Page 53 of Drown Like Heaven
Memories deepened the fantasy. Her head bobbing between my legs, tears down her face, the ocean behind her, dirty blonde hair wrapped around my fist.
I wished I knew what her most messed-up desire was, so I could think about it now while I got myself off. Think aboutdoingit to her, whatever it was. My fingers tightened around my dick.
I’ll figure it out one day, baby, and then I’ll make all your sick little fantasies come true.
Chapter 15
Dakota
Stanton was not only the building the Unit Ops lectures were in, but also where the entire lab was housed. It was in a high-ceiling basement, but some of the towers were still tall enough to breach that ceiling, so there was a viewing area on the first floor with windows looking in to the lab from above.
For example, standing on the top platform for the distillation column would put you in line with people standing on the first floor as they watched through the windows. It was an incredibly expensive lab space, and I was grateful to go to a school that’d made such an extensive investment in this area.
I pushed through the door to the stairwell and made my way down to the basement, to the open locker space outside the lab where students kept their PPE. Navigating on autopilot to my assigned locker, I gave a short wave to Quinn, who was already sitting at one of the round tables, laptop out.
“Hey,” I said as I sat with her, setting my hard hat and safety glasses on the table.
Unfortunately, the hard hat and glasses were non-negotiable if you wanted to enter the lab space. It made sense, because of all the tall platforms where things could fall from, and just the amount of heavy-duty equipment in the room. Some experiments even required coats, gloves, and face shields.
“Hey, Dakota,” she greeted, glancing up from her screen. “How’s it going?”
“It’s going alright. You?”
“Decent.”
We didn’t talk much after that, both of us just waiting for the other two members of our group to show up and for the lab period to start. Nate and Jackson walked in together a few minutes later, then we all gathered our PPE and note-taking supplies and headed over to the poly lab.
The polymers lab was technically separate from the main lab space with the distillation column and everything else, but the same safety rules applied.
A TA was already in the lab when we arrived, his back to us while he pried the lid off a large barrel of plastic pellets. It smelled faintly like chemicals and metal in the room.
“Hey,” he said, turning around. “I’m Jacob. I’ll be helping you guys out with lab today and Thursday—Dr. Killshaw will also be stopping in, but he’ll spend more time with you all on Thursday. Today we’re just going to be making the samples for your five different polymer types.”
“How’s it been going with other groups?” Jackson asked, reaching in to one of the large barrels and picking up a handful of plastic pellets, letting them spill between his fingers. “I heard this lab was finicky.”
“Yeah.” Jacob sighed, resting his hand on one of the workbenches. “The molds usually end up getting stuck about half the time. We’ll do our best, and if we can’t get a certain one made, I’ll either do it for you, or we have some from last year over on that table.”
He gestured to another workstation, on which sat a few thin plastic pieces in varying shades of clear and white, all about the size of my thumb.
“Will that impact our grade?” Quinn asked.
“No.” Jacob shook his head. “Not at all.”
She breathed a quiet sigh of relief.
Nate spoke up next, walking farther into the room towards the heated press at the back. “Can I be the one to put the shit in the press?”
“I don’t care,” Jacob said, then glanced between the rest of us.
I just shrugged, staying quiet. Like usual.
“You’ve just gotta be careful. Killshaw will murder me if you get something stuck in there.” He chuckled at our wide eyes. “Not really. He’s a good dude, but you should’ve seen the looks on your faces. Especially you—” he looked at the name tag on my helmet “—Dakota. You don’t need to be scared of him. Swear it.”
Great. I’ll be sure not to let myself be afraid of him. Since you swore I didn’t need to be.
I wished he hadn’t just called me out in front of everyone. But I didn’t know how I was supposed to react to mentions of my professor when I’d had agraphicsex dream about him, and he reminded me of someone else—someone whodidscare me. Viscerally.
After a few more minutes of going over the safety procedures and discussing the order we were going to melt our different polymer molds in, we got started. Honestly, it was a lot of waiting. Waiting for the press to heat up, waiting for it to get to pressure, letting it sit at that pressure, waiting for it to get to ahigherpressure, letting it sit at that pressure forlonger, taking out the mold and putting it in front of a fan to cool it.
