Deep End

I END THE AUTUMN QUARTER WITH ALL AS, AND NO, I DON’T care that English composition and German come with a small dash right after the letter. The plus that Dr. Carlsen tacked to my comp bio grade offsets at least one of them. In my heart, if not numerically.

“Will this ruin your GPA?” Maryam asks.

I credit the work I’ve been doing with Sam for my unbothered “It’ll lower it by a decimal point, which is fine.” Maryam is on my shit list, even more so than usual—has been since the night I returned from Tennessee, when she barged in on Lukas and me doing the dishes, drunkenly threatened to call the landlord if a single sex noise made it to her ears, and then absconded to her room with my fried rice.

“Sorry about her,” I told Lukas while getting ready for bed, handing him the still-packaged toothbrush from my last cleaning.

“I’m a Swede. We handle bluntness well.”

I fully planned to make a camgirl-worthy number of sex noises, just to annoy her, but fell asleep while Lukas brushed his teeth, and woke early the following day as he slipped from under the sheets.

“Practice,” he said, pressing a scratchy kiss into the corner of my throat. “Go back to sleep, Scarlett.”

I next see him when we meet to update Zach on our progress. I get to the library ten minutes early, but show up to the study room late—because Lukas finds me in the lobby, grabs my wrist, drags me into one of the single-person restrooms, and spends a pornographic amount of time with his head between my legs. His tongue is flat against my clit, his shoulder broad under my thigh, and . . .

He doesn’t let me come.

“Please.” My chest is heaving. “Please.”

He presses one last, feathery kiss against the top of my cunt. With horror, I watch him rise to his feet and lick his lips. He gently pulls up my joggers and wipes a solitary tear off my cheek.

“Go in first,” he says. He pats my ass lightly, like I’m an unruly pet in need of guidance, to treat with a firm but affectionate hand. It’s extremely condescending. I should not be turned on by it.

“But I want to—”

“No, Scarlett.” He doesn’t sound particularly authoritative about it, because there’s no need for posturing. He’s that confident.

I swallow. Ask, petulant, “Why don’t you go first?”

He points at the front of his pants.

“Oh.”

What’s remarkable is how otherwise unaffected he looks. I’m about to either shatter in a million pieces, or thaw into a syrupy puddle—jury’s deliberating.

“I could sneak into the next-door bathroom and make myself come,” I threaten resentfully.

“You could,” he acknowledges. “But you won’t.”

“I—you have no idea what I’m going to do.”

His smile is . . . really sweet, actually. And so is the way he pushes my hair back from my forehead before pressing a kiss in the middle of it. “You’ll do what I say, and we both know it. Or at least, I know it.” All my frown does is coax him into smoothing the little vertical wrinkles between my eyes with the pad of his thumb. “You’re fucking adorable, Scarlett.” He tilts my chin up. Another kiss, this time on the tip of my nose. “It makes me want to wreck you.”

The following hour in the study room is misery. I try not to fidget, especially while Zach asks me questions about my plans for the holidays, whether I’ll stay in town, hit me up if you want to get coffee. His words drift in and out, devoid of meaning. I show my neural network, still fever hot and breathless.

“The accuracy is thirty percent higher than what I got,” Lukas says, wholly focused on the data. “Scarlett, that’s a masterpiece.” He sounds impressed and happy that the model I created exists, and I wonder whether the bathroom ever happened. Maybe I hallucinated it. I was never about to come. His grunts were never muffled into my cunt. Healthcare professionals will come to take me away.

But the meeting ends—You have my number, right, Scarlett? Yup, Zach. Thanks for everything and happy holidays—and Lukas heads straight for the bathroom. I follow him, just a step behind. Don’t wait for the door to close to snarl, “I can’t—”

He presses me against it with a hard push, his body hot against mine. “I don’t know why it’s such a turn-on that you’re so much smarter than me, but every time we have a project meeting, I have to go home and jerk off until my dick is raw.”

“I’m not that smart—”

“Shut the fuck up, you brilliant, beautiful genius.” He kisses me deep and hard, first on the mouth, then lower, and he must know that I’m stretched to the brink, because he doesn’t tease. He bites. He licks. He sucks. In less than twenty seconds, my orgasm is ripped out of my spine, and I crush my moans against my own palm.

“Thank you,” I pant when I can talk. His face tucks against my belly, a sweet, delicious sting. “Thank you, I—”

He’s not done, though. Barely started. He buries his mouth in my cunt and licks it all up, humming his approval. It starts again. Finger in his hair, I try to push him away, but he won’t quit, and I come and come until I’m pleading with him to give me a break, and he just rumbles, “You can bear it for one more minute. One more. For me.”

I can, and it hurts in the sweetest possible way. When he’s done, I expect him to turn me around and bend me over. Instead, he remains on his knees, presses his unshaved cheek against my hip, inhales my scent, and starts moving his arm in rhythmic strokes.

It takes a moment for the meaning to sink in. “I—I . . . Lukas?”

He kisses my abdomen and looks up at me, eyes infinitely blue.

“I can . . .”

His arm doesn’t stop moving. “Can?”

It’s not the way it usually goes, between us. Me, offering. Him, asking. What I like is when he takes, and what he likes is . . . to watch me squirm. “Can what, Scarlett?”

I look down at him, still winded.

“Come on, sweetheart. Use your words.”

Why is it so weird to say? “I can—I want to go down on you.”

He thinks about it. An intriguing but not-too-tempting offer. “But that’s not what I want.” And yet, he rises to his feet and pushes me down on my knees. I open my mouth, willing, eager, and—

He presses it closed with a thumb under my chin. “I said no,” he reminds me, mild, almost bored, but tilts my face upward, like it’s something beautiful he wants to memorize, and continues stroking, his rhythm sustained.

“This is nice,” he says, voice raspy and focused. Cheeks flushed, a dull red. Hair dark, haloed by the ceiling lamp. The shift of muscles and veins and ink on his strong forearm. “It’s like when I’m home, masturbating, thinking about you. Isn’t it?” His thumb sweeps over my cheekbone. “Which is every time.”

His hand slows down, like he wants to pace himself, but speeds again when I wet my lips.

“That okay with you? The filthy stuff I think about doing to you while I make myself come?”

I nod. The movement has my mouth brush against the underside of his cock, and his breath hitches sharply.

“I knew you wouldn’t mind. Being my precious toy. My girl. Mine to use. Mine to fuck. Mine to destroy and to fix.”

Another eager, wholehearted nod. It’s all I want. For him to tell me what to do, and to take care of me.

“Christ. I can’t believe you fucking exist, Scarlett.” His thumb slides into the corner of my mouth, prying it open, and I offer no resistance. When the head of his cock shoves inside, heavy on my tongue, he’s already coming. His eyes stay open, even as his entire body shudders and a deep grunt explodes out of his chest.

I swallow what I can. What’s left, I lick off his fingers. “Perfect,” he repeats over and over, kissing my face, eyelids, mouth. The praise feels as good as the orgasms did.