IN VINO

A SPIRES STORY

ALEXIS HALL

Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Note

1. In Vino

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Alexis Hall

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used factiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

In Vino

Copyright © 2016 by Alexis Hall

Cover art: Lennan Adams

lennanadams@gmail.com

Editor: Michele Howe

(@Neverwhere)

michelejhowe@gmail.com

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

For Group

with all my love and some apologies

I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

NOTE

So For Real recently kind of won a RITA. This story is a thank you to all my readers for supporting me and my weird books. It means so much to me that I occasionally write things down and people occasionally like the things I have written down.

The suggestion in the Hassell & Hall Facebook group was that I should do something like Glitterland: Aftermath, but for Laurie and Toby. Except the more I thought about it, the more I realised that I’d left those characters exactly where I wanted them to be and anything extra would be, well, extra. Which meant I had to think of something else.

The other thing people often ask me about in For Real is Jasper’s story. And this is a tricky thing for them to ask me about because Jasper is, frankly, a hot mess. I do occasionally toy with the idea of giving him a book of his own—and he’s the sort of person who usually gets his own way—but you’ll see from this short why I hesitate.

Nevertheless, here he is. This interlude takes place during For Real. It’s not a romance because there’s no happy ending except in the ejaculatory sense. In fact, I’d characterise the ending as HFN, meaning Holy Fuck No. Trigger warnings for alcoholism, the abuse of a position of trust, and some really insensitive comments about AIDS.

Once again, thank you to everyone who read and supported For Real. I appreciate this isn’t the follow-up story you asked for but I hope you … um … enjoy doesn’t seem quite the right word. But here’s a thing for you.

Alexis Hall

August 2016

IN VINO

It’s the wine that’s made me sentimental. Or perhaps I pity James F. Hanley, being tripped-over by a child who lacks the capacity to sing and a man who lacks the capacity to count. In any case, I sing, something I haven’t done for years, fallen chorister that I am. My voice—lain so long fallow—rises from my lips like a lark. I’m honestly a little startled to discover something so pure still lingers inside me. Likely, I’ll rectify it soon enough, but for the moment … I still recall the thrill, guess I always will.

It must be the wine because it can’t be Laurie’s absurd happiness or the winsome ways of his boy. They dance on long after the song is done. I finish my cigarette, drain my glass and leave them to each other.

Silence trails me into the cloisters. I can get another drink in the SCR. There’ll be the dregs of conversation too. And Sherry, of course, the last flame amongst the ashes. But fuck him, I can’t bear his perfection tonight. If he’d been born just ten years earlier, he’d be conveniently dying of AIDs right now. For symbolic reasons, you understand, representing the destruction of the beautiful and the good. Easily interpretable primetime tragedy. Unfortunately, I’ve never seen him suffer so much as a cold. I want to imagine him a wasted ruin, fractious and afraid, so that I can be the better man. But my mind betrays me as it always does, and I am the one who is broken. Never him. Never Sherry. He is half-angel, dying as exquisitely as Saint Sebastian, barely pricked by arrows, while I weep on my knees at his bedside like Heathcliff and beg, please don’t leave me to a world without you. He’s the only person I’ve ever permitted to think well of me. And, let’s be honest, it’s touch and go.

As I wander without purpose, I abandon the glass on the ledge of one of the ornamental arches. Someone—a scout, a waiter, a porter, perhaps another academic—will find it in the morning and be annoyed. They’ll blame a careless undergraduate, of course. I think I must be exceptionally drunk. Inebriation is like the sea—even the bed is not the bottom, and I am floating gently in some bio-luminescent trench among the anglerfish and the vampire squid. But I like it down here. I’ve never seen well by sunlight and I prefer the company of eyeless things.

I can always tell when I’m deep-deep-deep because my thoughts take on the cut-glass clarity of uttered words. It’s almost as if they’ve shaped for themselves a recipient. Not an interlocutor, for this being is always absolutely silent, barely present but for a sense of limitless receptiveness. I suppose some would call this god, but my God has no use for me, nor I for him. Regardless, I am oddly comforted by the imagined existence of a listener. Someone to bear all that is ugly and unspeakable and true. And stay with me still.

Sherry might be waiting. But, no. No. I can’t see him again tonight. Given my behaviour earlier, we should be in the contrition stage of our cycle, and I’m not contrite enough. I will be, though, in a day or a handful of days, when the absence of him crawls over me like gangrene. At which point I’ll crawl too. I might even manage to treat him well for a little while. Oh, what fuckery is this? Whoever claimed there was veritas in vino was a rank amateur. We devotees drink it for delusion and I will never be good, or good enough, for Sherry. I will never be what he deserves.

Laurie, though, has betrayed me shamefully. Our brotherhood of the unloveable. Who will be defiantly wretched with me now? He’ll still visit, of course, but he’ll get joy and contentment everywhere, and it won’t be the same. It was bad enough when he was with Robert. So very Laurie to spend over a decade with the first man who made him beg and hurt, as if there’s some kind of magic to it. I thought he’d finally moved beyond such pathetic naïveté, but apparently I was wrong. His world is not completely devoid of enchantment

A moment of indulgence: I imagine Tobermory’s fingers tightening against my throat, the wild thing glitter of his eyes.

Surrender is as effortless as water for people like me, for people with nothing worth yielding. I gave him only a taste of it, but it I could tell it tantalised him. I should have taken it further and stirred that sweet little cock of his. It’s the filthiest of pleasures picturing the betrayal in Laurie’s eyes. My oldest friend, and the thought of causing him that much pain—of taking something beautiful from him—makes me instantly, powerfully hard. And to think his tender morsel of a dom believes himself a sadist.

“Dr Leigh?” A voice from the shadows.

I’m disconcerted for a second or two that the world is not my own dark kingdom. And then I recognise one my undergraduates. I give him the barest nod. “Mr Baron.”

We’re encouraged these days to be informal. Some of my colleagues are even—God help us—matey. They call tutorials “classes” and wear blazers with jeans. Probably they aspire to host hour-long specials on the BBC, where they serve up learning like slices of pizza: The Secret Life of Shakespeare, A Century of Sodomy, Top Ten Sex Scandals of the Sixteenth Century. It makes me want to vomit. And so does pizza.

The fashion may be to ape modernity—equal access frameworks and strategic outreach and we’re just like everyone else really—but I insist upon ceremony. The observances of rank. Oxford is Brideshead Revisited and Jude the Obscure. It is the city of Sidney and Wilmot and Wilde. We do not come here to be normal. We come because we are not. And we crave the brutal mastery of centuries and cold stone.

There was a girl a year or so back—from Leeds, I think—who pronounced my name as “Lay.” Dr Lay, she said, draping her flat, round vowels all over it. I didn’t deign to correct her. Just let the silence seal her in grey steel. Until she fled in tears. Honestly, I thought they were supposed to breed them tough up north. To this day, I’m not sure what happened to her. Did someone tell me she dropped out? Or changed course. Or committed suicide. It’s so hard to remember with undergraduates.

“Did you have a good evening?”

God save me from eighteen-year-olds attempting small talk. Not that He has ever saved me from anything before. “Very pleasant, thank you. Much wine had passed, with grave discourse. Of who fucks who, and who does worse.”

A sort of giggle. “Dr Leigh, you said fuck.”

“No, I quoted poetry, with the word fuck in it. One must always be precise, Mr Baron.”

Uninvited, he falls into step beside me. He’s taller than I am, with the rippling cartoon Hercules build of a rower, broad across the shoulders, tapering to long, lean flanks. Probably he rises at four am every morning and races down to the river with the rest of the public school beasts. “Are you always going to call me Mr Baron?”

“It’s your name.”

“My name is Oliver. Or my friends call me Ollie.”

I’m either too drunk or not drunk enough for this. In either case, I need another glass of wine. I need another bottle. “Not being of their number, I have no interest in what your friends call you.”

“Okay, but it’s not like we’re strangers either. And, right now, aren’t you off the clock?”

“Off the clock,” I repeat, fuzzily appalled. “I don’t work in Tescos.”

“No, if you worked in a supermarket, it would definitely be Waitrose.”

“You’re not funny, Mr Baron.”

He laughs anyway. Not the posh-boy bray I’m expecting, but something altogether … realer.

“Do you want something?” I ask, and I’m relieved to discover my tone is sharp, with an edge of boredom. As it should be.

He shifts uncertainly. And I pay no attention to the pull and bunch of muscles in his upper arms. “Um, gosh. Awks. Not really. I just saw you walking and you looked sort of…”

“I looked sort of what?”

“I don’t know.” This unsubtle evasion is probably the only flicker of sense he has shown in the last five minutes. Possibly his entire life. “I thought I might as well say hello.”

“Then mission accomplished. Goodnight.”

I move away as briskly as I can. The world rolls her hips and the ground lurches. The half-eaten moon swings in the sky like the hook of a pendulum. But where is the pit?

“Do you want me to walk you back to your room?” he calls after me.

Of course I don’t. “If you insist.”

“Cool.”

I’m dimly aware of time and space. Both of them passing, drifting away from me in snail-trails of starlight. It’s only when we’re at the foot of a staircase that I realise where we are.

“You think I live in my office?” My voice is not quite what I would have wished. Regrettably, I sound almost amused.

“Oh shit. I mean. Sorry. I … fuck.”

Actually, this is better. My rooms are full of Sherry. My sheets will smell of him. Strands of his hair will shine upon my pillows. I fumble for my keys. “Come on up.”

I’m at the very top. Laurie calls it my turret. Though I have yet to experience any Tirra-Lirra-ing. I don’t think I can cope with bright light so I turn on a lamp. It’s stained glass, art nouveau roses, casting pinkish dapples across the wood panelled walls. Oliver stands uncertainly in what should be a familiar place: this site of his weekly pilgrimage to literature.

“Would you like a drink?” I ask. I’m already pouring one for me. I’ve got about a third of a bottle of an Australian Cabernet Sauvignon, good enough to stay drunk on.

“Maybe some water? Should I get you some as well?”

I gave him the sort of look guaranteed to reduce under-prepared, over-aspirational undergraduates to tears. “Have some wine, for fuck’s sake.”

My fingers are not as steady as they could be but I manage to pour. And then press the glass into one of his big, oar-calloused hands.

“I don’t really—”

“Oh, don’t be virtuous, it’s tedious.”

He’s holding his wine as if I’ve given him a live grenade. “It’s just… My Dad…”

“Drink up, Mr Baron. ‘That second bottle tells us the truth of ourselves and forces us to speak truths of others.’” I feel the laughter, grape-red, upon my lips. “Though I confess I’m slightly past the second.”

After a long moment, he takes a sip. “Am I supposed to be all, deep nose and oaky finish? Base notes of berries and unicorns.”

“Personally I’ve always preferred simply to drink it.” I clink my glass to his. It makes the crystal sing: a sweet, clean note that hangs then shatters in the silence.

For some reason—an instinct for cruelty turned, this time, upon myself—I glance out of the mullioned windows and down, down, all the way down into the quad. Just in time to see a knight ride by. I recognise Sherry by his shadow. By the way what little light remains glitters in his hair. Even walking away, especially walking away, he’s beautiful. Long, careless strides as if loss and shame and fear have never touched him. And never could.

My palm is against the glass. But, of course, he won’t look up. He has no way of knowing I’m even here. Maybe he’s going to my rooms, wanting me, and I won’t be there, a possibility I have no ability to process. I love the idea of disappointing him, of possessing that power. But, at the same time, every moment I am not with Sherry—and there are so many, a universe of dust—feels like a wasted one. What do you do with a man you can neither bear to be with nor bear to be without? Although, to momentarily face a second-third-fourth bottle truth: it is mostly myself I cannot bear.

There’s another world, where I am different, or he is, and I push open the window. Maybe I call out to him or maybe I don’t have to because he magically already knows so I can run down the stairs and into his arms and the kiss of all kisses that I haven’t quite learned how to stop waiting for. And maybe there’s rain. And an ugly cat that I’m not allergic to.

In any case, it’s all irrelevant because he turns the other way and disappears. There’s a moment, just after, when I feel so close to weeping.

“Dr Leigh—” a touch between my shoulder blades “—are you okay?”

I spin round. Oh yes. Oliver Baron. I’d forgotten he was here. But I invited him, didn’t I?

Since there’s less than usual to lose, less than nothing in other words, I let myself enjoy looking at him. He’s just on the right side of brutish, powerful, but refined. And the rest of him is equally appealing. Green-eyed and clean-cut, naturally patrician, the sort of face that would place him somewhere between One Direction and a minor Royal. The crease of his lips is stained slightly purple.

So I kiss him.

He makes a delicious little shocked noise. But he doesn’t hesitate. His mouth parts under mine with all the clumsy fervour of half-drunk youth and I taste the bitterness of wine upon his tongue.

He doesn’t seem to know what to do with his hands.

I drop my wine glass—it’s in my way—and grab a handful of his shirt, using it to drag him deeper into my kiss. But the breaking glass distracts him.

“Jesus.” He pulls away, my reluctance to let him leaving a glistening trail across his chin. “Be careful.”

“It’s only glass.”

“You could get hurt.”

I laugh and try to kiss him again.

“Seriously.”

“Fine.” I put my hands on his shoulders and jump. He catches me and hoists me up and I twine my legs about his waist, my gown billowing around us. “Rescue me, then.”

He carries me effortlessly across the room. Then appears to have absolutely no idea what to do with me. I direct him to my chair, the fine old wingback from which I conduct tutorials, and he sinks down into it, bringing me with him. For a moment I’m tumbled over his lap as wantonly as a tavern wench in a pulp fantasy novel. If he knew me better, he’d pin me like this. A touch of indignity brings out the best in me. For what little that’s worth.

But, of course, he doesn’t. And I won’t admit that I want it. I right myself, panting a little, trying to gauge how deep I am, how far I’ve fallen. But I’m drunk beyond landmarks and there’s only dark from here.

I shove a hand between his legs. He’s already hard, but I stroke him anyway. There’s something strangely earnest about his cock as it jerks and strains. A puppy dog on the leash. Well, a large and vigorous puppy. A Labrador or something.

“Dr Leigh?”

“Yes, Mr Baron?”

“Is this … I mean. What’s going on?”

“What’s going on is that I’m about to fuck you. Any objections?”

“I … I don’t know.”

Admittedly, he’s not the quickest of his year’s cohort. I gave him my most piercing stare over the top of my glasses. “Do you think I’m entirely ignorant of the way you look at me?”

“Oh God.” He squeezes his eyes closed, a feverish flush streaking those perfectly chiselled cheekbones.

“Mr Baron,” I purr, “are you hot for teacher?”

“Yes, but—” he breaks into a strangled gasp as I squeeze him savagely.

“What did I tell you about precision?”

“You … you … said it was good.”

I decide to forgive him for his inability to recognise rhetorical questions because his cock clearly requires more blood than his brain. “So you do listen.”

“I listen to everything you say.” He’s looking at me again—surprisingly solemnly for a man getting what amounts to a hand job in Georgian armchair.

“How terribly unwise of you, my dear.” I let go of his cock and run my thumb carelessly across his lips. Sadness beats inside me like a second heart. “Now, are we making this terrible mistake, or not? I don’t have all night.”

This is, of course, a wild lie.

He kisses the pad of my thumb, which exactly the sort of pointless tenderness I can’t abide, and gives me a reckless, wine-stained smile. “Yeah, okay.”

Unsteadily, I stand, turn and go to work on his belt. I have to subject him to an exasperated sigh before he realises I need him to raise his hips. He does and I yank his jeans and underwear down his thighs. Which, I must concede, are rather fine: well-defined, and lightly whorled with gold-brown hair. His cock, too, is pleasantly fit for purpose, boasting both width and length, ruddily and prominently crowned. Whatever created Oliver Horatio Baron, late of Winchester College, has been liberal with its blessings. It’s enough to make one positively teleological.

And it seems I’m on my knees. Old habits, as they say, die hard. Fratres agnoscamus peccata nostra, ut api simus ad sacra mysteria celebranda. I lean forward and drop a mocking kiss on the head of his prick. He jerks and gasps, and leaks a pearly tear, leaving me with the fleetest trace of salt upon my lips.

Back to my feet, most likely lurching slightly, grace apparently being something else I lost on the way to where I am now. I stumble out of my shoes, shed socks and trousers and boxers. The rest is way too much trouble.

Do I have a condom? In my wallet, I’m sure. Except I don’t know where my wallet is. Maybe there’s some still in the desk, from the time Sherry fucked me over it. He’s always so fucking considerate.

Oh Sherry.

I’m right. Some ghastly American brand, of course. But, beggars etc.

Oliver has a rather dazed look as I roll the condom over his still attentive member. Perhaps I should do with this with all my (male) undergraduates. I might like them better, hard and quiet and useful.

The chair is wide enough that I can kneel over him, facing the room, my legs spread wide over his. It takes some fumbling under my gown to find his cock but as soon as I do I brace him and sink down.

There’s lube on the condom and, in any case, I’m a whore but that first breach is still exquisitely painful. It shocks a far too naked sound out of me. One that continues, its own ragged song, and the truest I’ve sung tonight, as I descend. I force myself open upon on the cock of an eighteen-year-old … and feeling rushes in.

“God,” says Mr Baron. “Fuck. God.”

For once, I couldn’t have said it better myself. At last my flesh meets his and he’s fully inside me. Deep enough to turn my every breath into something raw and sobbing. I’m pierced, impaled, and burning like a heretic martyr. Unrepentant.

And, for a strange, teetering moment, content.

An arm makes a clumsy attempt to embrace me and that’s the moment gone. I slap Oliver away and get to the business of fucking myself on his cock. My own, which has been at most academically interested in my activities, stirs and stiffens, distracting me with an itchy kind of desire that quickly becomes excruciating. Difficult to tell whether I like it or not.

My stomach muscles ache and my thighs quiver as I slip into a state of senseless arousal. I’m stifling in the robe—I must have sweated through both my shirt and jacket, and Tobermory’s careful bowtie, at last, surrenders. I catch a glimpse out of it of the corner of my eye as the black silk flutters to the floor. Probably I should have thought about all this earlier. But I can’t stop now. My body won’t let me. I drive myself harder, faster, moaning, my hands clawing ineffectively at fabric. Basically, it’s come or die trying. I’m good with either.

Reflected in the far window, where I stood however long ago, watching … letting … Sherry walk away from me, I can see our ghosts. I’m a graceless haze of black and white. The boy who pants at my shoulder barely distinguishable at all. I’m probably ruining him too. It’s almost enough to send me over.

Almost, fucking almost.

My glasses slide off my nose, bounce off my leg and go … somewhere. Now I can’t see a damn thing. And I can’t come either.

Not enough. Never quite enough.

I pull off with a wince and a wet squelch. Ten centuries of erudition curl their lip at me. My legs fold and I half-fall onto the floor, specifically onto the lovely silk Isfahan rug, which was a gift from my mother.

Balanced on my knees, and one hand, I drag my gown up over my back. My mind very kindly provides me with a detailed rendering of the picture I must be presenting to Oliver Baron. Sprawled at his feet, flashing my haunches at him like Lady Chatterley. Of course, that almost sends me over too.

I manage to say, in my driest voice, “In your own time, Mr Baron.” And not, fuck me, please, for the love god, make me come.

He gets down behind me. I am pleasantly surprised to discover he handles his cock with reasonable facility. Far better than he writes essays or participates in—

“Ah.” Not the most elegant sound I’ve ever made, but he wrenches it out of me in a sublimely brutal thrust. I think what I hate most is the gratitude in it.

“Yeah? You like that?”

I have no intention of replying to so smug an inquiry but, unfortunately, he does the same thing again. And I let out another helplessly revealing cry.

He smooths his palm over the curve of my buttock. And I’m fucked in the head, as well as the arse, because the unwanted admiration in it makes me shudder.

I snarl at him. “Put your hand on the back of my neck.”

That makes him falter—good, he was getting far too cocky—but, finally, he obeys.

“With conviction, Mr Baron.”

There. At last. His rowing calluses are, oh, quite something as he pushes my head to the rug. This lifts my hips enough that his next act of ingress into my person goes deep enough to knock against my heart. Or at the very least fill the cavity my heart is supposed to occupy. I wail, in terrified pleasure, and scrabble at the silk.

“How’s that?”

Motherfucker. He thinks he can tease me.

I gather myself. Difficult, when I feel split wide, as if at any moment, my gasping mouth will spew forth a tide of loathly toades and papers.

“I have no intention,” I said, “of providing formative feedback on your performance. Just … fuck me. Fuck me like you mean it.”

What I should really say is, fuck me like you hate me. But at this point there’s very little difference.

He does, however, set about his task with both precision and conviction. Possibly even to distinction level. He keeps his hand firmly on my neck, so I couldn’t get up even if I wanted to, and the other bites into my hip, most likely leaving bruises, as he hammers me into the floor. My teaching room reeks of sweat and sex and wine. And fills up with the sort of sounds it probably should never have encompassed, let alone on several, hazily remembered occasions. I bite my wrist in an effort to quell some of them, especially the hitchy little whimpers and approving oh god yeses that keep wanting to crawl their way up my throat and exist in the world.

I still can’t reach my cock. But, as it turns out, it doesn’t matter. Before I’m even quite aware of it, I’m tumbling into a smooth grey nothing. It’s something like peace, this place where my mind grants me mercy, and I’m just a body for things to happen in. I like the world rather more when it consists mainly of a cock and a hole.

And then I’ve come all over my mother’s rug.

“Wow. Did you just…”

Reality is like getting hit by car. “Yes. Yes I did.”

“You didn’t even…”

I’m warm and limp and almost blissfully weak. There’s some part of me that wants to lie here in my own cooling ejaculate, with my face on the floor and my legs splayed wide, letting Oliver Baron’s rather magnificent cock use me until he comes. There is, of course, no way in hell I will allow that to happen. “Yes, well,” I murmur, with what little asperity I can muster, “unlike you, I’m not a sodomitical neophyte. Now would you be so kind as to remove yourself?”

“Can’t I finish?”

“No, Mr Baron, you cannot. I am not a Fleshlight.”

He shifts, his still-nestled cock nudging me here and there, and dragging an unfortunate, and not remotely plaintive little mewl out of me. “But what am I supposed to do?”

“Planned ahead? I don’t know. And, frankly, I don’t care.”

“What, so—” there’s irritation in his voice, and hurt as well, though I ignore that “—I was just supposed to get myself off, and not give a damn about you?”

Since he's still showing no inclination to move, I crawl forward and do the job for him. At least, I try—my arse seems pathetically unwilling to let go. “Some of us,” I explain, once I’m free, “are grown ups and can take responsibility for our own sexual pleasure.”

“I thought you were supposed to take care of each other.”

I roll onto my back, tuck my hands behind my neck and cross my ankles. As if I hadn’t just been playing Christmas turkey on this very—now probably damaged—rug.

Oliver Baron is kneeling a short distance, shirt half undone, jeans bunched around his calves, cock in his hand. As far as I can tell, given that he is mainly a blur of pink-and-gold, debauchery and disappointment suit him very well.

“What do you think this was?” I ask.

He gives me something I interpret as an all too sharp look. What a moment to acquire even a rudimentary clue. “Apparently it was wanking with another person.”

I shrug. And wait for him to leave.

“Want to suck me?”

I imagine his cock twisting me open a second time. The vulgar breadth of it stretching my lips and the velvety weight of it— “No. I don’t like the taste of latex.”

“I’ll wash my dick.”

“If you take your penis anywhere near my sink—the area where I prepare my tea—I will unleash a fury upon you of such scope and magnitude it will make the Plagues of Egypt look like the work of a peeved amateur.”

“Right.” He tries, nearly falls over his jeans, and finally makes it to his feet. He peels off the condom and drops into the waste paper basket.

“Don’t pout, Mr Baron.”

Actually I have no idea what’s doing. But his posture suggests discontent. And he’s eighteen—pouting seems likely.

“Oh, I’m not.” Then comes the unmistakable sound of skin on damp skin. A blur of motion at his groin.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I’m not entirely impressed by the outraged squawk that emerges in lieu of the censorious roar I was hoping for.

“You said I should take responsibility for my own pleasure.”

“So you’re going to masturbate over me like a horny teenager with a Playboy centrefold?”

He shrugs and doesn’t stop.

“This is not appropriate, Mr Baron.”

“You have a really fucked up sense of perspective, Dr Leigh.”

It’s not the first time I’ve heard that. “I insist that you stop.”

“Or you’ll what? Give me bad marks? You do that already.”

“Your essays merit them. Your style is pedestrian, your coherence lacking, and your arguments facile.”

For some reason, my recitation of his academic failings seems to amuse him, and he laughs.

“I could report this,” I suggest. Speaking of facile.

“Yeah, I can see the story of how you invited a student up to your rooms at three in the morning, plied him with drink and made him have sex with you coming across really well.”

I suddenly don’t know what to do with myself. I’m drowning in my own body, in the weariness of my cock, the just-fucked soreness of my arse, the sweat drying on my neck and under my arms, the prickle of Russell cord against my bare legs. “Quickly, then.”

“I’m going to take as long as I like.” He lets go of his cock and I foolishly entertain a brief hope that he’s changed his mind. But he’s just reaching behind to something balanced on the arm of the chair. My glasses land on my chest. “Put them on. You don’t look like you without them.”

I don’t feel like me without them, either. People sometimes ask why I don’t wear contacts but I’ve never wanted to. I like my eyes armoured. I don’t know how everyone else can stand to be so exposed.

“Go on.”

There’s a significant part of me that doesn’t want to give him any satisfaction at all. But I do actually want my glasses back. So I slip them on and Oliver Baron snaps shiningly into focus. His shirt is fully open now, revealing the sculpted expanse of his torso, lightly flushed and glistening with sweat, his abs tightening and his chest heaving with his quickening breath. He’s standing with his legs slightly apart, staring down at me, his cock gliding in and out of the channel of his hand. He looks like a fake Grindr profile. Or a porn site pop-up.

I close my eyes. He can do what he likes but I don’t have to watch. I compose my expression into one of profound boredom. Base notes of contempt. Bouquet of superiority.

He laughs again. “You’re doing your tutorial face.”

Something brushes my leg—his foot I think? My gown is prodded and pushed at. Then I feel cold air against my thighs. The hot sense of being watched.

I can’t. It’s too … I need to see what he’s doing.

Opening my eyes again, I discover I look ridiculous. My shirt and jacket are basically intact, except for the open collar and lack of bowtie. But from the waist down I’m naked, the length of one leg and my spent, come-smeared cock exposed through the folds of my gown. I reach down to cover myself up.

“Did I say you could move?”

I think about protesting, but I’m not sure what good it will do. Or, for that matter, if I really want to stop this. I can’t deny that it has a faint … appeal. Not the act specifically, but being obliged to endure it. And so I lie back with a put-upon sigh.

“Very good.”

Oh no. I do not need the approval of a presumptuous undergraduate and I will not respond to it.

“You look so hot, Dr Leigh.” Oliver is stroking his cock in earnest now, long, rough strokes that remind me of being fucked. “Like a total pervert.”

“You coerce me into being your wank fodder and I’m the one you consider a pervert?”

“You started it. I’m just being a diligent student.”

I want to protest again. But I’m hampered by the fact he’s right. He’s done nothing I haven’t told him—explicitly or otherwise. An apt pupil indeed, as monstrous as his teacher.

“Hey,” he says, softly. “Want me to stop.”

I shake my head.

We pass a minute or so in something like silence. If silence can encompass the sound of one man masturbating over another. I try to lie still and think of nothing.

It doesn’t work. It never works.

My thoughts are everywhere. I am scuttled over by seacrabs. And nipped at. I feel filthy and objectified. And it’s … thrilling.

“Holy shit, you’re into this.”

My cock does appear to have joined, or more accurately re-joined, the party. Rather in the fashion of Maleficent at Sleeping Beauty’s christening. I subject it to my most disappointed gaze, which quells it not at all.

“So hot.” Oliver appears to possess a rather limited repertoire of lewd blandishments. But points for enthusiasm.

And then, just when I am beginning to think I might get through this relatively unscathed: “Spread your legs.”

“What? No. Absolutely not.”

“Go on. I want to see the hole I fucked.”

“No.” Except for the part where I do.

“Wider.”

I do not make any kind of noise. It is certainly not a whimper.

“Good.” Oliver gives a deep, dark groan. “You’re so slutty Dr Leigh.”

“Your commentary is unnecessary, Mr Baron. What have I told you about prolixity?”

He returns his attention to the business at hand. And I, once again, begin to think I’m in the all clear. But no.

“You look really swollen. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“Are you sure? Aren’t you sore?”

I need, as a matter of urgency, for the discussion of my arsehole to be over. “I like it, all right? Now stop—”

“Wow, you really are a pervert.” But he says it so gently that my twisted brain, normally incapable of recognising anything that could be even loosely construed as a compliment, decides to like it. “Get your hips up. I want to see properly.”

“No. You’ve seen quite enough already.”

“I’m nowhere near my limit.”

“Learn to live with it.”

“Always teaching.” He grins down at me. “But maybe you could stand to be taught a little too.”

I curl my lip. “I very much doubt it.”

“How about being more considerate of other people?” He moves with unexpected agility considering his jeans are round his knees—perhaps it’s the sort of thing they train you for at public school—and grabs my ankle. “Or at the very least doing what I tell you.”

“Oliver, don’t—”

I flail but he catches my other foot easily and wrenches my legs up and apart. My cock jerks and spatters precome over my belly. Probably the best thing to do right now would be to close my eyes and pretend I don’t exist. Or at the very least find some sort of happy place. With flowers and sunshine and … things.

“Fuck.” Oliver breathes out the word. “Look at you.”

Fresh heat floods me, my ridiculous prick apparently convinced that I’m already in a happy place.

“This turns you on.”

I meet Oliver’s eyes between the V of my legs. And discover I have absolutely nothing to say.

“You should touch yourself.” He’s sweating, but it looks good on him, as if he’s been glazed. Or dipped in honey. “Go on. I know you want to. Stroke your slutty cock for me.”

How does the saying go? When you’re in a hole, stop digging? Well, I’ve never understood it. Having already embarked upon a course of digging, it makes no sense to stop. You’re still in a hole regardless. It would be better to say “don’t begin digging unless you are absolutely certain that you want a hole here” or possibly “well, you’ve started digging, you’d better keep going or you’ll starve to death alone at the bottom of a hole.” Or to put it another way, this is already a staff-students relations calamity of unimaginable proportions. I might as well come again.

I wrap my hand around my cock, which is tingling, and aching with neglect, and a sort of languorous sense of sensuality rolls through me. A mortifying confession at the age of twenty nine but I’ve never really been very good at masturbating. I can give myself release but little else. I get too impatient, too self-conscious. I don’t think I’ve much care for my own pleasure in that way. Or interest in it.

“Like this?” Oh God, that’s me. Why am I asking?

He smiles. “Yeah, nice and slow, that’s right.”

Oliver Baron is a clearly a better teacher than I am. But, then, that doesn’t take much. I’m terrible at it. I am, after all, currently spread-eagled like Justine and stroking my cock to the direction of one of my students.

He runs his palms up and down my calves, along the straining muscles of my thighs. It’s at once exposing, reminding me of the position he has me in, and oddly soothing. A soft sigh escapes me. This feels perilously nice, lazy spirals of bliss twisting around my cock like Mayday ribbons.

It’s easy to lose myself and … I do. His hands are warm and strong and rough, the perfect combination of threatening and protective. I think at one point he kisses my ankle—there’s a whisper of heat there that makes me shiver—and I don’t even protest.

“You’re beautiful,” Oliver tells me.

Redundancy again. But all I do is moan.

“When you’re not being a dick. Well, okay. Even then. Go faster now.”

And I do. The increase of heat and pressure makes me writhe and arch my back. This must be sorcery. Or I have run mad. Or I’m drunker than I’ve ever been. Why am I doing this, and how does it feel so uncomplicatedly, untaintedly wonderful?

He drops to his knees, arranging my legs so that they curl around him. His fingers play sweetly at the crease of my groin. And dip into the tender crease of my arse. “So hot watching you like this. You’re so good, Dr Leigh.”

And that’s when I come. I normally rip my orgasms from my own, or someone else’s, flesh. Scrabble them from the gritty scarp face of satisfaction. But this is just a soft cresting, like a spill of sunlight across my skin, that builds and gathers inside me and then I’m gasping, and trembling, and my hand and stomach are wet.

“Oh,” I say.

“Yeah. Fuck yeah.” Oliver’s free hand grips my inner thigh, hard enough to hurt, most likely hard enough to mark. He’s working his cock ferociously with the other, his face a mask of concentrated effort. Though evidently not the sort he applies to his Anglo Saxon translations, which are barely average. “Close your eyes.”

Clearly I’m still confused, because I do.

“Going to come.”

I’ve done many depraved things in my life. Some of them I even remember. But I’m sure nothing has felt quite like this. Perhaps nothing will again. I’m drifting quietly in my own darkness, waiting with something that is neither patience or eagerness, and yet could be either of them, for Oliver to come on me. Probably best I say something before I start to like it. “Thank you for the update, Mr Baron.”

“Keep your eyes closed.”

Obedience makes me restless. “Perhaps I want to watch.”

“Can’t answer for my aim.”

“You think you’re going to hit me from all the way down there? Ah, the overweening arrogance of youth.”

“Better … safe … than sorry. But—” he interrupts himself with one of his growliest groans “—you can keep your mouth open if you like.”

“How dare you. I am not—”

He climaxes, splashing my cheeks, my throat, my lips, his come shockingly warm at the moment of impact. I’m sure I should feel degraded, and I do a little, though not particularly unusually or in a manner I would be unlikely to embrace. But there’s a moment when I find it … intimate. That something from inside him is now on me. And he tastes salty-sweet, like summer days, as if even his semen is wholesome.

After a moment or two, I sit up. There’s come on my robe too, though some of it’s mine. I use the sleeves to wipe my face. “Satisfied, Mr Baron?”

He’s slumped again the wingback chair, knees drawn up his chin, head down. “Fuck. That was … I’m not …” He glances up, grey-tinged and clammy, his eyes wet. “I’m not feeling so great.”

“If you’re going to vomit—” I kick the wastepaper basket over “—do it in there.”

“S-sorry.” He snatches for it and droops over it, but doesn’t actually throw up.

He really has nothing to worry about. It would not be the first time my bin has served such a purpose. I step over the muddle of my trousers, cross to the sink and get him a glass of water. “Here.”

“Thanks.” He takes it with a shaky hand. “It’s probably the wine catching up with me. I don’t usually drink.”

I sit down on the arm of my chair, draping one leg over the other, in the fashion I find most comfortable and elegant. “That’s your loss, my dear.”

“I don’t have a very good history with it.”

“What on earth has led you to believe I have any interest in your history?”

“Sorry.”

“Mm, I should think so.”

He sips the water, colour slowly returning to his face until he looks almost healthy again. “Did I … I mean … what we just …”

“Do you really think discussing what just happened is a remotely sensible idea, Mr Baron?”

“I guess not.” He sounds—

I don’t give a fuck how he sounds. “Are you feeling better?”

“Think so. It was really … everything was too…”

“Indeed. In which case, I’ll see you at ten next Tuesday. Do try to think of something even a little bit worthwhile to say about The Dream of the Rood.”

He scrambles to his feet, pulling up his jeans. I’m briefly alarmed he’s going to try and talk to me again but he just shoves the empty glass at me and leaves. Probably there would have been a door-slam involved if not for the green baize.

I sit for a while. The silence is sticky around me and the light that seeps through my windows is the colour of dirty water. I’m caught on the lip of dawn, the non-space between days. Even the birds, the beauty-maddened Oxford birds, who are so deceived by gold that they sing all night long, are sleeping now.

But I am desolate and sick of an old passion. I peel off my gown—I will need a new one, there’s no way I can face a dryer cleaner with this—and then my jacket, which is probably salvageable, and pull on my boxers. They’re the grey silk ones. A gift from Sherry following an act of violence committed upon another pair I claimed to be my favourites. Though, truthfully, I much preferred their destruction.

I am faithful, Sherry. In my fashion.

The bells begin to chime a desultory hour. I could die a thousand million deaths before the sun rises.

So I open another bottle. And pour myself another glass of wine.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to Kat, for enabling encouraging me to write this and to Group for being the best. To Michele for her insight and kindness, and Lennan for the gorgeous cover.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alexis Hall was born in the early 1980s and still thinks the 21st century is the future. To this day, he feels cheated that he lived through a fin de siècle but inexplicably failed to drink a single glass of absinthe, dance with a single courtesan, or stay in a single garret.

He did the Oxbridge thing sometime in the 2000s and failed to learn anything of substance. He has had many jobs, including ice cream maker, fortune teller, lab technician, and professional gambler. He was fired from most of them.

He can neither cook nor sing, but he can handle a sevventeenth-century smallsword, punts from the proper end, and knows how to hotwire a car.

He lives in southeast England, with no cats and no children, and fully intends to keep it that way.

- @quicunquevult

www.quicunquevult.com

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