I sat up in bed and glanced at the time, sure that I had overslept. Why hadn’t my alarm gone off? When I opened the app on my phone, the alarm was set for Monday, not Tuesday. And I was late.

“Shit,” I said, jumping out of bed. “Beth! Get up, sweetheart, we’re late.”

She mumbled something inaudible from her room. I jumped in the shower, scrubbing myself quickly before getting dressed.

“Are you ready?” I called when I sat down on my bed, pulling on socks and shoes.

“No,” Beth snapped from her room. “How do you expect me to be ready?”

“Don’t talk to me like that,” I called. “And hurry up, you can’t afford to be late. You’re going to end up in detention again, and as I recall, that was no fun the last time.”

Beth groaned, and I could imagine her rolling her eyes.

I would have liked to say that her attitude was a new development now that she was on the cusp of her teenage years, but she’d been this difficult from the start. Turning thirteen this year had only added to her experience, not created it.

“It’s not my fault we’re late,” she shouted from her room.

“It’s not mine, either,” I called. “But if you’re going to give me an attitude like this, you and I are going to have problems before we get to school. You don’t want to start the day like this, trust me.”

She mumbled something, and I considered taking this further, but we were late, and I wasn’t in the mood for another argument.

Lately, Beth and I had been getting stuck a lot more than we used to. She’d always had a strong personality but she was starting to act out, and I wasn’t always sure what to do. These were the times I wished her mother was still around. Liz would have known what to do with her. She’d always known how to deal with Beth, calming her down with kind words in a way I’d never been able to.

Then again, Beth had been three when Liz had died. She hadn’t been that much of a handful, yet.

Maybe Beth was getting worse because she didn’t have a mom. The famous pinch of guilt wedged itself between my ribs. In ten years I hadn’t found another woman that I wanted to call my own. Sure, I fucked around, I’d had flings, but it hadn’t been anything meaningful. When your wife died of complications during open heart surgery, it just wasn’t that easy to start all over again.

So, it was just me and Beth, fighting each other just as much as we were fighting the collapse of the world we used to know.

I finally got Beth to school, and we were miraculously still on time.

“See ya, dad,” she said, getting out of the car and hurrying away before I could lean over and kiss her. Where were the days when she used to cling to my leg, crying that I couldn’t just leave her at school all day? Then, it had been a pain in the ass. Now, I would give anything for Beth to want to stick to me like that again.

I sighed. “Welcome to puberty,” I told myself and turned back onto the main road to fight the traffic to UCLA.

I was later than I wanted to be. Everything about today was fucked up. Oversleeping had thrown off my routine, and I hated it. Order and routine was something I’d brought with me from the days I was in the Army, and I liked to have my life arranged just so. Old habits die hard.

When I arrived at my class, Isobel was waiting for me. Isobel Daughtry was my Teaching Assistant. She studied here as well and did a bit of extra grading for me for a small wage every week. She was dedicated to her studies, as far as I could tell, good at what she did as my TA and a total distraction.

Black hair, green eyes and the kind of body that made me want to explore her with my tongue made me think nasty thoughts about her. She was just the right amount of bad – she had a half sleeve of tattoos peeking out from underneath her shirt and piercings down her ears and in her nose. It was enough to make her look a little dangerous, a little fun and a lot like what I wanted right now.

I wasn’t supposed to want to fuck my TA. She was so much younger than I was and it was against almost every bullet point in the UCLA rule book to want this. But she’d started it. She stared at me with those emerald eyes every fucking lesson, making me wonder what she was picturing us doing.

It was obvious the lectures didn’t intrigue her as much as I did. And it was a compliment, for sure. But I needed to keep my head straight. I couldn’t think about sex with this girl. Woman. I had my career to consider. She was trouble.

Trouble wrapped up in a sexy-as-fuck body.

“Morning, Isobel,” I said to her and walked into the lecturing hall. She followed me. I unlocked my office door and sat down behind my desk. I had work to do, a lecture to finetune.

“Anything I can help you with?” I asked Isobel. She looked at me with eyes that suggested there were a lot of things I could do for her – or to her, rather – but she shook her head. Her shoulder-length hair moved around her face. God, she really was a stunner.

“I’m just going to go through these notes you gave me on the upcoming test,” she said. “Can I use your pencil?”

Before I could react, she leaned over my desk reaching for the pencil. Her blouse gaped, and I could see her tits; large, round, inviting.

I squeezed my eyes shut. “Don’t do that,” I said.

“Do what?” she asked. I opened my eyes and looked at her. She gave me big, innocent eyes, her lips pursed together in a semi pout.

“You know exactly what,” I said.

She shrugged one shoulder, and it made her left breast jiggle a little. Dear God, they were completely real. I swallowed, trying not to imagine myself sucking on her nipples.

“Why not?” she asked. I blinked at her. She was so forward about it, so fucking obnoxious. It made me want to punish her, to pull her over my lap and show her who was in charge around here. Oh, yeah. A good spanking could be just the thing.

“Because I want to fuck you, Isobel, and you’re not making it any easier for me to behave.”

Her lips parted, surprise registering on her face. If she wanted to be out there, I could, too. Lust flooded her features, and God help me if I didn’t feel it, too. The air was thick with desire.

The door in the lecturing hall banged open and the laughter of students sliced through the air between us. My students were arriving. I had a class to teach. Isobel shrugged nonchalantly and turned around, walking out of my office. I watched her ass, round and full until she disappeared out of sight. I tugged at my buckle, trying to rearrange my pants around my hard cock before I got up and took my position at the podium. I leaned on it with my elbow, hiding my body from the class until my erection died down. I didn’t want the whole world to know I was horny for my Teacher’s Assistant.