by Rachel Ember
“Touch yourself,” he hissed against Emile’s neck, and he kissed him, then bit him. The muscles of Emile’s back flexed under Jay’s chest as he reached beneath himself for his cock, and then Jay heard the rhythm of Emile’s jacking, with the wet sound of skin. Emile groaned to himself, and it was a groan that rose in pitch as Jay matched the rhythm of his hand as best he could with rapid, shallow thrusts as the fire they were feeding gusted through his blood—through every vein and capillary.
“Jay,” Emile moaned. “Jay, I’m going to—”
“Yeah,” was all Jay could manage, his vision dark with the effort of holding himself back from the final precipice. “Yeah, yeah, do it. Come for me.”
With a short little cry, Emile did, and Jay followed him almost instantly with a final, deep thrust that nested his hips against Emile’s sweet, spasming ass while they both shifted and rolled against one another, riding out the guttering flames together.
Ten
Emile
October
“You!” Sydney said, managing to sound both warm and accusing when Emile appeared in her office doorway. He assumed the accusation was due to the fact that he was early, and the warmth was due to the fact that he’d come with two cups of tea in addition to the manila folder of student essays under his arm.
Emile could tell she’d been working a while; there were enormous stacks of paper on her desk and the hair around her temples was soft, like she’d rubbed the gel out of it. He shrugged. “I had an appointment cancel. And I thought we could work in your office for once.”
Sydney’s office was slightly bigger than Emile’s, but it was also an awkward, triangular shape and had no natural light. Still, it wasn’t unprecedented for them to alternate spaces, and Emile had an irrational fear of having her in his office the day after he’d crawled across his desk to kiss Jay—before they’d very nearly ravished each other there. Like she would somehow smell his indiscretion in the air.
“Mine’s a mess,” Emile added, which was true, if hardly an explanation considering that his office was always a mess, and Sydney’s was, too. He spotted a tiny portion of her desk that was within her reach and not covered in student papers or open books, and carefully set down her tea. Then, he went to the armchair shoved into one of the vertices of the triangular room, moving a banker’s box full of used copies of Wuthering Heights so that he could sit.
Sydney was drinking deeply from her cup, and she showed no signs of asking any more questions about Emile’s office, so he relaxed as he sat down and took a tentative sip from his own cup.
“I suppose it’s about time you took a turn working out of your lap,” she decided after she’d swallowed and set aside her reading glasses, leaning back to smile at him tiredly. “I’m glad you’re here, too, because the next one in my stack is going to be a real point-earner.”
Emile smiled sweetly back at her. “I have my first round of written work from Lit 100, so we probably shouldn’t even bother keeping score.”
Sydney snorted, scooting her rolling chair forward to lean back over her desk, and then she slid her glasses back into place.
Emile turned on a lamp on the cluttered side table for additional light. It lit up a haze of dust motes in the air, all apparently stirred up by Emile seating himself in the infrequently used chair. As he withdrew his arm from the lamp’s switch, he noticed the oval bruise in the shape of Jay’s thumbprint on the tender skin just past his wrist. He smiled reflexively at the sight of it.
The idea of virginity had never held any special appeal to Emile, except that he vaguely associated it with his own, earliest sexual escapades, which had been made awkward and occasionally painful by his inexperience. He’d never been with anyone younger than himself, and most of his partners had been at least a few years older. Or many years older, in several cases—including, obviously, Ben.
The idea of being someone’s first had never held any inherent appeal to him. But the rapturous looks on Jay’s face, and his desperate roughness, had made Emile second-guess all of the assumptions he’d ever made about the inadvisability of hooking up with younger men.
“Something wrong with the chair?” Sydney asked from behind him, startling him out of his thoughts. “Something more than the usual, that is,” she amended wryly. Her chair’s terribleness was an established fact, based upon its mysterious hard and soft spots and the fact that its piping was inexplicably razor-sharp on insufficiently protected skin.
“No, just bracing myself for the atrocities,” Emile said, holding up his folder of essays. Sydney snorted and returned to her own grading.
Sometime during his second year as a teacher’s assistant, he’d learned one of the secrets of grading dozens of student assignments without completely zoning out: frequent changes of location. At home, Emile migrated between his desk, living room, bedroom floor, and kitchen counter—just depending on where his restless whims took him. He arranged himself now with the practiced movements of habit. He propped his right ankle on his left knee, put the manila folder on his left thigh, and then slid free the first two stapled pages while clicking open a red pen that had been tucked into the folder’s spine.
Then, he stared at the first page of a student’s essay without reading a word.
He was instead visited by a succession of visceral memories of his evening with Jay. And, their morning. He swallowed at the memory of Jay, sleep-rumpled and beautiful, his blue eyes intent and the early morning light in his golden hair as he’d traced the pad of his index finger down Emile’s chest.
Emile shuddered so hard that he upset the careful balance in his lap; then, as he reflexively jerked his arm, he splashed tea over the first essay.
“Shit,” he muttered. “Fuck.”
“Goddamn?” Sydney chimed in from her desk. “Don’t spill tea on that chair,” she added mildly. “It might have an explosive chemical reaction with the dust.”
Emile forced himself to focus on the words in front of him, and after rereading the first two sentences once, and then again, he finally managed to tune in fully. He’d just finished marking the paper and jotting down a few thoughts on the back, and was moving on to the next, when Sydney crowed, interrupting him.
“Seventeen points!” she declared. “Fifteen for frustration,” she added with a grimace.
“Ah,” Emile said with a quick grin. “That elusive category.” Frustration points were awarded for student work with content that you couldn’t technically mark down or even comment on even if it was objectively irritating. The points were their silent vindication. “What was it this time? The royal ‘we’?”
“No. Aggressive use of male pronouns.” She cracked her knuckles. “And you?”
Emile frowned. “Oh. I forgot to add it up.”
Sydney pushed her glasses up her nose and sniffed. “We always keep score, Mendes. Just because you’ve got Lit 100 doesn’t mean you can have your victory by default.”
Emile shook his head with a soft laugh, but then he obediently paged back through the essay to calculate.
An hour later, Emile hadn’t gotten nearly enough work done, but he thought he could probably catch up over the weekend. It wasn’t like he had plans. Jay’s face flashed in his mind again, however—apparently as his new, recurring daydream. Or did he have plans?
Last night, instead of bolting from Emile’s house like handsome young men were rumored to do, Jay had shyly accepted Emile’s invitation to stay over. He’d also hooked his finger in Emile’s collar before going out the door ahead of him that morning, and kissed him soundly in a way that had felt like a promise, not a farewell.
And Emile had missed him, instantly. He missed him now.
“I’m going to call it for today,” he told Sydney. She gave him a little wave without looking up from what she was doing, and he whisked her empty paper tea cup from her desk to toss into the recycling with his own on his way past the faculty lounge.
When he first saw Jay outside his office, pacing in the hallway like a r
estless lion, Emile’s first reaction was to be filled with a rush of tingling warmth, his body already conditioned to associate the sight of Jay with pleasure. Then, his head caught up with his body, and the euphoric warmth was quickly displaced.
Seeing Emile, Jay held still, sliding his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans with a tense smile. Emile swallowed, hurried forward to unlock his office, and ushered Jay inside, ridiculously grateful that the hallway happened to be empty—although there was no way to say who had already walked by and noticed Jay.
Calm down, Emile instructed himself. Even if Emile’s colleagues had happened past, there was nothing incriminating about a student coming to a professor’s office.
Still, his pulse was fast and noisy in his ears when he rounded on Jay behind the closed door. “You shouldn’t come here,” he said, but it came out breathy instead of scolding, and he had to clear his throat. “It’s… I know you aren’t my student now, but—”
“Actually,” Jay interrupted him, taking a couple of backward steps to slump against the closed door, his lower lip between his teeth and his eyebrows drawn together. “I’m still your student. Technically.”
Emile folded his arms tightly over his chest. “What—what do you mean?”
Jay groaned softly, his eyes pleading, like he knew Emile wouldn’t react well to what he had to say and couldn’t quite bring himself to spit it out. “I thought it was a done deal.”
Trying to muster patience, Emile asked, “You thought what was a done deal?”
Jay slid his hand around the back of his neck and shook his head. “Dropping your class. I asked my advisor, and she said it shouldn’t be an issue, so I just thought…” he trailed off without completing the statement, but Emile had already put it together.
“You made the request to drop the class,” he said, the calmness of his voice surprising him, considering how his heart continued to pound, “and you assumed that it would be approved.”
“Yeah,” Jay said miserably, hanging his head.
“And it wasn’t approved,” Emile continued, because it seemed necessary to say it all out loud and avoid any further misunderstandings.
Jay just nodded without looking up, his chin practically hitting his chest.
Emile sighed, rocking back and forth on his heels and with his hands clenching the insides of his elbows.
In a way, the fact Jay was in Emile’s class—either before or after their hookup last night—felt trivial. Jay wasn’t a PhD candidate or even a master’s student competing for faculty mentorship. He was a non-major undergraduate student in an introductory class, and from what little Emile had witnessed from his class participation, he wouldn’t need to have traded sex to win an A from professors who were far more demanding than Emile.
At the same time, rules were rules, and Emile had always tried to obey them all. Though he’d be breaking them now, whether or not Jay had successfully dropped the class, it was harder to justify that transgression to himself with Jay as his own student.
Jay walked a few steps deeper into the room, like he was going to resume his pacing from the hallway, but he was brought up short by Emile’s desk. So, he turned and leaned against it, his hands white-knuckled in their agitated grip on its edge. “I’m sorry.”
Emile shook his head. “You have nothing to be sorry for.” Trying to downplay how affected he was, he unwound his tightly crossed arms, but that left him with nothing to do but let them hang woodenly at his sides. “I’m the one who’s an authority figure. The responsibility is mine.”
Just as Jay dropping the class hadn’t eliminated the danger of something happening between them, his failure to drop it shouldn’t have felt quite so Earth-shattering, and yet, Emile did feel like the tectonic plates were rearranging themselves under his feet and that chaos was now inevitable—complete with toppling buildings and bubbling lava.
Jay’s jaw flexed, like he was gritting his teeth. “You make me sound like a kid,” he muttered, with an indignation that ironically made him seem very young, but Emile was certainly not going to make that observation out loud.
“You’re a student at a school where I teach. It wasn’t appropriate, regardless of whether you dropped my class or not.”
Jay’s expression turned even more bleak. “So, what are you saying? That you regret it? Regret last night?”
Emile should have said ‘yes,’ but he had never found lies easy. The honest answer, and the frustrating one, was that he didn’t regret it, even if disastrous consequences were likely inevitable. He barely felt guilty at all. And he was frustrated by that lack of guilt. Maybe his expression communicated what words couldn’t, though, because Jay’s whole demeanor turned gentle as he slowly pushed himself off the desk and took a step closer.
“You don’t regret it,” Jay said quietly, not asking. Emile closed his eyes against the urge to rush into Jay’s arms, bury his face against his chest, and let the anxiety he was feeling be eased. But it would be false comfort; it wouldn’t change reality or divert catastrophe.
He heard the soft fall of Jay’s next step, but before he could react, a precise and familiar pattern of knocks rang out on the door.
Emile’s eyes flew open; he knew exactly who was there.
The barest second passed before the door opened. In that second, Emile stared on dumbly, but Jay strode to the guest chair and threw himself down into it, like they’d just been in the middle of a discussion safely on either side of Emile’s desk.
Ben’s eyes met Emile’s before he’d even stepped through the door—his expression mildly startled, presumably at having discovered Emile just inside the door he’d pushed open instead of seated at his desk. “Ah, you’re in.” Ben’s smile was tense. He began to move into the room, and when his glance snagged on the back of Jay’s head, he paused again. “Oh… I didn’t realize you had student appointments this morning.”
Emile didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t sound like a lie, so he stared mutely at Ben. Ben looked increasingly confused as a couple of silent seconds passed.
“I was actually about to go,” Jay interrupted them in a brittlely casual voice. He hastily stood and slung his bag over his shoulder, but apparently miscalculated how close he was to Emile’s crowded desk. The bag struck a blue glass jar stuffed with ink pens and knocked it to the floor, where it promptly shattered against the thin rug. “Shit,” Jay said, dropping his bag again and immediately kneeling as though to pick up the shards of broken glass with his bare hands.
“Wait, don’t—” Emile began, taking a step forward and then freezing when a piece of glass was crushed under the sole of his shoe. “Don’t touch anything,” he finished quickly, but in his brief pause, Jay had already plucked a piece of jagged glass off the floor, and then with a soft oath, dropped it again and shoved his bleeding finger into his mouth.
Jay rocked back on his heels, grimacing, and then looked past Emile at Ben with an expression of intense uncertainty.
Apparently, Jay wasn’t a very good liar, either.
Taking a couple of cautious steps around the mess, Emile crouched in front of him, wanting to reach for his hand but feeling intensely aware that he probably wouldn’t offer unsolicited touch to any student—not to mention being incredibly conscious of Ben’s attention.
“May I see the cut?”
Jay extended a trembling hand. There was a row of beaded blood on a shallow laceration along the tip of his right forefinger, from the pad to the first knuckle. It struck him that it was probably the same strong, faintly callused finger that he’d put inside Emile the night before.
His ears burning and his head swimming, Emile blinked and said a little roughly, “It doesn’t look serious.”
Jay grimaced at his finger, looking a little green. “No,” he agreed. “I just hate blood.”
Emile chuckled softly, not sure why the admission filled him with tenderness.
“Should one of us walk him to the student clinic?”
For a second, Emile had
almost forgotten Ben, but now he was grimly reminded.
Jay straightened up, answering Ben before Emile could with a short laugh. “No, sir. I can find my own Band-Aid.”
There was something about hearing Jay call Ben ‘sir’ that made Emile want to laugh again. Instead, he tried not to look at either of them, maintaining a bland expression while Jay shouldered his bag again—this time, with marked care—and gave the other two men curt nods before he slipped out of the office.
“Jocks,” Ben said with a snort. “Like bulls in china cabinets.”
Emile reacted before he could stop himself, stiffening and shooting Ben a defensive glare. “Oh, yes, athletes are so devoid of grace and coordination.” He breathed out hard through his nostrils and pivoted in place, wincing when he stepped on more glass. “What did you need?” he asked testily. “I was in the middle of something.”
“You were in the middle of a student meeting,” Ben said slowly, “and your student just left.”
Emile bit his cheek. “I—he just got here while I was doing something else.”
“Something you were in the middle of,” Ben said, nodding as he crouched, his knees cracking. For a bewildered moment, Emile thought he was perhaps kneeling to beg forgiveness, before he realized that he’d only bent to carefully pick up a few pieces of glass. First, however, he took an immaculate handkerchief from his pocket and wrapped it around his hand to protect it.
“Yes,” Emile said gruffly. “So, what is it that you needed?” he asked again.
He should probably have tried to help Ben with the glass, but instead he stood stiffly at his full height while Ben gathered up all of the sharp pieces, piling them in one end of the handkerchief.
“I just wanted to say that I’m glad we cleared the air yesterday.”