It would take all of five minutes to walk across campus to reach Rawlins’s office, but Ellsbeth left the library at two thirty, walking slowly, only to find with a shock of disappointment that she arrived at the arcane mechanicals department building at two thirty-four. She sat in the courtyard across from the statue of Gregory Hale on a freezing-cold stone bench, where she tried to read the novel she had been keeping in her backpack for weeks. In actuality, she was just staring at the pages, taking in the prose with all of the nuance and analytical ability of a security camera. At two fifty-one, she allowed herself to pack the book away and go into the building itself.
His door was closed and locked, but she knocked. There was a strange buzzing in one of her ears. She could hear him shuffling around his office, standing and walking toward the door and then finally unlockingit.
“Miss Storer,” he said. “Early.”
Ellsbeth didn’t respond. She walked into the office behind him (grateful, too grateful that no other students were waiting for his office hours. Would they have been able to see how flushed she was? How she had to adjust herself with a squirming shimmy to keep her jeans from pressing into her? Would someone be able to know how turned on she was after just three words from Rawlins’s mouth? Would he?).
Rawlins walked back toward his desk, but he didn’t sit down. Ellsbeth shut the door behind her and pressed the knob on the handle to lock it. She inhaled and walked to him. Neither of them spoke. Ellsbeth could hear his breath quicken, and she smelled his cologne.
She lowered herself onto her knees and pressed her palms against his jeans, dark and stiff.
She ran her hands up his thigh, listening for his sharp inhale when she grazed the place that his cock was pressing against the denim, but she didn’t let her fingers linger. She undid his belt buckle and, in a single motion, pulled it through his belt loops. It whistled against the fabric, and then it was there, in her hand. Ellsbeth rose without a word.
They stood almost face-to-face, with Rawlins leaning into her, and Ellsbeth pressing forward on her tiptoes. She leaned in, just a little, just enough to see him lean in back with his lips parting—and then she turned around and left his office. The dull, flat expanse of sluggish procrastination that had eaten the previous few hours was replaced by sharpness and adrenaline. Her brain raced, the electrical impulses firing quickly and forcefully. Her sophomore year, a boy named Jono at a house party had offered them all bumps of cocaine off his student ID. Her senior year before their dissertations were due, her roommate Roxana had pressed a trio of Adderall pills into her palm with a wink. Neither high had felt as good as this: as clear or as exhilarating. Ellsbeth wanted to sprint home, to read a book, towritea book. And her feet were moving faster than her brain. She walked past the grad center library, through the main quad, and the several blocks down to thewine shop on Wickenden without touching the ground. An image was burning itself into her brain: the look on Rawlins’s face when she rose. He was impressed with her, and a little surprised, but more than that: It had been a look of naked desire. Despite his earlier misgivings, his half-hearted, self-righteous guilt, Ellsbeth knew at that moment without a doubt just how badly he wanted her.
When Ellsbeth made it backto her apartment, a forty-dollar bottle of wine tucked under her arm (a previously unthinkably extravagant expense, but she was buoyed by the fizzy awareness of Rawlins’s belt rolled up in her backpack), she found a package leaning against her front door. It was wrapped in brown paper, not quite like a gift, but certainly a step above the industrial plain cardboard most items shipped in. Her name and address were written in neat script. There was no return address, and no stamps.
The package contained a robe. A white robe lined with acid-green piping at the collar and wrists, and made of the thickest, softest material Ellsbeth had ever felt. It was the type of robe that hung in five-star European hotels, and Ellsbeth ran her fingers across the plush fabric almost reverently. It had come with just a stationery card embossed with the initialsTMR.And in the dark ink that spilled from a fountain pen, just a few lines:
To E-
My good girl.
-R
She took a bath and used thegoodbath salt, the tiny jar that smelled like honey and lavender. She had bought it years ago from a fancy department store in London, and it was still half full because she only doled it out to herself on special occasions. She wrapped herself in the robe when it was over, feeling like someone more glamorous than herself, like she shouldn’t be living in an apartment with dust collecting at the corner of the moldings and thick layers of paint on all of the light switches.
It was still half an hour until Rawlins said to be ready, and who knew how long he would make her wait until he actually arrived. Ellsbeth opened the wine and poured herself a generous glass, leaving the rest of the bottle open to breathe on the kitchen table. Banestooth was having a party—she could hear boys’ voices arguing whether they should put a recently delivered ice luge in the front room or the kitchen. There had been no shortage of drinking during her time as an undergraduate at St. Andrews, but fraternity culture seemed to be a distinctly American phenomenon. Of course, Banestooth Club promoted itself as asociety,with a purposefully obscure process for invitation to entry, and Ellsbeth had no doubt that a small but fair number of congressmen and Fortune 500 CEOs emerged from its ranks, from the rarefied world of privilege and old-boys connections. Still, despite all the cloak-and-dagger and self-serious branding (those brass wolf buttons they all wore!), Ellsbeth could look out her window and see that, at the end of the day, it was a fraternity. A place for twenty-year-old boys to drink themselves silly on kegs of beer and let piles of dishes gather mold in the sink. All college students imagine themselves to be impossibly important and grown-up. Ellsbeth certainly had—she cringed remembering nights she spent sitting on the floor of a party, swirling a cup of warm rum and Coke, and talking (too loudly, probably) about Hegel or Marx or Hale.
It only takes a few years’ removal from the coddling womb of being an undergraduate to realize that the world is far more indifferent to you than you would have ever believed.
Ellsbeth was still wearing thewhite robe when Rawlins knocked gently on the door at 8:12 p.m. He had barely made her wait at all. Maybe he was as impatient as she was.
“Come in,” she said. And then she added, “Sorry, the place is a little messy,” even though she had spent the last hour tidying up and it had only looked neater the day she movedin.
Rawlins was in jeans and a dark-green T-shirt that clung to his flat stomach. Ellsbeth exhaled as she took in every detail of him: the faintsmell of the cologne he wore, the small curl of chest hair that escaped his collar, the stiffness in his posture.
She turned to pour him a glass of wine (her own glass, half empty after being refilled, was already sitting on the table). As she walked away from the door, she let the robe fall to the floor. She was naked, as Rawlins had requested, with nothing on but a white lace thong. “Fuck,” she heard him mutter.
She kept her shoulders back purposefully as she returned with both glasses, and handed him his. “Cheers,” she said, and took a long sip.
“My belt is—”
“On the desk, like you told me.”
“What a good student you are.” His words caused something to twist and snare inside her, and she suppressed a shiver. “Into the bedroom now, and kneel on the bed, facing away from me.”
She did.
She couldn’t see what he was doing, but she could hear it: the snap of the belt as he picked it up, the gentle clang of the buckle hitting itself, his fingers running across the leather. And then, before she was ready, she felt Rawlins take both of her wrists in his hand. In one fluid motion, he looped the belt around her wrists and pulled it tight enough to cause Ellsbeth to gasp. Rawlins did not bind her as a loose suggestion, playacting at domination. She knew that even if she struggled, she wouldn’t be able to pull her wrists apart.
“How do you feel?” Rawlins murmured, his lips so close that she could feel his breath in her ear.
“More turned on than I want to admit,” Ellsbeth said. She couldn’t see him smile, but she could sense it. And then she felt a finger trace its way beneath the lace of her panties. “Do you remember the safe word?” Ellsbeth nodded, and Rawlins’s finger continued, pressing into the wetness between her legs, then withdrawing the moment Ellsbeth tried to press back into him. “Impatient, though. Always impatient. I think a spanking is in order.”
He sat on the bed and pulled Ellsbeth stomach-down onto his lap as if she weighed nothing. She couldn’t see him; she was facing away, toward the wall, her hands still tied behind her back. At first, Rawlinsgently slid his palm across her exposed ass; and then came a suddensmack,more painful than Ellsbeth had expected. The stinging lingered.
“Say, ‘Thank you, sir,’ ” Rawlins said, and he spanked her again, harder.
