“That was quite the entrance.” The hint of a wily smile quirks her lips and a stone sinks in my gut with the fleeting thought that she’s about to ask me for his number. “But, now I could use your help.” She props a hip on the counter and leans back on her hand.
I force my gaze off her chest and glue it to her stunning eyes, the color of well-aged scotch. “What is it you needed?”
“I read through the first five cantos of Don Juan and I was hoping to bounce some thoughts off you, since you seem to have an opinion on the whole thing.”
I give her a slow nod. “Let me just finish up a few things here, then I’m all yours.”
“I’ll be over there,” she says, pointing to her things on the table, as if I wasn’t already painfully aware of exactly where she was.
“I’ll be right over.”
I don’t mean to watch her go, but that’s where my eyes are until she lowers herself back onto her chair. I turn and adjust my jeans around my stiff cock, then go back to cataloging until it’s under control. I look at her a long moment, her back to me, testing myself. Once I’ve determined that my cock is, in fact, under my control, not hers, I step around the counter and slide into the seat across from her so I can keep an eye on the desk.
“So, what were your thoughts on the first five cantos?” I ask, tapping her open copy of Don Juan with my finger.
She leans back in her chair and watches my hand. “Is it just me, or is Don Juan a horribly flat character?”
“You’ve discovered what I was saying about Byron being self-indulgent. Juan is often more a plot device than a character. The narrator is subsumed into Byron himself much of the time. As you move deeper into the poem, you’ll find Byron becomes more central to the poem than Juan.”
“So he wrote about himself?”
I pull the book closer and flip to Canto III. “You read this, right?” I ask, turning it for her to see.
Her expression turns incredulous. “Yeah. What the hell was that, anyway? Byron totally hijacked the poem and started dissing on Coleridge, Wordsworth and…some other guy.”
I nod. “Robert Southey. And then there’s the whole section at the end with a different verse in which Byron gives us his opinion on the fact that Greece is under Ottoman control.”
“Which has nothing to do with Juan or anything else,” she finishes.
“But has everything to do with Byron,” I say, flipping to the end of the book. “He died from injuries he received at war fighting for Greece’s independence while he was in the middle of writing Canto seventeen. The adventures of Don Juan themselves are thought, in certain literary circles, to be poetic re-imaginings of Byron’s own escapades and dysfunctional relationships with the women in his life. Basically an imaginative autobiography wherein Byron retells the classic story of Don Juan with himself as the womanizer.” I lean back. “Like writing himself into his own porn.”
When she smiles and lowers her lashes, I realize I said what I just did to see what her reaction would be. I need to rein myself back. She’s totally off-limits.
“But why would he want to portray himself like that,” she says, lifting her eyes back to mine. “I mean, Don Juan’s kind of an idiot. I get that he’s sixteen and all, but it seems like he’s just sort of stumbling around here and there and lands dick first in women’s crotches totally by accident.”
And, Christ. She just picked up my innuendo and dished it right back.
Game fucking on.
I lean forward onto my elbows. “That’s true in a lot of ways. As I said, he’s generally the pursued in Byron’s version.”
Her eyes scan down my face to my chest, then over my biceps. It’s only with her scrutiny that I realize how tightly I’m clenching every muscle in my body, trying to keep it from responding to her presence.
“And he seems to like it,” she says, her eyes lifting back to mine.
I swallow when I feel my dick twitch to life again. “Yes. But what sixteen-year-old boy wouldn’t.”
“But his lovers are all older.” Her gaze twitches to my left hand, where it lays on her open copy of Don Juan, then back to my eyes. “And married.”
“And, therein lies his conflict.”
“He doesn’t really seem that conflicted.” She leans closer and lowers her voice. “He just fucks them.”
Fuck. There’s nothing I can do to stop my hard-on from raging. “Keep reading. Things go downhill fast.” Because they always do when you fuck people you’re not supposed to.
She leans back and pulls the book out from under my hand. “You’ll work it through with me? Because, I’ve got to tell you, I’m not seeing the conflict.”
“What year are you?” I don’t even realize I’ve said it until it’s out of my mouth.
Her eyes flick from the book to mine. “A senior.”
I feel my eyebrows arch before I can stop them. “You look younger.”
She bites her lips between her teeth for a moment. “Is that good or bad?”