Page 38 of Teach Me
“So fucking good. I can barely move.”
“Good.” A small smile played at the corners of his lips.
“Your desk is a disaster.” The stacks of paper on top of it were scattered haphazardly. “I think I jizzed all over one of your folders, sorry.”
“Easily replaced.”
“Better than some student’s test. Unless it was mine. That would be pretty fucking fitting.”
Grady stared at me, blinked, and then burst into a rumbly laugh I joined him in. When it died down, he pulled me backagainst him on the couch, and I let myself sink into the mellow warmth of his embrace.
“I’ve been thinking on your suggestion,” he said. “The arrangement between us. How do you see that working?”
“However we both want it to. I told you what I want and why.”
“I’m still curious, though. There are endless options at your fingertips for this kind of thing. Attractive options that…”
I shook my head vehemently. “Yeah, you’re right, technically. But I told you, it won’t feel the same. I’ll open an app and click a profile, I’ll bullshit back and forth, then pick someone’s place, and I’ll go over and suck their cock, and they’ll suck mine, and we’ll be done. Or I can ask someone on a date, and we’ll go through the whole process of picking out somewhere to meet. Getting to know each other, hooking up, and then never speaking again or, worse, hooking up, and then suddenly we’re dating and…”
Grady laughed. “What’s wrong with dating?”
“Nothing, it’s just not what I want right now. I’m trying to finish school and pay for it. I work a lot. You and I were easy so far. We texted each other and showed up when we could make our schedules fit. It was fucking ideal. And hot.”
Grady canted his head. “You liked the thrill.”
“I liked the thrill, yeah, but more than that, I liked how it felt with you. Like I said before, I trust you. You like the thrill, too. You said as much in a text one time. You’re probably worried about taking advantage of me or it seeming like you are, based on your position, right?”
“Astute. Yes, of course I am.”
I couldn’t blame him, but I’d never felt that way. “Then I’d be taking advantage of you as much as you are of me because it’s this I want.” I gestured between us. “This dynamic. Me standing in front of you on fucking pins and needles, half-hard justthinking about what might happen if you tell me to come around to the other side of the desk.” Grady hummed a thoughtful sound that felt like a purr against me. “We’d be using each other for as long as it works for us, and when it doesn’t, we do what mature adults do and stop it.”
“A mature adult might not get involved in something like this in the first place,” he pointed out.
I laughed. “No, a masochist would not get involved in the first place.”
“Touché.”
“So…do we have an arrangement, then?” I wriggled around so I could see his face, gauge his response.
Grady eyed me consideringly. “Yes.” He reached out, softly tracing the line of my jaw, then down to my throat, where it lingered. “I think we do.”
“Good. So can you start coming back to the cafe again? I miss ogling you.”
Grady chuckled. “I think I can do that. I’ve missed the omelets and ogling more than I thought I would.”
I walked homea half hour later and barely remembered my own footsteps.
I had just had the best sex of my life. Granted, technically the only sex of my life I really remembered, but I was pretty sure even if I’d had a hundred partners before, sex with Grady would still count as the best. I was high on the afterglow, and maybe the high part should have given me pause, but it didn’t. I felt free, liberated. Even if it was only sex, for the first time in my life, I felt like I could openly share my wants and desires without fearof judgment or shame. Did other people grow up with this sense of liberation? How fucking amazing was that?
There were pins and needles in my chest as I waited for any sense of shame to come, waited to feel some projection of disappointment from my parents or the faith I’d abandoned. But it never came.
19
GRADY
Hotels made the most sense and mitigated the risk of discovery, so we came up with a handful of reasonable options and cycled through them, never the same one twice in a row. We started with once a week and quickly moved to twice a week. We were insatiable, tangling together with hedonistic abandon as soon as one of us entered the room. I’d never experienced that level of desire before and was almost certain Cameron hadn’t either, judging by his enthusiasm. Maybe it was the taboo of it all—that was what I told myself, anyway—but it was also because of him. The wild grins he’d give me when we met up, the lazy conversations we’d have after we got off, when we lay panting and exhausted next to each other. Every free second that wasn’t spent on my book, Cameron’s work shifts, or homework we spent together. I started spending more time working at the cafe during Cameron’s shifts instead of in my office. He’d keep my coffee full, always topping it off with a cryptic smile that made me want to take him to a shadowed corner or a back room and taste the secret behind it.
When the expense started racking up, I said fuck it and told Cameron to come to my house, giving him instructions to parkin the public spaces on side streets and walk from there. I’d leave my back door unlocked and wait.