William

It's been a long time since I had to hide an erection.

The first time, my desk did the job. The second time, I had to stare out the window and avoid turning around.

After he leaves, I relax and slump into my chair. I knew Ethan was assigned to me as my TA, and I knew it was because he's the darling of the department head—he was probably expecting to be assigned to her. That'll come later, if he matriculates into the graduate program here instead of going elsewhere.

Since I only carry 100 and 300 level courses most of the time, I thought I was done with him. Having him in my classes was a nightmare, a form of torture. Every time I saw him sitting in the front row ready to taunt me with a thrown-up hand to answer every question I could pose, it was like a fish hook in my chest.

Not because I despise him. Oh no, not that.

When I first saw him, he walked into class wearing skin-tight jeans that could have been leggings and a long-sleeved t-shirt. The way he wore his hair—and the fact that he wore earrings—gave me a start. At first, I thought I was having a hard time determining whether he was a boy or girl.

Then it hit me: The dissonance wasn't the result of a question over his gender. He was obviously a boy, even if he was slight and slender and a little feminine in his dress and movements. That feeling of confusion was my mind trying to decipher an overpowering feeling of desire. My eyes kept seeking his neck, his wrists, the impressive bulge in those tight jeans that had half the girls in the class staring, and him oblivious.

Something about it made me angry. A joyous, argumentative anger that I hadn't felt in a long time. I took it out on him in class. I pushed him hard. Part of it was likely me wanting him to challenge me, to get in my face and argue and call me out…because if he did, he'd be close enough for me to smell him. Part of it, I'm sure, was guilt pushing me to drive him out of my class, hoping he'd drop or switch to another professor's offering.

He hasn't taken a course with me since, but he stuck out that semester and made an impression. I almost offered to write him a letter of recommendation if he'd come back and remind me before he graduated, but even that contact frightened me.

After I close the door, I grip my wedding ring and twist it around my finger. It used to be much looser. I should take it off now that the divorce is finalized…but the only time I've removed this ring in the last sixteen years was for a surgical procedure. It's never left my finger for any reason. I'm not even sure it will come off.

A pulsing, unwanted, wicked idea throbs at the back of my skull.

Ethan has matured since he started his secondary education. He looks a little more masculine now, but just a little, and it's offset by the girlish way he wears his hair and his obnoxious hipster clothes. I can't stop wondering what that hair would feel like between my fingers, what he tastes like, if my instinctive drive to…if he would respond the way I want. Fantasize about.

Damn, I'm hard. Locking my door even though my posted office hours have not yet ended, I turn and flop back in my creaky desk chair. I should get a new one. Almost everyone else in the department has simply bought their own; getting any new furniture or equipment around here is a chore and involves a lot of maneuvering and horse trading. When I first started as an adjunct, two of my fellow part-time professors almost got into a fist fight over who'd take the desk with the rickety leg that wobbled drunkenly, or the desk with a stuck bottom drawer that smelled faintly of abandoned cheese. All of us adjuncts shared an office to meet with students.

That was my first year, the same year I first laid eyes on Ethan and felt that desire. I'd held it down for such a long time. I tried so hard to be normal, I did. Oddly, Ethan deserves a little credit for improving my marriage; the semester I had him in class, I was much more aggressive with my wife, as if I could fuck my way out of those unwanted feelings. She enjoyed it quite a bit.

It was a brief flash of sunlight between passing storms. The end was already coming. How funny that despite it all, I was the one who was ever-faithful and she was the one who cheated. When I worked up the energy to confront her about it, she served me papers, her mind already made up. That was this summer. Strange how the news was inevitable, and not even really unwelcome, but it still hurt me.

It's also why I'm not buying a new chair. Legal bills.

“At least we never had kids,” I sigh aloud.

I wanted to, she didn't. One of many differences between us. Every relationship has cracks, but somehow all the effort I put into fixing them only widened them and made the whole edifice crumble that much faster.

So, my lust-addled brain, sloshing around in a stew of hormones, reminds me: You're not a married man anymore, are you?

A shiver of desire runs through me. No, I'm not. A terrible freedom has been laid on my shoulders. I could be myself, couldn't I? The world has changed, things aren't like they were.

It doesn't matter if I'm off limits, though. He is. He's a student and I'm faculty—that's enough to get me fired. Oh, a tenured professor might have been forgiven a dalliance with a student…ten years ago, but that has changed, and rightly so. That kind of thing is now one of the only threats to a tenured post, and I submit my tenure portfolio in the fall. I'm so close to job security and a pay bump that I desperately need.

Ethan isn't just a student and I'm not just faculty; the professor/teaching assistant relationship puts me in a position of authority over him. Since I am not yet tenured, and won't be for another year at best, getting caught with him would be a death sentence for my career.

Even if I were to speak to him and somehow arrange for us to…explore things after he graduates, it'd be a scandal.

Gah! Why am I thinking this? He probably loathes me. I practically tortured him in class. He came in here earlier like he was marching to his execution and when he brought the stack of books back he clearly wanted to get out of here and away from me.

I could speak to Carol, the department head. Explain that I'd be better off with another TA and he'd get more out of another post. Then again, tenure. The last thing I need right now is to make waves.

The other last thing I need right now is an erection that won't go away, as mental images of Ethan crack the crust of my thoughts like warm water flowing under ice. His lips, his strangely cute nose, his long and well-muscled runner's legs, an ass that could crack walnuts, a slender form that needs to be crushed in strong arms as a hot hard cock thrusts into—

Stop it, stop it, stop it.

I rise and pace the room. It only makes it worse; the damned thing bobs in my khakis and won't leave me alone. I can't think.

Grunting, I shove my notes and the stack of books Ethan brought me into my oversized doctor's bag-style briefcase and carry it with me, holding it over my crotch as I lock the office and rush out to my car.

I can work from home. After I start the engine, I point one of the air conditioner vents down at my legs, hoping cold air on my crotch will tame the beast.

It doesn't. I'm still pulsing angrily when I walk into my new apartment, a two bedroom in the corner of an old Victorian a few blocks from campus; close enough to walk, really. I'd planned to take a drive after work and clear my head. Now I'm just glad I didn't have to walk all the way back here with a stiffy.

I'd be gladder if I were walking into my own house, but I'm ceding that to Victoria. I focused on holding on to the more important things; my books, which were crammed together in as yet unopened moving boxes to be unloaded when the still-packed IKEA shelves are assembled, a battered desk that belonged to my grandfather, a few odds and ends, and my cat, Erebus.

Ebbie is waiting for me on my bean bag chair, that sad monument to my newly re-minted bachelorhood that's filling in for the sofa that hasn't been delivered yet. Ebbie is solidly in the middle years of his cat life, so rather than assault me at the door, he waits for me to cross the living room and come closer before he lazily stretches and trundles over to thrust his flank against my legs, his white-flashed tail flicking as he looks up mischievously. My first duty on arriving home is to feed him.

Once the food is in the bowl he loses all interest in me and eats greedily while I strip in the bedroom. My erection has finally slunk down but starts to come back as I remove my clothes until I'm walking around at full mast again.

I don't need a shower, but a cold one might help me think.

Yes, think.

I need clarity. That means taking care of business. Rather than duck under freezing water, I step under a steaming stream, put my hand on the wall, and wrap the other around my cock, stroking quickly and roughly, all business, like dealing with a bodily function.

Ethan flashes in my mind and I slow, savoring it. I picture him in my office, I picture him in class. I picture the way he crosses his legs, the way a woman does rather than the way a man does, the way he'd slip his shoes off during long lectures and reveal socks with Edgar Allen Poe's face on them. Him sitting cross-legged in rapt attention.

The images glide from fantasy to recollection smoothly. We're alone in the classroom now and he's asking me a barrage of questions, trying to grasp the material while I have an urge to grasp something else. A terrible, awful thought flickers in my mind and my imagination takes a turn I don't like but do at the same time.

I visualize him getting hard while he talks to me, his cock impressively bulging down into the leg of his jeans, so tight they look like he had to take a leap off a roof to squeeze into them. He leans on my desk coquettishly, like a smitten girl might, giving me longing, quick looks, averting his eyes when I turn directly to him. He arches his back and rises on his toes, thrusting that delectable ass up in the air.

It feels wicked and awful to picture this going on in a lecture hall, like it's the worst possible way to violate the ethics of my office. As I stand next to him he brushes me with hip and elbow and finally turns, his hand gliding up my leg to grasp my cock.

In the real world, a shiver goes through me as the pressure builds; I'm getting close.

Ethan is on his knees, between me and the desk. He pulls down my zipper, undoes my belt, and lifts my cock in both hands, his eyes full of excitement, obviously impressed by the size. His mouth stretches, hot and wet around the head—

I cry out and explode all over my hand and the shower wall, shuddering so hard my heels skim across the soap-slick tub, and I almost fall.

Erebus hurls himself against the bedroom door and meows impatiently, as if he would be offended at the impertinence of injuring myself when he needs tending.

Hurriedly I clean up and dry off and open the door. Ebbie struts into the room and leaps up on the mattress like he owns the place. The bed frame is still in boxes against the wall.

I should take care of that.

After throwing on some knock-around clothes, I resolve that tonight I will not sleep on an unfitted mattress on the floor. Erebus protests loudly as I lift him up and runs back to the bed twice before I finally put him outside the room entirely so that I can flip the mattress up against the wall.

Perhaps foolishly, I let him back in, heading to the fridge to grab a beer in the process. After I've cracked it open I lay out all the parts of the bed, careful to keep an eye on the small parts and fasteners so Erebus doesn't decide to make this harder on me than it needs to be.

Rather than frustrate me, he decides to crawl into and claim one of the boxes-within-boxes that the bed came in and mews happily.

“I wish I was as easily pleased as you are.”

Ebbie stares at me, blinking slowly, twice.

“All you need is food, a box to sit in, and a box to shit in, isn't that right?”

He doesn't deign to answer me with anything but another blink, and I feel chastened for my rudeness.

I lay out the big parts in a rough approximation of how they fit together. The instructions say it's a two-man build, but I've always seen that thing as more of a suggestion than a requirement. The beer helps my bravado.

“I'm turning into a lightweight,” I tell Erebus as I regard the empty bottle.

My cat dutifully follows me out to the kitchen and meows plaintively next to his bowl as I get another brew.

“You ate already, you little tub of guts,” I tell him, annoyed.

Erebus, his dignity affronted, makes a valiant effort to trip me so I faceplant into the unbuilt bed, but I'm wise to his tricks. I know him better than I ever knew Victoria, that's for sure.

A few times while I'm building, the wood protests with loud, splintery creaks, and I have to prop pieces up with bits of the boxes and other parts to keep the cheap plywood from separating. Erebus regards all this as if I were doing something fascinating.

“I have a problem, Ebbie.”

He licks his paw.

“An old student of mine has been assigned to me as a TA, and I can't get him out of my head.”

I stalk around the bed, trying to figure out how these “twist lock” fasteners work. The pictures on the instruction pamphlet are less than helpful.

I glance over at Erebus. “I haven't felt an attraction like this since I was in college myself.”

Turning back to my work, I finally figure out how the damn fasteners work. They look too fragile to me, but once the frame is mostly assembled I see how it sort of presses into itself when weight is exerted onto it.

Erebus disappears while I'm bending the cross-slats to force them into place but returns to reclaim his box and watch me further.

“That's a lie,” I admit to him. “I've felt attractions like this plenty of times, but never so intense.”

I look over at my cat and sigh.

“He's a student, I have a position of authority over him, and I'm old enough to be his father.”

Erebus meows.

“Well, I almost am. It's certainly biologically plausible, anyway.”

When I'm done, I throw the mattress back down onto the slats and wait for the bed to collapse. Then I test it with my weight. It creaks a little, but holds. I then go around and tighten a few screws and try to remember to tighten them after two weeks as the instructions say, at the same time knowing that I will do no such thing.

After the third attempt to lift Erebus permanently off the bed, I rip open my new sheets and throw them in a laundry basket. That's almost like catnip to Ebbie, who lurches off the bed and flops down on the sheets. I carry them, and him, out to the living room.

“I can't let on that I'm interested in him,” I say.

Erebus looks at me, yowling in annoyance as I pull the sheets out from under him. I end up having to lift him out of the basket when he tries to latch on with his claws and keep them to himself.

“I'll have to be hard on him.”

Erebus meows again.

“Oh shut up,” I say.

Suddenly disinterested in me, he stalks over to the end table I have under the window and leaps up to lie in the afternoon sun.

Looking his way, I sigh and question my sanity. I'm holding a conversation with my cat as if he's answering me. I slam the washer shut and start the cycle. Yes, I wash new sheets. There's no one here to judge me but Ebbie.

After I've flopped on my bean bag and mindlessly flipped channels to a movie I've seen twice, I consult a stack of delivery flyers that have accumulated under my door since I moved in. Pizza and Chinese and the usual stoner fare. They probably do a brisk trade here.

For a moment I stop and look around.

Even with Ebbie here for company, this seven hundred-square-foot apartment seems vastly cold and empty.