The intake of air when I felt a mouth on my knee sent my eyes wide open. My toes curled within my flats. My knees edged further apart to make space for him. I shot a few more uncertain glances at the nearest classmates on either side when I heard a deep male voice rumble against my inner thigh.
“I said, stop looking at them. Pay attention to your professor,” he said, mouth moving closer and closer to my skirt.
I had a point. I tried to push my knees together to get control of myself and focus. I worked hard, but my imagination worked harder. Caliban pinned my knees open as he worked closer and closer to the satin thong I’d worn beneath my plaid skirt. Of course, he didn’t rush it. Of course, he tantalized, taking his sickly-sweet time, drawing out excruciating minutes of getting so near I could feel hot, teasing breath on my most sensitive place. Of course, he didn’t so much as touch me before every cell within me was screaming out in desperation for the barest contact.
He was me, after all. He was the fractured parts of my broken mind. He’d know precisely what would drive me up the wall.
It had probably been only a few minutes of foreplay. Maybe five. Maybe fifteen. Maybe forty. Time was an illusion as the soaking want between my legs ached for connection.At this point, I was pretty sure I’d come if he so much as kissed me anywhere near my clit. My imagination played a dangerous game, counting on me to remain utterly silent despite the fire crackling in my veins.
The first time a thumb brushed over my uselessly drenched panties, I thought I was going to lose it in the middle of the lecture hall. Of course, I wasn’t hidden in a shadowy corner. Of course, I sat in the perfect center, protected only by the professor’s overall disinterest. I was confident that if they looked, they’d have no trouble peering up the tiered steps of the lecture hall into the way my knees remained forcefully separated, contents meant to be hidden beneath my skirt on prominent display. Instead, they remained in a state of bored fixation on their notes.
His mouth was next, kissing me through the cotton fabric once, then twice. When I squirmed in my chair, two hands pinned my hips to the seat. The first kisses were butterfly-light, landing on the soft petals as the flower opened for him and only him. The curl of my toes extended to my ankles, feet twisting until I was on my tiptoes, ballet flats more or less abandoned as my arches flexed beneath the desk. The subsequent kisses moved with slow intentionality, his fingers working their way in with such gradualness that no movement happened until I was mentally pleading for it.
I swallowed, mouth desperately dry, but conjured no saliva. My pulse thundered. My breath quickened. I tried to stay still, to remain silent. I searched for a clock, doing my best to draw myself back into the present moment, snagged like a rabbit on barbed wire, wondering if I wanted to escape to the release of orgasm or be set free from my explicit daydream by the loud ringing of a bell once the hour arrived.
My panties were slipped to the side, and I nearly buckled over my desk. I may as well have been in a dream itself, as unreal and disconnected as if I’d been contained within a nightmare of giving a speech while my classmates wore their underpants. The girl with the kitty-cat pencil case, the boyin the science fiction shirt, the outdated carpet, the blur of mundanity had utterly disappeared in a muddled swirl of misty forest and pleasure. I didn’t care who saw. I was close, and I’d be damned if anyone got in the way.
“Don’t move again,” came the deep, pleasurable vibrations up my very core, “or I’ll stop. And we don’t want that, do we?” The low growl of his warning cut through the center of me, crawling from my dripping entrance up my spine and wrapping its tendrils around whatever remained of my numb, lost mind.
I obeyed. I played the role of perfect statue, enjoying the new element of domination and performance as I acted out what it might be like if I weren’t being destroyed in the most depraved, indulgent way just below my line of sight. I maintained perfect eye contact with the lecturer—arguably too much eye contact—as my vision began to blur and water from warning signs of pending gratification.
My entire body acted as a single muscle, every part of me clenched as I sat in breathless, aching tension. Any tenderness was gone. The gentle teasing had disappeared. I was a meal to be silently devoured, a thrill to be relished by no one but myself as the world around me remained caught in its mundanity.
I struggled to keep quiet as he pushed me closer and closer to the end. I saw my incredible, satisfying release in terms of percentages as he carried me from sixty, to seventy, to eighty. He knew exactly how to push me over, as in a marvelous move of demonic delectation, he—
“Marlow?”
What? He never called me that.
Was it my professor? My classmates?
I heard my name called again but couldn’t make sense of the sound.
The scent changed. No longer was I under the fluorescents of a classroom engulfed in the mossy scents of the forest floor, but there was something sharper. Something like clovesand thieves’ oil…
September 12, age 26
My name dragged me up as if I were a corpse who’d been buried alive. The word echoed through the earth, grabbing me by whatever rope tethered me to reality as it lassoed me into consciousness. I groaned in a blur of groggy confusion, climax just within reach.
“Marlow, are you okay?”
I blinked rapidly as I struggled to make sense of the harsh white light and surrounding shadows. My body jostled lightly back and forth from the hum of a machine. It took a moment for my eyes to focus before I realized we were still in the car.
I blinked awake, stretching out of my slumped position. “Are we there?”
I looked up into the concerned eyes, the gold-brown hair, the strong jaw, the protector’s posture of the figure silhouetted above me.
“Silas?” I asked, wiping the smear of drool from the corner of my mouth.
He put a hand on my face, leaching whatever remained of my drunken buzz and hangover alike with his heavenly powers. Sobriety filled me like an unwilling bucket of cold water.
“You sounded like you were having a nightmare,” he said.
I sat up, pole-straight. His hand fell away as I took stock of my surroundings. I was still in the same black crop top and sweatpants I’d been wearing since we’d stumbled through my apartment after our release from the Canaanites. Despite the thick fabric of my pants, I didn’t miss the uncomfortable puddle that had worked its way between my legs. There were two minutes left on Kirby’s GPS.
“I was dreaming,” I said hoarsely. “It was a memory.”
My entire body remained on the precipice of orgasm, denied climax at the final moment of one of my favoritememories. Whether it had been the gin, or the ferocity with which Caliban had held me as he’d said even if I forced him to say goodbye, he’d never truly let me go, my brain had clung to him.
