It’s not even true winter yet, and my studio apartment is hopelessly chilly as if the street lamp outside the paper-thin window is the source of all the world’s cold. Researching my graduate thesis in Magical Realism, reading the lush descriptions of my Colombia is painful. Longing squeezes my heart like a tourniquet.

So, I spend the chilly evening with a cup of decaf tea, a thick blanket, and a pile of student essays. A night of monkish intellectualism. A scholar in a foreign place surrounded by dead men’s work and lofty ideals, imparting clarity and judgment to the next generation.

Then, suddenly, Basya’s essay. “Sexuality in Sleeping Beauty.”

My throat squeezes. My face burns. My cock startles.

This is not normal.

If I were sixteen and not thirty, I could understand how the title alone would rile me up. If Basya was beside me while I corrected her terrible spelling of the word ‘erotic’, if her long brown hair and creamy skin were near enough to brush my pen, I could understand. If I believed in the myths and legends I taught in class, if I suspected that my nightly dreams of my student’s body were incubus visitations, if I could accept this sudden sexual rush was a witch weaving her spell…

I scoff at the idea and stretch my neck. I’m over-tired. Lonely.

I sip my tea and beat down my lust with the usual mental stick: the universities’ policy about faculty-student relations. I read it Basya’s first day in my class and memorized it when she asked me for coffee a week later. “Should a consensual relationship develop, or appear likely to develop, while the faculty member is in a position of authority, the faculty member and/or student shall avoid and/or terminate the position of authority.”

I never bothered to look at the sanctions; I’d be fired, deported, humiliated, and destroyed. My survival in this country depends upon the goodwill of the university, and I’m not about to give them a reason to dismiss me.

I won’t give up my life’s work for a passing fuck.

Not when there was promise in that policy as well.

Once this class was over… once Basya earned her ‘A’ by virtue of her cleverness, eagerness to learn, and her interest in the topic, then I would no longer be in a position of authority.

Once I handed back the finals, I’d make my own offer. Coffee, I think, is preferable in the country to a bar, though the bar would happen as a matter of course after coffee. I can’t wait to see the sparkle of her green-eyes when I can unleash my charm on her.

Dating her after finals. Fucking her by Christmas.

The vulgarity of my own thoughts surprises me. I’ve never respected obscenity about women. Even back home, I wasn’t the type to cat-call or boast about conquests. I put down the tea and press my fingers into my nose as if I could push the idea from my mind.

Dating after finals. Kissing by Christmas. That was safe. Well, not safe, but…

A wave of exhaustion hits me. I’ll go to sleep early. Grade in the morning.

My sleep-time ritual is mechanical. Floss, brush, rinse. Wet the comb and run it through my hair, a habit even Mama mocked.

“Martín, will you meet a princess in your dreams?”

This Sunday, on the phone, Mama had been strange. After her usual chastisement for not being married and being so far from home, she’d said, “Things are not well with your soul, Martín.”

If I somehow forgot what shame was and told Mama about the dreams, she’d say they were from the devil.

Another wave of exhaustion crushes me. I move towards the bed as if blind. My fingers slide on the crowded counter, the table that doubles as my desk, then the light by the bed. When did I get so tired? My head is full of cotton. In the dark, I forget to be neat with my sweater and trousers. They puddle on the floor. Where are my pajama bottoms? It’s undoubtedly too cold to sleep naked, but I fall into the pillow and roll under the covers as if I’ve walked across the Andes. Like I’ve had to stand in front of a million people and tell them everything I knew in the world before I could rest.

Do I dream of waking?

The woman is warm as summer, scented with rosemary and thyme. I try to touch her, but my hands won’t move. Trapped under my pillow, weighted by my head.

Not, that’s not right. Shaking off the haze, I understand my hands are asleep. So, go the rest of you back to sleep.

Mentally, I draw a red line through that thought and write ‘awkward. Check English grammar usage’ in the margin. No more grading before bedtime, Martín.

Then too tired to turn on my side. Too tired to move my arms, I drowse again.

My legs tingle… no, that’s a hand touching me. Warm, slow, sexual. I moan— not with pleasure, but with confusion. Who is that?

Then, the pressure on my cock, the massaging hands that will sink into sucking lips.

Basya giggles in the darkness.

Wake up. You don’t want these dreams. Position of authority. Wait until after finals, then by Christmas…

“No...” My voice sounds years away.

“Shh,” she whispers back. She nips at my thigh.

Too real to be a dream, it startles me, but my fearful lurch doesn’t wake my spine. My pillows are anvils, enchanted stones. Must be a dream.

The blanket rise, woman-shaped. Like a depraved magic trick. Ladies and Gentlemen, look how my beautiful assistant appears out of nowhere! Observe how her head bobs up and down on the lucky gentleman’s cock. See her hands scratching their way up his chest?

But if I found the strength to yank aside the sheets? No one would be there.

I had the strength once when the dreams first started. But now…

My cock slides past her lips and brushes the roof of her mouth, and I melt into pleasure so intense it can’t be imaginary.

Her lips cruelly abandon my cock, and she licks her way up my body. The sheet ruffles as her body appears beneath it. Her smooth back, her spread thighs, her knees on either side of me. All a shadowy unreal.

“Basya,” I beg her. “Let me sleep in peace.”

She squeezes my cock until my moan is a growl of painful lust. The sheet rises over me, never slipping away from her face, never uncovering my feet or my chin. Her hands grip my thighs. My cock slides into her body.

This has never happened before. It’s only been her mouth and not… oh, God… it’s so good.

She moans so deep it echoes through her body and trembles about my cock. Rolling, twisting, dancing above me, she surrenders utterly to her desires. When she leans back, the points of her nipples press against the sheet. Her nails sink into my calves as she fucks herself using my cock.

I am allowed only to groan, pointless and frozen, a tool for her pleasure, not a man at all. Her voice crows louder as she hurls herself at my cock, fucking herself with the kind of force I wouldn’t dare use. Her yelps deepen into animalistic grunts, then screeching as she nears her orgasm.

She throws herself forward. Her teeth at my neck, her hands on my wrists, her laugh wicked in-between her pants. “Didn’t you want to fuck me, professor?”

The little bitch. I didn’t… but then I am. Arching up into her sweet cunt, bucking hard enough to make this frail woman lose her balance, though she has nowhere to fall but back onto my cock.

She screams her ecstasy, roars with pleasure. More beast than woman. Impossibly sexy.

This is no more reason, no sense of reality. Only the need to fuck her… I want control of my own body. Want to roll her onto her back, show her all the ways I could conquer, pleasure, control her. Instead, I erupt inside her, spilling out into her hot wet body.

“Oh shit!” I moan with helpless pleasure. She laughs and continues to use my body, while I surrender to the oblivion of my own bliss.

My pillow flails off my wrists, and the blankets shrink away from my chest in a frumpy lump when I sit up. The room is crowded with an emptiness that mocks my heavy panting breath. The dry shelves bow under books where reality blends into the surreal.

I stand if only to feel in control of my body.

My bed is wrecked, torn apart by my own solitary thrashing.

It was only a dream.

I’ll take a shower, rinse away the thunder of lust, and the sense of being utterly used up. The water will restore my humanity.

One hell of a dream.

In the bathroom light, I see the red in my eyes, the mangled mane of my hair.

The scratches on my chest.

“Oh fuck…”

“Professor Tejo!” Basya’s voice knots in my belly like a tightening spring. The parking lot is too cold and too grey for such a summery sweetness.

I can’t evade that call. Can’t resist her beaming smile. Can’t escape her long brown hair braided like vines over her smooth shoulders. Can’t live without the glitter of her eyes over my body and the excitement on her lips. She won’t even wait until class.

“Good morning, Ms. Basya! And how did you like last night’s reading?”

Circe and Odysseus. She’d love—

“So good! I loved how Circe trapped Odysseus and how even the gods could get him free. And…” she takes a moment to catch up to her thoughts and me. “Like it’s only when he starts… treating her good… like with a degree of respect that he escapes.”

We walk towards the university, steps in sync. “Equality, huh? I always interpreted it as gambling with sex. He wins his freedom, his men’s humanity, then her wisdom.”

This is not inappropriate; most literature is about sex and death. I’m very upfront about that on the first day of class.

Basya takes the bait and scoffs. “She holds him for three years. She only lets him go when she’s damned ready.”

I love the confidence in her tone, the boldness in picking fights with her literature professor. “I didn’t say he was a good gambler.”

The fear of the dreams fades from my mind and into the delight of good conversation. We talk from the parking lot to my office in the library — where the librarians watch our whispers jealously. From my office to the café, from the café to the door of my classroom. Not her class.

I lean in the doorway, greeting my freshman distractedly as they wander past, my eyes on Basya. “Now, let me spoil a thousand-year-old story for you. He ends up on an island with another witch for—”

“Goddess.”

“Pardon?”

“Circe is a goddess.” Basya asserts as if the legend is real, and there is a terrible danger in disrespecting her. “Above the whims of man, the pull of destiny. She’s more powerful than a witch.”

“Interesting distinction. So, a witch is not above the whims of man or the pull of destiny.”

“Witches are very fallible creatures.” I never know what to do with this side of Basya, the side the treats myth and legends as facts. It’s dangerous for her academic career and awkward as hell. “As easily tempted and, well…I better let you teach. See you in class later… professor.”

It’s only as she leaves that I notice the wrongness of my body language. One elbow leaned on the door over my head to stretch myself tall. Like a teenager, my hips jutted forward, making an offering to be touched and taken by some pagan god if I were good enough. Like chatting up some woman in a bar and not my student.

Still, I linger in the door, hating myself for watching her go but unable to look away from the swish of her long skirt or the grip of her denim jacket. Not until one of the freshmen teases me, “Oooo, the dreamboat of the English department is caking with a hottie.”

I don’t know the full connotation of the word ‘caking,’ but I correct my posture and saunter into the classroom. “Don’t be an ass, Jeff. I can’t be the dreamboat of the English Department. I don’t have tenure.”

A week passes without dreams as if the white hotness of that last one melted the rest. I catch up with my grading, catch up with my research, catch up with friends at the bar. One night—and this is the height of sinful, selfish, time-wasting self-indulgence— I watch a film on my laptop.

When I begin to doze, a knock comes from directly over my head. Which is a concrete wall.

I put my laptop to the side and shake myself awake. Had to be dozing.  I rub my eyes and shift to get out of bed and brush my teeth.

Then the knock comes again.

A quick tap, like Poe’s raven, gently rapping. Only that’s not my chamber door. That’s solid concrete. Still, one mustn’t be rude. “Who’s there?”

 The words leave me like a knock-knock joke.

“It’s Basya. Invite me in, Professor Tejo.”

I stare at the wall over my head and blink. “Sorry. There’s no knob.”

“Say the words.” She insists. Peevish. Like a woman taking care of a child who could not obey her perfectly reasonable instructions.

My mind fills with the politer set of monsters. The iron-clad laws of the vampire, the perfect etiquette of fairies. “No.”

“We need to talk. I’m having trouble holding it at bay.”

I touch the smooth surface of the wall as if I could find her hands and hold them, hoping that small gesture could relieve the weariness in her voice. “Hold what at bay?”

The whims of man? The pull of destiny? The lust of witches?

The silence yawns.

She knocks again.

“Martín.” She’s never called me by my first name in real life. “Please, invite me in.”

The street lamp casts a shadow of the kitchen window on the wall behind me. Four lines like a cross, interrupted suddenly by the shape of a woman. When I turn to look at the window over the kitchen sink, the view is empty. Only the streetlamp outside.

Then the shadow window behind me slides open. Witches, I realize, are not the politer set of monsters.

“Don’t worry, Martín, I’ll let myself in.”

The street lamp flickers, and the light dies.

In the darkness, her kiss is all-consuming. When I reach to push her away, I pull her closer. When I try to speak, the words melt into a groan. The resistance in me — the logic and reason, which in fairness has never been my strong suit— turns to a flood of lust.

I forget she’s a student. Forget she’s forbidden. Forget she’s slipped through a fucking wall. I’m only aware of her body, her tongue in my mouth, her teeth on my lips.

She comes into my arms naked, and she has no patience for my pj's. While I kiss her, glutting myself on the earthiness of her mouth, she claws at my shirt. The buttons, big enough to fall open on their own, catch in her fingernails then snap off.

The sweet feral scent of a woman baked in the sun and unashamed of her own sweat fills me. No expensive perfume, no artisan soap could match her for raw sexuality.

I suck on the graceful column of her neck as she writhes against me, pressing her naked breasts and wet sex into my clothing. I want to tear my pajamas away, but I’m afraid if I release her, she might vanish into the shadows and leave me unfulfilled.

She presses her body so hard against me that I can’t fall onto the bed. I carry her with me, into my lap, where she straddles me and rubs her breasts in my face, and sighs with toe-curling joy. My cock writhes against the flannel wet with precum and her sex, threatening to tear the fabric to enter her.

I feast on her breasts, sharp teardrops with wide nipples, like cherries that roll on my lips when I suck. She claws at my pants, and the fabric slips under her nails, too soft to shred.

“Take them off and fuck me.”

“No.” I resist her command and cradle her waist, her back, her sides. Smaller and frailer than me, she flows onto the bed while I kiss her. I kiss the outlines of her features, but not the fullness of her mouth, touching the smile in her heavy-lidded eyes with my lips. She laughs at me.

I kiss her mouth to break her smugness, pin her arms over her head. She wrenches and bucks. To escape me? No. To grind her sopping wet cunt against the spearhead of my cock.

“I don’t know how you got in here. And I don’t know what you are.” I kiss-bite her neck— hard enough to leave a mark— and wrestle with my pants to free my cock. “But tonight, you’re mine.”

Basya laughs a delicious cackle. Before I manage to thrust my cock inside, before I can fuck her, she twists her arms. Holds my hands. Slips the world sideways.

I fall without moving. No longer pinning a lover to my bed anymore, but hanging by a spider-thin twine around my wrists.

“The hell?”

There is nothing but darkness. Nothing to hold.

But she holds onto me, her legs tight around my waist, her hands leisurely stroking my chest. She kisses me deeply while we dangle in the void. Presses her breasts to my face.

“I am my own.” She promises.

I squirm, terrified of accidentally escaping that thread, horrified of falling.

She grips my cock, and all my strength shudders under her cruel play.

“Just because I choose you doesn’t mean I need you.” She licks my ear. “Don’t you forget it.”

Basya takes my cock easily, squeezes her sex around me, gyrate, and moans. All I can do is quiver, helpless in the air, while she takes whatever she wants.

I want her to need me. I want to drive her out of her mind. I know I can. If I were in control…if I could find a way to move, to touch and stroke. Then she’d need me. She uses me as a tool to satisfy her own lust, but she doesn’t understand what having a partner could do.

“Basya, let me go. I want to make love to you.”

She laughs at the idea, kisses me. Like a drug. Like poison. Arousal breaks through me a deadly disease without a cure known to man. Known to Basya perhaps, known to whatever secret world she belongs to, but utterly unreachable to me unless she takes pity and saves me. Every thrust of her body wounds me. Every little yelp of need proves I am unnecessary.

She is an expert at pleasuring herself with her living toy. When I come, it’s incidental, unrelated to her ecstasy, unnecessary in the dark void of her lust.

But the scorching bliss consumes me as if my soul drained from my cock and into her body. I won’t survive another orgasm like that.

Basya sighs, the longing of a woman who’s gotten exactly what she wanted only to find she craves more.

The rope my life depends on goes slack, and I fall through the darkness.

She does not.

The fall ends when I open my eyes. The popcorn ceiling of my tiny studio. Of course, why wouldn’t I be in this bed? My hands ache because I slept funny. My pajama bottoms are rumpled and wet. My nightshirt has fallen open from my wild thrashing.

The buttons are flung across the room, pale in the morning sunlight. Too mundane to have been handled by a woman made of shadow.

I’m losing my mind. Reality is bending under the pressure of my life.

I’m not sure how to stop it from breaking.

Except to prove it’s real.

I avoid Basya until the afternoon class. She wears a scarf, thick and red. Hiding the place where I left a bruise? Or just protecting herself from the cold?

I ignore her raised hand. It annoys Basya to be ignored; the hard line of her lips deepens when I praise the idiotic answers I’ve pried out of the boys in the back, who have barely read the cliff notes of Beowulf.

I recognize that harshness building in her, and to bait her more, I ask the class. “Can we agree that Beowulf’s defeat of Grendel symbolizes his mastery of masculine evil, and his victory over Grendel’s mother symbolizes his mastery of feminine evil?”

“No.” Basya doesn’t raise her hand. “I don’t even know if we can count her defeated.”

I open our translation and purposefully read, not the humbler omniscient narrator, but Beowulf’s arrogant retelling. “For a while, it was hand-to-hand between us, then blood went curling along the currents, and I beheaded Grendel’s mother in the hall with a mighty sword.”

Basya squirmed, and her face reddened. “First off, I don’t trust Beowulf recounting this story, and second, she’s a wilderness goddess; death doesn’t mean defeat.”

“Explain. How does he defeat her if not through death?” Tell me how to escape you. How to flee your island, to walk out of your lair, how to regain myself.

“He doesn’t,” Basya answers. “She was driven into the water by the coming of the Geats. This combat releases her and restores her to the woods. That brightening of the forest isn’t some Divine Father—”

“That’s a very poetic interpretation, but it’s not in the text.”

“Maybe not in a text written by men. They’d resist anything except their All-father, but it’s what happened.”

“What happened? Basya, this is Myth and Legends. Not history.” My tone is even and calm, appropriate for a professor. Still, the class squirms, deeply aware this is no typical classroom debate. “Magic isn’t real.”

My shadow-lover manifests in her anger, right there in the front row of my classroom. I’m afraid she’ll spring at me, tear my suit, and trap me on my back on the long flat table. In front of all these students and without even the dignity of a desk, she’ll force me to want her. She’d admit to the power she could wield, and I would have no choice but to bow before it.

But at least I would know for a fact there was magic in the world, and it belonged to her. I would know I’m not losing my mind.

Basya casts her eyes humbly down in defeat. “Of course not, Professor Tejo.  I just… I get carried away. Creative writing instincts.”

I take no joy in this victory. If it is a victory. Part of me feels like a man abusing his power. Part of me feels like a fool flailing against power I can not understand.

No!  There is no magic. There is only a graduate student, far from his home, experiencing a mental breakdown and obsessing over a beautiful, intelligent student. Punishing her for the twisted fantasies my own dreams have crafted.

I end class early and duck into my office to decide what to do next. Confess my creeping madness to my mother, a psychiatrist, or my thesis adviser?

The office, an old supply closet in the library, is only a little smaller than my apartment and unsullied with personality. I collapse in the rolling desk chair and press my palms against my face.

People crack all the time. I just need time. Surely my advisors would have pity on me, just for a week or so. A little break from the surreal and I would regain my sanity. Regain my self-control. Regain myself—

In the darkness of my palms, the door clicks.

“Professor?” Basya’s voice chills me. “We need to talk.”

I draw in a breath and fortify myself. Then look at her.

She stands with her back to the door, delicate and earthy. Black skirt flaring around shapely calves, waist trim, and belted. The blouse, sheer enough to tear, is the only protection against her teardrops breasts.

“Ms. Basya, yes, I’m glad you’re here. I need to apologize for—”

The red scarf slips as she tugs it free.

There’s the bruise on her neck. My bruise.

“No…” I rise and look for a way to escape the tiny office.

By the time I rise from the chair, the world has changed. I’m not in my office.

Fuck I’m not even sure I’m in the same world.

The place is enormous, vast, and palatial. The walls and high ceiling are made of beaten gold and pure ice. Water rushes nearby, a muted echoing sound like an underwater treasure cave.

“Basya,” I stammer. “You’re not playing fair.”

“I don’t have to.” She beckons me nearer, and there’s something around my neck. A chain.

I obey, trembling because she’s absolutely right. In this place, the university seems hazy and unreal.

“Basya, just because you chose me doesn’t mean you own me.”

“Don’t I?” She flicks the chain, as delicate as a necklace around her fingers but heavy as a yoke around my neck. I stumble forward and fall to my knees. “Take off your pants.”

I unlatch my belt. I ought not to be kneeling in these trousers; they’re expensive. Then again, the floor is starlight, so my pants will probably be fine.

“Basya.” My cock leaps towards her. I resent its thoughtless freedom and hate this undeniable proof of my lust. “Don’t trap me. Let me—”

“What?” Her nails cut over my cheek. “Make love to me?”

Am I gambling with sex or asking for equality. “Yes.”

Her smug smile falters. For a moment, my dark goddess is just a young woman, full of self-doubt and hope. Then she hardens. “You wouldn’t even deign to get a coffee with me. I don’t trust—”

Last chance. I recite the worlds like a counter-spell. “Should a consensual relationship develop while the faculty member is in a position of authority, the faculty member and/or student shall avoid and/or terminate the position of authority.”

“What is that?” She stiffens.

“The universities’ policy on teacher/student relations.” I lift her skirt a little and kiss her knee.

“You memorized it?”

“I needed to remind myself to wait until after finals. To keep things between us professional.” What a ridiculous fear with her chains around my throat, with my tongue on her inner thigh, with the gold and ice of her reality melting mine. “I didn’t want to pressure you.”

“Oh, shit…”

The weight on my neck disappears. Just the red scarf. The carpet is rough under my knees, the peaceful sounds of the library murmur outside the door.

But I lift her skirt and kiss higher.

I can smell her longing, the deep need for touch.

She strokes my hair and caresses my neck. “Can you… please?”

I kiss the mouth of her sex, a gentle flicker of my lips to part her soft skin, and taste the spice and sweetness of her body. Her thighs stiffen alongside my head, and I thrill with my own arousal. Not a false magical lust, no charm or spell, but the real heady rush of a living woman.

Students laugh faintly beyond the door, a printer creaks. I lean forward again to lick between her legs, to lap at her dripping wetness.

Then I’m only aware of her. The taste, the smell. A natural earth sleekness that I feast upon while she gasps and pants, suppressing her own voice with her hand to her mouth. I suck at the tender skin around her clit until she’s pants and moans, hanging on the door. The electricity of her desire frightens her when I finally touch it directly.

Even when she orgasms, I don’t stop, relishing the control she’s given me, the power she’s permitted me to sate her lust. She squirms and presses against my mouth. She needs more stimulation than my tongue can give, and she slips to the floor with me.

She kisses me, moans when the taste of her sex touches her tongue. She laps it from my mouth, my lips, and my cheeks.

“I want more, Martín.”

I untuck her blouse and reach one hand under her shirt. Her breast is so warm and wonderful in my hand, and she arches and moans under my touch. I kiss her onto her back, and she resists, but only for a moment.

She wraps her arms around me and parts her legs. I sink in between them as effortlessly as I sink into her lips. She shivers with the riot of pleasure when my cock nestles inside. I kiss her neck gently, sigh with content.

“Oh god,” she bucks against me, and I cave under the movements of her lust, pushing back enough to send her into another startling spiral of pleasure.

We kiss and moan, hands and legs slipping over each other’s bodies. Time loses meaning.

When she ripples against me, her orgasm triggers mine. The relief is mind-numbing and so wonderfully real. She gasps and clings to me, and I can taste her sweat and the heat of her skin. I kiss her and remain inside until my cock begins to soften.

She stirs away and smiles at me, satisfied, amused, and affectionate. The kind of smile you’d expect from a well-fed tiger. “Don’t expect any easy favors out of this, man. I’m only a little nicer than Circe.”

“I’ll settle for coffee after finals.”