I jot down the numbers neatly in the top right hand corner of my yellow legal pad, which, twenty minutes into class, contains nothing but scribbles, scrawls and doodles. And when I tot them all up in my head, I’m impressed. Because Marcus clearly has a cock that’s more than a match for the size of his brain.
I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s not as if I haven’t done this close to a hundred times before. Every class, the same routine. And, miraculously, the same three numbers come up every time. Like I’ve hit the jackpot over and over and over. And I get that same little thrill shooting through my body every time.
Marcus, as I said, is oblivious. For all he knows, I’m absorbed in his lecture. It’s not that I don’t care about the subject or I’m not listening. I’m following his every single word and being distracted at the same time. I’m multi-tasking.
Marcus is talking about Kinsey and the conclusion reached in his landmark sex study that women don’t respond to visual stimuli in the same way as men, and sometimes not at all. I beg to differ. And if Marcus only knew what he was doing to me, he would too.
He elides neatly from Kinsey into Freud – another old pervert with strange ideas about female sexuality – and now he’s got all my gears churning.
He writes CASTRATION on the white board. And PENIS ENVY. Then underlines each twice as he repeats them aloud for added effect. And you’d think that’d be one gigantic buzzkill for my scholastic masturbation fantasy, right?
Wrong.
See, Marcus has a voice like brown sugar – soft, dark, rich. Just to hear him say anything makes me all gooey inside. But the words he says that really turn me on are the least sexy of all. Words that sound clipped and cold and technical, but when Marcus says them it sounds like he’s talking dirty – in an intellectual way.
These words especially:
Abjection.
Catharsis.
Semiotics.
Sublimation.
Triangulation.
Rhetoric.
Urtext.
And last, but certainly not least, my absolute favorite, the one word to rule them all:
Hegemony.
When Marcus speaks, it’s with such quiet authority that he has me in his grip and I feel like I would do just about anything he asked.
So when he says, ‘penis envy’, I hear him plead, order and command, ‘Please fuck me’.
And even though he’s not looking at me, I know he’s speaking to me, and only to me.
Only to me.
This has nothing to do with Jack, my infatuation with Marcus. I love Jack and only Jack. This is just an amusement, a little romantic episode I’ve dreamt up to amuse myself in class. A pedagogical daddy fantasy that’s got me hot for teacher and flies from my mind the second the bell goes.
This time it doesn’t even get that far.
I’m looking at Marcus’ sinewy arms and long muscular legs and imagining what it would be like to have them wrapped around my body, my entire body, the way a spider holds a fly in place as it prepares to consume it. I want to be held by Marcus, consumed by Marcus, in that way. And I wonder if Marcus can fuck as expertly as he talks about psychoanalysis and semiotics and the auteur theory.
I let the question hang in the air.
The answer comes unexpectedly from behind, in a conspiratorial whisper.
‘He’s a freak.’
I turn around and look directly into a pair of bright, clear, almost luminous, green eyes and full, sensuous lips arched into a coquettish smile. And that’s how I meet Anna. Leaning over me from the row behind, whispering into my ear, in full view of Marcus.
I know her, of course. She’s in my class. Anna is blonde, petite and voluptuous; the super-hot girl at school who turns everybody’s head. She’s the girl everyone wants to be friends with; the girl all the guys want to fuck.
I was brought up Catholic and taught that sex was something you weren’t supposed to seek or experience pleasure in. It wasn’t until I started going out with Jack, long after I’d lost my virginity, that I stopped feeling so conflicted and started to enjoy it.
Anna doesn’t seem to have had any of those hang-ups. She’s flirtatious, free and relaxed, always ready with an easy smile. I look at her and see someone who’s comfortable with her body, her sexuality, and the power it holds. And she intrigues me.
Have you ever met someone and thought, from the second you laid eyes on them, from the moment they first spoke to you, We’re going to be friends.
That’s how I feel about Anna, the instant she says, ‘He’s a freak’. It’s like hearing my own voice, like she knows exactly what I’m thinking. And understands.
That’s how it will be between us from now on. A secret bond.
What I didn’t know is this: