“Are you okay, Emmaline?” Ethan asks. His finger brushes through my hair and tucks it behind my ear. The electric current in the air connects at our touch. I’m hyperaware of my breathing.
I see Ethan swallow. He feels it, too.
“I’m fine,” I say quietly.
“I’ll take care of this with campus police,” Ethan says, his hands gripping my upper arms, near my shoulder. He releases me almost instantly but his touch feels so good it makes me dizzy.
“Thank you,” I say, walking toward the door.
I look back, and he doesn’t go back to his car until I’m inside.
I can’t breathe. I feel drunk, intoxicated by how safe I felt when he took me home. I found him attractive before, but his protectiveness threw my attraction into overdrive.
Fuck. I can’t stop thinking about how Ethan looked at me. How he touched me.
I’m working on that assignment. I won’t have that clear-headed focus I hoped for at all, though.
If I’m being honest, I’m thinking about Ethan the whole time I’m writing it, and that just turns me on more. There’s something kind of … dirty sexy about that. The way that he made me feel safe was warm, gentle, but when I think about him as my professor, there’s a whole other dimension to this. I contemplate that for a second when I hold my pen between my lips, and imagine his voice reading the assignment prompt again.
‘In class today, why did you write something personal? If you didn’t write something you consider personal, explain why it is.’
I can almost hear Ethan’s voice asking me, “Emmaline, why is it personal?” I can practically feel his eyes on me, like they were when he opened the car door for me.
Ethan
Touching her, and not kissing her … that’s the most willpower I think I’ve ever exerted in my life. I barely fucking know Emmaline, but I’m stalking her. There’s no other word for it. Today, I planned to run into her, knowing she was taking a jog because I saw her today between classes, getting tense. I knew she wanted to let off steam. I saw her planner when she was doing notes between classes, and her little routine included running. I figured I’d get to see her again…and I don’t know why I thought this was a good idea.
Today, after I looked her up, I knew I was going to poke around campus.
Planning to run into her, well, they say your willpower lessens later in the day.
But then she ran into me. Emmaline Travers, the student, the daughter of the woman it took me years to get over. I got irrationally fucking angry about the boys who were going to hurt her…I don’t know Emmaline.
But I really fucking want to.
I’m pulling up to my gate, almost entering my own damn code wrong because I’m so distracted. The moving iron gates take a few seconds longer than I’d like, but I’ve got to get inside. I need a shower. I’m sweating, and I didn’t get my dog a run in today, but I know he’ll happily sleep when we go inside.
Which is good, because I’m going to wash off all this sweat and stroke the throbbing erection tenting my pants right now.
I’m like a fucking teenager, sweating over a 19-year-old and hurrying back home so that I can jerk off thinking about her.
Well, when I step into the palatial home that’s just my dog and I, and Victor, well, I’m not so much the teenager.
I’m just obsessed. Stalkin
g her the way I did today — looking her up online, making sure to take turns around campus between my classes that would lead me to her getting out of hers. This is exactly the kind of psycho killer shit that made me come on too damn strong to Joelle. This is different, already, though.
I couldn’t keep my fucking hands off of Emmaline. Touching her hair, inhaling the scent of her so close to me. The way she leaned into me when I held her arms … Emmaline looks at me with an unmistakable return of my own attraction.
This is nothing like what happened with Joelle. I was an overbearing ass as a friend, controlling, possessive, and that shit turned Joelle off. But Emmaline … she likes this about me. Well, she did ask how I knew where she lived. I didn’t answer. But the fact that she’s attracted to me makes my own growing obsession that much more dangerous. It would be just me that got hurt if she wasn’t interested and I had to do the smart thing and ignore it. But how do I ignore a sweet little girl that fucking wants me too?
That rage that made me punch all those cocky little shits into hamburger, that rage is a product of my desire for Emmaline. But I’m already fucking in too deep.
It reminds me of another night that went a little differently than this one, but I think of it all the same. I head down my hallway, to my massive library, fingering stack after stack of leather-bound books, and pour myself a drink. I need to dull the ache within me now. The first sip burns good going down, but I can’t swallow back the memories.
***
I see Joelle’s form fading behind the crackling bonfire. She’s wandered off with some guy that’s not her friend. He’ll probably be her boyfriend, and after the way that I looked at Joelle at lunch yesterday, I could tell she knew how I felt about her.