Page 35 of Between the Lines

On the car ride home, I crank the air.

I wasn’t lying to him when I said that home was too loud to think. The middle of the night is when I get in my quiet time. My time to read or write or mindlessly surf the web without one of the littles begging for my phone so they can play Minecraft or watch YouTube. I thought tonight’s drug of choice would be the latestepisode in my favorite true crime podcast that I can’t listen to in the car when I have the kids, but tonight, my mind is completely elsewhere.

You know what week no one ever talks about when it comes to women? It’s the week when you’re unbearably horny. Combining this week with Nathan Harding’s hands on me and the phantom of him calling me agood girl, and I know what I’m doing with my “me time” before I’ve even rolled into the driveway.

Living in a house full of people has meant two things for my sex life: no vibrators, and I’ve learned to master the silent orgasm.

Tonight though, I long for something other than my own fingers. Because something tells me that they won’t do justice to the fantasy I’ve been concocting on my car ride home of Nathan towering over me. His praises of my classroom work shifting in the bedroom to the tune of those unsaid words. I get more and more wet with each pass that the Nathan in my head calls me aGood girl.

Unfortunately, as my slim fingers slip past my waistband, as I swirl over my clit, bypass it, and go straight for my wet pussy, I am right. Two fingers aren’t enough to satisfy the image of Nathan’s hard on that I saw earlier with what I imagine he would do to me behind closed doors. Not when the man in my head has my ankles up by my shoulders, is slapping my clit before tapping the thick head of his cock against my opening.

I’m usually so,soquiet, but all of a sudden, I’m reaching for a pillow to cover my face before that hand is blindly slipping under my tank top, pinching my swollen nipples as Fantasy Nathan flicks his tongue over one and bites.

His cock is thicker than it is long, but it fills me soso good, and IknowI draw blood as I bite down on my bottom lip, slip a third finger into my wetness, and swipe my thumb over my aching clit.

It doesn’t take long at all for me to come. For the first time since I started locking my bedroom door, I actually fear I might make anoise that sounds the alarms. But I keep it to a shrill whine that is mostly muffled by my pillow, as the Nathan in my head demands that I come, and I give him exactly what he asks for.

sixteen

nathan

I haven’t gottena single productive thing done since I sat down at my desk this morning.

I work in a middle school, and this is the strangest thing that has happened to me all week.

I thrive on order and structure. I have a morning to-do list that gets completed before most of my staff has walked through the front doors, and yet, here it sits, untouched, while the rest of the school is through almost two full class periods. And I have done nothing but stare at the tube that was on my desk when I arrived.

I know it’s makeup. There is nothing inherently baffling about it.

And yet, since last night, it feels as if my brain were thrown into a waffle maker, and just when things were settling down, someone flipped me.

That someone being Claire Benson.

There was a note attached to the gift, written in neat, loopy handwriting, that I have traced no less than one hundred times.

Just in case.

-C

We won’t talk about the way I traced the curve of thatClike it was the curve of her Cheshire smile standing before my cock. We also won’t talk about the way I had my hand wrapped around myself before I even had my shoes kicked off after I arrived home last night. I came twice—twice—in the shower, picturing her in too many ways to be considered polite. I thought I’d gotten it out of my system, but the moment I saw her car in the parking lot, my skin heated, and the moment I saw the package on my desk, I was half hard again.

In youroffice, Harding. Get it together.

The sad fact is, I don’t even need her gift.

The excuse I would’ve been able to make to see her, to walk down and show her that I used the gift she’d gotten me, is out the window. Her ice pack must’ve done the trick, because all that was left from my run-in with the door frame was a slight red hue.

Now you’re wishing for a bruise?Pull yourself together.

The ring of the bell snaps me from my trance—Claire’s fingertips on my skin and the way her cheeks turn the sweetest shades of the color wheel—and I have to will myself back into a modicum of professionalism because now that it’s third period, Claire is on her prep, and she has so graciously allotted it to working beside Lucy and me on this mentorship program. We are going to spend the next forty or so minutes together, and I have to pull it together.

“Lucy had an emergency meeting with a student. Do you mind if it’s just you and me, or would you rather reschedule?”

My body prickles with awareness, both at her presence, and at the new news that I will have her all to myself.

“I don’t mind. Please, take a seat.”

I hope she doesn’t notice how gravelly my words ring out.

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