The Artistry of Love

by C. J. Scarlett

  She went back into her apartment and checked her messages. She had a few from Trish asking if everything was okay, if she needed help, and then eventually joking, said she assumed she must be dead or banging him into the next century. Alessia rolled her eyes. Well, both of those were wrong but one was closer to the truth than the other.

  She smiled as she went back into her apartment, putting on music as she moved through the kitchen to clean things up. She could still feel his hands in her hair, his mouth against hers. She could still smell him, still feel that heat. She wanted to do it all over again, and do it right, and go as far as he would let her.

  Chapter 13

  Waking up the next day wasn’t unlike when she rolled out of bed on New Year’s Day. There was no real hangover involved. She had a bit of a headache from all the tequila and salty food she ate without following it up with the proper amounts of water, and she was more tired than she wanted to be since her sleep was restless and filled with bouts of rather racy dreams of the professor and her. But what she felt that morning were consequences. New Year’s Eve was the time to kiss whoever she wanted, eat and drink whatever she wanted, and then deal with it on the morning of the first day of the year.

  That was her that morning; the first thing she thought of was how Erik had seen them, how they had not been anything close to careful with dinner last night, and everything awful that could follow that up. She sprung out of bed as if her hips were a well-oiled hinge. She stared at her clock to find she’d awakened five minutes before her alarm.

  “Shit.”

  She jumped out of bed and tried to think of the best way to deal with this. She’d gone on a date with her mentoring professor, there was no negotiating that at this point. She’d then proceeded to get fairly buzzed at dinner with him, invite him back to her apartment, and make out with him in her kitchen. She also very nearly got close to copping a feel and doing something entirely more adult. Only she and Dr. Tekkin knew that, but Erik, who was jealous and possessive, saw them together. It wouldn’t take much, just an inference, a suggestion that something unethical was happening, and she’d be out of the program, Dr. Tekkin would be out of a job. Everyone lost.

  So, her first order of business was talking to Erik. She had to find a way to talk about this with him without revealing everything that had happened. He was her friend, she believed that; first and foremost, he was her friend, no matter his feelings. She just hoped he believed that too. She fired off a text to him.

  Meet for coffee?

  She put her phone down and paced around. She poured herself a bowl of cereal, not caring for once how childish it looked to be a grown woman pouring herself a bowl of Apple Jacks. She needed the sugar and the comfort. She woofed it down and swallowed the remaining soy milk laced over with residue, turned a strange greenish brown. She checked her phone. No answer yet. He could still be asleep, he was kind of a late sleeper compared to her. He could easily just be waiting to roll out of bed just before his morning class.

  She drank some water, trying to calm the headache. She followed it with Tylenol and threw another couple of mouthfuls of cereal into her mouth. She paced some more. Still no answer on the phone. She should get ready, shower, do her makeup, and put on clothes. She needed to busy herself before she drove herself completely nuts.

  So, she went through the motions of getting dressed. She pulled out clothes to wear, and started her shower. She made it as cold as possible when she first stepped in, letting the shock and the chill go through her. It was a nice little reprieve. She turned it back to warm and then let herself get washed over in the hot water. She slowly massaged the shampoo into her scalp and ran her fingers through it like so many rakes to get all the soap and dirt and sweat and shame and fear out of it. Then she lathed it over in conditioner, massaging again to work the kinks out. She tried to calm herself with the smell of her lavender body wash as she moved it across her body. When she had nothing left to wash and she was getting pruny, she forced herself to turn the shower off and step out, wrapping herself in a towel and relishing at the chill in the air.

  She slipped her clothes on, telling herself she wouldn’t check her phone again until she was completely dressed. It was good to give herself a timeframe. Alessia did her best not to smudge anything as her somewhat shaky hands applied her makeup. She looked at herself in the mirror. She was the picture of confidence, ready for class and all sorts of other things that had nothing to do with sleeping with a superior professor who also happened to be part of a terrorist cell. None of that here, no, ma’am.

  Sure. Tell me when and where.

  He’d texted her back. She could hear how curt he was, even in the minuscule texts. This wouldn’t be easy. She wondered if she should invite him here, give them some privacy in case he got a little too loud and anyone overheard their situation. That would probably just be a slap in the face for him though, to be invited back for coffee to be begged not to tell the world that she may or may not have gone on a date with a professor the night before.

  She told him to meet her at Starbucks before their seminar. She wanted to work through whatever tension they had going there before they were surrounded by everyone else in their class. It wouldn’t translate well to work if they were ready to jump at each other’s throats in the middle of debating ethics for shifters in the workplace. He sent her back a message with an affirmative answer and she looked in the mirror, fixing her hair just a bit before stepping out her door to meet him.

  Did she look like someone who kissed someone last night? Was there a guilty tell for that? Was there anything for that like sex hair or hickies? She walked as if there was nothing wrong, nothing had happened. As far as everyone knew who met her eye as she walked across campus, she was just another grad student making her way to classes, already behind in grading papers for her students. Which was true, to an extent.

  She got to the Starbucks early and downed a shot of expresso as if it were Jack Daniels. It wouldn’t exactly have the calming effects, but at least she could wear it like battle armor. It was energy, it was something. She held onto the bitter taste of the espresso in her mouth like it was a hard candy or a stress ball. She looked up and saw Erik walking in, looking just as miserable as he had the last night. She tried not to panic, tried not to read too much into it. He sat across from her.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hi.”

  He was quick and quiet already. She could work with it. Or work around it.

  “How have you been?”

  “You mean since we saw each other last night with your new older boyfriend?”

  Yikes. She winced, just a little bit. But she wouldn’t let Erik dictate the conversation. He was very good at things like that, making his voice heard, shutting other people down. She wouldn’t let that work here though. This was a conversation between friends, not a debate in class. She leaned forward to get closer to him. She felt like she had more control over the situation if he was closer.

  “Look,” she said. “He’s not my boyfriend. He was taking me out to dinner as an apology.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes!”

  She wasn’t technically lying on that part. Dr. Tekkin had taken her out to apologize. Not that Erik knew what he was apologizing for or the extent to which she let that apology go (very nearly to her bedroom), but the point right now was that he was assuming. He was assuming things that were true but he was doing it for the completely wrong reasons. He was jealous, she needed to sort that part out first.

  “Look, Erik, I like you, you’re my friend,” she said. “And I trust you but I also need to know you won’t go and do something stupid.”

  “You think I care about your little romance so much that I’d kill myself?” he asked with an exasperated laugh.

  She rolled her eyes. “Like go telling someone just to try to get Dr. Tekkin fired.”

  “Why? You want to protect him now?”

  “Did you tell someone?”

  “And what
if I did? Is there a story people should know about?”

  “Erik.”

  She went from trying to be the understanding, patient friend to seeing red in a second. He was a jealous little boy, she decided. She’d known he had an attitude like this about him; he was the type of person used to being heard, used to getting everything he wanted in any given situation, used to being everyone’s favorite. And now he was second fiddle. He wasn’t even a fiddle really. Alessia had no intentions of ever having a relationship with him, despite what he would try to swing for her. She wanted to tell him that, to rip into him the truth of all that, and let him know how utterly wrong he had been to assume he could just have her.

  But he was still her friend and she couldn’t bring herself to purposefully hurt him, no matter how much she was sure he deserved it.

  “Erik, I don’t know what fantasy you cooked up in your head but you need to snap out of it,” she said. “You’re my friend, a very good friend, but a friend. Even if I was dating someone, it wouldn’t be your place to be angry about it. Dr. Tekkin did something nice last night to make up for some unfortunate stuff that’s happened recently with class and our politics. Please don’t try to punish him because of some misplaced jealousy.”

  Well, it wasn’t exactly misplaced, but he didn’t need to know that right at this second. She looked at Erik and watched his eyes soften. He desperately tried to cling to his own anger, but it was slipping away from him at every second. She watched it disappear, dissipate, vanish from his face until it melted into nothing short of misery. She didn’t like hurting him, she didn’t want to hurt him, as much as she liked knocking him down a peg.

  “I didn’t tell anyone and I wouldn’t,” he sighed. “Honestly, doing that never even really crossed my mind.”

  “Good.”

  “So, there’s really nothing here?” he asked, his hands gesturing between the two of us.

  She frowned. “You’re my friend, Erik. Do we have good chemistry? Yeah. But that doesn’t mean I want to start something. I like you as my friend too much to chase after something as silly as that.”

  “You think something with me would be silly?”

  There they were again, the walls, the chip on his shoulder. He had the most fragile ego of any man she’d ever known and one day, she would do a long dig into his history to figure out exactly where that inferiority complex came from that manifested itself in the form of total asshole-ish behavior.

  “You know that’s not what I’m saying but please pick a fight if it makes you feel better,” she said, crossing her arms. “Chemistry isn’t something to ruin an established relationship over. We can have chemistry with anyone. I like you too much as you are to try for more.”

  “Don’t you think this should be a two-way decision since I’m also part of this hypothetical we?”

  “No,” she said plainly. “This is my decision how to act on my own feelings; it has nothing to do with you.”

  And that was that. She wouldn’t go as far to say she broke his heart because she didn’t think his feelings ran deep enough for that. He was enraptured by a pretty face and got a little too excited at how well he argued. Maybe he even thought she was smart but beyond all that, there was nothing there for him to get overly bent out of shape over. She was a possibility, a prospect, not his true love.

  “Well, this has been a miserable and frustrating conversation,” Erik said. “I’ll see you in class.”

  And then he was gone. She let out a breath. She may have lost a friend, but her position at the school was still intact. Small victories.

  Chapter 14

  It was after the lecture on Wednesday that Dr. Tekkin asked her to stay after again. They’d been discussing the uprisings of the 1920s, how they led to uprisings in the 1960s and what communism had to offer the shifter ideal. Alessia knew Dr. Tekkin was really just spouting his own Marxist ideals but she also didn’t totally disagree with him. When he concluded with a lengthy speech about how capitalism would give way to a decay into communist America that prized shifters, he asked her to stay after to talk to her about something.

  She was totally prepared for him to actually want to talk to her about something from class, maybe a graded test or a homework assignment. She fully expected that perhaps he’d hand her some lecture notes to go over for next week, as he sometimes did.

  Instead, he waited until the last student closed the door to the lecture hall behind them before he took her face in his rough, large hands and pulled her face to his. She didn’t miss a beat, her lips coming up to meet his own in the familiar dance they’d practiced nights ago. She let her bag shrug off her shoulder as she wrapped both her arms around his shoulders. His hands went down to her hips as he maneuvered them, walking her back until the podium was pressed into her behind and he lifted up. She broke the kiss with a slight gasp but recovered quickly, bringing him back in as she felt the solid wood of the podium under her legs. He pressed closer to her. She spread her knees to allow him to settle there, inches from her.

  His hands grew a bit more daring, moving across the contours of her body, feeling her arms and the bumps of her ribs, massaging at her hips. She felt herself get a little too excited at the possibility that he’d been thinking about this all lecture. Maybe he fumbled over the word “autocracy” because he’d been imaging her pressed against him the entire time.

  “I thought we were pulling back on this,” she gasped into his mouth.

  “We are,” he said. “I just couldn’t help myself.”

  It was like a junkie convinced they’d be okay if they could just get one tiny hit. She was the drug and she could feel the heat rising from behind his navel with the way her legs were positioned to receive him. His temperature was rising. She wasn’t scared. She wanted to convey that to him. He wanted to wait, take things slow—or at least in controlled bursts of passion—and she’d respect that, but she also wanted him to know she wouldn’t go running. And, honestly, the idea of him getting a little too frisky in the bedroom because he was part dragon kind of excited her more than it should have.

  “Come over to my place tonight,” she whispered against his lips before moving to kiss down his jaw. “Please.”

  The real question in her request wasn’t lost on him and he pulled back to look at her deeply in the eyes. His thumbs came up to stroke against her cheeks and he brought his forehead to gently sit against her own. He was thinking and she massaged at his shoulders, moving to let her fingers dance through his hair. She didn’t want to force him, but she also didn’t want to lose this chance. She liked him a lot. She wanted to get to know him in as many was as she possibly could, as many ways as he would allow.

  “Are you sure that’s what you want?” he asked so quietly she might have missed it.

  “Yes,” she gasped. “Please.”

  He took another long moment before he finally spoke again. “Okay. I’ll come over at eight. I have a department dinner.”

  She smiled and pulled him into a chaste, innocent kiss. When she pulled away, he was smiling too. She gave him a few more pecks as she got down off the podium and he picked up her bag to hand it to her. They eventually separated as she walked down the lecture hall, leaving early to give him time to collect his things and exit at a staggered time in case anyone was waiting outside to raise an eyebrow.

  She felt incredibly light, walking back to her apartment that afternoon. There was so much promise in his gaze, so much fire waiting there too. She’d had first times with plenty of guys—maybe not as many as Trish and she may have felt a little inadequate about that. But this was different. She’d learned that long ago, a first time with someone was nothing like her first time with another. And this was the first time she was most looking forward to.

  She got back to her apartment and set to cleaning it, lighting some candles to give it the sense that it always smelled like lavender honey. She poured through her closet to find the right clothes to wear. She didn’t want to overstep her bounds, but she wasn�
�t about to greet him in some t-shirt and sweatpants combo with a messy bun.

  She didn’t stop smiling the entire time, having no idea that by the end of the night, her world would be dramatically different for less enjoyable reasons.

  #

  She opted to not try to play the part of the stereotypical seductress and instead put on something as if she were meeting someone for a date. She put the candles out a solid hour before he was set to arrive to get rid of any residual wax or wick smell that would give away how hard she tried to get her apartment smelling this way. She also put on some jazz album so by the time he arrived, it was well into the middle of the vinyl and didn’t seem like she’d been playing it just for him.

  She was a mess, she knew. And kind of a dork. But she poured two glasses of red wine and set them out just as the clock struck eight p.m. and she heard a knock on the door.

  “That was prompt,” she said, opening to his smirking face.

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  He stepped in. She closed the door behind him. She walked over and handed him one of the glasses of wine and they gave a light cheers, the rims of their respective glasses just barely grazing each other in a light kiss of a clink. They both took deep sips and pulled back together. The wine moved through her throat and down to her stomach in a warm wave, the bitter taste of the dark, dry red making a home on her taste buds.

  He stared at her with the eyes of a predator and she shivered. He noticed, and smirked deeper, darker. He set his wine down and she followed suit. He moved towards her closely until there were inches—maybe less—between them. His lips found their familiar home on hers and her hands wrapped around to link behind his neck, scratching at his scalp and already earning moans.

  He gently walked her back, this time towards her couch. He dipped her down and she lowered herself without issue, feeling the cushions to her back in strong contrast to the solid body hovering over her front. He braced himself with his hands on either side of her head and lowered himself to kiss her. She wrapped her legs around his waist, hiking her skirt up to give herself better access to his hips. He pressed down into her and she felt everything she’d been searching for, the hint of what awaited beneath the zipper of his pants.