The last days of spring semester were impossible to manage. Between grading final essays and exams, delivering lectures and setting up a curriculum for the summer students, the able-bodied members of the faculty were tortured by a constant parade of freshly tanned skin, ripened breasts and an intoxicating spirit of freedom that seeped through every fold of the campus fabric.
Hopelessly distracted by the sexual shopping mall the campus became, I was forced to employ a monklike focus to these days. From my car to the office, I would drop my eyes to the sidewalk, looking up only long enough to avoid collisions with students and the occasional colleague. Through the halls, my downward stare would continue until I was safely deposited behind my floor to ceiling metal door. Once there, I could, for the most part, think about poorly structured paragraphs, unsupported arguments and the pros and cons of giving Student X a B+ or an A-.
In my fifth year as a professor, I had reached the final day of this annual hell when there was a light rap on my door. My thoughts had just turned to beating the rush hour traffic home for a sunset run and I was pissed to be delayed. Getting up from my desk, I remembered that officially, these were my office hours. That time professors set aside each week for “one on ones” with their students. Like most of my colleagues, my office hours were dominated by butt kissers and grade whiners. It was a professional obligation I despised.
Opening the door, I braced myself for an onslaught of complaint: “I was sick when I took it” “The question wasn’t clear” “If I don’t get a C in your course, I’m going to lose my financial aid.” Shameless in pursuit of a desired result without the required effort to produce it, I was always dismissive of these last-minute pleaders seeking an alternative reality to the coursework they didn’t do.
“Yes?” I asked in my best “What the fuck?” tone. My eyes trained downward, I wasn’t interested in even looking at who had found their way to my office.
“Hello, Professor, we came to keep you company.”
Before me stood two of my coed students. Their faces were familiar but the smiles they offered and the outfits they wore made them contextually hard to place. After months of seeing them bundled up to fight the New England chill, these little, asexual, sweatpants wearing things had blossomed into sex flowers.
Roberta had been to see me once before. Dark skinned with eyes to match, she’d puckered her thick, heartshaped lips in a very sweet way when I’d denied her request to make a late change to her paper topic. That day, a down coat had covered her all the way to the instep of her snowboots. Now, on the cusp of my summer vacation, she stood in the doorway wearing a thin white button-down over a blue and white polka dot bikini; a khaki miniskirt cut off the very tops of her hairless brown legs.
By her side, sporting a straw-blonde pony and dancing green eyes was Jessica. In class, Jessica would always start scribbling furiously in her notebook whenever I looked up at her from the lectern. For one whole session I’d made a game of it, punctuating my thoughts with a glance her way and chuckling as her head bent down in response. It had given me an immature thrill to dictate her actions, hardly professorial but thrilling just the same.
Standing close to her tanner, taller friend, she still had trouble looking at me but her shyness offered me an irresistible opportunity to let my eyes wander over the full wide mounds straining against her dress.
As one of the younger faculty members, I worked hard every semester to create a shell of authority around myself to dissuade students from becoming too familiar with me. I was a serious academic with several papers published and a book in the works. It was my firm belief that to live on too friendly of terms with students invited ruin of one kind or another. Having said this, I am human and though I maintained my distance, a large part of me longed to connect with the young men and women in my class on a more intimate level. If nothing else, I wanted to know that I was at least admired.
“Well, that’s very nice of you,” I said, “come on in.” I stood aside from the door and breathed in the deliciousness of their youth. A gentle zephyr tinged with shampoo, soft perfume and a little weed (I thought) followed them into my office. As they sat in the two chairs in front of my desk, I noted a silent giggle between the two of them. Jessica had a couple of hives on her neck and a pinkish burn to her ears. She was no more comfortable in my office than she’d been in my class.
Roberta, on the other hand, was at complete ease. Just a sophomore, it was a cinch to imagine her a decade removed from this scene, working in the entertainment industry as an up and coming agent, which she’d told me was her desire. She was a prepossessed young woman, decided in what she wanted and unabashed in asking for it.
Sitting on the other side of my desk, I closed the exam booklet I’d been grading and looked across at them. Jessica quickly turned to study the calendar on the wall while her friend met my gaze with calculating ebony eyes. A streak of golden hair framed the right side of her face in a most becoming way. My eyes must have lingered too long because she noticed, smiled at my appreciation and tucked the bottle blonde strand behind her heavily jeweled ear.
“Certainly, you’ve got better things to do than keep me company,” I said, “What can I do for you?” My manner was studiously septic.
“Seriously, we just wanted to say ‘Hi’”
“Really? There’s not a grade change we’re looking for? A recommendation, maybe? A few of my final thoughts on Fitzgerald’s contribution to the American cultural forum?”
At this, they both indulged me with a chuckle. Jessica almost lifted her eyes to mine but couldn’t quite get there. She diverted back to Roberta.
This was an unusual encounter, like nothing I’d experienced in my past. I could not read their intention and their attractiveness was dangerous. I longed to be on my way; physically and mentally, the semester had been draining.
They said nothing and neither did I. I didn’t have the patience for small talk and I really didn’t like where my mind was heading as they sat before me. Roberta’s skin was almost pornographic in its volume and tone; it rippled with her movement and came to rest like a sheet of silk. Beside her, Jessica was the virginal archetype of Victorian literature, pale and soft in the most inviting ways. She had a crush on me, I was sure, and while in most instances, I would have appreciated this and given gentle but unreciprocated care to her feelings, now it only made me mad. Mad at myself more than anything, here I was on the cusp of three months of freedom and these two were pinning me down, raking their claws over my desire.
“What of it, Jessica? You’ve come to keep me company? You haven’t looked me in the eye all semester.” My question had no humor in it but Jessica laughed nonetheless. The tender freckles across her nose and cheekbones were all that saved her face from going completely panic-button red. Her face dropped downward and her embarrassment poured over her neck and shoulders, a stark contrast to the sparkling white of her dress. She giggled breathlessly and I concluded that indeed, that was marijuana I had detected upon their arrival.
I looked over at Roberta. Her mocha-colored lips were stretched across the brilliance of her teeth; she licked them both and raised her eyebrows, at a loss herself to respond to her friend’s behavior. Then, without warning, she too slouched in her chair and burst into a fit of laughter. As she did, her skirt began to ride up her muscular thighs. To my disbelief, joy and panic, the khaki material didn’t stop its bunching movement until it had slid all the way over her hips. There, to my long, chaste eyes was her smooth, naked pussy. For several deep laughs, she was totally exposed, her knees opening and closing with her amusement. I looked away, trying to do the right thing but had to look back.
“Oopsie.” Roberta regained her composure long enough to pull her skirt down and look across the desk at me with daring eyes. There was no shame in them. It was clear; she knew the power that she held between those thighs and I could feel the rush it gave her to lord it over me. My cock pressed hard and hot along my thigh.
“Look, girls,” I was scrambling here; the image of that little snatch was enough to send me to some very dark places that, outside of that particular moment, I had no desire to go. My career was on the line. “It’s very nice of you to drop in but I really have to be getting home.”
Jessica’s head shot up in alarm. For the first time in four months, those delightful emerald eyes locked on to mine. “Are you serious?” There was something so sincere in her tone, it almost felt like heartache.
“Yes, ‘home.’ You know, I’ve got to run, make dinner…” For emphasis, I held up the blue book I had been correcting, “grade exams.”
As enticing as the two of them were, I was convinced this little visit was some stoner dare they had forced each other into. Perhaps there was a whole group of similarly dressed undergrads waiting back in the dorm room, laughing at the future stories their friends would bring back from Professor Blackburn’s office. A striving intellectual, I believed I was getting punk’d.
For a breathless few moments, the late spring air hung between us undisturbed. Roberta looked at me as though she were sizing up a slave at auction. She knew what was racing through my mind and I was certain she was scheming how best to use it for advantage, but for what, I did not know. It was unnerving to see the machinations of her mind work so hard while I could not help but fixate on the image her parted thighs had granted me. Though I worshipped the power of the mind, I could barely control the physical longing that image had stirred. Roberta’s gaze was too much for me and so I turned to Jessica, hoping that, from her, I could expect a full and hasty retreat. But I was mistaken.
Her soft pink mouth was half open, her green eyes pooling with emotion. She rubbed one of them fiercely as if to make some unnamed pain go away, then turned to Roberta as though to say something but no words came. She just stared, her mouth still open. I was at a loss as to what these two girls expected of me. I was desperate to be free of them.
“What if we did want to get our grades changed? What could we do?” Roberta’s silliness was far gone; I was dealing with the future agent. It pissed me off that my time had been wasted, my fragilities toyed with. This wasn’t about me, of course; it was about their greedy, little needs.