by Rachel Ember
Jay cleared his throat and tried again, determined to get this out. “Ever since the night we met,” he managed to begin, “I’ve felt awful about how I acted. I wanted to tell you that, but I didn’t know how to find you.” The words came easier as he spoke. Even though this was approximately the most awkward and horrible thing Jay had ever had to do, he’d practiced his script. “Maybe it was good luck after all, that you’re my professor. Because now I can tell you how sorry I am.”
He’d done it. He’d said what he wanted to say. With a deep breath, the awful pressure in Jay’s chest eased a little.
Emile, though, looked stricken. “You’re sorry?” There was a little furrow between his perfect black eyebrows.
Jay’s chest felt tight again. “Well, yeah. Of course. I sexually assaulted you,” he added in a whisper, with a surreptitious glance around the room even though he already knew they were alone.
Emile’s jaw dropped. Jay didn’t think he’d ever seen that happen to anyone. It was definitely a real thing, not just a line people used in books. A half-second later, Emile snapped his mouth closed again and said, as though horrified, “What?”
Of all the reactions Jay had imagined—and he’d imagined a lot of them, including yelling and possibly punching, and once, though he’d thought it unlikely, tears—the disbelieving expression on Emile’s face was not one he’d anticipated.
“You do remember me, don’t you?” The bar hadn’t been that dark, and they’d gotten so close and stared at each other with such intensity—
“Of course, I remember you,” Emile breathed, erasing the breaking wave of Jay’s confusion.
“Then you remember what I did,” Jay said, biting out the words. It took all of his strength to meet Emile’s eyes again, grimacing. “I freaked you out so much you… ran.” Jay’s voice wobbled, and he slumped against the desk behind him, holding onto its edge with one hand. With the other, he pushed his hair back, then slid his palm down over his eyes and let it linger there, hiding.
Before Jay could peer at Emile through the cracks in his fingers, Emile closed the distance between them and took Jay by the shoulders. Jay’s hand fell away from his face in surprise, leaving nothing between them.
Jay took a shaky breath, warmth and tension flooding his body in equal parts, and it was a dizzying cocktail. With Jay still braced against the desk and Emile standing up straight, they were nose to nose. Emile’s feet bracketed his ankles.
Their faces were inches apart. They’d been this close before, of course, including a couple days ago in the hallway, but Jay was still stunned. He could count Emile’s eyelashes, see dashes of gold in his not-quite-black irises, and smell his complicated scent. He was thrown back so hard into the vivid memories from the bar, a fresh jolt of heat burst out of his heart and disseminated throughout his body. Including his cock.
Not the time, he reminded himself viciously even as he stared into the dark fire of Emile’s eyes, awestruck and helplessly turned on.
“That’s not what that was,” Emile said, low and firm, and he squeezed Jay’s shoulders for emphasis. His hands were so warm. “I left because I was overwhelmed by how much I…” His gaze dipped to Jay’s mouth and then stilled. After a long pause, he finished, “Wanted you.”
Jay processed what he had just been told, but it was hard when they were standing chest to chest, the warm weight of Emile’s hands on his body.
Emile quickly stepped back, subtracting those two steps that had brought them together. He folded his arms with his gaze averted. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done—what I did.” He made a brief gesture between their bodies, presumably meaning that he shouldn’t have put his hands on Jay. Jay begged to differ, but his thoughts were molasses. He could barely blink, let alone form words. “I just didn’t… don’t… want you to think you did something wrong. Not that night.” He drew a deep breath and exhaled hard. “You were magnificent.”
Magnificent.
A switch flipped in Jay’s head, and his nerves were washed away by the rising tide of renewed confidence.
“Then why did you leave?” He watched Emile closely for an answer, his voice low but steady, his quaking hands relaxing where he’d been unconsciously gripping the edge of the desk.
Emile rubbed his arms. “Because—well, I didn’t know you were a student, obviously, but I knew you weren’t even twenty-one.” He swallowed, a fascinating, visible lump traveling down the light brown column of his neck in a path Jay wanted to trace with his knuckle, then his tongue. “It all felt like—a lot. More than I thought I could manage at the time.”
Emile’s simple, confused words made more sense to Jay than an articulate speech could have. They echoed Jay’s own struggle to understand what had come alive between them in the bar.
“‘A lot,’” Jay echoed with a quick smile. “I know exactly what you mean.”
Emile smiled back—small and cautious, but a smile nonetheless. “Not particularly eloquent for a professor of English, but it gets the point across.”
Something else Emile had said filled Jay with hope layered over his relief. Jay pushed himself away from the desk so they stood chest to chest, chests and hips almost touching but not quite. “It was ‘a lot,’ and more than you could manage—at the time?”
Emile tensed, his eyes widening at Jay’s movement, but he didn’t flee. He just adjusted the angle of his face to stare up at Jay and swallowed again. Jay wanted to do things with Emile he couldn’t exactly picture or articulate; he was pursuing a vision, a feeling more than a specific act. He had no idea where his confidence was coming from, but he was sure that if he got his hands on Emile, he would know what to do.
Maybe all this reckless certainty stemmed from the fact that Emile had called him magnificent.
God.
“Y-yes, well, at the time, I’d just been dumped.” Emile laughed. The single, semi-high note was only attractive because everything he did and said was attractive. Jay wanted to get more noises out of him.
“Dumped?” The idea of anyone having Emile and discarding him seemed like sacrilege. “Your ex must be a stupid asshole,” Jay murmured. Finally, and yet unhurriedly, he settled his hands on Emile’s waist. The thin tweed of the vest was faintly rough on his hands, but he could feel Emile’s heat through it at once, and this close, he could smell something more than cologne and aftershave—the sweet notes of something in his hair, probably wax. As soon as he noticed it, a wave of sensory memory from the bar rushed over him.
Jay tilted his head down to nudge Emile’s temple so he could breathe him in more deeply. But before he could, Emile’s hands suddenly raised between them, planted against Jay’s chest.
“Wait. Wait.”
Jay didn’t want to wait, but five minutes of encouragement couldn’t erase several weeks of agonized uncertainty, and he found himself lodged, frozen again, halfway between the unsure and confident versions of himself. He leaned his head back an inch so he could see Emile’s face, which was pulled into a similarly conflicted expression.
“You’re my student,” he said firmly. “This can’t… I can’t.” But his tone was weak, and his fingers curled slightly against Jay’s shirt, sparking little flames of sensation on his chest.
On the field, when a player was all alone with no one on his side to defend him if he accepted a pass, sometimes he still called for it. If there was a path from the ball to him, opening as though by magic, he seized it. He trusted that it wouldn’t close before the pass could complete, and that when he turned and brought the ball with him toward the goal area, he could take it where it needed to go through the power of his own instinct.
Some players doubted—hesitated—and lost these moments. Jay was not that kind of player.
So, instead of letting go of Emile, Jay kissed him.
Four
Emile
September
Emile had been unprepared. That was his excuse. Just like that night at the bar when they’d collided—literally, metaphoricall
y, cosmically—he hadn’t had time to ready himself.
He couldn’t possibly have been expected to do what was responsible or moral or ethical, not when the laws of nature compelled him to open his mouth for Jay’s hot, demanding kiss, to make a muffled sound that was some kind of wordless plea against his tongue, and then spread his legs, slumping back against the desk behind him so that its legs skidded an inch over the tile floor. The sound might have startled them out of a less intense moment, but as it was, Jay tightened his hold on Emile’s waist and hauled him off the desk and up against Jay’s body, leaving Emile balanced on the balls of his feet, bearing only half his own weight.
Meanwhile, the kissing. Emile couldn’t remember being kissed like this. Jay alternated rough, shallow stabs of his tongue with little bites of Emile’s lower lip. It was a kiss without strategy or studied technique, all instinct and intuition. And it was effective as hell. Emile couldn’t bring himself to do anything but receive what Jay was giving him, panting and holding two fistfuls of Jay’s shirt.
Jay was hard, and Emile was getting there fast—a lot faster than he could remember since he’d been nineteen himself. The rush of blood and the shock of abrupt sensation left him dizzy. Their hips were pressed so tightly together that Emile could feel the heady swelling of his own cock, the hot, unavoidable honesty of his body’s response pressing them even more tightly together.
In the back of his mind, Emile was thinking What the fuck are you doing?, but that thought was quiet—like a whisper in a crowded room, or a sound from above the surface heard from deep underwater—and so easy to ignore in favor of the swift, searing conversation of bodies.
Then the door opened.
Emile dropped to his heels in an instant, turning toward the window and putting his back to the door. In the same moment, Jay leapt away as if Emile had suddenly caught fire. Emile shot a horrified look at the door over his shoulder, imagining a dozen students had somehow appeared and would now be staring at him, slack-jawed.
Only one student had come in, as it turned out. And through some miracle, he had yanked the door open and come inside without ever looking up from his phone. He kept his head down, feet shuffling in unlaced white sneakers, and cast himself down into a desk in the corner without ever seeming to notice that Jay and Emile were present, let alone what they’d been doing.
Thank God for tech-obsessed post-millennials.
“Emile,” Jay breathed.
Emile shot him a censoring look.
Jay flinched and amended, “Professor. I—”
“I have to go,” Emile said, grasping his messenger bag and slinging it over his shoulder. He was unsure if he was grateful or bereaved that the door hadn’t stayed closed forever. He burst into the hallway, ready to flee… and stopped.
If he ran now, he would be abandoning Jay at a crucial moment—again. Jay had just told him how Emile leaving Laramie’s without explanation had wrecked him. Regretting his choice that night had been Emile’s reason for reaching out to Jay just now and being honest. Ill-advised though that honesty had been in hindsight, leading as it had to Emile being driven half-delirious with lust, he couldn’t just reverse course and act like a coward again. Instead of fleeing the building, Emile made himself wait for Jay in the hallway.
A few seconds later, Jay came out of the room, his eyes wide and haunted as they met Emile’s. They looked at each other for a moment, and then Emile pressed his lips together.
“Walk with me?” he managed, looking left and right as though someone passing by would hear the innocent question and somehow know.
Cautious hope sparked in Jay’s eyes. Emile’s heart jumped with the urge to reward that hope, to please himself by pleasing Jay.
No, he hastened to tell himself. I won’t. He was not going to lay another hand on Jay, nor invite Jay to lay a hand on him. But he had to explain. Jay was his student, for fuck’s sake. And even if he hadn’t been, Emile wasn’t going to knowingly treat someone as badly as he’d treated Jay that summer. He couldn’t just pretend like what had happened between them—just now and weeks ago—hadn’t happened at all, and then manage to look at himself in the mirror.
They began walking slowly, Jay with a noticeable hitch in his step and his armful of books in a strategic position over his pelvis. Emile fought back the instinctive pride at having put Jay into such a state, and neither of them spoke until they were out of the building and into the sunlight, the campus open and busy around them.
Emile automatically walked in the direction of Cross Hall, where he’d been planning to spend his few hours between classes answering emails. Because the thought of getting Jay into his office terrified him on several levels, he was going to be sure they said what needed to be said before they got to his building.
“If things were different…” he started, with a quick glance at Jay. The young man’s face was pulled into a scowl.
“A few minutes ago, things didn’t seem like they needed to be ‘different’ for you to be interested,” Jay muttered.
“Well—” Emile’s voice sounded a little strangled, even to him, “I wasn’t expecting you to… I wasn’t thinking. I’m obviously—” he swallowed, “I’m obviously attracted to you. But you’re my student.” And you’re only eighteen, Emile didn’t add. Their relative ages weren’t relevant. The question began and ended with the fact that Jay was a student in his class. It was impossible.
“We’re both adults,” Jay said sulkily. “I don’t know why it makes a difference.” He looked down at his feet as he walked. He had such long legs, Emile thought absently. He obviously had to measure his strides to keep pace with Emile, but he seemed to do it automatically. Jay went on, thankfully oblivious to Emile’s ogling. “You already ignore me in class. You can just keep doing that. But instead of doing it because we almost fucked, you can do it because we’re fucking for real.”
Emile was so affected by Jay’s unflinching profanity that he almost tripped on the next crack in the sidewalk. He caught a flash of a smile on Jay’s face. He liked getting a rise out of Emile, and Emile wasn’t going to pretend Jay wasn’t good at leaving him flustered. He hoped it wasn’t obvious quite how much Emile liked the feeling.
“It’s not an option,” he said, quiet but serious. He could hardly get into his reasons why, even if babbling about his ex was likely to be an excellent way to deter Jay’s interest. Groping for material in his head, he recited one of the things he’d been told several times by concerned friends and colleagues over his years of dating Ben. “It would ruin my career. Tenured professors might get away with that kind of thing, but not associate professors.”
Though he’d always refused to listen, Emile was aware that all of the people who’d tried to talk him out of his relationship with Ben had been making valid points. Their comments all sounded very different to him post-break-up than they had before.
The thought redoubled his resolve. He would not be to anyone what Ben had been to him. The idea made him sick. And he’d met Ben when he was a graduate student, not a freshman undergraduate. He couldn’t imagine how much more confusing things would have gotten between them if he had been that young.
“I’m sorry for everything, Jay, really,” Emile said, sighing. They were nearly at the steps leading up to the front doors of Cross, so he paused and turned, looking up at Jay. He looked like a strong, sexy angel, with his golden hair and his bright eyes and the sunlight behind him creating a halo effect around his profile. The world was unfair. “I’m sorry for my behavior in Andersonville. It was cruel. And my behavior today was unprofessional. In class, too. I shouldn’t have avoided you. I won’t do that anymore.”
Jay hung his head. “This isn’t fair,” he said softly. “I’ve never felt like this before. And now that I do…” He looked and sounded so sad, and unashamedly so. Emile appreciated the willingness to be vulnerable in a man. Especially a man so young. Or of any age, he amended, thinking sourly of Ben.
Ben, Ben, Ben. He was so tired of thinking of
Ben. He refocused.
Now at the bottom of the stairs leading up to Cross Hall’s front doors, they were outside the sidewalk traffic. Emile still kept his voice low. “You’re going to feel this way again,” he assured Jay. “Better, even. There will be many, many people who will make you feel better than I ever could.” Emile didn’t think he was lying, exactly, but he also knew how rare the kind of connection between them had been in Emile’s own life. And ridiculously, the idea of Jay with someone else put a sour taste in his mouth. He pressed on anyway. “Don’t let this experience make you doubt yourself,” he added—hesitant, but feeling the need to touch on the other issue. The aspect of the dynamic between them that they hadn’t discussed. What Jay had alluded to before he and Emile had wound up tangled up together in the classroom.
Emile was not a Dom under any circumstances, but in some ways, kink was kink. Some aspects of the lifestyle were universal to all participants, including the simple but often difficult act of accepting and embracing your preferences for what they were. Not doing that and letting the shame get the upper hand, well… it could be a setback from happiness and satisfying relationships, and Emile wanted Jay to be happy and satisfied.
“I have an appointment,” he said, which wasn’t true, but he suddenly needed to be further apart from Jay. He couldn’t expect himself to say many more responsible things. If he pushed his luck, he might accidentally say something too honest, such as telling Jay, Actually I’ve changed my mind—will you please come into my office and let me blow you?
At that thought, Emile hastily backed away. “I am sorry,” he murmured.
Jay lifted his chin long enough to fix his sad blue eyes on Emile’s, and he smiled faintly. “So am I.”