He didn't know she was here, the Professor. He hadn't seen her when she unlocked his bedroom door from the outside, hadn't noticed when she slipped in, the door whispering shut behind her.
During the day, in class and during training and at meals, the Professor noticed everything, both the things he commented on and the things he didn't. No one who wasn't a telepath ever seemed to realize how rare it was for him to miss anything that happened here, especially when he was paying attention—
And there was no one he paid more attention to than her, these days. If she hadn't been cheating, or if she weren't so strong now, he'd have seen her for sure—but he was distracted, and she was strong, and it was easy, so easy for her to slip between the cracks, to watch what he was doing. What he had been doing, the thing that had woken her up again in the middle of the night, wet and aching.
She'd come to him openly, once, not long after her eighteenth birthday. He'd turned her away, saying, "You're so lovely, darling—but, Jean, I'm more than thirty years your senior, and your teacher besides. It wouldn't be right."
Before Cairo, she'd accepted this. Before, she'd only seen a glimpse or two of the way he thought of her—chaste enough fragments, quickly buried. But since Cairo, since then—
They were connected now, more than they'd ever been, and she'd seen everything. All his fantasies about her, his shame, the way the two connected, two sides of a coin, one informing the other whenever he finally gave in—
He'd given in again tonight. He was sitting up in bed, shirtless, pants gaping open. One hand was pinching his right nipple, while the other was around his blood-red prick, jerking it up and down, up and down.
He was thinking of her. He hadn't settled on what it was this time, yet, though he'd narrowed it down to two fantasies, both set on the desk in his office. In one version, she was lying on it, skirt hiked up, his head burrowed between her legs, her heels kicking against his back, hands pulling at his hair. (The Professor always had his hair, in these.) In the other version, she was bent over, skirt hiked up again, panties around her ankles, and he was fucking her from behind, their fingers twined together on the desk's surface. (The Professor was never in his chair, in these.)
"Charles," she said, breaking his illusion, the one where he was alone, the only one who knew about this, and would never act on it.
The Professor froze. Horror flooded through him. Lust did, too. It was delicious. "Jean? What are you—you shouldn't be in here. And you shouldn't be—"
If she shouldn't have been naked, then he shouldn't have been looking; so far, though, he hadn't looked away. Part of him was telling him he should, but another part was merely surprised, that he'd guessed so correctly what she looked like with her clothes off...
"I want it." She climbed into his bed, straddled him, not far from his hand, still unmoving on his prick. "You want it, too. I know you do. I saw it all."
"Jean," he said, but she kissed him, and ran her hands over his shoulders, and he gave in and kissed her back.
Suddenly, the fantasy in his mind was a lot more like reality: her riding his prick or his face, him fucking her with his fingers—
He hadn't been hard, the other times, so that was an easy decision to make. The Professor groaned when he felt her make it.
His hands roamed over her sides, then went to her breasts, pinching and pulling her nipples, just the way she liked. Though she'd expected him to, he didn't protest one last time when she lowered herself onto him, began fucking herself on him, until she was gasping and then until he was.
Afterward, his hands still roamed for a while, though more slowly, as if he were drunk, or falling asleep.
But from the look on his face when she got up from the bed, he was anything but either of those.
"Tell me, Jean: how many times has this happened?" he asked, the same as he always did, his voice as kind as it always was.
There was no point in trying not to answer; Jean already knew she would, the same as she always did. "Six, so far."
Once she was in the hallway, she reached back and took it all away from him, until the next time.