“You all keep saying that—”
“Because it’s true!”
I take a sip of my cheap wine and try to process this the way I do most things—carefully, from multiple angles, and with genuine curiosity. My body is just a body. It has systems and processes and…an orgasm is just another one of them.
One nobody ever took the time to explain to me properly.
What I need isn’t a friend telling me what I’ve been missing out on. What I needis a teacher.
2
AUGUST
I’ve performedopen-heart surgery on a man whose chest I sawed open with my own hands and I did not break a sweat.
I’ve lectured five hundred people at the Edinburgh Medical Symposium on the biochemical function of the thoracic cavity while running a fever and wearing shoes that were half a size too small. I received a standing ovation and even signed books afterward in the hallway.
Still, I did not break a sweat.
I’veneverlost my composure or failed to complete anything I set my mind to in the thirty-six years I’ve been on this Earth.
Not untilshewalked in and sat down.
I stare at her, and my brain simply stops working. It only takes a millisecond. One moment I’m standing at the podium going over my opening remarks that I’ve delivered every first day of the fall semester for the last five years. And the next, I’m awestruck by the girl sitting in the front row.
She’s got dark hair, enormous brown eyes, and a body that is so perfect it should be taken in for study and examination.
By me only, of course.
She’s eighteen, maybe nineteen, and has the face of beauty that belongs in a museum. The way she looks at me as she uncaps her pen and opens her spiral notebook—it’s like she’s ready to learn everything I know. And not just class-related.
Get it together, August.
I’m a thirty-six-year-old professor of anatomy with a medical degree from Johns Hopkins, and for the first time outside of the gym, I’m feeling myself start to perspire.
I clear my throat and look at my notes, but my eyes move right back to her as she twirls her pen between her fingers. Such delicate fingers.
God help me.
It’s not just the sweat starting either. My heart is racing, and blood is rushing between my legs. I clench my jaw, even chew the inside of my cheek. No, Icannotget hard right now. Not here.
She smiles innocently at me, completely unaware of the depraved thoughts flooding my mind. Knuckles going white as I grip the podium, I look away.
I’m not going to think about those eyes, that smile, the fact that she’s clearly not wearing a bra beneath that vintage band T-shirt. I’m just going to look out into the crowd of students and deliver my lecture as I always do. And I’mdefinitelynot going to look at the front row again.
My plan doesn’t even last a minute.
The gorgeous girl is writing in her notebook. Already. I have barely gotten started, and she’s writing. A distant thought echoes in my mind. Maybe she’s writing about me…
Professor Holt. Tall. Intimidatingly hot. Great jaw. Obviously works out—
No. She doesn’t seem like the kind of girl who’d be writing that sort of stuff. She seems like a girl who’d be writing down reminders to herself, organizing her study schedule. The kind ofgirl who does all the assigned reading and then a little more just to be sure.
She seems—and this thought just comes to me from somewhere I can’t explain and has no roots in academia—like she’s never been touched. There’s just such innocence about her. I can’t even picture her with a guy.
Or maybe I just don’t want to…
Suddenly, I realize I’ve spaced out completely. Not only that, but I’ve lost my place in my lecture notes. I’m just sort of staring like I’ve been hypnotized. And not up at the board behind me but ather. The girl I swore a moment ago I would not look at again.
