her face right up to mine. She parted her lips. I could hear her breathing stop, along with everything else in the universe, except the throbbing in my lap.

“…And she could do something like take his hand like this…” she reached haltingly to my lap and grasped my hand. Almost hypnotized, I didn’t resist. Gently, she closed her fingers around my wrist and pulled the hand closer to her.

“…And he could touch her, you know? Just a little. Just to build the…” here, she cautiously placed my hand between her legs, nothing but the thin black cotton of her dress between my fingertips. She paused it there, waiting to see the effect this would have on me, her deep eyes still fixed staring at mine.

“Just to build the uh… the tension,” she exhaled and pressed my fingertips further against her body. “And he’d want to touch her so badly, you know? He’d be just dying to really touch her. By this point she’s soaking wet …but he doesn’t know that yet.” She smiled. “He’s wondering if she’ll let him… let him…”

My head was spinning. This was wrong. Disgusting, even. At any point, any one of the other students could come barging in and I was sitting here, rock hard with one hand on my student’s crotch. There was no coming back from this now. She was tiny, easily half my size; I could grab her right now, and fling her onto the table, and fuck her so hard she would never think of teasing me like this again. So what was stopping me? Was she really so sure I wouldn’t?

Suddenly, she stepped back and tossed my hand aside. Her entire attitude changed. “But nope, they won’t do anything. Not yet. Nope. Because of tension.”

I was stunned. She pretended to pick some lint off her skirt and cracked her neck from side to side like a villain in a mafia movie. She grabbed her folder from the chair and gave me a glancing look before moving for the door. “You’re a good teacher you know,” she tossed her hair flippantly, “You’ve taught me so much already. Later!”

Before I knew it she had left, slamming the door behind her. My dick throbbed in my pants. Bitch. I was going to teach her a lesson, all right.

I had never felt so turned on in all my life. I raced home, drunk on my own brazenness, feeling sure that the people I passed in the street could see straight into my depraved soul, could somehow sense how soaking wet my panties were and how fast my thoughts were flickering from one dirty possibility to the next.

What had I done?

I hate being challenged. I hate when people underestimate me. Let’s call it a character flaw. But I was in hot water now. Now, I was committed. As I walked through my front door, the realization hit me like a ton of bricks: this was going to happen. Soon. Somewhere in my future I was going to let my Creative Writing teacher do very, very bad things to me. And now it was just a matter of time, a matter of playing it cool in these intervening moments.

Should I submit another story? Would he ask to see me again? Did the other students think I was a raging slut? I realized that their disapproval only seemed to add to the thrill of it. It was glorious. No longer was I just writing about these things, I was living them. He was right – words do have power. And the body can speak. And mine was saying, “more.”

The next class, I felt close to fainting, like some kind of maiden with a heaving bosom in a bodice-ripper. Mr. Cain acted like nothing had even happened. He was so bland and dismissive I almost doubted my entire memory of the class before. This, together with how painfully boring Linda’s piece was (even by her standards) and I was starting to lose hope as the end of the class approached. Maybe I had just embarrassed myself. Had I worn this tight little skirt for nothing? Had I agonized over which exact bra to wear just to go home and take it off again?

When it was my turn, I carried on with a reading from my short horror story, which seemed uninteresting to the other students in comparison to what had already passed; I couldn’t drum up any enthusiasm for it either. But as the hour petered out and everyone started to pack away their books and disperse, Mr. Cain cleared his throat and said to nobody in particular, “Michelle, could you please stay after class for a moment, please?”

In that split second, my entire body pulsed with an “oh god yes!” but on the surface, I tried to feign indifference and only muttered, “sure,” also to nobody in particular. He nodded once and the other students floated off.

As the last student left the classroom, he still had his back to me, fussing with some papers on the desk – that desk that I couldn’t look at anymore without my mind wandering. I sat deathly still in my chair, trying to will my heartbeat to calm down. Clasped in my lap was a new and updated story, longer by 2000 words and overflowing with tension, among other things.

Late into the night before, I had slaved on a new version of the story, one where the girl teases, and teases, and teases… She pushes too far, and she gets “punished”, her young body bearing the brunt of her sexual hubris, like some whore-ish character in a Greek tragedy. In other words, it was an amateurish hot mess. But, as they say, know your audience. I wanted Mr. Cain to read himself in those pages. And me. I loved the feeling of control I had over him, how I had immobilized him in his seat with just a look, just a suggestion. It was a power I was just feeling out the corners of; a power I did not intend to use wisely that day.

But something about the way he kept his back to me now was making me nervous. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, waiting. What was he doing? Should I say something?

“You’ve written another draft of your story?” he said, still not turning to face me.

I waited as long as I could before replying. “Yes.”

“Read it to me.”

The force in his voice sent happy tingles all over my body.

I waited again, not wanting to lose this moment yet, this sweet moment where anything could happen. I examined my fingernails with feigned boredom.

“Make me,” I said.

Slowly, he turned to look at me with something like a smirk on his face. His serious demeanor from the class was entirely gone, replaced with something much rougher, something I didn’t quite recognize.

“What did you say?”

He took a step towards me. He was genuinely surprised. I loved feeling that I had overstepped his boundaries. Loved the feeling that I could puncture his self-assured exterior and really shake him. I loved the feeling that this was all very, very wrong. Twisted, even.

“I said, if you want me to do anything, you’ll have to make me.”

I was proud of how womanly my voice sounded, and how firm. But inside, I was nothing but hot jelly, and if he had touched me at that moment I’m sure I would have exploded into a million pieces.

He riveted his eyes to mine, and they were two hard drills, boring deep into the core of me, challenging me.

“Ok,” he said, and before the word had left his lips he lunged towards me and snatched the folder from my grasp, flinging it in one smooth movement to the ground. The papers inside scattered onto the floor, the “All of me, twisted” title spinning across the polished floor. My useless hands still hovered in front of me, the rest of my body frozen in terror.

He turned to me and took one slow, searing glance all over my entire body. Could he tell that every part of me was humming and snapping with electricity …or was it fear? The thrilling rush moving all over the surface of my skin spoke so quickly I couldn’t tell whether it was oh god yes or just oh god. He stood in front of me, my eyes level with his belt and lightly freckled forearms hanging down loosely.

“Stand up. Or, if you like, I can make you stand up,” he said in a voice like iron.

Instinctively, I obeyed. I tried to look at his face, but it was as though there was a force field preventing me from meeting his eyes. I shuddered.

“Look at me.”

I looked. He returned a gaze so hard and penetrating that I turned away again, embarrassed by how much it embarrassed me.

“Take off your shirt” he said, easily. With shaking fingers, I worked each button, feeling as though his laser-like gaze was the reason for how hot I suddenly felt. With a nervous shrug, I let the shirt slip to the ground. The scars along my arms were exposed, but they seemed so faint now, nothing but pale ghosts from the past.

“And your bra,” he continued, and I did as I was told. The cool air on my breasts sent goosebumps all down along my back. With my gaze glued to the floor and a thick shield of hair hiding my face, I still felt his eyes crawling over every inch of me.

He grabbed my wrist and twisted me around, and in a second he had unzipped the back of my skirt and I felt the flimsy material flutter down over my legs and to the ground to join the rest of my modesty. Placing one heavy hand on my hip, he seemed to be sizing me up. I felt the warm air of his breath over my back as he caressed carefully, first one cheek and then the next.

“Go and pick up your story, now, and read it to me” he said, and his words were beginning to sound hypnotic. I stepped out of my clothes and went to the corner of the room where the papers had crumpled, completely naked but for my panties, and slowly bent over to pick them up. I gave him a full, slow view of my butt as my knees bent, briefly touched the floor and bounced back up again. I felt him watching.

Placing a page on the desk, back still to him, I started to read. I was desperately trying to conceal my shaking voice, feeling more exposed than I ever had in my life, and yet somehow relishing the sensation. I wanted him to see me. All of me. Twisted. I had gone no further than a few sentences before he stopped me harshly, “Don’t read that. You know what I want to hear.”

I took a deep breath and found the paragraph I knew he wanted. I wanted it too. In a faltering voice, I instead began reading about the heroine splayed open on the chair, legs spread, the hero violating her completely. As I read, I felt every last sliver of my resistance slipping away, till my mind had warmed to the idea.

From the very moment I had written those words, I had secretly wanted them all to come true, but it was only here, naked in front of him, reading them out loud that I truly realized with a deep, painful ache throughout my entire body that I wanted this. I wanted it badly.

Some part of myself had led me to this twisted moment, even though I myself wasn’t aware of it at the time. The realization of what was going to happen next sent a single bead of wetness rolling down the inside of my thigh. I was screaming on the inside. I reached the end of the paragraph, and let the silence close all around me; the words I had just spoken hanging in the air like an incantation that had conjured this dark, twisted moment.

“Is this how you want the story to go?” he asked. I could hear him breathing.

I nodded mutely, without looking at him.

“Then put your hands on the desk again.”

I did, and gingerly raised my rear into the air as I had done in the class before. But this time, the stakes were much, much higher. This time, I had skin in the game. I squeezed my eyes shut and focused on each of the sounds behind me – the rustle of fabric moving against warm skin, the sound of him unzipping his trousers, of his steps coming closer towards me.

Again, he placed a full hand against my ass cheek, holding it there as though to pin me down. I relaxed forward and let my forearms fall onto the table, exposing the most vulnerable parts of my body to him. I felt the hard tip of his cock gently touch the opening of my pussy, and wait there. It was a question, a suggestion, but he already knew that every part of me was responding yes; I squirmed with anticipation – I didn’t just want the tip, I wanted all of it.

But to my waggling hips, he only said, “That’s what you want? Hm. But that’s not how the story goes, does it?”

Oh, I knew how the story went all right.

I swiveled my head to see him easily thrust the length of his thick thumb into my pussy, right to the knuckle, and I arched my back in response. His dick bobbed menacingly against my ass, tracing wet trails on the skin there. I had never been so turned on in my life, and from so little. He slipped his thumb out again and dragged the moisture it had gathered slowly upwards, tracing a sticky line, anointing my ass with my own wetness. Just like that, he was a magician who had transferred the thrilling heat in my pussy to this other new, forbidden part of my body. A delicious warmth spread out over me. Nobody had ever touched me like that before.

Resting the pad of his thumb there for a moment, he then began to press tiny, insistent circles round my tight hole.

“But I’m scared,” I said, surprising even myself with how unguarded I sounded.

“I know,” he said after a pause, and resumed rolling and pressing. The warmth spread.

I pressed my cheek hard against the wood of the table and clenched my fists. I felt so small. Helpless.

I loved it.

“Is it going to hurt?” I asked, deliberately trying out my best damsel-in-distress voice. He took his time before answering; lovingly stroking my ass, as if doing so would help him figure out the answer.

“Hurt? Oh yes. It will hurt. A lot.”

My pussy pulsed around his thumb, and he smiled quietly at this, picking up the pace.

“But we’re going to stay true to the story. Don’t worry, if you don’t do it, I’ll just make you.”

Another pulse. With each passing moment, each stroke, he seemed to be bewitching my body, coaxing something dark and secret inside me to open up to him.

His cock was again between my ass cheeks, and now he took his time gliding the length of it all the way up, and all the way down again. And with each trip down, just as I was sure the swollen tip would catch and enter me, he pulled away and stroked once more, slowly, up and then slowly down again. The ache in my pussy was becoming unbearable – I reached around to touch my clit, but he swiftly slapped away my hands and then, on thinking about it for a moment, he grabbed both my small wrists in his left hand and pinned them against my lower back, the right hand still anchored against my butt, his dick sliding and teasing slowly up …and then slowly down again.

“Tension, Michelle,” he muttered, and pressed the weight of his body fully against mine. The feeling of his balls pressing into me was the only delicious relief I had; with my hands now pinned, I had to push my clit back against his body to soothe the infuriating pressure there. I needed the touch of his belly, something, anything. He playfully backed away, teasing me.

“That’s what you want?” he said, and positioned the tip of his hot cock against the quivering opening of my ass, sinking just the tiniest length into me. I gasped and melted into a wash of goosebumps.

“…Then come and get it.”

In those dizzying moments, my body was a whirring engine, rapidly working under wave after wave of pain, transmuting each thrill into deep, shuddering pleasure. He waited, sensing how I needed to adjust my body to him, around him.

My clit was longing again to be close to his body, to make contact with him and anchor myself against the waves. My elbows were beginning to hurt against the hard table. My feet were numb, a universe away.

“Come,” he said again, beckoning, but the moment I tried again to lean back into him, was the moment I became aware of the full heft of his cock blocking my path, finding only resistance in my overwhelmed ass.

All at once I understood. Tension. Every fiber in my body wanted to move closer and relieve my poor aching clit …but it came at a price. I took a deep breath, trying to gather myself. Sensing this, he leaned forward and showered my back with a sprinkling of soft kisses, kisses which seemed even more tender given that I was simultaneously impaled on his rock hard dick.

“Don’t rush. Remember, you don’t have to do it all at once. Go slow with me,” he whispered into my ear. His gentleness seemed to relax me, and I opened further to him, my body thrumming in this new altered dimension of pleasure, of how utterly filthy it was to be fucked like this, here, by him. I wanted his body to change mine, to reshape me. I wanted the pain.

Tossing my head back, I edged back a few millimeters, taking more of him into my body. It was though the corresponding amount of air was displaced from his lungs and he laughed, “Good girl!”

I felt my ass relax further, growing accustomed to its new life as a source of pleasure, a vortex of sensation, an undiscovered thing that could be used. Or abused.

He ran his hand all along my sides and back, stroking out any threads of fear and resistance. We were pinned hard together, only the smallest of movements possible. In a moment, his thumb was in my pussy again, and my entire body responded joyfully. With easy strokes, he guided me closer and closer to an orgasm, but as I saw the edge of it, he pulled out, the tiniest tip of his thumb left touching me, teasing.

“Come,” he beckoned again, and I took another deep breath, wanting with all my heart to follow that thumb and finally come, releasing myself from this torture. I leant back further, taking more of his thick cock into my ass, but at the same time winning more of his thumb too. Waves of pain and pleasure flooded through me, and I gasped. No sooner had I thought I was close again to my orgasm’s edge, did he pull his thumb away again and plunge me again into desperation.

“Come,” he said, more insistently. Almost the entire shaft was buried inside me now, so that I felt like a millimeter more and I wouldn’t be able to breath anymore. Chasing his thumb had led me to the wide, painful base of his cock, and I realized with horror that I may not be able to go any further. I wanted so badly to come, but the pain in my wrists reminded me that I was going nowhere, and that if I wanted the sweet release of pleasure, I would have to take it with a hearty dose of pain.

His breathing seemed to deepen, and become irregular. I felt him throb inside me, seeming to grow and expand into every last corner of my body. I groaned at the thought of him enjoying it, enjoying my ass.

“You like this, you little slut? You like pretending to be all hardcore, but look at you now, huh?”

I tossed my hair. He wanted to hurt me, did he? Well, I could hurt him, too.

“You’re an old has-been who will never publish his stupid novel, and all you do is live vicariously through your students,” I said, the burning pain bringing hot tears to my eyes. Where the hell did that come from?

“You think you’re so edgy don’t you? You thi--”

“Whatever. At least I actually write, at least I’m not afraid” I said, shocked at this outburst, the pain making me reckless.

He paused. I saw the curve of my own tear drop on the table out the corner of my eye. I had gone too far.

“Well, you should be,” he said. The next moment, he had drawn back slightly, gathered his force and threw himself hard at me, plunging the full length of an angry cock deep into me; I screamed out, my hips banging the edge of the table, the full weight of his manly body driving itself into me without mercy. I saw stars. In the moments that followed, the gathering bliss in my pussy came to one bright, delicious point and burst, sending heavy ripples of stinging pleasure all through me. My entire body bucked and twitched around him. As my poor ass clenched and grasped after him, I pulled him down with me into a juicy orgasm. He cried out too, defeated, spurting jets of wet cum deep into my body and squeezing down hard on my waist to pull in deeper still.

I collapsed onto the desk, body sore and soaked with sweat, and his body collapsed on top of mine. I welcomed the crushing sensation, feeling all at once that after what we had done together, I could let his body do anything to mine, endure any pain he wished to dole out …and push far past it. I heard him panting in my ear, and we waited like this for a moment, for him to deflate inside me, for my heart to stop pounding in my ears and my pussy to stop twitching so violently.

Slowly, delicately, he slid out of my body and stood up, surveying the damage in the form of my crumpled body on the desk. He gave my ass a squeeze.

“You’re still mixing your tenses in that third paragraph,” he said.

I love it when a student has the grit to rise to a challenge. I love when writers can dig deep and confront their limits, pushing them to find what they’re really capable of. Michelle was such a student. For the next three months, I pushed her. At the same time as her words were growing, enlarging, becoming more sophisticated, her body was opening up to me, until I could access even the deepest parts of her, easily.

And she really wasn’t afraid. I hurt her. I used her body, over and over again, daring her to back down, but each time she accommodated me, somehow finding new levels of pleasure, nuances of feeling that even I, old has-been that I was, had never experienced. I admired her. And I loved completely wrecking her body, finding new ways to violate her little form, to overwhelm her, to punish her naiveté.

By the time the class came to an end, Michelle was an entirely different person. She had transformed into a noble explorer of new sexual worlds, of vast and fearsome horizons of pleasure, of new places, both profane and sublime …that I had introduced her to, but which she had become native to in no time. My body had been new territory to her, but she had soon charted and laid claim to every last inch of it, so that I could only wish her well when the class was done and we had no more natural reason to spend time together.

That was also the last class for me. She had been right all along: I was hiding behind my students, being lazy, never pushing myself to write what I truly wanted, to take risks. It was scary, to force myself to do something I had never done before, but then I just remembered Michelle, face down in a pool of her own tears, ass upturned, utterly vulnerable to me and yet not the slightest bit fearful, and I thought, why not?

After all, tension is a good thing, isn’t it?