Seducing Professor Coyle (2 page)

Ben glared at the professor. “Most of the teachers have us take tests on the computer and submit them online. If you did that, you’d be less likely to lose things than with your old-school
paper
exams.”

Coyle’s eyes widened further.

Ben met his gaze without flinching, without even blinking.

Finally, Dr. Coyle’s eyes shifted and he gazed up at the ceiling, shaking his head slightly, like he was trying to summon the patience to deal with a rambunctious toddler. Drumming his fingers on the desk, he looked at Ben again. “I always return the
paper
exams and essays back to the students once I’ve graded them, do I not? So you would have noticed if you didn’t get it returned to you.”

Ben shrugged. “I guess.” The truth was he wasn’t sure he would have. Coyle’s class was the only one that practically put him to sleep, and he was usually jumping the gun to get out of there as soon as his watch told him it was over. And a few times, he’d sneaked out early.

“Well, if you’ve attended all my classes as you claim, you would have received your test back, graded. You must have it somewhere. It’s Friday. Take the weekend to go through your things. If you find it, bring it to me on Monday, and I’ll adjust your status.”

Ben nodded grimly. He never hung on to tests, or at least he didn’t think so. He didn’t actively toss them in the trash, but he didn’t file them or anything. His entire life was on computers; he was pretty disorganized when it came to hard copies. Still, he prayed he had the damn test stuffed in a notebook somewhere, or scattered among his things back at home. Maybe he’d shoved it in the coffee table drawer, as he often did with things he wasn’t sure he’d need again. Or maybe it was under the stack of old bills he kept ‘filed’ on his bedroom bookshelf.

“Benjamin.”

Ben looked up at Dr. Coyle. He’d been lost in his own miserable thoughts, and realized he’d been sitting in the chair saying nothing, shoulders slumped. “Yeah. Sorry. Thinking.”

Coyle sighed. “I’ve had a lot of students come into my office, trying to squeak by on shoddy work. My gut tells me you’re honest, not trying to get away with something. I’m not unreasonable, but I can’t change your grade based on nothing. Please. Try to find the test.”

Ben stood, snatching his grade printout off the desk. “And if I can’t?”

Dr. Coyle shrugged. “Then there’s nothing I can do.”

Ben stared at him. “
Nothing?
I refuse to accept that.”

Something passed over the professor’s face that made Ben frown. It was a sudden change in his expression, a crack in the mask. For that quick, fleeting moment, he swore he saw fear in the professor’s reflective blue eyes. It confused him. It wasn’t like he’d threatened the guy.

“Dr. Coyle? Are you all right?”

Coyle stared into his eyes, and for another long moment, he seemed lost, somewhere else. The prolonged eye contact unnerved Ben. But in the stratosphere beneath his awkwardness, it unfurled something else. His mouth went dry, a slight flutter in his chest, and for a moment he wanted to dive on the professor and kiss him. He blinked, shaking it off with a deep breath.
Christ
, Ben thought,
has it been that long since I’ve gotten laid? Talk about hard up.

“Dr. Coyle?”

In a flash, the professor’s stoic countenance returned, and Coyle blinked slowly. “I’m fine, Benjamin. Please, if you don’t mind, I have a lot of work to do.”

Ben met his eyes. Coyle looked quickly away, fussing with the folder on his desk. Finally, Ben turned and headed for the door. “Then I’ll try and find the test,” he said. “Even though
you
lost it.”

He glanced over his shoulder as he left the office. The professor was watching him again with that strange, panicked expression. As Ben stepped out and closed the door behind him, he let out a breath. He moved back down the marbled hallway, away from Coyle’s office. His anxiety over his grade was still present, but it had been temporarily pushed aside for the feeling that something significant had just happened. What exactly it was, he had no idea.

He left the building and headed toward the parking lot, trying to shake the eerie sensation that
something was coming
, something more than the crashing chaos of failing a class that would prevent him from graduating. It was that faint glimmer he sometimes got when things were about to change in his life, a slight shift in the wind, an electric buzz in the air.

He got in his car and pulled out onto the road. During the short ride back to his apartment, he made a conscious effort to subdue the strange feeling, along with the sudden erection that pulsed painfully against his jeans.

****

“Benny, what the freaking
hell
are you doing?”

Ben looked up from the living room floor, where he sat surrounded by papers he’d torn out of the coffee table drawer. He’d done the same to the kitchen, office, and his bedroom, making a righteous mess but not finding what he sought in the process. “I’m looking for a lit test I took weeks ago, one that Dr. Coyle claims I never turned in.”

Ben’s roommate Dominick stood with an armful of grocery bags, his nose wrinkling as he surveyed the mess. Moving to the kitchen, he set his bags down and pulled out a six pack. “I need a beer for this. And it looks like you could use one, too.”

Dominick pulled two beers out of the rack and popped the caps off. Ben wasn’t a big drinker, but the after work beer on Friday night had become a ritual for them. Though they were opposites in most regards, Dominick’s relaxed nature kept Ben grounded, and he was feeling anything
but
grounded at the moment, so he accepted the beer. His pulse slowed a bit, grateful for his roommate’s presence and cheerful energy as he sat down on the floor across from him. “Okay,” Dom said. “Start over.”

Ben relayed the events of his day, and his meeting with the professor, while Dominick sipped his beer and nodded, annoyingly relaxed as Ben grew more anxious with the retelling. Dom had moved into his apartment a year ago after they’d met at one of the few gay bars on the outskirts of town. He wore his bright red hair long and wild, a trimmed goatee, and with his construction worker physique, had initially appealed to Ben as a sexy Viking type.

Though they’d shared a single night of satisfying sex, Ben hadn’t expected to stay in touch with his brawny conquest—picking up townies was a less complicated way to get laid than fishing in the college pool, but he certainly had no designs on dating one of them.

But the morning after, they’d talked for hours while Dominick cooked him breakfast, and eventually lunch, and had found they enjoyed each other’s friendship far more than they’d enjoyed the sex. Through mutual agreement, they never slept together again. Neither of them made friends easily, and they deemed their quick, comfortable connection to be valuable, something that shouldn’t be hindered by the complications of a sexual relationship. When Dom’s lease ran out on his apartment, Ben gladly offered him his extra bedroom, grateful for the added rent money. And grateful to have someone around to make him feel less lonely, who would remind him to slow down once in a while. Dom’s pace was infuriatingly docile to Ben at times, and in turn, Ben drove Dom nuts with his obsessive drive to succeed, at the expense of almost everything else.

“I don’t get it,” Dominick said. “Isn’t there some way you can prove you were in class that day? I mean doesn’t he take attendance?”

Ben rolled his eyes. “Taking attendance is for children, apparently, not grownups paying for an education. The guy is a pompous fucker and I hate him. I can’t find the damn test. I don’t know what I’m gonna do.” He hung his head and rubbed his temples, shoulders slumping with the weight of his world crashing down.

“So you’ll fight it.” Dominick gave his shoulder a squeeze. “I’m sure it will work out fine.”

Despite his roommate’s optimism, doom pressed down on Ben. This couldn’t stop him from graduating, not
this
. It was too stupid. He’d find a way around it somehow. He had been through worse. He’d been on his own, more or less, since he was ten years old. After his mother died, his father became a drunk. The old man passed out in front of the television every night. Ben avoided going home while his father was on a bender, spending all his time on the computers in the town library.

But then dear old Dad turned to pills, then cocaine, and was home less and less. As the money ran out, so did the food, then the electricity, and finally the heat.

Though he was only a kid, he felt a deep shame that winter night he was forced to wander over to the neighbor’s house, frozen tears on his cheeks, and explain that he had no heat, no food, no lights, and no idea where his father was. Thereafter, as he maneuvered through life as a foster child, he was driven, determined that this unlucky hand would not dictate his future. He studied hard, worked for two years after school, saved his money, and eventually got into college. He’d worked his ass off, and now, on the last mile, he was emotionally tapped out, and had given it everything he had. Worse than that, his bank account was getting light. He needed to graduate this spring and get a job. He’d planned it so carefully, there was no wiggle room. He couldn’t put in another semester after this, to retake a class he’d already taken. Aside from the fact that he couldn’t afford it, his nerves were frayed to shit.

“I
like
literature, personally,” Dom said as he perused Ben’s text book, retrieving it from the pile of items torn from his backpack and strewn across the floor. “You should read more. It’s such an escape from the real world.”

Ben huffed. “You think I want to escape the real world?”

Dom looked up from the book, smiling. “No, Benny. I think you
need
to. You’re too high strung.”

“Screw you, I’m strung just right.”

“Hey, what’s this?” Dominick pulled out a folded paper that had been wedged between the pages of the text book. Opening it up, he raised his eyebrows. “Well, it’s
a
test. Don’t know if it’s
the
test.”

Ben scrambled across the floor and snatched the paper from Dom’s hand. Heart racing, his eyes scanned the page. “Ha! Dominick, you beautiful son of a bitch. This is it. This is it!” Laughing, he dove on Dominick, hugging him roughly. “Fuck, have I told you lately that I love you? I owe you one, big time.”

Chuckling, Dominick pushed Benjamin off him. “Okay, okay. You’re welcome. But Ben?”

“Yeah?” Ben beamed as he examined the test he held, hardly believing his luck.

“Why isn’t it graded?”

Ben looked up. “What?”

Dom pointed to the paper. “The test. It’s got no grade on it.”

Panic rising, Ben examined the test. Dom was right. There was no grade written at the top, no comments from Dr. Coyle, nothing but Ben’s neatly printed answers. He turned it over, examining the back, then flipped it and studied the front again, hoping he’d missed something. “Oh my God,” he groaned, slapping a palm to his forehead. “No, no I couldn’t have.”

Dominick sighed, looking sympathetic. “You walked out of class without turning it in, didn’t you?”

Ben shook his head, the pressure of impending tears stinging his eyes. “I couldn’t have. I wouldn’t have. How could I have spaced like that? I must have just shoved it in my book and walked out when class ended. Idiot! How could I have been such an idiot?”

Dominick crawled across the floor and sat beside him, looking down at the test with Ben. “You’re not an idiot. You’re just stressed out. You spend every night building computer programs for your other classes. With all the shit you’re juggling, you’re gonna get distracted once in a while.”

Biting his lip, Ben shook his head. “I don’t get distracted.”

“Yeah, you do,” Dominick said. He tapped a finger on the test. “And you did.”

Ben lowered the paper, staring blankly ahead. “I’m screwed. I cannot believe this.”

“You could write a grade in yourself,” Dom suggested. “Your teacher’s got no record of it, you could put anything. Give yourself an A, man.”

“I can’t! What if he goes through it? If it’s C work and I give myself an A, he’ll know.”

Dom shrugged. “So give yourself a C.”

“I can’t do that either!” Ben’s voice was rising to hysteria. “What if it’s A work and I give it a C? He’ll still know. And anyway, I doubt I can copy his handwriting.”

“It’s
one
letter, Ben, you can imitate one letter.”

Sighing, Ben fell back and lay on the rug, staring at the ceiling. “No. I’ll tell him the truth. That I spaced and walked out with it instead of turning it in. Hopefully he’ll understand that mere mortals make mistakes, and still be willing to count it into my grade.”

“I’m sure he will,” Dom said. “But guess what? It’s Friday night, and we have plans.
Big
plans. Sure to make even you forget your problems for a while.”

Lifting his head, Ben narrowed his eyes when he saw Dom’s grin. “Oh, no. Not one of
those
parties. I already told you, I’m not into it.”

“How do you know if you haven’t been to one? Come on, don’t make me go by myself. My chances will be a lot better if I walk in with
you
.”

“Oh, please.” Ben sat up. “You’re just trying to manipulate me into going. I am seriously not in a party mood, Dom, for real.”

For weeks Dominick had been going on about this party he’d been taken to by a guy he met at the bar one night. A huge house owned by some rich gay man called ‘Thorn’, which turned Ben off right away. There was no way it was a real name, and anyone who chose to call themselves ‘Thorn’ had to have issues. But to hear Dominick tell it, the party was like an evening at Caligula’s palace, complete with heated swimming pool and hot tubs, liquor shots poured from ice luges, and an unending plethora of gorgeous men with loose morals.

Apparently this Thorn character threw such parties often, and when Dom’s previous ticket in had declined to see him again, he’d started badgering Ben to go with him.

“Come on,” Dominick said. “You’re hot, way better looking than me. You’ll up my cred!”