“This isn’t creative,” she countered. “It’s just an aesthetic. I’m not changing your article. And I’m not changing those names.”
I had to sit down. Even if it was in the uncomfortable metal chair.
“Chloe… please don’t do this. I need the names changed. I need to protect the people I used to write this thing.”
She stared back at me harshly… and in that moment I knew. She wouldn’t ever budge. She wouldn’t risk rattling her contacts at Cosmo, or their editors.
No matter what came out of my mouth, in her mind it was already done.
“Listen…” I pleaded. Panic was setting in. I was trying hard to maintain control. “What if I talked to them? What if I can somehow explain what happened?”
But my boss was already shaking her head.
“I’m forbidding you now, Brooke. No way. No how.”
My mind raced, looking for another option. A way around her. A way to defy her without my boss knowing I’d defied her at all.
But Chloe saw through me like I was a pane of glass.
“I’ll know the very moment you try,” she said, as if reading my mind. “You talk to anyone over there and it’s your job, Brooke,” she said coldly. “Instantly.”
I got up from the chair on two shaky legs. Slowly, I ambled out of her office.
“Instantly and irrevocably,” she called after me.
Thirty-Seven
TREY
“Hey professor… got a minute?”
I was almost all the way to my car. Way in the back of the secondary faculty parking lot, between the mounds of pushed-up snow that the plows had shoved against the light poles.
The blonde approaching me now had come seemingly from out of nowhere. She’d been hiding behind a drift, or a tree, or…
“I botched that last test,” she said sadly. “Bad. I mean… real bad. As in, my average is so low, there’s probably no way I can pass your class.”
She stood there with a finger hooked into her mouth, trying to look helpless. Trying to look sexy at the same time of course, but it was the helpless part she needed work on.
“It’s still pretty early in the semester,” I replied skeptically. “You’ll get plenty of other chances to get your average up.”
She took another two or three steps closer, and into the light. I noticed she was all done up. Long blonde hair, combed and straightened. Cherry red lipstick, over a pretty, pouty mouth.
“I might fail my other tests too,” she sulked. “I’m just… bad.” She took another step that was more of a strut. “Really, really bad.”
My pulse quickened just looking at her. She was absolutely gorgeous. Dripping with sex appeal, even in the faded light of the parking lot’s far-flung overheads.
“Professor?”
The word meant nothing to me right now. I was too busy envisioning my hands on her body. Imagining how incredible it would feel to just push her into a snowbank… to nudge her legs apart, right here, right out in the cold.
How hot it would feel to sink straight into her. To bottom out in that tight, gorgeous pussy and start pounding away…
“What if I don’t want to wait until the next test?” the blonde was asking innocently. “What if I want to get my average up… now?”
She was close enough to reach for me, and so she did. A delicate hand slid between us. It closed heavily over the bulge that had rapidly appeared between my legs.
“I… can’t get involved with students,” I sighed. “It’s against the rules.”