Sweat beaded like a crown of shame on my forehead as I sat in my sixth period English class, consumed with my internal struggle.
Don’t look at him too often.
Don’t walk past his desk.
Again.
Okay, this would be the last time.
The struggle was very real and my only relief came from knowing that he was experiencing the same thing. I was the focus of this class, his contemplation based on the angled slope of my breasts beneath my silk blouse, the exact shade of each strand in my long cascade of golden brown hair. I knew this because his eyes had become an accessory I wore with pride, a necklace I wore pressed tight to my throat, hot and heavy on the exposed skill above my décolletage.
Also, I knew because he told me so.
With his apple poems, but also in the margins of his tests, across entire pages of his notebook where he drew beautiful little sketches of me, fragments of my person so that only someone well acquainted with me would recognize their likeness. I knew even as I sat at my desk while the students wrote poems as a creative writing exercise, that his lean, strong fingers were tracing the tip of his pencil around the lines of my face.
“All right,” I stood up to address the class. “Who is ready to share?”
I smiled when Benny’s hand shot into the air. He had been particularly motivated since King joined our classes.
I was strangely shocked to see King’s hand up, lazily propped on the edge of his small desk. He participated frequently in class discussions, especially during our Paradise Lost unit, but I hadn’t expected him to be willing to share his poetic side to a greater audience than me. For some reason, it made my heart pang.
So, even though I knew it was a bad idea, I found myself calling on him to read. Our eyes clashed as I did so, the impact so tangible that I was sure the class heard the crackling clang of electric chemistry between us. King smiled that long, slow curl of the lips that unwound something inside me, before he stood up.
“Why don’t you read the poem for us, then we will question you as a class about your intentions?” I suggested, somewhat breathily.
He nodded and didn’t take his burning gaze off of me as he began to recite his poem.
“A secret in her smile
Tucked in a rosy furl
I want to pull it out with my teeth
Soothe the paper cut with my tongue
Dip in the well of her blood and write
My own secret on her lips
So that every time she talks
Every lick of those lips
And drag of breath through her mouth
She feels me
Her tongue scrapes the scar of my secret on the inside of her pout
And she can’t deny the truth of it
Of me
Of us
I’ve branded her with it
She’s mine.”
The silence in the class was impenetrable. It cloaked me in faux privacy, enabled me to indulge in a moment of pure, unadulterated awe and lust. There was no doubt in my mind that King was speaking about me. The glittering ice blue of his eyes shone on me spotlight bright. I fidgeted nervously under his possessive regard, fiddling with my left ring finger where my wedding and engagement bands used to rest.
The girls in my class had collectively lost their breath to him, their pheromones heating in the small room so that the cloying scent of their adolescent sweet perfume grew stronger.
Seventeen-year-old girls, and I was no better.
In fact, I was significantly worse.
I’d been a married woman, lived enough years to control my baser instincts, especially after William had successfully cauterized them for so long.
Yet, there I stood in front of my classroom, thighs rubbing together, nipples beaded under my shirt and pulse throbbing like strobe lights, calling King to claim me, to take me like I knew he wanted to.
As if reading my salacious thoughts, King sank back into his chair and winked at me. “So, whaddya think, teach?”
I was grateful for the reminder that I was, indeed, his teacher.
“Interesting, King, I’ll give you that. But why don’t we see what your classmates have to say?”
Immediately, nearly everyone’s hands flooded the air.
King chuckled and slouched further back in his seat, a lazy smirk on his face. “Well, look at that, at least someone liked it.”
Talia laughed and flounced over to King from her seat on the other side of the room. With an ease that belayed their familiarity, she flopped into his lap and wrapped her arms around his neck.
“You are so silly. Of course, I liked it,” she crooned to him as she pressed a kiss to his cheek.
I wasn’t sure who looked more devastated, Benny or myself. My breath froze in my lungs, the iced air expanding until my lungs ached.
King smiled fondly at Talia but gently urged her off of his lap. “Wasn’t about you, sweets. You’re not the only beautiful girl around here, you know.”