Fundamentals of Being a Good Girl
(A Saucy Excerpt)
I pinch the bridge of my nose. “Madelyn, we can’t. It would be inappropriate.”
“I like it when you use your exasperated professor voice on me,” she says in a low hum. “Do it again.”
Oh, I’ll do it again. I’ll do it again right now. I stride over to the glass board I have mounted to the wall, uncap a marker, and start writing. An impressive feat, given that my penis is currently starving my brain of blood.
I finish, cap my marker again, and then face the person responsible for my penile-focused blood flow. She’s sitting primly in the chair, back straight, hands in her lap, looking for all the world like a straight-A student, looking like someone who knew even before she graduated college that she was going to be a politician’s wife.
“Pay attention, Ms. Kowalczk, because there is going to be a test later. There are three exceedingly salient reasons why we should not have sex. Well, have sex again. Number one.” I emphatically tap the board with the cap of the marker near the top item. “You live with me.”
Maddie raises her hand and then speaks after I nod at her. “Professor Loe, if I may—isn’t that an excellent reason to have sex?”
“It is not. I don’t want your living here to feel like it’s conditional. Zero impression of a quid pro quo. Now, number two,” I say, before she can initiate a rebuttal of my point, “you work for me. It’s against the agency’s policy. It’s also unethical, since I employ you, and would introduce complications for everyone if things go south.”
She raises her hand again, her posture perfect, her eyes bright. This shouldn’t be hot. It’s not hot. I’ve never even considered any kind of classroom role-play because classrooms aren’t sexy. They are made of linoleum and projectors that refuse to work at least once a month and they’re haunted by all the unanswered emails in my inbox, wailing just under the threshold of sound.
But my dick is submitting a memo that it’s a fan of this right now. Me at the board and Maddie with her hand raised. Me standing, her sitting. Me able to see the braless, perky tits move under her shirt as she tries to raise her hand higher.
“Yes, Ms. Kowalczk?”
“Counterargument: no one has to know that you’re screwing your nanny.” I make a face at her, and she rushes on. “Not the agency, not anyone who would think it’s prima facie unethical. Plus, is it that unethical when you didn’t know I’d be your nanny when we met on my birthday? Surely there’s some nuance in there.”
“I’m very glad you brought up your birthday,” I say, and then I tap-tap-tap the glass next to item number three. “Because this is a very important one.” I underline each of the six words I wrote there. “You. Are. Too. Young. For. Me.”
Maddie stands up and takes a few casual steps toward me. I don’t back away—I don’t want to give her the satisfaction—but I can’t control the hot, primal quiver in my muscles as she steps close enough that she has to tilt her head back to peer up at me.
“Counterargument: I’m twenty-six.”
“Counter-counterargument: I’m thirty-five.”
“So you’ve got an upstairs ibuprofen bottle and a downstairs ibuprofen bottle, so what?”
“I’m not sold separately, Madelyn.” I use the dry erase marker as a pointer and point at the ceiling. Upstairs, where my entire world is either sleeping next to a dog or doing FaceTime karaoke. “I’m a dad, a pet frog–level dad, and I’m an ex-husband, and I’m also potentially in a deeply unhealthy relationship with my university. At twenty-six, you should be young and carefree and fucking equally young and carefree people who don’t have goldfish crackers wedged between their couch cushions. Also, it’s just . . . wrong. I’m nearly a decade older than you.”
Maddie finds the dry erase marker in my hand. Steals it with a graze of her delicate fingers.
“I,” she starts, uncapping the marker and writing on the board under my last reason, “just got out of the world’s worst engagement, where my fiancé’s aspirations dictated every phase of my future and every mundane aspect of my life, down to the brand of reusable water bottle I carried. The literal last thing I want is another relationship or scenario, where my life is forced to fit around someone else’s. I don’t ever want that again, in fact. So I’m not asking you to go steady; I don’t want to file taxes together. I just want you to fuck me until I scream.”
On the board, in the pretty handwriting endemic to popular girls of every generation, Maddie has written just sex, nothing else and now she underlines the nothing else several times.
And then under my second reason, she writes: No one has to know.
And then under my first, she writes: Living together means you can have my pussy for breakfast every morning.
Time seems to slow and stretch, an infinity of shock, of erotic revelation, and I stare at the graceful handwriting, the precisely kerned letters of pussy, and everything is falling away, everything except that word, that image, the memory of her taste.
Everything except the idea of waking up, walking to her room, and treating myself to her sweet cunt before the day begins. Going to campus with my nanny still on my face.
I’ve taken hold of the marker, I’m pulling it away from her as I crowd her up against the glass board. The word pussy is right next to her ear.
“You’re not paying very good attention to the lesson, Ms. Kowalczk.” I clamp the marker horizontally between my teeth so I can use both hands on her waist to spin her around to face the board. I put her hands up on either side of it and then take the marker and write it’s a bad idea underneath everything else and then circle it.
She turns her head so that I can see the side of her face—slightly snubbed nose, high cheeks, a mouth that looks even fuller in profile. “But what if it’s a secret bad idea?” she whispers. “Our little secret? That you can’t stop fucking your nanny? That you need to use her to keep your cock warm when the nights get cold?”
“Jesus Christ,” I breathe, pressing my forehead to her silk hair. “You’re killing me.”
“You know what I think?” she murmurs. “I think for all your talk of behaving, of good manners, Bram Loe is actually very, very bad. And no one knows it but you. And now me.”