It was the cruelest irony that the man I despised, the man who tortured me from the front of the classroom three days a week, was the hottest fucking thing I’d ever seen.
His voice, those questions, those eyes that looked at you like they stripped you bare, had me shifting in my seat, edgy and unfocused—
And he knew it.
Gray
This was my penance—
Three days a week, first-year torts in the morning, a medical malpractice seminar for third-year students in the afternoon. Six hours of teaching a week for a year. One hundred and fifty hours, now reduced to one hundred and twenty-six. Not that I kept count. It was a chance to erase my sins. The professional ones, at least. The others? Beyond redemption.
The only thing that kept me sane stood in front of the class, stumbling over the case I’d asked her to read.
I called on her way too much. I knew it, and based off of the way her eyes fairly screamed, Go fuck yourself, she knew it, too. But I’d always had remarkably poor impulse control, and like everything that came before her and annihilated my life, she was another thing that tempted me.
I’d noticed her the first day of classes. She’d sat in the front of the room, right in the center. I’d walked in late, this classroom the last place I wanted to be. To add insult to injury, it wasn’t even a good law school. I’d gone from the top of my law class at the University of Chicago, to a lucrative practice where I quickly made more money than my South Side background knew what to do with, to this. A shitty visiting professor job at a shitty law school, teaching a bunch of rich students who could afford to pay the school’s ridiculously high tuition, but weren’t smart enough, or motivated enough, to get into a good law school. But then again, I wasn’t exactly the authority on good life choices. If I were, I wouldn’t be here. It said more about my character than I liked, that at thirty I’d already enjoyed a meteoric rise, followed by an even bigger crash.
I’d only found out about teaching the first-year class the week before school started. Visiting professors rarely taught 1Ls, but a professor had a medical emergency and Hannover was desperate. Currently ranking in the hundreds on the list of top law schools, they’d struggled to find a replacement on such short notice. So that was how I ended up walking into torts at ten thirty Monday morning and seeing her.
That first morning, I’d set my books down on the desk in the front of the classroom, looked up, and been knocked back.
The counselor my former law partners in Chicago made me talk to had said I had an addictive personality. He’d analyzed my behavior—racing my Ferrari down Lake Shore Drive until I lost control and smashed it into a pole, the marriage that ended to a wife who was colder than Chicago winters, the women, the partying—and said I had problems relating to others. He threw around words like “unemotional,” and “cold.” All fancy words for saying what I’d known my entire life.
I was a bastard.
It wasn’t exactly a shock; I came from a long line of bastards, drunks, and philanderers. The only difference between me and the rest of the Canter men? I’d gotten out of the hellhole I’d grown up in. Or so I’d thought.
But it didn’t matter how expensive my suits were, how much I’d paid for my house in Georgetown, or the car I’d bought to replace the one I’d totaled—
I’d always be the boy from the rough neighborhood in Chicago. The one who got into bar fights, drove too fast, fucked girls with giant tits and curvy asses, knocked back too much Scotch, and played way too hard. I’d tried to erase those parts of myself, or to push them down at least—
And once I saw her, they came back up again.
Blair Reynolds.
They gave us a chart with all the students’ names and pictures. The second I saw her in my classroom I’d stared at that chart like a little boy with a crush. Then I’d looked at her, really looked at her.
She looked like money. Not my kind of money. The kind I’d earned through brutal work, no small amount of luck, and sheer force of will. The kind that couldn’t have picked a Picasso from a Monet, that dropped thousands of dollars at a strip club because those were the girls I was the most comfortable with. No, she looked like ponies, and ribbons in her hair, and cotillion, and ruffles. She looked like a duchess.
And the bastard in me wanted her with a hunger that terrified me.
I wanted to consume her; I wanted to break her and put her back together again, because that’s what I did—I broke things.
I couldn’t, of course. This was the new me—my chance at salvaging the wreck I’d made of everything. So I stayed away from her. Except for the times when I absolutely couldn’t resist, and I had to call on her.
I figured I’d given up enough bad habits. I had to be able to keep one. And if I could only have one, then no fucking question, I wanted it to be her.
She stood in front of me, reciting the case, and it took everything I had to keep my body from responding to the sound of her voice. It was cool, and crisp, and elegant. She danced over words and phrases, and I never could resist the urge to watch her mouth as she spoke.
I’d imagined myself kissing that mouth, fucking that mouth, capturing those lips. It was no wonder I operated in a constant state of near-arousal when she spoke. I ran through multiplication tables in my head to keep my body from responding.
Because it wasn’t just her lips that tempted me. It was her skin, soft and creamy, like fine bone china. I’d dreamed about her skin enough nights, of her legs tangled with mine, her flesh bare, a thin film of sweat covering her body as I drove into her. Dreamed of bending my head and taking one of her nipples between my lips, making her moan and cry out. Imagined her pulling me closer, begging for me to suck her harder, begging me to fuck her. I’d dreamed of wrapping that long, brown hair around my fist as she took me into her mouth. Dreamed of the look in those big brown eyes when she came.
She dominated my fantasies, had since that very first day. I was consumed by her, and I’d never even spoken to her outside of class, our sole interaction limited to these days when I fired questions at her, and she answered in that haughty tone that screamed, I am royalty and you are a peasant, in that voice that only made me want her more.
Silence filled the classroom.
Shit, she’d finished.
“That’s all, Ms. Reynolds.” I gave her a curt nod, indicating she could sit.
She sank into her chair with a grace I felt in my bones, and a new tension filled the classroom as everyone wondered who would be my next victim. The silence dragged, students squirming in their seats, imagining the tortures I was preparing for them.
I stared at her—I rarely let myself think of her as Blair—it seemed too intimate, too dangerous. She had to be Ms. Reynolds. But I couldn’t resist the urge to look. She held my gaze without flinching, her only reaction the slightest flush on her face.
I lived for her blushes.
Her eyes were completely at odds with her rosy cheeks. Her eyes blasted back defiance and anger. They came alive while the rest of her was composed—pearl necklace, perfect outfit, elegant hair, fake smile. For fifty-nine minutes out of the hour each class, she was untouchable. She wore her perfection like a mask that shielded her from the world, the seemingly unbreakable wall that kept everyone at bay. But there was always a minute—I made sure of it—when the mask came off, when the wall tumbled down. And in that minute, someone else looked at me. In that minute, I undressed her and stripped her of the facade she presented to the rest of the world. For a minute every single week, I unraveled her.
The bastard in me fucking loved it.