Page 21 of Bad Professor

I’ve never carried a woman to bed before. That’s too romantic, too fairy tale. Too much like the guy with the red room who wants to sweep a woman off her feet.

The legs are still shaky as I look around for something to leave a note. The cat sits in the doorway to the kitchen, giving me its best-disinterested expression.

I find a square pad of Post-it notes and a pen on the counter. What to write?

Thanks for the good time, seems rude. Have a nice life seems even worse.

Can I see you again? Even thinking the question feels heavy. Is that what I want? To see Tilly again? To meet her for coffee and find out more about the people in her life, in the pictures. See more of the happy smile when she’s with her daughters, and find out what made her so hesitant at the beginning.

To find out more, because right now, that woman is a mystery to me in every way.

But that woman has kids, and she’s older than I am. Does this matter? Not to me, but I can see issues and baggage, and I’m gearing up for another year of lectures and new faces—

That should not be the reason I don’t want to see her.

I’d love to hear from you again. Dex

There. The ball is in her court.

12

Tilly

Dexter is gone when I wake up and I’m okay with that.

I slept with a man I don’t know. I had a one-night stand. I had casual sex.

Oh, God, please don’t let him give me an STD.

We used condoms, which is strange when you’re forty-five. When I was married, Carlos and I never used birth control because another baby would have been a blessing. He refused to have a vasectomy—he must have known there was a chance he might be interested in fathering another woman’s baby—and hated condoms, so birth control was up to me.

I felt so young when Dexter pulled out the little foil square from his wallet. And then when he rolled it on…

I hug my pillow, picturing Dexter’s cock.

I never thought of myself as a penis woman, like men are breast men or ass men. To me, the penis is a funny-looking appendage, good for one thing, and clearly has a mind of its own. The two real-life penises I have seen—I didn’t get a good look at Kevin due to the dark and the rushedness of the whole experience—were nothing to be excited about. Average in length and girth, they went from soft to hard under my hand, and hard to soft like a deflating balloon when things were over.

But Dexter is another story. Long and rock hard, it would have filled my grip if I’d taken the time to touch—and it definitely filled the other place.

What would it have felt like in my mouth?

When I think about how Dexter’s penis felt inside me, it makes me realize that, despite what I might have said to Carlos in the past, my husband did not have an average-sized penis. In fact, it might have been on the small size.

And I kind of want to tell him that.

But I don’t. Instead, I get out of bed, feeling a little achy, like after a good session of Pilates. Muscles have been stretched, places have been awakened—

Dexter made me come with his mouth. Twice. And then once more.

Who says it takes a long time for me to have an orgasm? I kind of want to tell Carlos that, too.

The last time I had sex was on a Saturday night. We had ordered in, watched a movie on Netflix. The girls were both staying over at friends’ houses. I had a shower and put on a slinky nightgown before crawling into bed, hopeful with anticipation curling in my stomach.

It had been a while.

Carlos had reached for my breasts and fondled them roughly. He pulled up the skirt of my nightgown, ripped off my panties.

I had been… drier… than I should have been when he pushed inside me.

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