I reign in my annoyance and keep reading.
When you submit them, do so in print and leave off any identifying information. You may turn them in at my office mail slot. The due date hasn’t changed—5PM on Wednesday.
See you all next Monday.
He didn’t sign the email, either. It reads like he wrote it hastily, though I can’t imagine why. Paper submissions? Maybe he’s just old school. I still have a couple professors back home who ask for all our assignments printed out, though they’re usually a lot older than Jack—Professor Kingston—seems to be. He’s got to be thirty, max. Maybe even younger. It’s hard to see past the chiseled jaw and two-day stubble enough to tell.
But why the anonymous thing? That seems weird. Doesn’t he need to know who wrote which essays in order to grade us?
Unless . . .
I bite down hard on my lip, suppress a sudden smile.
Unless he doesn’t trust himself to pick the best essay. Unless he’s worried he’d be tempted to select—or not select—a certain student for reasons other than her academic ability.
But which one is it? Based on the way he ran from me just now, I’m leaning toward the latter. He wants to not choose me, to keep me as far away from him as possible so he can forget that last night ever happened.
But maybe not. There’s a chance, however small, that he’s tempted, too. That he remembers our lips molding together, a perfect match, our bodies hot against one another’s, with the same burn of lust that I do.
If I can make him feel like that with my body, then surely I can win over his mind, too.
Just like that, finally, the perfect essay topic pops into my mind. I close my inbox, open a new document, and start to write.
Jack
Monday comes simultaneously too fast and not fast enough. I holed up for the weekend, after my last graduate seminar ended Friday morning, and tried my damnedest not to think about Harper Reed. Not to think about the irresistible way her mouth forms this little moue when she’s distressed. Not to think about how that mouth, which felt so hot against mine in the confessional, would feel if I buried myself in it. I try not to think about her firm arse, either, or the sweet, sharp taste of her pussy as I tongued her senseless. She clenched so hard when she came, I can only imagine what it would feel like to be inside her for that moment.
Okay, so not thinking about her doesn’t work so well. At least in between taking more than my fair share of showers and getting my hand exercise in, I have plenty of work to distract me. I busy myself speed-reading the Heaney essays.
Some of the forty-seven submissions were easy to weed out. Honestly, how did some of these people make it to third year of uni at Oxford of all places, most of them majoring in bloody poetry, without being able to formulate a simple sentence?
It’s not entirely their fault. The school system tries to trick them into throwing in huge vocabulary words and long, rambling, purple prose, because from primary school on, they’re rewarded for every extraneous word with a gold star. It’s like Pavlov’s dogs, only it creates terrible writers instead of salivating canines.
I narrowed it down to twelve decent essays first. Good enough that I would grant them all top marks on a normal grading scale. But one writer among them stood out, I decided by Sunday morning. They made a compelling argument as to Heaney’s authorial intentions. They showed a keen understanding of his work, the nuances and the straightforward statements alike.
More than that, they threw in some additional references, casually, not in a bragging sort of way. Just enough to show that they had done their homework, researched the hell out of Heaney above and beyond the required reading.
That’s the sort of assistant I need. Someone who will go above and beyond for Eliot, someone who won’t stop digging until they uncover all the answers.
Now, I just have to pray that whoever the student is, they’re as deeply interested in Eliot as they were in Heaney.
That, and of course, I have to pray that of all the gin joints in all the towns, she won’t step into mine. Or, to word it less stereotypically, I have to hope I didn’t just choose, out of almost fifty possible candidates, the one student I ethically should not select.
Except, would it be ethical to not select her, just because I can’t stop picturing her naked and spread-eagled in my bed?
I wanted to do that, honestly. Just write her off. I would have, actually, if I hadn’t run into her semi-drunk after the dinner with Kat and blatantly started flirting all over again, then stormed home after abandoning her on the steps of the Bodleian to send an email out to the whole class, asking them all to submit their essays anonymously. At least this way I couldn’t be tempted to do exactly what I wanted to do.