dead.”
“Gotcha,” grinned Kip. She didn’t seem shocked at all.
Oh yes, I thought. You get me, you read me, and now you know you can have me any time you want . I was tempted to resign right then.
Kip had more to say. “You tend to run away if you’re not tied down, don’t you, babe? I bet you’d like me to chase you into a corner and wrestle you to the floor. You can get what you want, my dear, but you have to ask for it. That’s the rule.”
I really hadn’t seen this coming. Two weeks before, Kip had seemed unusually friendly when I was the last guest to leave her house after a department party that she had put on as an icebreaker at the beginning of the fall semester. Once we were alone, her strong, graceful hands punctuated her comments with taps on my shoulders. While I was making a point about the transvestite heroines in Shakespeare’s plays, she distracted me by stroking my hair. While showing me through her house, she led me by the hand. I secretly hoped that she was planning to throw me onto her vintage brass bed, but I couldn’t be sure I was reading the signs clearly.
In any case, my common sense told me that getting sexual with my boss would be a really bad career move. My moist cunt was telling me other things.
Kip offered me a brandy and I accepted, but nothing she said or did was a clear proposition. Finally, I thanked her for a lovely evening and stood up to leave. She followed me to her front hallway, where she calmly pulled me into her arms as though she wanted to dance. Before I could react, she tipped my head back slightly and pressed her lips to mine. When I didn’t resist, she slid her tongue into my mouth. Yes! I felt faint, but I didn’t mind.
I could taste the wine she had drunk and the salty peanuts she had eaten. I could feel her heart beating beneath her small, hot breasts. I could feel my panties growing wetter, and I wondered if she could smell me. I breathed in her own clean but earthy smell as I moved my hips, hoping she found me irresistible.
Kip pulled her mouth away from mine, and smoothly pushed me away from her. “I’ll see you at school on Monday, Athena,” she smiled. I felt as if she had just poured icewater over me.
“Goodnight. See ya,” I muttered. I grabbed my jacket and pulled it on while opening the front door, and rushed out to the darkness. I didn’t want Kip to know how disappointed I was.
In the following weeks, I told myself that she had done the right thing, and that I should be glad to be working for someone who was ethical enough to protect me from my own reckless desire.
But my dreams were so lurid and drastic that I remembered them clearly while showering, dressing, and preparing myself for my audience of students. A few scenes even jumped into my mind’s eye when I was driving to work or grading essays or exchanging small talk with a colleague: Kip beckoning me to kneel at her feet. Kip, dressed in black leather, pinching my bare nipples while discussing literature. Kip taking an old-fashioned wooden paddle off the wall of her office to use on my naked ass as I waited obediently on all fours. Kip approaching me with a scary grin that said that she wasn’t violating my rights, she was giving us both what we wanted.
The best and worst scenes from the cinema of my imagination were full of restraining devices: Kip as a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (and very handsome in the red serge uniform), pulling my hands behind my back (not gently this time) and securing them in metal handcuffs before pushing me into the backseat of a police cruiser to await further attention. Kip as a vaguely Shakespearian guard locking me, a mischievous and disheveled maid, into wooden stocks in a public square. Kip as a kidnapper, tying me up with rope before covering my eyes with a blindfold and my mouth with a gag, the better to spirit me away to her secret lair.
When the real Kip had invited me back to her house for a drink and a private
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