Chapter Fifteen Bram #2
“Stop doubting yourself,” I advise. “You know these dinguses didn’t do what you asked, and if they had real reasons why they couldn’t do the assignment, then they would have come to you.
They sent in this shit because they couldn’t be bothered to try harder, and you can’t reward that attitude.
Plus, it’s not fair to the students who at least gestured to the bare minimum. ”
She taps on the desk next to her keyboard with her fingers, lightly, indecisively. “My gut says that this is find out time. But my gut always assumes the worst—that everyone has an ulterior motive. Shouldn’t I make an effort at assuming the best of human nature?”
“In a class that satisfies a gen ed requirement? Maddie.”
A deep inhale that lifts her shoulders. And then a few taps and two clicks. The assignments are marked with one point each.
“Good,” I murmur approvingly, and her next breath catches like a flag snapping in the wind.
Pleasure rolls through me, something not entirely good, not entirely healthy, and I force myself to straighten up and step back. I’m too close, I want to be closer, and . . .
Maddie turns and, with her eyes locked on mine, finds my hips with her hands.
I freeze, every nerve ending flashing with contradictory signals.
My body wants more and a lot more, but my brain knows I should stop this, pull away, make space, and before I can do anything, react in any measure except horny turmoil, Maddie leans closer and presses her open mouth to my dick.
I can feel the shape of her lips through the thin fabric of my joggers; I can feel her breath.
I was already half hard, but now having this brilliant, newly ruthless little thing with her hands on me, with her clever lips tracing over my shaft and head, I’ve got blood pumping to my groin so fast that syncope is a real concern.
She makes a satisfied purr as my cock kicks to life underneath her kisses, and that purr could be taxonomically categorized as carnivorous because it’s eating me alive, Jesus fucking Christ, and her hands curl even harder around my hips, like she is a predatory animal in truth, and I’ve just been pounced on.
I want to let her pounce. I want to let her sharpen her claws on me, nip at me, and then I want to have her curl up in my arms when she’s done, exhausted but happy.
I want to set her loose on the world and then have her sit on my lap while she licks the blood from her metaphorical paws.
But—fuck. No. She’s only got her mouth on me because she’s sitting in my chair in my office. Because she lives here, because she’s young and broke and watching my kids.
I stagger back, and Maddie’s hands are still in the air, still holding invisible hips, and her expression should be one of confusion or shock or even rejection, but instead, she’s beaming up at me, like she finds me adorable.
“Bram,” she says.
“Madelyn.” But it comes out too breathless to sound stern, and her cheeks are bunched into high, rosy apples right now. Her eyes are sparkling.
“I know you’re going to have some reason why we shouldn’t—”
“Reasons, plural—”
“—and I think we should just skip over that part and get to the part where we see how much of you can fit in my mouth.”
Fuck my life, I can’t—I need her to understand that I am actually going to pass out if she keeps saying things like this.
No one has ever talked to me with such blunt, filthy honesty, and no one has ever acted like not having me fuck their face would ruin their night, and I’m uniquely ill-equipped to process any of it, because this part of Bram Loe has never been needed or required by anyone.
Not even my ex-wife, who treated sex like she treated eating—necessary and occasionally done with gusto, but usually as only a pragmatic concession to biology.
And oh god, I don’t even want to think it, but I can’t help it, I am a bad fucking person, but having my nanny talk to me like this . . .
No, not my nanny! My childcare provider. What is happening to me???
I pinch the bridge of my nose. “Madelyn, we can’t. It would be inappropriate.”
“I like it when you use your exasperated professor voice on me,” she says in a low hum. “Do it again.”
Oh, I’ll do it again. I’ll do it again right now. I stride over to the glass board I have mounted to the wall, uncap a marker, and start writing. An impressive feat, given that my penis is currently starving my brain of blood.
I finish, cap my marker again, and then face the person responsible for my penile-focused blood flow.
She’s sitting primly in the chair, back straight, looking for all the world like a straight-A student.
Looking like someone who knew even before she graduated college that she was going to be a politician’s wife.
“Pay attention, Ms. Kowalczk, because there is going to be a test later. There are three exceedingly salient reasons why we should not have sex. Well, have sex again. Number one.” I emphatically tap the board with the cap of the marker near the top item. “You live with me.”
Maddie raises her hand and then speaks after I nod at her. “Professor Loe, if I may—isn’t that an excellent reason to have sex?”
“It is not. I don’t want your living here to feel like it’s conditional.
Zero impression of a quid pro quo. Now, number two,” I say, before she can initiate a rebuttal of my point, “you work for me. It’s against the agency’s policy.
It’s also unethical, since I employ you, and would introduce complications for everyone if things go south. ”
She raises her hand again, her posture perfect, her eyes bright.
This shouldn’t be hot. It’s not hot. I’ve never even considered any kind of classroom role-play because classrooms aren’t sexy.
They are made of linoleum and projectors that refuse to work at least once a month and they’re haunted by all the unanswered emails in my inbox, wailing just under the threshold of sound.
But my dick is submitting a memo that it’s a fan of this right now. Me at the board and Maddie with her hand raised. Me standing, her sitting. Me able to see the braless, perky tits move under her shirt as she tries to raise her hand higher.
“Yes, Ms. Kowalczk?”
“Counterargument: no one has to know that you’re screwing your nanny.
” I make a face at her, and she rushes on.
“Not the agency, not anyone who would think it’s prima facie unethical.
Plus, is it that unethical when you didn’t know I’d be your nanny when we met on my birthday? Surely there’s some nuance in there.”
“I’m very glad you brought up your birthday,” I say, and then I tap-tap-tap the glass next to item number three. “Because this is a very important one.” I underline each of the six words I wrote there. “You. Are. Too. Young. For. Me.”
Maddie stands up and takes a few casual steps toward me. I don’t back away—I don’t want to give her the satisfaction—but I can’t control the hot, primal quiver in my muscles as she steps close enough that she has to tilt her head back to peer up at me.
“Counterargument: I’m twenty-six.”
“Counter-counterargument: I’m thirty-five.”
“So you’ve got an upstairs ibuprofen bottle and a downstairs ibuprofen bottle, so what?”
“I’m not sold separately, Madelyn.” I use the dry erase marker as a pointer and point at the ceiling.
Upstairs, where my entire world is either sleeping next to a dog or doing FaceTime karaoke.
“I’m a dad, a pet frog–level dad, and I’m an ex-husband, and I’m also in a deeply unhealthy relationship with my university.
At twenty-six, you should be young and carefree and fucking equally young and carefree people who don’t have goldfish crackers wedged between their couch cushions.
Also, it’s just . . . wrong. I’m nearly a decade older than you. ”
Maddie finds the dry erase marker in my hand. Steals it with a graze of her delicate fingers.
“I,” she starts, uncapping the marker and writing on the board under my last reason, “just got out of the world’s worst engagement, where my fiancé’s aspirations dictated every phase of my future and every mundane aspect of my life, down to the brand of reusable water bottle I carried.
The literal last thing I want is another scenario where my life is forced to fit around someone else’s.
I don’t ever want that again, in fact. So I’m not asking you to go steady; I don’t want to file taxes together.
I just want you to fuck me until I scream. ”
On the board, in the pretty handwriting endemic to popular girls of every generation, Maddie has written just sex, nothing else and now she underlines the nothing else several times.
And then under my second reason, she writes: No one has to know.
And then under my first, she writes: Living together means you can have my pussy for breakfast every morning.
Time seems to slow and stretch, an infinity of shock, of erotic revelation, and I stare at the graceful handwriting, the precisely kerned letters of pussy, and everything is falling away, everything except that word, that image, the memory of her taste.
Everything except the idea of waking up, walking to her room, and treating myself to her sweet cunt before the day begins. Going to campus with my nanny still on my face.
I’ve taken hold of the marker, I’m pulling it away from her as I crowd her up against the glass board. The word pussy is right next to her ear.
“You’re not paying very good attention to the lesson, Ms. Kowalczk.
” I clamp the marker horizontally between my teeth so I can use both hands on her waist to spin her around to face the board.
I put her hands up on either side of it and then take the marker and write it’s a bad idea underneath everything else and then circle it.
She turns her head so that I can see the side of her face—slightly snubbed nose, high cheeks, a mouth that looks even fuller in profile.
“But what if it’s a secret bad idea?” she whispers.
“Our little secret? That you can’t stop fucking your nanny?
That you need to use her to keep your cock warm when the nights get cold? ”
“Jesus Christ,” I breathe, pressing my forehead to her silk hair. “You’re killing me.”
“You know what I think?” she murmurs. “I think for all your talk of behaving, of good manners, Bram Loe is actually very, very bad. And no one knows it but you. And now me.”
I’m shaking my head no against her head.
I’m a good guy now, but there was a time when I wasn’t.
There was a time when I thought breaking the rules was a good thing, the right thing, if they were bullshit rules that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
There was a time when I did dangerous things, when I liked the danger, when danger felt as comfortable to me as repotting a plant or sketching while sitting in front of a mossy rock does now.
When I stopped, I stopped because I was tired, because living my actual life in the daylight started to make more sense than fighting for an abstract future in the dark, and there was a part of me that felt relief at being good again.
I’d been a good kid, a good teen, and it was the detour into malfeasance and vigilantism that had been the aberration, and I was going back to the Real Bram, who’d always wanted to follow the rules to begin with.
But sometimes . . . I wondered. Late at night, or on long drives, or in greenhouse reveries, I wondered if I could really think of myself as inherently good when I’d slipped so easily into being bad.
And right now, I don’t feel inherently good at all.
Right now, I want to have my nanny’s pussy for breakfast every morning.
Fuck it. Why shouldn’t I have this? It won’t hurt anyone, it doesn’t change anything, and don’t I deserve this?
Doesn’t she? I have nothing that’s only for myself, just like Ali pointed out, and Maddie’s owed lots of non-focus-grouped depravity—as much as she wants—and so what if it’s reckless and wrong?
It’ll be sex and nothing else, it’ll be our secret bad idea, and maybe none of it matters, the reasons for doing it and the reasons for not doing it, because I was never going to be able to resist Madelyn Kowalczk anyway.
This has been inevitable since the moment she stole my parking spot.