Grading Curves Read online

  “Is this a good size?” He turns back to me with the transfer paper and pauses, frowns. “What’s wrong? You okay?”

  “Yes, I’m fine.” I hurriedly remove my sweater and shrug out of the left strap. “And that size is perfect.”

  To avoid his scrutiny, I twist in the chair, presenting my shoulder and back to him. Water hits my back and then he’s touching me.

  I shiver, and no way he could’ve missed it. Please God, let him chalk it up to being cold. Look who my mother is. I think You kind of owe me one. I don’t know if my prayer is heard, but Dean doesn’t comment on the full body quake I just gave, so I’ll take it.

  Because for the love of all that’s Hail-Mary-worthy, he’s just smoothed his palm over me, and my sex clenches so hard I’ll probably be bruised down there.

  I hold my cardigan up over my breasts. If he catches sight of the beaded nipples that are no doubt prodding through my bra and shirt like spikes, my humiliation would be complete. Fuck humiliation, my nipples yell. We want summa that.

  Oh for fuck’s sake.

  Slowly, he peels the transparent from my skin. And even that’s a sensory caress. “Take a look in the mirror over there.”

  Careful to keep a grip on my sweater, I shove off the elevated chair and cross to the mirror hanging on the far wall. Turning, I inspect the outline on my lower shoulder blade and upper back. It’s medium-sized but if I needed to cover it for work, I wouldn’t have any problems.

  “Perfect.” I return to the chair, but he’s lugging one of the folded-up pieces of furniture over, and in minutes, he has it erected to form a long, black-cushioned table-slash-bed-slash-OBGYN-chair.

  I refuse to think of stirrups.

  “Come on over here.” He pats the cushion. When I eye it, not even attempting to hide my skepticism, the corner of his mouth quirks. The first smile I’ve seen on him—even if it’s a not-quite-smile—and I quickly glance away from it. If his lips looked full before, that slight curl made them positively edible. “Trust me. I’ve had a four-hundred-pound biker whose beard added another fifteen stretched out on this. It can support your tiny frame.”

  Tiny? I snort. When you’re six-three or six-four, I suppose my five-feet-four inches may seem small. But with my full C-cup, hips for days, ass and thick thighs, I’ve never been called petite or tiny.

  “I need you to lie on your stomach. I got you,” Dean murmurs, cupping my hips and helping me to turn and shift so I’m positioned as he needs me. With a professionalism that isn’t lost on me and is much appreciated, he gently tugs down the back of my tank top until more of my back is exposed to him. I must be flashing him a fair amount of side boob, but to give him credit, he doesn’t seem to notice. And I can’t decide if I’m relieved or disappointed over that.

  He spins around to his station to gather ink and small caps, but my skin is branded by his palm prints. Part of me wants to reach down and scrub at my hips, try to erase the phantom pressure of him cradling me, but the other needier, darker part hungers to cover it, press it harder, deeper into my skin. Savor that branding for as long as I can.

  “Ready?” he rumbles from beside me.

  My nerves are tap-dancing like they’re auditioning for Gregory Hines.

  The buzz from the tattoo machine fills my ears, and I tense. But Dean doesn’t make me wait, doesn’t allow my fear of the unknown to escalate until I’m paralyzed. Settling one hand on the middle of my back, he bends over me and puts the needle to my skin.

  In pure reflex, I flinch, but he murmurs, “Easy,” and doesn’t stop with the first line. Which is good. His calm clears the voice inside my head screaming, “Needle! Abort! Abort!”, and I concentrate on what he’s doing to me.

  It’s not…painful. And if I didn’t know those instruments of torture were what transferred and embedded the ink into skin, I would’ve assumed it was a really sharp pin dragging across my skin. That’s what it feels like. It’s a steady, grating sting, but nothing unbearable. I exhale the breath I hadn’t been aware of holding and slowly relax. Okay, this isn’t too bad.

  “You good?” he asks, pausing to lean over and study my face. I nod, and he returns to my back. This time when the buzzing starts, I don’t jump, and my body doesn’t turn into a slab of marble. “And Woody wasn’t mean. He just didn’t take anyone’s shit. Remember that episode when he went to that bougie as hell restaurant and the maître d’ refused to serve him because he wasn’t anybody important? Woody refused to take that lying down, so he dressed up as some princess and damn near broke them eating them out of their food. He did tear up the restaurant at the end though.” He snorted while I marveled at his random and startling knowledge about cartoons. “See? There’s a difference between fucking someone over and doling out what they have coming to them.”

  I don’t reply, but his last words strike a place so deep inside me, I vibrate with it. There’s a difference between fucking someone over and doling out what they had coming to them. How he encapsulates my life in that simple sentence.

  “So, why the woodpecker?” he presses.

  Initially, I remain silent. My reasons are my own, and not ones I want to share. Especially since they have to do with my mother and family. With my own cowardice. But as if he’s a bartender and the tattoo gun is a shot of Scotch, my lips part of their own accord and I’m confessing.

  “One morning a few weeks ago, I should’ve been at work, but I couldn’t drag myself out of my bed.” I stare at the far wall, much like I did that morning when all I wanted to do was curl up beneath the covers and never emerge from them. “I was in a…dark place. Then, I noticed this constant, insistent knocking. At first, I thought maybe someone was at the door, but it was coming from the side of the house near my bedroom window. A woodpecker. It continued for at least a half-hour. Unrelenting. As if it were telling me to wake the fuck up. To get my ass out of the bed and get on with the business of living.”

  I laugh, and it’s small and self-deprecating, because hell, I know how I sound. But Dean doesn’t take the opportunity to join in and tease me. Instead, he straightens on the stool, shuts the machine down and stares at me. There’s no condemnation in those beautiful eyes. No, his gaze holds nothing but…understanding. I shift my attention back to the wall, not ready to see that. Not sure if I even want it.

  “Anyway, I did get my ass out of the bed. And I accepted a job offer out here that I’d applied for on a whim. Then, I packed up and moved hours away to start over.”

  But not before I turned my mother into the police for identity theft. That information I manage to keep to myself.

  “And then you walked in here for a tattoo to commemorate it,” he says. “That’s some ballsy shit, Woody.”

  I blink, then snicker at the nickname. He means it as a compliment, and I take it that way. With a slight smile curling the corner of his mouth, he returns to his work. For the next few minutes, silence reigns as I run our conversation since that “I’ll take her,” through my head.

  “I bought them myself,” I murmur, the words escaping me without my permission.

  He glances up at me, lifting the gun from my skin. “What?”

  “The earrings.” I unfold an arm from under my head and tap one of the diamond studs. “A man didn’t buy them for me. I did as a present to myself after I graduated college.” Why it was important for him to know that? I can’t say, which seems to be the theme of the night.

  “Not that you need one to give you gifts, and I think it’s bad ass and sexy as fuck that you can do it for yourself, but you don’t have a man to do that for you?”

  Bad ass? Sexy as fuck? Okay, there’s no mistaking that compliment. And even though it’s most likely the kind of throw away thing a man his age, who looks like him, casually tosses out to women, my heart thuds against my chest like an anvil striking steel, and it echoes in my sex, my clit. Desire slides through my veins, heavy and thick, like the sweetest, warmest molasses. I fight the urge to squirm, to both increase and alleviate the swelling be
tween my legs created by just that piercing gaze and his words.

  “No,” I say, shocked at how even my voice is, but so damn happy. How humiliating would it be if he realized this woman old enough to have babysat him was having hot flashes over him? “Well, not right now.”

  “What the fuck’s wrong with the men where you lived? Are they blind or dickless?”

  I wait for him to return to the tattoo before softly saying, “Not all of them are bad.”

  Yes, I’d dated a few assholes. But there’d been a couple who’d been good men. I hadn’t blamed them for calling it quits when they couldn’t put up with my family constantly hitting them up for money or stealing it when they didn’t agree.

  How would Dean handle them, my mother? He might be young, but somehow, I can’t see him standing for their behavior.

  We both fall silent, and the lull of the buzzing tattoo machine and the constant drag of it over my skin draws me into this subspace where only my body, his hands and the bee-sting pain exists. Closing my eyes, I fall under the seduction of it. Craving the slight strokes and tugs on my back, the pain that’s riding the edge of pleasure. A low but aching throb sets up shop in my lower stomach and farther down still, in my sex. My breasts grow heavier, and lying on them, the nipples taut and sensitive against the black padding, intensifies the pressure, and my teeth sink into my bottom lip.

  “Keep still,” Dean murmurs, wiping a paper towel across my skin. “Only a little longer.”

  I nod, but God. My body has turned into one big tuning fork, and he is the sole frequency I’m attuned to. I struggle not to quiver, to shake with the need zipping through me like tiny, electrical currents. He’d warned me about some people deriving pleasure from getting tattooed, and I hadn’t believed him. Now, I do. Yet, it’s not the pleasure/pain of the needle or the almost mesmerizing drone of the gun or even the subtly commanding way he directs my body.

  It’s him.

  He’s the reason I’m five seconds and one brush over my clit away from crying out in orgasm.

  Minutes later, he shuts off the tattoo machine for good and straightens. “It’s done. Let me wipe it off and you can take a look.” For the next few moments, he cleans my skin and then rubs an ointment on me. “Okay, you’re ready,” he says, shucking his gloves.

  Carefully, I sit up, clutching my sweater, keeping my head lowered. I’m shaking now, and there’s no way he can’t notice it. Maybe because it’s been at least a year since I’ve been with a man. Maybe it’s the adrenaline coursing through my veins like a hit of speed. Or maybe it’s just the force of this man’s too-seeing, too-beautiful predatory gaze. In this instant, aching, wet and so, so hungry, I’m willing to beg him to take me down, possess me, feast on me.

  I need to get out of here.

  “Look at me,” he softly orders. And though it’s the last thing I should do, I acquiesce. And am trapped by blue flames. “You want me to do something about it?”

  I’m not a hypocrite, so there’s no need to pretend I don’t know the “it” to which he’s referring. Do I? No. Yes. God, yes.

  But I’m a newly hired college professor in a small, private college where they made me sign a morality clause for god’s sake. I can’t just have sex in a tattoo shop with a man I’ve known all of three hours, and who’s young enough to be my best friend’s baby brother. If I had a best friend. Semantics.

  “Your choice, Woody,” he says, and his use of the nickname isn’t an accident. He’s reminding me of my decision to own my shit. To take a chance and not give a damn what other people think. To be brave.

  “Yes,” I breathe.

  “Yes, what?”

  “I want you to do something about it.”

  He rolls closer on the stool, pressing forward so my knees part around his chest. We’re almost eye level, and the demand, the lust darkening his gaze steals the air from my lungs.

  “Do something about what?” he insists.

  I loose a sound in my throat that’s half disbelieving chuckle and half groan. “You’re going to make me say it, aren’t you?”

  He doesn’t reply, but waits, not shifting closer, but not backing away from me either. “I want you to do something about…” I falter, but the thought that the sooner I put it out there, the sooner I’ll discover if that mouth is as soft as it looks, purges the words from me. “Do something about the orgasm I needed five minutes ago before I lose my mind.”

  The skin over his cheekbones tauten, making them appear sharper. He cups my knees and eases them farther apart, opening me wider. His gaze skates over my chest, lingering on the tank clinging to my breasts and the clear outline of my nipples under the thin material, before lowering to my denim-covered sex.

  “You’re wet, aren’t you?” he asks, his voice a low rumble with a vein of steel threading through it. Demanding my honesty…again.

  “Yes,” I breathe, giving it to him. There’s no use in lying. If he chose to unzip my jeans and slide a finger inside my panties, he could easily discover the truth. I’m drenched for him. Embarrassingly so.

  “You going to let me find out for myself?” he presses, damn near echoing my thoughts. “You going to let me pull these jeans off those gorgeous hips and dick tease of an ass and let me see if that vanilla-and-whatever-the-fuck else scent on your skin is thicker, sweeter in your pussy? You going to let me get my tongue wrapped around that scent, Woody?”

  Shock barrels through me. Shock and lust so hot it incinerates every brain cell that controls motor functions. No one has ever spoken to me like that. Shouldn’t I be angry? Offended? Anything other than so damn hot and wet Hanes might need to make fire-retardant and water-resistant underwear a thing?

  My mind is numb, but my body isn’t experiencing the existential crisis since my lips part, and I utter, “Yes.”

  He stands and thrusts a hand through my hair, gripping the curls and tugging my head back. With no hesitation, he bows over me and crushes his mouth to mine. For a moment, I’m stunned. But then the feeling of his full lips on mine, his taste invading me penetrates my senses, and with a groan, I crack. Open wider to him. Accept the thrust of his tongue. Give him back mine.

  Jesus, he’s wild and greedy. He takes my mouth like he owns the title to it. There’s no exploration period. He dives between my lips, claiming and conquering as if he already knows what makes me purr and burn. And dammit, he does. This is our first kiss, but it might as well be our hundredth, because he licks and sucks at me in ways I like and didn’t know I loved.

  “Put your arms around my shoulders,” he mutters against my mouth.

  I obey, and before I can object, he hoists me in the air. On reflex, I wind my legs around his narrow waist, but my heart is thumping against my sternum. Don’t get me wrong, I love my shape and am very happy with my size fourteen. I’m not fat, but not by any stretch of the imagination am I skinny or a lightweight. And anxiety dropkicks need out the door as images of him dropping me or blowing out his back run across my mind’s eye on an endless movie reel.

  “Easy, Woody. I got you,” he assures me, his fingers flexing against my ass. Damn, it’s like the man can read my mind. “Thinking I can’t handle you is an insult to both of us.” He crosses the short distance to the tattoo chair and deposits me on the seat. His big body looms over me as he grabs the back of the chair with one hand and firmly cradles my chin with the other. Tilting my head back, he narrows his eyes. “The crack earlier about age. Getting up on my table. And now this. In case you have any more doubts about how fucking much I want to swan dive into your walking wet dream of a body while I stare into a face and eyes that could make a grown ass man cry, here.”

  He releases my chin and grasps my hand and flattens it over the rock hard and—goddamn—huge erection imprinting the front of his jeans. My breath expels from my lungs on an audible whoosh, and I’m left a little lightheaded. I glance up his torso, and he’s peering down at me, face stamped with a fierce need and… I don’t know what the other thing is, and with my fing
ers curling around his cock as much as his width and his jeans will allow, I don’t analyze it.

  My body and hunger take over, and I’m scrabbling at his button and zipper before my mind catches up with a “What the fuck, woman?” But as soon as I dip my hand inside his black boxer briefs and close it around thick, hot, pulsing flesh, my mind steps back in surrender with an “As you were.”

  A sigh escapes me as I drag him free. I can’t lie; his dick is beautiful. A smooth, rounded and ruddy cap already glistening with tiny drops of precum tops an almost brutish, veined stalk. Fisting him, feeling the life pulsing beneath the thin skin, holding all that strength in my hand, I don’t fight the impulse to lean forward and lick the head, teasing the slit with the tip of my tongue…

  “Fuck that,” he growls, and hard hands burrow into my hair, yanking my head back.

  His mouth covers mine in hard possession, and I curl my tongue around his, suck, let him taste himself on me. Who am I becoming? The question pings off my skull, but I shut it down. In this moment, I don’t care. I’m whoever I need to be to get off…and have this man do it.

  “You and that mouth are going to do that again. Now that I’ve had your hot little tongue on my dick, I’m not going to stop until I’m down your throat after a good, hard sucking. But not before I get my mouth on you. I want to eat your tight little pussy so bad I’m having hunger pains. So what about it, Woody? You going to come on my face and give it to me?”

  “Oh shit,” I whisper, staring up at him.

  A faint smirk lifts a corner of his mouth. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  Covering my mouth once more, he makes short and skilled work of my jeans, and before I can suck in a breath, flip-flops, denim and lace are puddled on the floor, and he’s kneeling in front of me. Pushing my thighs farther apart, he circles my ankles and props my feet on the corners of the chair, opening me wide for him. Air brushes over my exposed and soaked sex, and I shiver, fighting the urge to squeeze my legs together and hide myself from his gaze.