My brow puckered. “Look, I know you think I’m stupid, but I’m really not. I was desperate.” I heard the plea in my voice and hated myself for it. There was no entreating this man to do anything.
“You keep on using that word,” he retorted. “Desperate, but how desperate?”
“What do you want from me?” I cried again, unable to take his tormenting for much longer.
He patted the desk. “Sit here.”
I reared back. “Huh?”
“Sit here.”
All of a sudden, it hit me. I shook my head. “I’m not going to fuck you.”
“Good thing I don’t want to fuck you either,” he countered immediately, unoffended by my words.
I’d been slow on the uptake here, granted, but what the hell was he talking about?
He didn’t want to fuck me, so why did he want me to sit on his desk?
Throat tightening, I stared at him and recognized that he looked almost bored by our conversation.
“If I sit there, what do you want me to do?” I inquired, voice husky.
“You’re going to spread your legs and touch your pussy until you come.”
For a second, my eyes bugged out, and how the hell I didn’t laugh, I wasn’t sure.
He said it so calmly, without so much as a hint of heat.
I wasn’t a virgin, but I didn’t go around jilling off in front of people. Especially not professors.
And certainly not professors who loathed the ground I walked on.
“Are you for real?” I rasped, my fingers tightening to the point of pain in the busted seams of my bag.
“Oh, most definitely.”
❖
The way he crooned those words made me think this wasn’t even a sexual thing. It was about dominance.
He wanted me to do this to humiliate me.
To belittle me.
I just didn’t understand why.
What had I ever done to him to make him want to do this to me? To treat me like I was a dispensable pawn in his personal game of chess?
My heartbeat pounded in my ears with a dull throb that had pain slicing through my nerve endings. Shuddering, I stared at him and asked, “Why?”
His smile was cool, calculating, but his voice was like silk, and all the more dangerous for it as he threatened, “Because if you don’t want to lose everything, you’ll do as I say.”
The words made me feel even more like a dog who was being trained.
When I didn’t immediately leap up to do his bidding, he whispered, “Is there a reason your brother depends on you and not your mother? Is she dead?”
Eyes flaring wide at that, I bit out, “You leave him out of this.”
“He’s part of the problem, isn’t he?” he retorted, as cool as ever. “His fate rests in my hands as much as yours does.”
He wasn’t wrong there.
Damn him.
I licked my lips. “P-Please, I’ll clean anything, you can videotape me.”
“Because I have time for that…” He cocked a brow at me. “I have time to let a filthy thief into my home and record her while she cleans the place, just to make sure she isn’t stealing from me?”
“But why would you want me to,” I motioned at the desk, “do that?”
He wasn’t getting anything out of it.
Not with the repugnant twist to his lips that told me, more than his words had, that he didn’t want to fuck me.
“Because I told you to. It isn’t about ‘want.’ It’s about obedience. It’s about the fact that if you don’t shut your fucking mouth and do as you’re told, your shitty little world will come tumbling down around your ears.
“I’ve seen you steal from your workplace, and you’ve barely managed to get by in my class so a word in the Dean’s ear...” He smirked at me, a hateful twist of his mouth that I wanted to slap. “Then, there’s your boss. After I explain what I saw, your boss will fire you, so what more do you think it will take for you to lose everything? And so close to finals too?”
As he dug the knife in and twisted, my nostrils flared with rage as I clambered to my feet. When I didn’t spin around for the door, the most beautifully hateful smile curved his lips.
At any other moment, had a man graced me with a smile like that, I knew for a fact I’d be weak in the knees.
Instead?
I was outraged and disgusted.
That smile was so beatific because he knew he’d won, knew that I was about to do as he asked.
My jaw clenched as I rounded the desk and hefted my not insubstantial weight onto it. Almost as though he read my mind, he murmured, “Are you sure you’re poor?”
For a second, I was speechless—were the stealing, the shitty bookbag that had fallen to pieces, and the crap state of my clothes, not enough proof? “W-What do you mean?”
“You’re hardly starving, are you?”
I wanted to splutter, wanted to slap his face for the needlessly cruel words. It was like he wanted me to hate him. Like he was saying it, digging the knife in all the more just to get a rise out of me.
The bastard.
“Cheap foods are nutritionally poor,” I murmured.
He hummed, and the tone of it was disbelieving. Like he didn’t know that cheap, ready meals contained the worst kind of nutrition.
Like I was bullshitting about that.
“You skipped a step,” he carried on, settling back into his seat, rocking it as though he were in the middle of a lively debate.
“I-I did?”
“Can’t get yourself off in your jeans, can you?”
My cheeks flushed with my misery as I jumped off the desk, because if I’d been happy about touching myself in front of him, I was less than ecstatic after his comments.
Was he about to remark on the size of my ass?
On the state of my panties?
Apparently, it was open fucking season on Phoebe Whitehouse today.
I was in the stocks and he was quite at ease throwing rotten fruit and vegetables my way.
Mouth tightening, I unfastened the fly of my jeans then began to drag them down my hips. As I started, however, he murmured, “Turn around.”
I closed my eyes, aware that his intention truly was to humiliate me, because he’d evidently read my mind.
This time, no amount of tightening stopped the quiver as my mouth trembled with my embarrassment. I struggled out of the jeans, trying not to bend down and kick my way out of them instead, but they weren’t having it. They gathered around my ankles and stuck fast.
Mortified beyond belief, I bent over and quickly loosened them before twisting around, with my face bright pink.
The nasty sneer on his face said it all.
I was a disappointment.
To a man who I hadn’t intended on pleasing in the first place.
Great.
Cheeks burning with the scorch to my pride, I scuttled over to the desk and lifted myself back onto it once more. A fine tremor coursed along my body, making me preternaturally aware of every single fucking inch of it.
The ass that was too big.
The hips that were too round.
The belly that jiggled.
The tits that refused to stay contained by anything other than one of the ugly bras that ‘big’ girls had to wear.
The only saving grace?
He hadn’t asked me to take off my panties.