The Temptation: A Professor Student Romance (Forbidden First Times Book 6)

by Sofia T Summers

  “Oh, fuck,” I muttered through clenched teeth. “Baby, you feel so fucking good!”

  Eden pushed her ass against me, humping my cock and taking every inch like a champ. The sweet release felt so good, better than anything else, even better than usual – I had been so stressed that my lust had been building all day and I hadn’t even realized it. Coming in Eden’s sweet body brought me crashing back down to earth, brought me right back to the real world once again.

  With my breathing hard and ragged, I pulled out and yanked up my boxers and pants. Eden was shaking as she reached for clothes and began to dress with fumbling hands.

  “Will,” Eden said softly as she turned to me. “What was that?”

  I didn’t reply, only made for the door. Coming over like this had been incredibly risky – we’d fucked in the foyer of her apartment, for god’s sake! – and now, I was terrifically frightened that her roommate would come home and see us flushed and sweaty and smell the musky sex scent that hung in the air like perfume.

  “Will, wait,” Eden said. She reached for my arm but she missed and I didn’t step closer. “I want – I need – to talk to you,” she pleaded. “Please, don’t go.”

  When I stepped into the fading sunshine, it was hard to believe that I had only been inside for a few minutes. The intense quickie with Eden had cleared my mind ... and now, I was exhausted.

  I was in also in way over my head, with no clue or sign as to how I was going to swim to the surface and regain control over my life.

  27

  Eden – Tuesday

  I was now, officially, more confused that I had ever been in my life. I wasn’t sure what had happened the day before – after Will had left, despite my pleas to talk, I had actually pinched myself to make sure that I hadn’t dreamt up the entire encounter.

  No, it had been very, very real. My thighs were wet and sticky and warm from my juices and the friction of our bodies rubbing together. I was still heaving and shaking from the intense orgasm that I’d had – more powerful than any other orgasm had ever been. Will had come deep inside of me, and my neck was sore from where he’d bitten me.

  I should have been happy. Will had proved that he still wanted me ... or at least, still wanted my body.

  But as things between us were getting physically hotter, they were also getting harder to read and understand. I didn’t get it – back at the brewpub that day, I had really gotten the sense that I was getting to know Will, the real Will, not the cheerfully cold professor who the students of Oakbrook lusted after.

  And ever since then, things had been so much more complicated. Maybe it was naïve of me to think so, but I didn’t think it was because of the hot, intense sexual encounters that we had been illicitly sharing.

  It had to be something else, something deeper. Something that was holding Will back from telling me the truth about his feelings for me and what he really wanted from me and from the future. I wasn’t an expert on relationships, but from everything that I had always read, sex was supposed to make things more intimate, not less so.

  Maybe I was being foolish by thinking that just because we weren’t talking, there wasn’t anything between us. Either way, it was driving me crazy and I knew I had to do something about it soon.

  But what? I couldn’t exactly go to Petra and ask her advice – she would look at me like I had three heads. Or worse, she’d be angry that I’d kept the secret from her for so long. For once in my life, I wished that I was one of those girls with a whole gaggle of friends – a big group of girls who could give me advice on my hair and tell me how to lose weight and what they thought when Will looked at me a certain way or ignored my request to talk. Because my mom was a single mom, I’d always been wary of talking to her about my personal life ... not that I’d ever had much of one. Growing up, we’d never really talked about sex or anything like that. She’d bought me a book when I was eleven that talked about how women got pregnant, and that was about it.

  The last thing I could do was call her up and say, hey mom! I’m dating a professor!

  I put my head in my hands and sighed. No matter how many times I thought about it, no matter how many times I circled around my options, none of them seemed like a viable solution. And if Will kept refusing to talk to me except for what he wanted sex, how would I deal with that?

  It wasn’t like I could just show up at his house again and demand to be let inside and sit on his couch and tell him the truth: that I was falling in love with him, and that I wanted to be with him for real, not in secret. When I thought of the first time I’d gone over there, I wanted to die with shame. He’d practically yanked me off my feet to hustle me inside, and I’d thought at the time that it had just been because seeing me made him so happy that he had to have me, right then.

  It was a strange thing – part of me was beginning to wonder if Will wasn’t deeply uncomfortable with his own emotions. It was true that he clearly had spent years building up a wall between himself and the rest of the world, but I had always just thought that was an illusion, the kind of thing he maintained because he was so worried about his reputation as a professor.

  Now, I was starting to think otherwise. Worst of all – and I knew this was a terrible reaction to have – it just made me want him even more. It made me want to get to know him and his tender side, to cradle and nurture that and watch him get more extroverted and warmer with love. I’d always heard that it was impossible to change people. But love itself was impossible.

  If love couldn’t fix the problems of the world, what use was it?

  I bit my lip and sighed. As much as I hated to admit it, I wasn’t thinking about the problems of the world and whether or not love could fix them.

  I was only thinking of me, and Will, and the fact that the two of us seemed to be on a crazy, wild rollercoaster together.

  It was Tuesday morning, and I had been lying in bed for two hours – when I’d woken up, it had still been dark outside. Now, the sun was struggling mightily to peek through a heavy layer of grey clouds. The weather had been getting warmer over the last few weeks, just another sign that spring was coming faster than I ever could have imagined, but I could tell from peering out my window that today was going to be gusty and cold and grey.

  I shivered, pulling my duvet higher until just the tip of my nose and my eyes were exposed from the blankets. I was so tired that my head ached, but it wasn’t like I could even try to go back to sleep. Will’s class started soon, and I had to get my butt to campus if only to turn in a paper.

  I got up and started putzing around my room as I got dressed, hunting for the books I’d need. I dawdled and delayed, even spending ten minutes in the bathroom trying to tuck my hair into the perfect messy knot.

  “Morning,” Petra called from the kitchen as I emerged, fully dressed and carrying my bag.

  “Morning,” I called back. Things had been weird between us ever since that day when I’d burst into tears. I hadn’t been spending much time in the living room, and neither had Petra.

  Maybe after the semester was over, things between us would reach some semblance of normalcy once again.

  “You doing okay this morning? Want coffee?” Petra asked.

  I nodded. “I just have to turn in a paper,” I told her. “And then, I don’t know. I might just come home.”

  Petra’s brows knitted together with worry and she nodded. “Okay,” she said. “Well, have a good one.”

  Ouch, I thought. Have I really been shutting her out for so long that she’s stopped asking?

  My heart sank as I realized that was true. That realization, combined with the crappy weather outside, put me in a rotten mood and by the time I got to campus I was ready to sit down and say, screw it. I stomped up the stairs in the Liberal Arts building until I got to Will’s classroom, where I was the last one inside.

  He didn’t even look at me as I walked inside and I felt a powerful rush of hurt, unlike anything I had ever felt before.

  This was why people
always said it was a bad idea to get involved with someone who you worked with. I knew it, and yet I’d gone and done it anyway.

  Will – Professor Marks – started the lecture discussion and I stared at the blackboard, the spot right above his head, in a concentrated effort not to look at his face. I felt myself slipping into a deep, cold fog – a fog that even the works of Virginia Woolf couldn’t begin to penetrate – and basically counted the seconds left on the clock until class was over.

  A seminar had never gone more slowly than it went for me that day. My ass ached from the hard wooden chair as if I’d been planted there for hours, and my head hurt from the bright yellow florescent lights beating down on my head. I almost felt like I had a hangover, which was impossible as I hadn’t had anything to drink the night before.

  I glanced up at the chalkboard just in time to see Will’s eyes flicker over me. A bolt of hot angst and love went shooting through me like a Cupid’s arrow, and I quickly glanced out the window, my heart racing as if he’d just pulled me into his arms for a steamy kiss.

  Am I hungover on lust, I pondered as I nibbled my lower lip and stared out at the quad. A hint of green was beginning to show under the dead brown winter grass, and I crossed my legs in my chair and thought about spring.

  Spring, which of course, would inevitably lead to summer.

  Where would I be, then?

  I felt a rude poke in my side and I yelped, then flushed crimson and turned to the side. Another student was staring at me with concern on her eyes. If Will had heard my squawk of surprise, he thankfully ignored it.

  “What?” I hissed.

  The student was the same one who had brazenly flirted with Will that day, in front of me, and I had disliked her ever since. But now that I saw her, I recognized her as someone who I’d shared more than a few classes with over the years at Oakbrook. She had a round face with even rounder blue eyes and wispy blonde hair – her name was Katie or Kelly or something like that.

  “I just wanted to make sure you were okay,” she whispered, leaning close so no one else would hear. “You look like you’re about to be sick.”

  I swallowed hard and nodded. “Just my period,” I whispered back.

  At least women always have that excuse, I thought, even though I hated the fact that I’d used it so much over the last few weeks.

  Katie or Kelly discreetly passed me a tampon and I stared down at it for a second before nodding at her in thanks. A slight pang of guilt hit me – what if all this time, we could have been friends?

  If we’d been friends, I wouldn’t have cared that she tried to flirt with Will.

  Was this relationship ruining more than just my heart?

  The end of class couldn’t come fast enough. Will didn’t make another effort to look at me, and I slunk out of the classroom and hunched my shoulders around my ears as I stalked across the muddy grass to my tech seminar. When the professor saw me, he raised an eyebrow and my heart sank.

  “Ms. Cooper,” he said. “Just when I never thought that I’d be seeing you again.”

  28

  Will – Friday

  The week was rapidly turning into a miserable one. I hadn’t seen Eden since Tuesday – she’d skipped yesterday’s seminar. Normally, I’d be upset and frustrated that a student would choose to ditch so late in the semester, when I was offering valuable information about the final exam and how their senior paper should be crafted, but it was secretly a relief. Seeing her in class had been torturous – I had barely been able to keep my mind on the subject matter with her lovely curves and wounded expression.

  I knew she was hurting, and I knew I was the cause. If I hadn’t acted like such a forceful asshole that day, going over to her apartment and fucking her and then leaving like a cad, maybe things would be better between us now.

  I kept trying to tell myself that it was for the best. Yes, it hurt, but what else could I have done? Risked my job?

  Back in January, losing my precious tenure-track position would have seemed as horrible as being damned to Malebolge, the eighth ring of Dante’s Hell, but now I could barely make myself care.

  In fact, I was even thinking of taking a sabbatical ... which was practically unheard of for a professor who hadn’t actually made tenure yet. I thought about taking a semester or two off in a distant place, a huge city, where I could lose myself in the anonymity of it. I even thought about what I’d do there – but no matter how long I stared at Kayak and scanned the reviews on TripAdvisor, I just couldn’t make myself book a trip.

  It was like I needed to be close to Eden, or I would die.

  Dramatic, I know – almost like something a teenager would say. But the truth was, Eden had stirred so many deep feelings in me, feelings closer to love than I ever thought I would reach. I’d grown up with cold, distant parents who hadn’t exactly been a good model of romantic love.

  I’d always assumed that my life would be the same. Eden had come into it, warm and wanton, and knocked me off balance. Around her, I was like a gyroscope missing an axis. I hated and loved it at the same time, and that hate only stemmed from not being able to take full advantage of my feelings for her, the way I wanted to so very badly.

  Not to mention, I knew exactly why Eden had skipped my class. It wasn’t the usual nebulous heartsickness that she had clearly been wrestling with since the day when she and I had first kissed.

  It was all because of me – and because of the texts I’d sent to her after Gina Grant had come to my office, all suspicious and demanding. I’d told Eden that we had to lie low for a while. She’d responded that she understood.

  I kept waiting for something from her, which was stupid. At this point, radio silence was far safer. I kept thinking back to those damning emails we’d exchanged when I’d been out sick and wondering if the dean – or anyone else, say someone nosy and chummy with Gina in the IT department – would “mysteriously” stumble upon them.

  Every morning that week, I’d woken up and chugged a solid half bottle of Maalox before heading to Oakbrook to teach. Things proceeded mostly as normal.

  Until that morning.

  I had just finished grading papers when I went out into the lounge to refill my coffee mug. To my surprise, Dean Schell was standing there.

  He wasn’t smiling.

  “Hello,” he said, nodding curtly at me. We’d always had a decent relationship – as cold a personality as I cultivated, it was nothing on Dean Schell, but I’d always figured that we had done it for similar reasons and thusly were bound to get along.

  My stomach churned.

  “Hello,” I replied.

  “Will, can I have a moment?”

  From the tone of his voice, I knew he was asking merely as a courtesy.

  “Of course,” I said. “What seems to be the matter?”

  The dean coughed and turned away. “Please, Will, come with me.”

  Feeling more and more like a chastened student by the second, I followed behind.

  The walk to Dean Schell’s office was like marching to an execution chamber – what kind of horrors awaited me there? I tried to tell myself that it was nothing: he probably just wanted me to lead some kind of committee, or organize an event, or even go to that stupid fucking conference with Gina and represent Oakbrook.

  When we got to his office, Dean Schell ushered me inside and closed the door behind him.

  Gina Grant was waiting inside, perched on the edge of her chair like a nervous debutante.

  Oh, fuck.

  I stared at her in shock but she refused to look at me, keeping her little upturned nose in the air.

  What a bitch, I thought. Clearing my throat, I made a point of not sitting down, as if I hoped to keep this sure-to-be unpleasant meeting as brief as possible.

  “Will, please sit,” Dean Schell said.

  Reluctantly, I lowered myself into the squashy leather armchair next to Gina.

  “Will,” Dean Schell began, sitting down in the chair behind his desk and grunting slightly.
“I’ve heard serious allegations of an inappropriate relationship between you and an undergraduate. If you have anything to tell me, I’d advise you to do it now.”

  “What have you heard?” I shot back.

  “I’d rather hear it from you,” Dean Schell replied, and my heart sank.

  Gina threw me a triumphant look and just like that, I knew she’d done it – somehow, found out about Eden and myself and then gone to the dean, all because she was so fucking jealous and bitter.

  “No,” I said. I shook my head. “Nothing has happened.”

  The dean narrowed his eyes, but didn’t reply. My mind was reeling around inside my head and my stomach was still doing anxious flips, but I knew I had to deny everything or risk losing my job and everything that I’d worked for.

  And Gina was behind all of this – not Eden. A sudden realization hit me: that Eden never would have done something like this. She clearly loved me too much to make my life a living hell, even if it would mean getting revenge for breaking things off between us.

  She loved me, and she would want me to be happy and secure no matter what.

  The epiphany nearly made me sick to my stomach. How could I have been so wrong, so evil, to think that Eden would even contemplate telling someone about what had happened between us?

  Fuck, she’d been even more careful than I had.

  I loved her – more than I had ever thought possible – and now, I had to do whatever I could to make this up to her. I loved her goodness, her sexy curves.

  Loved her heart and her sweet brown eyes and the way she wanted nothing more than to be loved in return.

  She was able to penetrate my icy exterior with her kindness, with her adorable self – a feat that literally other no woman would ever be able to accomplish in the span of my lifetime.