The Professor

‘Please be quiet. I am in the middle of behaving decently. It so rarely happens it deserves at least some respectful silence and gracious acceptance,’ he says.

But I can’t give him even that much. My acceptance isn’t gracious. My silence isn’t respectful. Instead it seethes with a brutal awareness of every tiny thing he does, from the sparking sensation of his thumb running around the inside of the jacket collar, to the shock of the sheer size of the thing when he snaps it closed around me. You could fit two of me inside its warm confines.

Warm, I think, with his body heat.

And oh, God – heady with his scent.

Honestly, it’s a wonder I understand the language he uses when he next speaks. His hands are still almost on me when he does it. My own hands are lost inside his sleeves.

How am I meant to concentrate?

‘Are you going to tell me the real reason you neglected to return?’

‘I would really rather not, if I can get away with it.’

‘You can.’ He leans down, sudden and shocking. More so, when I realise why: to take me into his confidence. To be conspiratorial with me, as though we’re intimates. ‘But don’t tell anyone. I don’t want it getting out that Professor Halstrom is going soft in his dotage. Next thing you know I’ll have students spending years in bathrooms left, right and centre.’

‘I think “dotage” might be a little bit strong.’

‘That’s only because you haven’t seen me with my trousers down. I have an arse like a dying question mark,’ he says, followed by me waiting for my desire to wither away.

It should wither, after that. It should make it easy to sneer.

But it doesn’t. I have to fight with my last breath to get the next words out.

‘I take back what I said about your manner being lovely.’

‘I thought you might eventually,’ he says, a laugh somewhere in the back of his throat.

I wish I did not love that laugh. I wish I hated him. I do hate him. I will hate him.

‘Your manner is completely gross. And absolutely seething with bullshit. I already know that you’re thirty-one.’

‘Thirty-one? Wherever did you hear that? I’m nine hundred and twelve.’

‘I knew you were a werewolf. All the signs were there and now the final proof.’

‘Werewolves don’t live to be nine hundred and twelve.’

‘Spoken like someone with inside knowledge.’

‘Inside knowledge of what?’

I try to stop myself answering. Things are going too far. Our conversations are too fast, like a death-defying ride at a ruinous fairground that might at any moment fling me off.

But the words just keep coming.

My hands keep gripping the bar that barely holds me in.

‘Werewolf society.’

The sound of his laughter is startling, like a roll of thunder inside a tiny room. It cracks off the old stone walls, bold as brass and completely inappropriate for someone like him. He should have a strained, half-dying thing. A sound that has to fight to get past his teeth, or else no sound at all.

And I think he knows it.

The rain hasn’t stopped, but he still clears his throat and claims it has. ‘We should go about our business while we can,’ he says, and I am forced to agree. If I say no he might think I want to stay here talking to him all day, when I would swear on a stack of Bibles I don’t. I even prove it a second later when I go to walk in the opposite direction and he calls out to me.

‘Where on earth are you going, Miss Hayridge?’ he asks.

And I swear my stomach drops. My heart lurches against my ribcage.

He means business, as in more talking to him.

More saying of the things that made me masturbate in a public bathroom.

In fact, he confirms it a second later.

‘My office is this way,’ he says.

Then I simply have to follow him, to meet my doom.

Chapter Five (#ua302d615-4fcb-5e50-92a8-226f88b0a3b1)

The first thing he does when we get to his office is light a little gas stove – both for the heat and for the kettle he sits atop it. No electric for him, of course, and instead of teabags he has tea leaves and strainers and other items I’ve only ever read about. I watch him go about the business of making it with the same fascination heroines probably experience over wizards doing magic. Wide-eyed and unable to move from the corner I’ve chosen, half-wondering what mystical thing will happen next.

The jacket was weird enough.

The conversation was worse.

The tea makes my teeth chatter. And then there is the seat I notice – not the same thing from before but a real soft-backed and inviting-looking chair. He went out and got something better for me, I think, then immediately try to dismiss the idea. He probably just realised it was inadequate for any student. Perhaps he gives Earl Grey to everyone. Most likely he uses his handkerchief to dry everyone’s hair for them.

It just doesn’t feel that way, when he does it.

It feels like the air grows thick and close, the moment he tells me to turn around. He barely has to do anything for me to sense him – the crackle between us reveals everything. It sizzles as he reaches for the rope of my hair, and louder when he lifts it.

The way he squeezes the water out of it is best though.

Tightly, so tightly my scalp will be tender later. It will remember his hands on me, long after this moment has dwindled down to nothing. It might be the only contact I ever get, after all. Just this one hint of how strong he really is and how big his hands are, followed by the strongest wave yet of his deep, heavy scent. Oh, God, that deep, heavy scent. I suppose the rain has made it more pronounced. Or it could be the lack of jacket. Without it he seems almost bare, despite the waistcoat he keeps on.

I can still see so much more, regardless. I can see how oddly narrow his waist is, how broad his chest. It strains against the material whenever he moves, and he moves a lot. He stretches up to dry his own hair, and fusses with his cuffs, and bends to buff his shoes, all the time twisting and turning and bending in a way that seems far too flexible for someone like him. It feels too flexible for someone like me.

Though I promise I do my best not to look. At the very least I try to look in a manner that doesn’t convey outright hunger. I keep my mouth tightly closed and my eyes a normal size, hands clenched tightly inside the sleeves of his jacket. And when I manage to breathe, I do it in a slow and steady and normal sort of fashion.

Even though smell is now devouring what little air there is in here.

And the way he looks at me after, as though he knows what I’m thinking. He knows how he looks, and what it does to me. He must – nothing else could explain his expression. If he could set me on fire with his eyes I think he would. Contempt is probably on the tip of his tongue right now, to the point where I cringe when he goes to speak.

But that only makes it more shocking when he tells me this: