Chapter Thirty-Nine Bram #2
“And if you’re making the same mistake that you made with Gentry?”
“I can’t be,” she murmurs. “Because I’m not the same person who made that mistake. I might make different ones, but not that one ever again.”
“And what if it ruins your future?”
Her voice is stronger now, threaded with relief. “No one else gets to define ruin for me. Not anymore.”
“Professor Kowalczk, turn around and tell me who loves whom more.”
She takes a second. A long second, and I know that I’ve done something unfathomably stupid, that I’m laying my soul bare for her again, but I want this—this anatomy of us, this diagram of our broken edges, of our rupture, to mean what I think it means.
I want to hope. I want to look into her eyes and feel something vital take root between us.
She does turn, and when she looks up at me, there’s a shine in her viridian eyes. “I don’t know.”
I cup her jaw, gently, and she trembles. “You don’t?” I ask tenderly.
“It can’t be you,” she says thickly. “Because I love you so much that even my ribosomes hurt with it.”*
The confession makes me close my eyes. I’m floating, a spore, a samara off a maple tree, spinning and spinning.*
“You love me.”
“I love you,” she repeats in a whisper. “I love you and it scares the hell out of me.”
She turns again and takes the marker. I open my eyes to see her draw a cell wall around everything—nucleus, chloroplasts, vacuole, Golgi apparatus, and mitochondria.* She writes next to it.
I fucked up. I’m sorry. I love you.
I find her fingers around the marker, wrap my fingers around both, and then write my response.
I love you. There’s nothing to forgive.
“I lied,” she whispers. “About things only being physical between us. It was so much more, and I knew it, but I lied anyway. And I thought your past meant we could have no future, but watching Gentry’s secrets unravel on national television .
. .” A shaky laugh. “Bram, your past is everything I need for my future. I need a partner in crime and I need someone to pull me back when I want to go too far. I need someone who’s charted a path along the edges of morality, and I need someone who found their way back again.
I need someone to give me five different layers of advice, who will be as merciless on my behalf as I am for the things I care about, who will make sure I never stand alone, no matter where I find myself. ”
I drop my lips to her head. Her hair is the glossiest silk. Jasmine is everywhere.
“Forgive me for lying,” she breathes. “Forgive me for clutching a dream I didn’t even want in the end. Forgive me for being so preoccupied with what a just-broken-up woman is supposed to do that I couldn’t even see what I wanted to do.”
A dream I didn’t even want in the end. “You no longer want to run for office?”
A small shake of her head, like she’s being careful of my lips on her hair. “There’s a way to do so much more, behind the scenes. That’s where I’m meant to be. That’s what I’m going to do.”
“Whatever you want,” I murmur, and I mean it. Whatever she wants, whatever she needs. I’ll be behind her, beside her, underneath her when she needs to sit on my lap and hear about how perfect she is.
“Forgive me,” I add now, guiding the marker down to the tray and then finding her waist with my hands.
“Forgive me for breaking our rules. Forgive me for pushing for more when you’d made your lines in the sand clear.
Forgive me my greediness, that I want so much of you, to keep you and care for you, to be the soil and water and sun.
That I love you past all logic even though logic demands I should let you go now, that you should get a chance to build your life without a lonely dad weighing you down. ”
She twists so she can glare up at me. “To be clear, logic can go to hell.”
“It’ll have to,” I murmur, nuzzling her hair again. “I’m too selfish.”
“And if it doesn’t work, well, then we all know you’re the world champion at breaking up. And it will be okay.”
It will be okay. We’ll be okay. And that’s how I know this thing between us can’t be all bad, because in every version of the future, even the ones where we don’t end up together, we will both be okay. Sad, maybe. Lonely for a while, perhaps. But respected and cared for and okay.
Her waist is so warm under my hands, so soft through the expensive material of her clothes. “Is class dismissed, Professor Kowalczk?”
She arches a little so that her breasts push out and her curvy bottom grazes my lap. I let out a wounded hiss at the contact, my trapped and swelling cock trying to surge closer to her.
“Not even a little,” she says, satisfaction dripping from the words.
“Does that mean you have more anatomy to teach me?”
In response, she guides my hands up to the perky handfuls beneath her blouse, and then grinds back against me as I squeeze them. I’m fully hard now, and with the door locked, I don’t waste any time. I slide a hand under her skirt and find her completely naked.
“Such a bad girl,” I grunt, checking to see if she’s wet—she is—and then I start unbuckling.
“Oh god, oh god.” She’s shuddering and yanking up her skirt and trying to arch her back even more, and the minute the head of my cock slips against her opening, she starts begging, pleading, words falling from her lips like a closing argument—you have to, you must, feel how much I need it, if you don’t, I’ll die, I’ll die.
The words break into a moan as I push inside, nerve endings on nerve endings, soft around hard, hot against hot.
I make a noise too, engulfed by silk, by the slick squeeze of her inner walls, buried in a snug, velvet cunt from root to crown.
I’m about to grab her hips to fuck away every last moment we weren’t together when I catch sight of her high heel out of the corner of my vision.
“These bratty little heels,” I growl, and then use her hips to push her to the desk. She stumbles, catches herself on her hands, and then with a saucy look back at me, bends at the waist, knowing that it’s only a skirt that separates me from what I want.
I yank it up impatiently, guide one knee so it’s resting on the desk and her cunt is right there for the taking, and then I fit myself right back into her body like I never left.
“Be a good girl and make yourself come,” I tell her, thrusting into her with deep, demanding strokes.
I keep one hand on her hip and then slide the other to her foot, trace my fingers along the ankle strap.
I want to rub my cock on it. I want to come all over it.
I want to fuck her in these heels every night.
“Not a problem,” she breathily replies, her hand wedged just where she needs it and her fingers hard at work. “This is—fuck, this is so hot—”
She’s telling me. I’ve got Stern Teacher Maddie bent over a desk in a classroom, her ankle-strapped heel in one hand, her moans filling the air as she masturbates and I use her pretty pussy for myself and—
She comes with a keening wail, and I go rigid, letting the rippling clenches of her core take me all the way home, extracting the pleasure out of my body like a debt to be paid, and then I fold over her with a groan as I release pulse after pulse of my orgasm inside her.
So much of it, a lonely man’s worth, and she’s giggling underneath me by the time I finish.
“Been a while, Mr. Loe? I can already feel it running down my thighs.”
“Stop—ah—stop laughing, it hurts,” I grumble, wincing as she giggles again and it squeezes my sensitive organ.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I promise I’ll start taking anatomy very seriously.”
“You already did. I’m actually impressed.” I carefully work my way free and then wince a second time after I see what a slick mess she is. “Stay here.”
I go to get my scarf while she sighs happily over the desk.
“I’m glad you appreciated it. And I didn’t even get to the endoplasmic reticulum.”
I use the scarf to clean her up, and then I help her rearrange her clothes after I make sure she can stand without swaying.
“You know—” I start, and she does get a little serious then, her lips pressing together as she nods.
“I know. We need to talk more. Figure out what happens next. Take an inventory of where we stand.”
I run my hand down the row of still-buttoned buttons on her blouse. “Actually, I was about to say that the kids are all with Sara, and I have the house completely to myself this weekend.”
Maddie’s lips part . . . and then curve into a catlike smile. “In that case, Mr. Loe, I have so much more anatomy to teach you.”