Page 45 of Prosecco with My Professor
“One night,” she repeats. “And all you want is to, um, go down on me?”
“Yes.”
“You would do that, even after last weekend?”
“Last weekend?” I am confused again. This has gone pretty far off from the straightforward apology and dismissal that I was expecting.
“Let’s not pretend I was sexy at all while I was sick. I’m not sure why you’d still be interested after all that…” She trails off, casts about for a word, and then settles on “phlegm.”
To be honest, I didn’t notice anything unsexy about last weekend. It’s not like I got hard listening to her coughing in her sleep or monitoring her fever, but it didn’t change the way I think about Emma—this sexy woman who needs desperately, in my opinion, to ride my tongue.
I corral my thoughts back to the question at hand. “Yes, I would still be interested in that. I still find you unbelievably sexy.”
Emma’s cheeks go pink, but she looks at me skeptically. “Does that mean your offer still stands?”
This time, I rub my jaw, my beard rasping over my palm while I think about it. “Yes, I’m not rescinding it.”
My heart, which realizes our conversation is getting somewhere interesting, is beating faster.
Emma studies me for a moment. “We have, I suppose, already technically done that before.”
There’s a glint in Emma’s eyes that I haven’t seen since the night we first met. I think she’s flirting with me. Longing blooms in my chest. I liked the way we were together that night, without the professional relationship between us.
“Yes, we have.” I shift on my feet and bring myself a few centimeters closer to her. Emma looks at me, her eyes wide and cheeks flushed. She licks her lips, and my gaze drops to her mouth. The scent of eucalyptus washes over me.
And somewhere, an alarm goes off.
Emma and I both flinch apart. She spins and digs her phone out from beneath a stack of papers on the table. “Sorry. I set a timer to try the Pomodoro technique to see if it would help me focus on my classwork. But, uh, you distracted me.”
I look over the papers again, the textbooks, the open laptop. There’s a small pile of cough drops and a slightly larger pile of empty cough drop wrappers next to it.
“You still aren’t feeling well.”
“I’m fine, really,” she protests. “I feel a lot be—” She’s interrupted by a wracking cough. She covers her mouth with her hand and the other falls to her abdomen, while she nearly doubles over from the force of the cough.
There is a glass of water on the counter, and I hand it to her. By the time she calms down enough to breathe and to drink, her eyes have watered, and her cheeks are flushed—not from arousal or embarrassment this time.
“I swear, I really am a lot better,” she insists between gulps of water. “It’s just this lingering cough that I can’t kick.”
I bite my tongue.
Once she’s caught her breath, drunk the whole glass of water, and I’ve refilled it for her, I make a suggestion. “You’re still”—I can see the protest forming on her lips already—“recovering and you’ve got a lot of work. We’re not in a rush.”
Finally, she nods.
“We’ll talk after the holidays,” I suggest. “Get your work done so we can enjoy ourselves.”
I leave Emma’s feeling like I’ve just given myself and Emma a reward for good behavior that I have to wait weeks to claim.
22
Emma
I don’t havea lot of time to think about the fact that Santo still wants to give me an orgasm. He was right—I have a lot going on. I’ve been swamped with my schoolwork and, not that there’s a great time to miss almost a week of school, but having been sick right near the end of the term means everything is crammed in at the last moment.
For Christmas, I go home to Texas. In the divorce, we decided to sell the house, and I was renting a place before I came to Europe, so now I rent an Airbnb for the week, and the kids fly back home. On Christmas morning, when I throw Pillsbury canned biscuits into the oven and watch some videos for my classes, the house is deceptively quiet. Long gone are the days of early morning furors of opening presents and playing with toys.
Parker comes down the stairs first. Growing up, they’d been the quietest of my three kids, and now that they are in college out west, they are really coming out of their shell…at least, I can’t keep track of all their new friends’ names and the photos on Instagram make it seem like Parker is having a great time.
