Pretend Daddy: A Fake Marriage Romance

by Amy Brent

  “It’s a lovely place,” I said, noticing the décor was manly, but not overly so. The sofa and matching chairs were dark leather and a ginormous flat panel TV hung on the wall, but the walls were painted a light tan and the wood finishings were a blond pine. There were no animal heads on the walls, but that was not surprising. Those weren’t the kinds of trophies a hunter like Holden Moss collected.

  “Hope you’re hungry,” he said.

  I turned back toward the kitchen and took a deep breath. “Now that you mention it, I am. And something smells amazing.”

  He went to the kitchen side of the island and took the lid off a large pot that was simmering on the island’s cooktop. He waved the lid to spread the scent of tomato sauce my way. The wonderful aroma of garlic and basil filled the air and teased my nose. “I hope you like spaghetti.”

  “I love spaghetti,” I said, inhaling deeply. I lifted the champagne glass to my lips and gave him a coy look. “Why Professor Moss, I thought you had just lured me here to fuck. I had no idea we were actually going to have dinner.”

  He smiled as he stirred the sauce. “I would never ask a lady to fuck without feeding her first,” he said. He had a boyish grin, wide mouth, lots of teeth. It made his eyes sparkle and lit up his entire face. “Besides, there’s nothing more embarrassing than to be in the middle of having great sex and hear your stomach growl.”

  “So, you speak from experience?” I asked, watching him from over the top of the champagne glass.

  “I’m afraid I do,” he said. He stirred the sauce, then brought the spoon up for a taste. He blew over the spoon for a second, then carefully tasted the sauce. Smacking his lips, he held the spoon out to me with his other hand cupped underneath ready to catch anything that might drop. “Mmmm, that’s pretty good if I do say so myself. Taste?”

  I leaned in and blew on the sauce, then sucked it from the spoon. I had no idea how hungry I was. I had been so caught up in getting ready for my night with Holden that I had forgotten to eat. My stomach growled at the taste. “Oh my, that is good,” I said, licking my lips. “I would say that’s better than sex, but it’s too early to tell.”

  “Then the bar is set high,” he said, smiling again as he went back to stirring the sauce. He glanced up at me. “Can I ask you something?”

  I turned sideways on the stool, crossing my long legs and resting the champagne glass on my knee. I had a pretty good idea what the question was going to be. It was the old, “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this with your panties down around your ankles?” routine.

  I held up the champagne glass and gave him a nod to proceed. “Of course, Professor. Ask away.”

  “No offense, but do you do this sort of thing often?” he asked without looking me in the eye. “I mean—again, no offense—and I’m certainly not knocking your tactics. To the contrary, I have spent most of the day wondering what I did to deserve this. But—”

  I interrupted him so he didn’t have to say the words he was thinking. “But do I always show my pussy to strange men in public and invite them to fuck me in private?”

  “Do you think I’m a strange man?” he asked, smiling at me as he stirred the sauce.

  “I think you certainly have the potential to be strange,” I said, teasing him with my eyes. “Or at the very least, a little kinky.”

  He chuckled and gave me a single nod. “I will admit to a certain fondness for kink, Miss Allen. But you still haven’t answered my question.”

  “Which was?”

  “Do you do this sort of thing often?”

  I took another sip of the champagne, then dabbed the corners of my lips with my fingertips. “You read my paper, right? This is sort of my kind of thing.”

  He tapped the spoon on the edge of the pot, put the lid on the sauce, and picked up his glass. He leaned back against the sink, nodding as he stared into my eyes. “I did read your paper, and of course I understand the concept of nymphomania or hypersexuality or whatever you want to call it. However—and you might find this hard to believe given the degrees hanging on my office wall—but I don’t think nymphomania actually exists.”

  That caught me by surprise, given that he had spent most of his life studying psychology and dissecting how the human brain did or did not work. For him to reveal that he didn’t believe in the existence of something as ancient and established as nymphomania was a little surprising to hear.

  “You don’t think nymphomania is a real thing?” I asked, giving him a little frown that pushed away the smile. I feigned a southern belle accent. “Why, Professor Moss, what makes you say such horrible things, especially seeing as how you are in the presence of a lady who has been clinically diagnosed as such?”

  He cocked one eyebrow in classic Rhett Butler fashion and pooched out his lips. “Actually, my dear, your paper supports my theory.”

  “Really?” I dropped the playful accent because he had peaked my interest in more ways than one. “How so?”

  He frowned thoughtfully as he sipped the champagne. “You observed quite correctly that in our chauvinistic society it is expected for a man to have unbridled sexual urges because that’s programmed into his base DNA. Call it the instinct of procreation, the desire to prolong the survival of the species, to continue the lineage of generations to come. Correct?”

  “You say it much better and more formally than I did, but basically, that’s correct. Please, proceed.”

  He extended a long finger from the hand holding the champagne glass. “But if a woman has that same primal instinct—or rather acts on the urges generated by that instinct—there must be something clinically, medically, or psychologically wrong with her.

  “Her sex drive must be stuck on high,” I offered, recalling the words my therapist had once used to describe me, right before he leaned me over his desk and fucked me in the ass.

  “Yes,” Holden said, seriously. “She must be a slut or have a mental defect of some kind because for a woman to want to have sex just for the sake of having sex, well, that’s not considered normal in our overly-judgmental, post-Victorian, chauvinistic society.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him and said with a hard tone, “Yes, exactly! If a guy loves to fuck—and fucks every willing woman he can—he is just being a guy because that’s what guys do. Even men who are monogamous want to fuck other women.”

  “Yes, precisely,” Holden said, finger wagging in the air. “Humans are the only monogamous species on the planet because the very concept of monogamy goes against the primal urge to procreate and prolong the species. Women have the same urges as men. We just come at procreation from different angles.”

  I shook my finger to match his. “But if a woman fucks as freely as a man—whether she is in a monogamous relationship or not—she is considered a slut or a whore or a nympho, all conditions of the mind which have been blamed on mental illness in some capacity over time. Forget the moral judgment part of the equation. If a woman is doing those things, the bitch must be crazy! That’s the double standard.”

  “Exactly,” he said, tapping the butt of his fist on the counter, making the lid on the pot dance. “A double standard established somewhere in times past by a man who had no other explanation as to why some women acted like men when it came to sex.”

  “Maybe he was trying to explain why his own wife fucked around on him,” I said, eyebrows flexing. “What? She cheated on me? The bitch must be crazy!”

  Holden covered his mouth to keep from spraying champagne across the island. “Yes! Or perhaps, in his closed Victorian mind, there was no other reasonable explanation because ladies simply did not act that way. Unless they were ladies of the night who were paid to do so.”

  “You mean prostitutes. Women with no moral turpitude.”

  “Yes, exactly,” he said again, hands cutting the air as if he were conjuring his point from thin air. “Or witches or vixens or sirens who used their sexuality as a dark power over men.”

  “You’re really going deep here,
Professor Moss,” I said with a smile. I drained the champagne glass and fanned myself with my free hand. “It’s a little unexpected, but it’s sort of getting me hot.”

  He smiled and tried to ignore the comment because he was still in professor mode, which I found adorable.

  He went on, “So, why should there be a double standard for men versus women? Why are men just doing what comes natural to the male of the species, but when a woman does it there must be another reason why? She must be ill to do those things. When in truth, aren’t we all just answering the same inherent call of the wild, so to speak?”

  I blinked at him because he had taken the thoughts right out of my own brain, though I had branded myself a nymphomaniac years ago and had come to wear that brand as a symbol of pride. Whether I liked it or not, I had allowed myself to be defined by my sexual desires. They drove every decision I made, affected every relationship I forged, even made me do things I might not have done if I wasn’t out to prove the point that I was proud of who I was.

  But what if I wasn’t a nymphomaniac at all. What if, as Holden suggested, there was no such thing as nymphomania? What if I was just a woman who answered the call of her own primal instincts rather than suppressing them? If that was the case, I had answered that call over and over and over again.

  “So, you’re saying that nymphomania is not a real thing?” I asked the question and let it hang in the air for a moment. “You’re saying that I really just like to fuck and it’s biological, not psychological? I’m just a horny girl?”

  He let his big shoulders rise and fall slowly, eyeing me with a slight smile. “Would that be so horrible? To know that your brain is fine and you’re just fulfilling the sexual needs of your incredibly, sexy body?”

  “No, that wouldn’t be horrible at all,” I said. “Except that I’ve spent the last five years trying to sort things out in my head. Maybe I should have been focusing more on my womb than my brain.”

  He let his head bob. “So, you’re one of those people who went into psychology to help explain your own issues. Or those things you thought were your issues, like your ‘hyperactive’ sex drive—and I’m not saying your sex drive is any more active than most women your age. Maybe you just act upon those urges where other women suppress them. Ever think about that?”

  “So, it’s not a sexual issue,” I said, flexing my eyebrows at him. “It’s a self-control issue.”

  “It might not be an issue at all,” he said. “Just because you act on those urges does not mean you have a lack of self-control. It just means you act. You follow your heart, your head, and your womb. You let your urges lead you. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.”

  I thought about his words for a moment. I felt a tear stinging my left eye. I casually wiped it away with my knuckle. “What if those urges lead me to do things I regret doing?”

  “Do you have lots of regrets?” he asked, staring into my eyes with a concerned look on his handsome face. He spread out his hands, palms up. “Are you going to regret coming here?”

  I frowned at the thought of regret, which had never concerned me before. “Honestly, I have regretted some of the decisions I’ve made, regretted sleeping with some of the men I’ve been with, but regret is not something I spend much time thinking about.”

  “What about the repercussions of your actions?” he asked. He was in full psychoanalysis mode now and I found it captivating. I had not heard him lecture in class yet, but I knew he was a wonderful teacher, which just made me want him more. I squirmed uneasily on the stool, starting to feel a little like I was being interrogated. I wondered if he had any handcuffs… perhaps a blindfold and gag…

  When I didn’t answer quickly enough, he asked the question in a different way, “Have you done things that affected others?”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Why are you asking me these things, Professor Moss? Why do I feel like I’m being psychoanalyzed?”

  He blinked at me, then shook his head and smiled. “Shit, I’m sorry,” he said, holding up his hands. “I guess I miss practicing.”

  “You practiced?” I asked. “As in psychoanalysis?”

  “Yes, for a short time, after I got my Ph.D.”

  “Why did you stop?”

  He frowned and let his head swivel slowly from side to side. “It just wasn’t for me. Sitting in a small room listening to broken people’s problems all day long, wishing you could fix them even though you know you can’t.” He picked up the spoon and stared at it. “I started taking my work home, drinking too much, getting depressed because I didn’t think I was making much of a difference. Then I got an offer to teach and jumped at it. I’ve never looked back. You know the old saying, ‘Those who can do, those who can’t teach’? It applies to psychology more than you know.”

  “So, you prefer teaching,” I said with a slow nod. Now I was the one analyzing him. He was much better at it than I was. “Do you think you’ll ever go back to practicing?”

  “No, teaching has become my passion,” he said with a happy sigh. “When you teach, you don’t really have the chance to dig into a subject’s head, which is a good thing because trust me, you never know what you’re going to find there. That’s one reason your paper got my brain pumping, among other things. I’ve never really given much thought to the concept of nymphomania or satyrism, but I now find the subjects fascinating. And I have you to thank.”

  I held out my empty champagne class and wiggled it at him. “Maybe you should write a book. After you refill my glass and fuck my brains out, of course.”

  “A book… hmmm… that could be interesting…”

  “And maybe I could be your own private guinea pig. We could team up and experiment on each other, like Masters and Johnson. Oh my god, think of the fun we could have, all in the name of science!”

  “That’s an interesting idea,” he said, refilling my glass from the champagne bottle he had on ice in a bucket on the counter between us. “My best pal, Wynn Driver, wrote a book and is making a fortune from it.”

  “Is that the ‘what’s your vagina thinking’ book?” I asked as he handed back the glass, now full to the rim with champagne bubbles. I knew the name Wynn Driver well. While doing my homework on Holden Moss, Driver’s name kept coming up with the women Holden had slept with. It seemed the two hunky psyche professors were not only best friends and colleagues, but had spent a considerable amount of time fucking the same women, often at the same time. I wondered if I would ever be so lucky as to be scotched between them with their cocks inside me at the same time. Sigh… a girl could dream…

  I held up a hand to slow down the conversation. “Okay, so let’s say my nymphomania is not real, that I’m really just a horny young woman who acts on her sexual urges. What about my other issue?”

  His eyebrows knitted above his blue eyes. “What other issue is that?”

  “My desire to be teacher’s pet,” I said coyly, my eyes going dreamy, staring into his.

  He blinked at me with the glass at his lips. “Teacher’s pet?”

  “I have always had a very strong attraction—an overwhelming attraction, even—to teachers.”

  “You have?”

  “Yes, I have,” I said seriously, though my insides were merrily churning from the look on his face. “I seduced and slept with several teachers in high school, and have slept with at least one professor per year since I’ve been at college. Some of the sex has just been once or twice, but one was a long-term relationship that lasted almost an entire year.”

  He narrowed his eyes at me. “You’ve slept with professors all through college? You mean, professors at this college?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  He set the glass on the counter and leaned back against the sink again with his arms folded over his chest. “You’ve had sex, or affairs, with other professors here at Midwestern University?”

  “Of course, I have,” I huffed. “I’ve been here four years, you know.”

  “Please tell me Profes
sor Markle was not one of them,” Holden said with a careful smile. “That’s an image I could never get out of my head.”

  “No, as fucked up as I am, I have never had the desire to sleep with Professor Markle.” I smiled at him again from over the champagne glass. “And no, I will not name names, so don’t ask.”

  “Wait a second… are you the one… did you… did you fuck Keith Calloway in the pool at the natatorium?”

  He asked the question and let his mouth hang open waiting for an answer that did not come. He had undoubtedly heard that Professor Calloway had taken an extended sabbatical after being caught screwing a student by his wife and campus security. That student had managed to remain anonymous. I was not about to change that now.

  I gave him a hard look. “Are we gonna talk all night or are we gonna fuck?” I asked, holding up my wrist and tapping a nail to my watch crystal. “Because I have to tell you, the evening is really starting to drag on and I’d hate to have to go home and satisfy myself.”