Tenure

3. James

3

James

Jesus, she’s mad. I don’t know why I find that as satisfying as I do, but my rock-hard cock is screaming at me to keep toying with her. See how far I can push her. See what happens when she snaps.

I frown at myself, surprised. Most of the professors help themselves; it kind of comes with the territory. But I’ve never had any interest. Younger almost always means dumber, and nothing turns me off faster than a woman who can’t spell syllabus.

She stands up and angrily picks up her things. I think she’s going to leave again in a huff— good, I can kick her out of my class— but instead she storms past me and drops her shit on my desk, pulling a chair up to it with a screech, and then plops herself down in my chair.

You little fucking cunt.

She says nothing as she opens her notebook, licking her fingers before aggressively flipping the page.

My cock twitches again.

Shit.

She looks up at me, her brown eyes practically glowing red. “Chapter six,” she seethes.

I blink, surprised. She’s read ahead? I find myself taking a seat in the shitty, uncomfortable chair she put out for me.

“What about it?” I ask hesitantly.

“I don’t have access to the lecture notes yet. Obviously. But I was wondering—” She starts rattling off figures, spinning her notebook around and sliding it across the desk as she talks. I reach for her book and frown; she’s laid out her problems more or less exactly the way I lay out mine. Made notes that—

This could be my fucking lecture.

I got stuck with this class. I don’t normally teach open classes; if there aren’t at least two prerequisites for the course, they don’t bother asking me because the answer will be no . But Barry took an extended sabbatical, decided he liked Italy more than his wife, and they asked me to step in.

I chucked all of Barry’s notes in the trash before the semester even started.

He was a good teacher, sure. But he hand-held and mollycoddled, so by the time they hit my classes—upper-level classes—they weren’t ready. Not really. You want to be an astronaut? A physicist? An engineer? Stop wasting everyone’s time and get studying.

I’d cut out the introductory bullshit, weeks of review and tutorials, and gone straight to chapter one of a textbook I’d actually helped pen. It jumped right in, no preamble, all business. I figured the majority of the students would drop, and I’d be off the hook for teaching the damn class.

Maybe I should just get her to teach it instead.

“—the textbook is wrong.”

That snaps me out of my reverie damn quick.

“What?” I ask sharply.

She taps on her notes and slides her textbook over.

“See? This doesn’t make sense.”

I almost laugh. But then I do a double-take and pick up the textbook. I glance down at her calculations, her formula laid out in tidy print with a little red question mark in the margin, and I feel my stomach drop out through my feet.

She’s fucking right.

It’s subtle. A typo in the formula. But . . .

“I’ll take it from your expression that I’m right,” she says wryly, snatching her notes back and stuffing them in her bag. She stands and walks around the desk, looking coolly down her nose at me.

“You wrote this one, didn’t you?”

“Co-wrote,” I grit out, trying to burn a hole through the page with my eyes.

“Mm. Well. We can’t all be perfect.”

And she walks out without it, leaving me and my aching cock—possibly for the first time in my life—feeling absolutely dumbfounded.