He kneels down, his hands large and calloused on my knees. Without instruction, my thighs open for him, and I swallowhard. His touch isn’t warm like Landon, and it doesn’t feel meant to be there, it feels cold like electricity bringing the dead back to life. I jerk in my seat as he cocks an eyebrow at me.
“How should I punish you, Jasmine?”
I open my mouth, but no sound comes out. All I can hear is blood rushing in my ears, the beat of my pulse slamming through my veins. I can’t look away.
Kilgore moves slowly, like he’s giving me time to run—and knows I won’t.
His hands slide up my thighs, skin-on-skin, igniting a burn where he touches. His fingertips trace the curve above my knees, then higher, dragging the hem of my dress with him. His knuckles graze sensitive flesh, and I gasp despite myself.
“Be still,” he commands, barely above a whisper.
I freeze.
When his fingers hook the edge of my underwear, it feels like the air is sucked from the room.
“Lift up,” he whispers, eyes locked on mine, and I do.
He peels the lace down—slow, careful, reverent in a way that makes it worse. Like he’s unwrapping something fragile. Like he wants to ruin it on purpose. They pool at my ankles. He bends to catch them before they fall, holds them in his hand like a specimen—turning them over once, twice, as if studying a thread of evidence.
“You will get these back when you learn how to not make a mess of yourself in my class,” he says finally, his voice back to clinicaland composed. But his pupils are still dilated, jaw tight. “We’ll start with that.”
Then he slips them into the breast pocket of his button-down like they belong there.
My breath stutters. My thighs clench instinctively, as if trying to hold onto something that’s already been taken. I don’t know what I’ve become in this room. All I know is that I can’t look away from him. And he—he hasn’t blinked once.
“Now, you’re dismissed, Miss Rivera.”
I jump like a live wire and scurry out of my seat. “Thank you, Professor.”
I don’t wait for a response. I don’twantone.
I shoulder past Landon—he whistles low and slow, like I’m some pretty little thing trotting off the auction block. But for once, he doesn’t touch me. Maybe evenheknows Kilgore’s leash is shorter than it looks.
The hallway hits like a slap of cold air, but it does nothing to cool the heat crawling under my skin. My panties are gone. My pride’s in shreds. And my body doesn’t know whether to shake with shame or…crawl back for more.
12
JASMINE
I always thoughtsix weeks into college I’d be the talk of the town—have at least three friends, dye my hair something cute like pastel blue, and learn how to shotgun a beer with my eyes closed. You know,normalcollege shit.
Instead, I have a live-in stalker with a smirk and accent that should be illegal, a situationship with the most beautiful girl in the world whose weirdly fine withsharing, and my professor has my panties somewhere, doing things to it that only should live in a nightmare, but my fucked up brain calls it fantasy.
College has been eventful…just eventful in all the wrong fucking ways.
My emotional support is a rapidly dying houseplant and a guy who kisses me like he owns my soul, but hey, English 101 is ridiculously easy, and Computer Science is less of a bore than I thought it would be. Three cheers for liberal arts education!
I’m about three pages into my five-page paper on Shakespeare’s love sonnets, where I expertly and with entirely too much personal conviction, claim that Shakespeare was, in fact,emotionally cheating on his wife. The man wrote 126 poems to a beautiful young man with an easy going smile and the kind of bone structure that inspires ruin. You can’t tell me that wasn’t emotional adultery at the very least. I even built a whole paragraph around Sonnet 20 and annotated it like it’s a crime scene, as an accompanying part of my essay.
I’m curled up in bed, laptop balanced on a pillow over my thighs, the glow of my desk lamp painting soft yellow light across the pages of the library book I borrowed and haven’t opened once. There’s a half-drunk iced coffee sweating on the nightstand, and the scent of coconut lotion and overpriced wax melts is the only thing keeping me sane.
I lean over to take a sip of my coffee, and glance up from the screen, blinking. Normally, I would scream, get pissed off and tell Landon to go fuck himself, but finding him staring at me from a distance has become a normal occurrence now a days. I don’t even flinch.
“Again,” I say, swallowing the overly sweet and still kind of bitter coffee. “Watching me like that only makes you more of a fucking creep, Lan.”
He chuckles, leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed over his chest. Black shirt, grey sweats, tattooed forearms on full display like some kind of sinful exhibit.
“You need better instincts,” he sighs, moving deeper into my room, as if I fucking invited him.
