Chapter 49
Forty-Nine
ADDIE
Ihadn’t had Sunday night jitters quite like this for…
Well, I hadn’t had them for years. I was good at my job.
I was great at my job. The administrative staff had faith in me, and I knew I had a solid plan for the year.
I was excited about the lectures I had planned for the semester, and I knew that my tutorials had the potential to create some provocative discussions.
But I couldn’t calm my nerves, which meant I also couldn’t sleep.
So, I was watching Hands to Myself as quietly as possible at nearly midnight, waiting for sleep to come and take me.
“How do they keep finding people this horny?” Eli’s sleep-rough voice cut through the room, both shocking and soothing me.
“Did I wake you?” I asked instead of answering his question. Mostly because I had no answer to it. I also did not know how they consistently found people who just could not keep their hands (and mouths) to themselves.
“No, I woke up thirsty so came to get a drink,” he replied as he walked into the kitchen and grabbed a glass of water.
I heard him rinse the glass and put it back in the cupboard before he leaned against the entrance of the kitchen.
I looked at him and immediately wished I hadn’t.
His hair was messy, his eyes soft, and his chest bare.
He was only wearing boxers, and his legs were crossed at the ankle, which made them look delectable.
“Can’t sleep?” he asked, voice still low.
“I am that lovely combo of anxious and nervous, which is adding up to nausea. So, no, I can’t sleep.”
He nodded as he walked across to me, holding out his hand.
“Come on, you’re not going to slowly pass out on the sofa and wreck your spine before your first day.”
“And what are you proposing?” I asked, my eyes moving from his extended hand to his crotch and back again.
“I’m not proposing that. At least not tonight. Let’s go lie down, and you can ask random questions until you fall asleep.”
I turned off the TV and slipped my hand into his. His grip on me made me feel calmer as I let him pull me up and lead me towards his bedroom.
“I’ll be back in a second,” he said as he dropped my hand and disappeared into my room, returning thirty seconds later with my pillow.
I watched him walk over to his bed and switch one of the pillows out for mine.
The low light from the lamp on his bedside table cast him a golden glow, creating shadows that made him look the kind of beautiful I didn’t think I could find the words for.
I was still rooted to the spot where he left me when he climbed into the bed and settled into his fortress of pillows.
The sound of him slapping a hand on the mattress brought me back to the room.
“Are you coming?” he asked, his voice even lower than it had been in the living room.
I shuffled across the room and climbed into the bed.
As I pulled the duvet over me and settled, I realised that the only other time Eli and I had shared a bed was in the aftermath of his panic attack.
We had been very good at not falling asleep in each other’s bed post sex.
It felt too intimate to do that. But with Eli’s scent enveloping me and his body heat warming me up, I realised that lying in bed next to him under the guise of making me feel better was more intimate than falling asleep next to him as I came down from an orgasm high.
It was something a partner would do. And if there was one thing Eli and I could never be, it was that.
I pushed away the part of me that was increasingly yearning for that and the memory of Becky asking if I wanted a confidant and someone to share my days with, and tried to find a question dumb enough to distract me completely.
“What is your favourite mythical creature?”
Eli’s hair belonged threaded through my fingers. The strands were soft, and it was the perfect length for me to grip onto.
I always wondered if he was aware that he made a lot of noise whenever my hands were in his hair. Gentle hums or gasps. The most soul-destroying whimpers and pretty little whines of please, please, please.
My favourite, though, were the guttural moans that made him stop what he was doing. Even though they caused the loss of the perfect pressure and suction of his mouth against me, leaving me doing the whimpering.
“Sorry,” he said as he pressed an open-mouth kiss on my inner thigh, so close to where I wanted him, but not close enough. “Can you not do what you were doing? It’s distracting.”
“Oh, you mean this?” I scratched along his scalp and then gently tugged on his hair the way I knew he liked. His eyes fluttered closed, his hips pressed down against the mattress, and he bit down on the skin of my inner thigh gently.
“Yeah, that,” he said as he kissed the spot he just marked.
I loosened my grip on his hair, hoping that would get him back on track. Instead, he kept working the skin over while he slowly slipped a finger inside me and fucked me leisurely with it. It was good.
It was almost perfect. But it wasn’t enough.
And Eli knew it.
I could feel him smiling against my thigh as his tongue did one final sweep over his latest mark while I tried to fuck down on his finger faster.
I pulled on his hair. He gasped and repaid me with a nip on his mark.
“I’m not begging, Elijah,” I said huskily. Although this was the closest he had ever got me to doing so.
“Fuck,” Eli said against my leg before finally returning to my clit.
“Yes…right there…don’t move…”
Eli pressed an arm over my lower stomach as his finger started moving faster, and he focused the point of his tongue just so. My hands flexed in his hair, and I pulled it one more time, my body curling up, as the waves of my orgasm crashed over me.
I had no idea how long I rode that wave for, but when I came back to myself, Eli was looking at me smugly, his arm still pinning my hips down.
“Good morning to you, too,” I said as I slumped back against my pillow.
“It is a good morning,” he said before he pressed one more kiss to the mark he made and crawled back over to his side of the bed. As he settled next to me, he turned on his bedside lamp, and I noticed a wet patch on his boxers.
“Did you?” I half asked as I reached out and rested my hand over the damp fabric, feeling his softening cock through it.
“I did, yes. You’re exceptionally sexy when you come on my face.” He took a deep breath. “Hard pivot, how are you feeling about today?”
I snorted, not removing my hand, and noticing that he wasn’t getting softer anymore. No, he was getting hard again.
“I still feel like I’m going to be sick. It’s like that first day of school, but magnified because I am the teacher, and so there is no one to quickly befriend because our surnames start with the same letter. I am for sure going to end up eating my lunch in the toilet.”
“You know Becky, so you’re not going to be totally alone. I’m sure she would eat with you if you asked her nicely,” he teased as his hips pressed up into my touch.
“But she has friends on the staff. She might not want to hang around with her kid sister, who has no friends.”
Eli hummed. “I’m pretty sure you’re one of her favourite people, so I don’t think you have anything to worry about there. Also, I think you could just eat lunch in your office. There is no reason to go lock yourself in a cubicle.”
I rolled my eyes and ran my thumb along the bump of his piercing.
“Okay, fine, lunch might not be a problem. My other fear is that I am convinced I’ve forgotten how to do my job.
I’ve had longer off than I usually do, so my rhythm might be off.
Plus, I was teaching in French. What if I’m not good at this job when I have to do it in English?
I don’t have the advantage of having an accent that endears people to me here. It’s the same as everyone else’s!”
Eli laughed softly, and I swiped my thumb over his head through the damp cotton, causing that laugh to turn into a groan.
He put his hand over mine, not to remove it, just to stop me from teasing him.
“Look, I am very aware that I have never seen you do your job, but I do know that Becky backed you and the powers that be listened to her. She knew you would be able to do this job. You are good at teaching Shakespeare. You were teaching me new things all the time, and there is no way you haven’t got better at it in fourteen years with more knowledge and actual teaching experience under your belt.
I highly doubt that you’ve forgotten how to do it, and the students will find you engaging no matter what. ”
“But what if they don’t! What if I become one of those teachers they all talk about because my lectures are shit and boring?”
“You could never be boring, Ads,” he replied quietly.
It had been a while since I had someone to reassure me in the moment when it felt like everything was going to shit, and I was doubting myself.
Someone to catch you when you feel like you’re falling apart.
I cleared my throat and blinked away the tears threatening to spill over.
“What do you have on today?” he asked as he removed his hand from mine. I started teasing his barbell from side to side while I thought about the colour-coded schedule I had committed to memory for the semester.
“Two lectures and a seminar. Which are all introductory, all about Shakespeare, and all very much in my wheelhouse. But I had a vision while I was watching Hands last night that I was mid-lecture, and I noticed people starting to snicker, and when I looked down, my boob was just hanging out. What if it was a premonition?”
“Which boob?”
I laughed. “Seriously?” Eli nodded. “The funner one.”
“Do you need to worst-case scenario this?”
“What?”
“I find it helps sometimes when I am very stressed. Like the morning of the menu tasting when I was doing yoga and supposed to be focusing on the present, what I was actually doing was trying not to notice how your back muscles move when you’re in downward dog and thinking about the fact that I might give you severe food poisoning with a bit of chicken and have to nurse you back to health. So, let’s worst-case scenario this.”
I tried not to get stuck on the idea of Eli looking after me if I were sick.
Or the fact that when he was doing yoga, he was thinking about me.
“Okay, let’s do that. I’m late to my first lecture, and then I can’t get my slides up for my presentation. The students lose all respect for me,” I started.
“Rumour spreads quickly that you are terrible at timekeeping and so old that you don’t know how technology works. In your next lecture, you get continually heckled and don’t finish a single sentence. For an hour,” Eli continued.
“I’m so flustered that I end up being late to the seminar taking place in my own office, and when I get there, somehow all the students are already inside and they are staring at me—”
“Because your boob fell out while you were rushing to get back to your office,” Eli cut in.
“Yes! Exactly, but I’m so hot from the rushing that I don’t notice, so I go about my business and settle in to teach them. I think they are just laughing at me because of the rumours, but it’s worse than that. There’s a boob out!”
“You tuck it away and try to get on with the seminar, but it doesn’t work. You fumble through the hour and rush them out of the office the moment you can.”
“Just as I’m getting ready to call it a day, the police turn up because I’m being done for indecent exposure. And then I end up in prison, and my family never speaks to me again.”
He was quiet. Then he huffed out a breath. “Fuck, that took a turn. I’d still visit you in prison, though.”
“You’re too kind.” I tried to joke, but it failed because he would visit me in prison and wasn’t that just the nicest thing anyone had ever said to me?
“Don’t you feel better now?”
I thought about it for a moment. There were still some nerves, but honestly, they were to be expected. It was a new job in a new country. I mean, this city was home, but it wasn’t the environment I learned to teach in. If I wasn’t nervous, I would be worried.
“I no longer feel like I’m going to crash and burn,” I said. Which was the truth.
Eli smiled brightly. “Told you it would help.”
It was in that moment, as I looked at a sleep-mussed, pleasure-happy Eli staring at me through half-lidded eyes that shone with pride, that I finally accepted that I was fucked.
I had broken the golden rule.
The only rule I had never broken.
I had never even come close before.
But with this man, I hadn’t even realised I was breaking it until suddenly I knew.
I was in love with him.
And it was awful knowing that he now had the power to break me, and he probably didn’t even know it because he was sticking to the rules just fine.
Knowing that I had broken one rule, I decided breaking another wouldn’t do me any harm.
“You know what else might help keep me distracted?” I asked as I ran my fingers around the head of his cock.
“Enlighten me,” he answered, his head tipping back as I squeezed his length before running my fingers along his waistband. He nodded almost imperceptibly.
“It might be better if I showed you,” I answered, pulling his boxers down. I settled the waistband under his balls and teased the head.
“By all means, go ahead,” Eli half moaned as I moved to straddle his thighs. I took him in my hand and locked eyes with him as I let a dribble of spit land on his head before I started stroking him.
“Ads, can you do me a favour?” I hummed an affirmative as I ran my thumb across his silverware. “Make it rough.”
“My pleasure.”