Lessons in Corruption (The Fallen Men 1)

“Talia?” I asked, before I could help myself. “Care to share with the class what is so amusing about John Milton’s greatest work?”

Normally, I didn’t mind if the kids goofed off a little while they worked. I wanted them to like my class, like me, so that the work they did would be less like homework and more like curiosity propelled research. Talia knew this so she frowned at me the way one friend would frown at another who was interrupting her flirtation.

Too freaking bad.

“The fall of humanity from Eden was instigated by a fuckin’ apple. You tell me how Paradise Lost isn’t a kind of comedy,” King taunted, leaning forward on his forearms so that his defined biceps flexed beautifully under his dress shirt.

Focus.

“Either elaborate or admit you were slacking off in class, Mr. Garro,” I retorted.

The class raised their collective eyebrow and a few students made ‘oooh’ noses as if we were two boxers entering a ring.

“There is a thin line between tragedy and comedy, yeah? Well, the comic tragedy of Milton’s poem is the contrast between mankind’s practices and preaching of virtues and morality in the face of reality, which holds temptation after temptation. Basically, they don’t stand a chance of staying on the path to heaven. Satan is so easily able to corrupt Eve because he only has to open her eyes to the endless possibilities of life instead of the narrow scope that God and his religion allowed her previously. One bite of the apple, one taste of temptation, and it’s fuckin’ hard to go back to.”

“That’s depressing,” Aimee murmured.

“Yeah, don’t know what kind of comedy you watch, man, but that shit is not funny,” Carson drawled.

“It’s not funny like that. It’s ironic. Paradise Lost is supposed to be about the fall of man from Eden, the fall of Satan and his angels from Heaven, about their follies as they compare to the grace and power of God. It’s God that’s supposed to be the hero, the perfect character, but it’s Eve and Satan that we empathize with the most.”

This was, unfortunately, true. It was the very reason that I so loved Paradise Lost, why I was desperate to go back to school for my Master’s degree and eventually my PhD. The idea of delving further into the contradictions that made up Milton’s masterful poem had formed the first time I read it at seventeen. It had appealed to the tension within myself, the need to sin and the learned inability to do so without systemic grief.

That King got the conflict nearly undid my resolve.

“Totally,” Benny agreed, his voice dreamy as he stared across the room at the biker boy. “It’s like Milton kept trying and failing to make God and Michael and Jesus his heroes but even he couldn’t get behind them.”

“Even God thinks it’s fuckin’ funny,” King continued, gazing lazily around the class at his captive audience. “During the battle between the angels, he literally sits ‘above and laughs the while.’”

“Because?” I prompted as I stood up to round my desk and rest my bottom against the front of it.

Typically, I didn’t like to be behind my desk when I was discussing with the class but lately, I’d been using it like a shield against King. I remembered why when his eyes raked up and down my body. My outfit was conservative, a thick, chunky knit sweater with great woven ropes up the arms and across the front in a cool stone color over a tight black knit skirt that came to the tops of my knees. There was no reason for his eyes to darken, for them to linger over my tidy braid like he wanted to dig his fingers in it, use it to hold me still while he plundered my mouth. No reason at all because I was careful with how I dressed now that he was my student.

Yet, I knew he wanted me. Badly. And the thought sent power and lust spiraling through me.

“Because even God knows he has created creatures who will only ever be imperfect and he has given them impossibly lofty fuckin’ goals,” King said.

“Some would say that they aren’t ‘goals,’ that he doesn’t expect them to live up to all the ideals he sets for them but that he gives them those aspirations to guide them towards a good path,” I countered.

He snorted. “Look where those got ‘em, kicked out of beautiful places and unable to appreciate the beauty of their new reality. Only Satan, the ‘bad guy,’ makes something of his new circumstances.”

“Yeah, but only because he’s angry,” Margaret countered.

King shrugged one shoulder. “Doesn’t matter why. If you want to evolve you gotta accept your circumstances, your reality. That’s one of the problems with the pious in Paradise Lost.”

I had never heard King speak so eloquently, with so few curse words. The effect was staggering. He was wonderfully intelligent, which wasn’t surprising given that he passed the rigorous exams to get into EBA. It was surprising because I had bought into the cliché, a biker as a dense, potentially violent man without social mores.