Throat bone dry while the acid in my stomach did somersaults, I stared through narrowed eyes across an eerily clean desk at my English teacher and her delectable mouth, which had driven me crazy since the first day of class when she’d taken her place behind the instructor’s podium.
That skeeved me out more than anything. Nothing about Dr. Kavanagh was my type. I preferred blondes with gorgeous long, flowing hair. My Literature professor kept her dark mass scraped back and hidden away in a tight holy-roller bun secured at the base of her neck.
I was a lover of long lean bodies that liked to show off their impressive curves with fashionable, revealing clothes. Kavanagh was tiny, and probably too rounded for my taste. Or at least I figured she had chub rolls she wanted to hide. Why else would she wear clothes three sizes too large for her?
And I liked confident sensuality in a female, someone who knew she had it and moved as if she wanted every guy in a fifty-mile radius to stop whatever he was doing just to gawk at her whenever she sauntered by. Kavanagh didn’t have a single saunter in her repertoire. She had the sensuality of a nun, and she didn’t seem to like guys at all. Not that I believed she was a dyke as Tenning had suggested. I just viewed her as an anti-sexual being. Genderless. At least, I wanted to.
Which was another reason I hated being so aware of her as a woman whenever she was around. While I was imagining how her sweet, plush lips would feel wrapped around my favorite body part, I knew she had nothing but freaking literature on the brain.
“I actually tried, you know,” I said, attempting to focus on her green eyes and not her mouth. “That was probably the best damn paper I ever wrote. And I didn’t cheat like I’m sure half the class did. I read the book, the Cliff Notes, sample essays. I even watched the weird-ass movie. I did all the fucking work.”
Silently seating herself in the chair opposite the desk from me, Dr. Kavanagh gave me a tight smile. “And yet you completely missed the entire point of the assignment.”
Well, shit, you think? I jerked my hands into the air. “Maybe because I didn’t understand the goddamn point. I mean, what the hell did you want me to say?”
I knew I should’ve toned down the language, but she had me turned inside-out. And I’d only been in her office for two minutes. How this one tiny little person could get me so instantly and completely riled, I didn’t know. But here I was, mad, turned-on, ashamed, alarmed and frankly disturbed by my attraction, while I was equally pissed at her for knowing exactly how much I didn’t deserve to step foot on this campus because I was too freaking stupid.
And, fuck, had she put on lip gloss or something since I’d seen her this morning in class? Her mouth looked shinier than ever. I caught myself looking at it again and jerked my gaze away. Damn it, bitchy teachers should not have lips like that.
She sighed and interlaced her hands before resting them on top of her desk. “It wasn’t about what I wanted you to say; it was about what you needed to say.”
And there went all my composure. Again.
“What I needed to say?” I surged to my feet and clutched my hair as I began to pace the five feet of room I had in her snug office. “What I needed to say? What the fuck does that even mean?”
Dr. Kavanagh remained cool and collected, damn her, seated in her chair as she calmly watched me unravel into a hot pile of anxiety. “It means you didn’t do what you were asked to do. I wanted you to make a correlation between a character in the story and yourself. You made no such connection. In fact, you didn’t talk about you at all.”
I snorted. “Maybe I didn’t feel a connection with a bunch of rich-ass idiots from the twenties, whining about lost love while they spread around adultery like it was some kind of candy. How am I supposed to correlate anything when there is nothing to correlate?”
She fell back in her chair and sent me a frustrated frown. “Mr. Gamble…” With another sigh, she shook her head and ran her hands wearily over her face, which unfortunately made me focus on her lips.
God damn, that mouth should not be legal. I could picture it pursed so perfectly around my cock, could almost feel the wet slide of her tongue running up my entire length as she sucked me in deep.
Shit, now I had wood.
Fortunately oblivious to my crude, unwanted thoughts, she stiffened her shoulders, sat forward again and looked me straight in the eye. “Truly talented literature is truly talented for a reason. It always—always—finds a way to reach every person who reads it. It takes a theme about the human condition and makes it its little bitch.”
My eyebrows shot up into my hairline. What the hell? Shaking my head, I blinked. “Did you just say—”