Chapter 4

Evelyn's POV

"Professor, are you still so reluctant to let yourself feel something?"

I couldn't think. My own student was moving inside me — Liam, his thickness filling me completely, working against that deepest, most treacherous part of me — and my body, with no regard for shame or sense, was already climbing toward the edge.

How had it come to this?

If this is a dream, let me wake up. Now. Please.

Liam drove into me with a sharp, deliberate thrust. "Professor — I'm close. Come with me."

He arched his neck back, and reached the peak.

At the same moment, a broken sound tore from my throat. My spine curved off the mattress; my eyes fixed on the ceiling, unseeing. My whole body shook in long, helpless waves.

I had climaxed. Under my own student's body, I had actually climaxed.

When it was over, I pressed both hands over my face and couldn't look at him — couldn't look at myself. I tried to gather my thoughts, but everything inside me was in pieces. I had always been careful at this university, kept every line exactly where it belonged. Liam was a good student. So why now? Why me?

I was trembling. Tears slipped free before I could stop them.

After a long silence, I made myself look at him. He was watching me, his gaze so intent and so warm that my heart lurched against my ribs.

"Why?" My voice came out smaller than I intended. "Why would you do this? I'm your teacher."

Liam didn't look away. He reached out and lifted a loose strand of hair from the pillow beside my face, curling it slowly between his fingers, his voice carrying a quietness that was almost brutal in its certainty. "Professor, I've wanted this for a long time. Tonight I finally had the chance. I don't care that you're my teacher or anything else. I want you. That's all there is to it."

"Whatever your reasons are — this was once, and only once. It can never happen again. This isn't right." I was trying to convince him. I was trying to convince myself. His body had already been inside mine, but I was still his teacher, and I could not let myself truly fall. I wanted better for him. I didn't want him to walk down a road he couldn't come back from.

Liam gave a quiet laugh — the kind of easy, unshakeable confidence that seemed to come naturally to athletes who had always trusted their own bodies. "Only once? I never agreed to that."

"You got what you wanted, didn't you? Now that you have it, surely the appeal is gone—"

"The appeal is gone?" He lowered himself until his nose nearly touched my forehead. "You can feel it yourself — you know exactly how much I still want you. I want to be with you. I want to make love to you. I want to see you every single day."

The words hit me like a physical impact. I clapped my hands over my ears. "Stop — stop it, please. We can't do this, we can't—"

Liam didn't press forward the way I expected him to. Instead, he rested his chin against the top of my head, and something in him went still — like a wild thing that had finally found the one place it meant to be, all its aggression quietly dissolved.

"Professor," he said, "if you push me away right now, we can pretend tonight never happened."

I went still.

His arms were still around me. His eyes, steady and bright, hadn't left my face. I could feel his heartbeat through his chest — almost perfectly in time with mine.

"You—" I tilted my head up, and what I saw in his eyes stopped me: desire, yes, deep and unmistakable, but beneath it something more serious, something that had been there all along.

Liam dipped his head and pressed the softest kiss to the corner of my mouth. "I told you — I like you, so the choice is yours. If you don't want this, I won't touch you again. But if it's only fear that's stopping you, Professor, then I'll wait."

He drew back a few inches and, true to his word, went still.

The moment he pulled away, something was hollowed out of me. The heat hadn't faded — the ache low in my belly hadn't faded — and with the distance between us it only sharpened, restless and insistent in a way I couldn't reason with.

I looked at him. The flat lines of his stomach. The definition of muscle along his sides. The evidence, still faint and pulsing, that his want hadn't gone anywhere either.

My fingers tightened in the sheets until my knuckles went white.

"Liam."

He looked at me. Careful. Waiting.

"I didn't say," I said quietly, "that you could leave."

Something shifted in his expression the instant the words left my mouth. He moved closer, pressing his forehead to mine. "Say it clearly, Professor. Do you want me?"

I closed my eyes.

"...I want you."

He came back to me like a runner off a starting gun. He kissed me — slowly, patiently, as though asking a question with every pass of his lips — his tongue tracing the shape of my mouth while his palm slid along the curve of my waist, cupped beneath my leg, and guided himself back to my entrance.

"I'm coming back in," he said, low against my mouth.

I turned my face to the side and let out a soft sound of assent.

Liam rolled his hips forward in one controlled, unhurried push, and the moment he filled me completely he exhaled sharply, his breath ragged. "You're so warm inside, Professor."

"Don't — don't say that—"

"No. I'm going to say it." He began to move, each slow withdrawal and return pressing directly against the place that made coherent thought impossible. "You're holding me so tight. Can you feel me inside you? If you still can't believe this is real, then feel it. Let your body confirm it."

Whatever words I might have formed dissolved into broken, breathless sounds. He kept moving, each thrust deep enough to feel like it went all the way through me. My fingers found his back and held on. This time, I didn't try to push him away.

"Together, Professor."

He arched his neck back again, and in the same instant I came apart beneath him, both of us cresting at exactly the same moment.

Liam stayed until three in the morning.

After he left, I pulled the blankets around myself and lay there, my knees too sore to press together properly. I had told him no more more times than I could count, and every single time the words had been swallowed before they reached the air.

At six-thirty, the sound of skate blades scraping ice drifted up through the window, right on schedule.

I left the apartment early. Before I went, I picked up the white knee-highs I'd left on the floor the night before, balled them up, and dropped them into the very bottom of the trash can. Then I thought about it, and fished them back out.

My office was on the third floor. I arrived before anyone else; the door was still locked. I switched on the light, sat down at my desk, and pulled up the university's administrative portal — every email thread connected to departmental funding, one by one.

When Adam had left last night, he'd paused at the shoe rack by the door for several seconds too long. I'd looked at it afterward. Liam's hockey bag was leaning against it — a bag Adam would have recognized without any trouble.

I stared at the list of emails. My eyes stopped on one dated three years back.

Sender: Adam. Recipient: the head of finance in the Athletics Department, with the head hockey coach CC'd at the time.

The subject line read: Classroom resources can always wait. The arena cannot.

Substantial sums of instructional funding had been redirected into Athletics — and the timing aligned precisely with Adam's campaign for his second term as president. The spreadsheet attached to the thread contained more than a dozen similar transfers, ranging from tens of thousands of dollars to well over a hundred thousand, spread across three years. The Athletics Department code appeared neatly in the column labeled Actual Receiving Department, while the official reports listed every one of them under Academic Resource Development.

I stared at that column heading. A low, persistent ringing filled my ears.

Adam had mentioned the administrative paperwork — had dangled it like a pair of handcuffs, ready to lock around my wrists. I couldn't let him do it. I needed a way out before he could.

I clicked Print.

The printer in the corner hummed to life, feeding out page after page, each sheet still faintly warm.

I was cold all over, but my heart was going very fast.

I gathered the three pages, folded them carefully, and slid them into the inner pocket of my bag.

My hands were steady the entire time. Steadier, in fact, than they'd been all night — steadier than they had been when Liam's hands were at my waist.

At four-thirty that afternoon, I went to the rink.

For the past two years I had made a habit of taking the highest row in the far corner of the bleachers, watching the young men out on the ice — their crossovers, their hard stops, the clean violence of their collisions along the boards.

Practice ended early today. When I saw Liam moving toward the gate to step off the ice, some reflex took over and I turned away, already moving toward the exit, trying to be gone before he spotted me.

I had just reached the bottom of the bleacher steps when a figure swept to a stop directly in front of me — fluid, precise, the kind of stop that came from ten thousand hours of practice. He pulled off his helmet. His hair was soaked through; the front of his training jacket hung open over a compression shirt dark with sweat.

"Professor."