Page 23 of Dark Ink

“I’ll give you an A.”

It felt crass. On equal grounds with offering cash. It wasn’t what I wanted for the beautiful girl I first saw in sunlight. When the autumn trees, vibrant and full and lovely, seemed to dance just for her. The wind moved just to feel the softness of her hair. Fate itself worked so that I would see her. She came with poetry. She came with music. She came with something pure and gentle and sacred.

But I was tired of our dance. Tired of the steps forward, the steps backwards. Tired of the distance maintained between us like opposing magnets.

The crossroad devil offers deals. Anything for the price of a soul. The world for one little signature. I thought myself better than the devil, serving a silver platter to my minx in the form of the good grade she thought she so desired. I thought myself better, but not by much.

Eithne stared at me with the expected shock. I’d degraded her. She needed to act that way, at least to justify her standing there, with me, just a little bit longer. But she didn’t move for the door. She didn’t repeat her command, her secret plea. The fire in her eyes dimmed, the whites of her knuckles receded, and she still was silent.

“You don’t even have to come the rest of the semester,” I added. “Guaranteed A and all you have to do is spend the rest of the period with me. Here.”

I’d sweetened the pot irresistibly. All Eithne claimed to want was to graduate with honours so she could get a good, soulless, mindless job. I knew this. She knew this.

But I believe Eithne was tired of the dance, too, because she didn’t bother with any false act of deciding, this way or that. She sighed through her nose noisily. Glanced once at the door over my shoulder. Drew her lips into a straight line as she glared at me.

“I’m all yours, Professor.”

It was not said with playfulness. Nor alluringness. There was no sweetness, no tease, no twinkle at the corner of her unnarrowed eyes. She would go to the fiery stake. But she was determined to show no eagerness for its blaze. I couldn’t really say I blamed her.

She followed me back down the stairs willingly enough. I checked a few times that she hadn’t darted back up the stairs to the door and each time she hadn’t. She merely assessed me with an arched eyebrow that seemed to say, “Something wrong, Professor?”

At the front of the auditorium, Eithne stood at a distance as I pulled a stack of heavy paper and several charcoal pencils from my satchel. I held them out for her. She remained where she was. Stubborn as a mule. I cursed. I walked over to her. She stared down at the blank pages unimpressed as I nudged them closer toward her. Finally I let them all drop. The stack of paper carded out like I was going to select a tarot card. The pencils spun like the arrows of a wayward compass.

“Draw an orchid,” I instructed and then without another word, returned to the desk behind the lectern.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Eithne hesitate. Again a little glance toward the locked lower door, shade pulled tight. Was it for my sake? Or hers? I busied myself with essays I wasn’t really reading (never did, never would) as she lowered herself slowly to the floor.

“Is this what you want?” she asked, breaking the silence that had threatened to crush the two of us alive in that empty auditorium. “Me on my knees, Professor Merrick?”

She was mocking me. I ignored her taunts and replied calmly, “If you just took the paper, you wouldn’t be on the floor, Ms Brady.”

“But how would you get hard then?” she shot back.

I didn’t like this flippant side of her. It aroused in me too easily a desire to put her in her place. To punish her. To take her over my knee. Turn her ass cheeks red. If she wanted me so badly to be Professor Merrick, I’d more than gladly make of her Pupil Brady. But these were distractions, fun as they were, that I didn’t need for the time being. I had other aims in mind for that late afternoon than my pleasure.

“An orchid, Ms Brady,” I told her. “Is the problem that you don’t know how to draw one?”

Eithne glared and fumed as she took up her charcoal pencil and began to scratch it across the page. She worked quickly. I kept my focus on the blurred words of the essay in front of me, but it was difficult with the way her long dark hair curtained her pursed lips and hard-set eyes. I longed to sketch the indentation the heel of her boots made in her ass or the tops of her breasts hanging like forbidden fruits I could just make out from the limp collar of her sweatshirt.

When Eithne was finished she looked up at me like a child seeking release from the time-out corner. I held out my open palm and she rolled her eyes. Her steps were petulant: slow, loud, drawing attention to herself. The paper crumpled where she jammed it at me with her thumb.

She stood a little too close as I examined it. Her scent was too present and it was far too easy to imagine the smell of sweat, of dried paint, of her desire. It threatened to make me hard. It guaranteed to make me hate myself even more than I already did. I told myself I was making amends. I told myself I was making things better. I told myself this was for her.

The orchid was lovely. Stunning really. It showed true talent. A unique perspective. She grasped not for the thing itself, but the thing it stirred inside of me. It was good. Very good. I tore it up in front of her and didn’t wait for her foot stomping to speak.

“Now draw your pussy.”

“What?”

“Your pussy, Ms Brady.”

Eithne glared down at me. I stared calmly back up at her. I could see the resistance in her. The unwillingness. But there was also that stubbornness. She didn’t want to draw her pussy like I’d told her, but she didn’t want me to know she didn’t want to. Why?

Eithne returned to the floor and again picked up the charcoal pencil. Again the curtain of hair, the swelling of her ass around the heels of her boots, the forbidden fruit, hanging, eager to be licked, bitten. Again she looked up when she was finished like I should go to her. Again I held out my open palm, barely feigning to glance in her direction.

Her drawing of her pussy was everything her orchid wasn’t. I wasn’t disappointed, only because I suspected this would be the case.

“It looks like it belongs in a medical journal,” I told her.

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