Chapter 24 Who Said Business And Pleasure Don’t Mix?
WHO SAID BUSINESS AND PLEASURE DON’T MIX?
STATEN
“We’ve been at this for houuursss,” Knox complains, really making a show of planting his face into my bedspread like subject-verb agreement and pronoun usage is a death sentence.
I know I’m prepared for the final exam—I could answer half of these questions in my sleep—but getting Knox to a place where he feels confident taking the test is way more difficult than memorizing Hardwin’s bloated lesson plans.
I deadpan, “You’ve only gotten five questions right.”
His head perks up like he’s a cat hearing a tin can being peeled back. “That’s good, right?”
I know it’s my sacred duty to ply him with reassurance, but I have to be realistic. “Out of twenty-five questions.”
“Oh.”
I don’t particularly love petting his ego when I know he has enough testosterone to air out a room, but I don’t want to dampen his spirits either—a balancing act that I have yet to conquer.
Knox rolls onto his back, starfishing, his eyes lasered on the dusty ceiling that hasn’t had a good sweep in ages. “I’m never going to remember this many things,” he says, his tone notched with defeat, as if he’s already decided that he’ll tank the entire thing.
I hate seeing him so hard on himself. Hardwin’s tests aren’t for the faint of heart. The concepts are difficult and extensive, the wording is convoluted, and I have a sneaking suspicion that the bitter, old man doesn’t want to see any of his students succeed.
My brain—which has been half-submerged in the linework of literary analysis—logs back into the present, my senses yanked out of a murky lake like a fish bobbing on a line.
I grab his hand (which, yes, has become second nature for me), and try to mollify his worries with a palm squeeze.
Sympathy is an adverse reaction—the downfall of being exposed to the secondhand high of potent self-doubt.
“Hey, no. Don’t say that. We’re not setting ourselves up for failure today, okay?”
“What if I just prove my dad right?” Knox asks, his voice charred with a darkness that I’ve never been privy to. Even the silence expands to accommodate for the heft of the question.
No longer does Mr. Hockey sit before me—on a campaign to crush his father’s expectations—but a lesser man takes his place, one who still conflates his self-worth with Daddy’s elusive praise.
“You won’t,” I growl, the two syllables fanged. “Remember what I said earlier in the quad? You’re capable of whatever you put your mind to. You just…you have to believe it.”
Knox doesn’t bother debating me, which is uncharacteristic of him.
Mr. Fuckface Mulligan is so obsessed with his son’s star quality that he’s made it his life’s goal to dim Knox’s light so he, in all his unimpressive mundaneness, can steal a taste of what it means to be extraordinary. He wasn’t born with it, obviously.
Well, newsflash, buddy, Knox might want to keep the peace between you two, but he’s got a guard dog with the bullshit tolerance of a kindergarten teacher pre-coffee at seven in the morning.
From the few months I’ve known Knox, it’s clear that he doesn’t fall into the conventional learning styles. He zonks out when I lecture him, visual is more promising but less time-effective, and reading slash writing is a big no-no. I have to switch up my teaching technique.
Knox plays a sport—a hard one, at that—which means he’s doing a lot of hands-on learning when it comes to strategy. Maybe he’s a kinesthetic learner. Or maybe he just needs a little more incentive than a big, red A on a flimsy piece of paper.
“Alright, here’s what we’re going to do: I’m upping the stakes,” I decide, thumbing through the Rolodex in my head for a quick solution.
Knox’s hand falls from mine, and he ticks his head. “What do you mean?”
While I scramble for something to crack the algorithm, I land on quite possibly the most humiliating and discredited technique of them all, and an anxious heat works into the corners of my body—two criteria away from probably being an occupational hazard.
My tongue is the consistency of papier-maché. “For every answer you get right, I’ll take a piece of clothing off.”
Is this a good deal on my part? Maybe not, seeing as I only have socks to spare for two rounds. Though, judging by the immediate intrigue sparkling in his eyes, I think my decision is more than justified.
Plus, I haven’t stopped thinking about the first time we had sex.
It wasn’t at all how I imagined losing my virginity—it was better.
No gaudy rose petals or overly expensive champagne bottles or swanky sex playlist to add to the first-time jitters.
It wasn’t contrived in any way. The only thing I was worried about was fitting Knox’s Pringle can of a dick inside of me.
He laid down a safety net, and now I need to return the favor.
“Fuck,” he moans, drinking my ensemble in—doing the math in his head of how many questions he has to get right until I’m straddling him in my birthday suit.
Six questions. He only has to get six right.
The tension suddenly turns flammable, and my nipples pebble against the inside of my bra despite the steady sixty-eight degrees of the house. He’s about to flatten every boundary with enthusiasm, and I have a feeling his carnivorous hunger won’t ebb until he’s making a meal out of me.
I clear my throat, trying to ignore the way my pussy clenches around a phantom fullness. I’m no better than him. If I wasn’t so determined to make this man a straight-A student, I’d strip all my clothes off right here, right now.
“What does the term ‘ekphrasis’ refer to?”
Knox doesn’t even have to think about it.
“It’s a literary device used to help a reader visualize a work of art in great detail.”
That’s right. How did he get that so quickly?
My thoughts glitch a full frame as my jaw practically dislodges in shock. I’m sweating like we’re already in the height of summer, my vision overexposed thanks to the focus group of hormones that all wager against my imminent undoing.
“You—” My voice collapses into a splutter.
“One sock off. Now.”
There’s a cockiness about Knox I can’t fault. He might claim plausible deniability, but I know secretly, deep down, he just needed a little motivation to push him over the edge. I’ve severely underestimated the monster that I’ve just freed.
I begin to slip off my sock, my nerves auditioning for a starring role. “How did you—”
“Oh, Ace. I can do a lot when I have the right incentive,” he drawls, completely bereft of his preliminary hesitation and now the new proprietor to an endless amount of panty-wetting hubris.
Knox Mulligan is kneeling at the altar of my destruction, and I have no qualms about it. If this is the most effective way he learns, then so be it.
Despite the confiscation of my sock, it feels like my skin is crawling with fire, the sticky lust inside of me fusing to my bones. “You need to get five more questions right.”
His gaze is branding, working double time to mentally account for the terrain of skin he has to familiarize himself with when he inevitably wins his prize. His own pathological need to have me is—well, it’s contagious. Perhaps frightening if I wasn’t trapped in my own throes of pleasure.
“Good, because I’m not going to be able to focus much longer with you looking like the sexiest woman on the fucking planet.”
Sexiest? That seems like a bit of a stretch, but the vote of confidence is nice.
“What is the central theme of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’?”
Knox errs on the side of caution before answering.
Really considers the logistics of the question so he doesn’t forfeit his turn.
His face is scrunched in concentration as he slides the cotton of my footwear between the pads of his fingers.
At the last minute, I foolishly think he’s about to concede before a textbook-rehearsed response crash-lands between us.
“One of the central themes is how the narrator’s guilt and further disillusionment lead to his ultimate downfall.
Through the lens of subjectivity, the narrator struggles with paranoia and ends up denying his own sanity.
” His words darken, and the complacency hidden in their syllables has my heartbeat thrumming like an electric guitar riff.
When I slide off his next well-earned trophy, the tremble in my legs dictates a ramp-up in my anticipation—tingles of the non-garden-variety kind.
Lubricious thoughts permeate my mind like a bad leak in mid-rainy season.
There go my only buffers. Now any question that Knox gets right will have me teetering on half-nudity.
I have to give him something harder. Not just because I want to test him, but because there’s something satisfying about seeing the lengths he’ll go to have me naked and squirming underneath him.
God, I wish I could just take it all off now.
Skip the schoolgirl fantasy foreplay. I want to overdose on him.
I want his tongue licking at the corners of my mouth; I want his fingers plugging my embarrassingly wet pussy; I want him swallowing my moans.
It’s no surprise that he’s already hard—he was from the second I proposed this alternative teaching method.
His erection looks particularly painful tonight, contained by the unbreathable denim of his jeans. Sometimes I forget how naturally huge he is: a mean, hulking appendage fattened with an insane amount of blood. My hunger begets yet another inquiry.
“What does the green light in The Great Gatsby symbolize?”
Knox is so close to me that his cologne and body heat are smudging my sensibility. My self-control is a goddamn sham, and I have to remind myself to cling to my overt motive before it reaches a vanishing point in the barren stretch of my conscience.
The ulterior motive is much more tantalizing.
He’s already divesting me of my long-sleeve top in one fell swoop, all while reciting another answer that fuels our forbidden affair, the press of his hard cock against my belly nearly making me whine.