She could have given him everything. More than he ever imagined, something that at his age, especially, he should have begged her for.

She leaned back against the steps of the university library. Older men were supposed to have it together. Issues resolved. But at thirty-six he, when it came to relationships, was an adolescent despite his profound intellect, a stint in the army, and nine years of marriage.

She gazed up at a sky that to her eyes always looked red. The whole world seemed to bleed, even the students strolling up and down the street. Blood oozing from every pore, sanguine auras exuding life around their young bodies. How dare he do this to her. How dare he promise her forever when he had no concept of the word.

He would simply have to understand her point of view.

Revenge made her blood sing the way just being near him used to. For a few weeks she felt human again, until he created the worst kind of monster. Hell hath no fury, as the saying went. She smiled to herself and rose from the steps.

* * * *

She waited outside his classroom. He would walk right by her at first; they hadn’t seen one another in a month, and she recently cut off all of her black hair into her new punky hairdo. It wasn’t the first time she had appeared here, or at his apartment, like his own personal poltergeist to haunt him with the memory of what he’d done. No, this was the fourth time, and every time he was as surprised as the first. He underestimated her persistence and spontaneity. He underestimated a lot of things.

She listened to him expound upon the finer points of composition in his soft voice and absently rubbed the itchy barbed-wire tattoo she’d had for three weeks now around her left arm. As a Ph.D. student he was expected to teach, and had been doing so for several years. She came to see him once, when they first began dating. His students clearly loved him. She loved him so much it hurt.

His pupils filed out slowly, followed at last by their teacher, head characteristically down and arms full of books. He played the part of the harried professor well, down to the wire-frame glasses and the tousled dark hair shining with strands of silver. He looked so sweet, so kind, but always with an air of gloominess, if not mordancy, about him despite his quick laugh and bright smile. “Academic disdain,” as he referred to it. But she knew it to be the pain of his past, a pain she tried to assuage and could not, though he hadn’t given her nearly enough time to try.

He had taken it out on the wrong person this time.

“Hey,” she said. He glanced up, caught sight of her, and his small brown eyes grew to twice their normal size.

“You scared the crap out of me! Again.”

“I seem to be good at that. At least I’m good at something. I just came to…see how you were doing.”

“Come here,” he said, beckoning her with one finger to walk with him through Baker Hall. He made small talk about the weather, which he always did while adjusting to her surprise visits, as they crossed campus to the Student Center where his office was located. He dropped off his books and locked both doors. The clutter on his barely visible desktop was much the same as that within his apartment.

“Why don’t you want me anymore?”

“I do want you,” he said quietly. “More than I’ve ever wanted anything in this world. But I can’t make you happy. You have to let me go.”

“How do you expect me to when in the same breath that you break up with me you tell me how much you adore me and how much you like being with me?”

He glanced away, silent, for a moment. “That’s why I avoided you, so you would be able to move on.”

“No. If you thought for one minute that you were right, you would’ve been able to explain your reasoning, to my face, a long time ago.”

“I’m too old for you.”

She pressed her hands to her temples, holding in check the emotions that in the last two weeks had run the gamut from suicidal depression to blind rage. “We are not having this conversation again. Twelve years is nothing. Nothing! Life is too short to worry about something so petty! Why can’t you accept that I want you?”

“Baby, I don’t want to talk about this right now–”

“But we’re going to, because every time we’ve planned a talk you’ve blown me off. I know you don’t want to talk about it, to anyone. Your friends have told me. And they’ve told me that you’re feeling something you’re not used to feeling. What is it?”

He gazed at her with wet, glassy eyes, as if everything he’d said in the last two weeks to convince her of his unworthiness had simply gone out of him. Not so long ago she was often capable of reducing him to that same mindless stare, captivating him with a beauty she never believed she possessed.

“That it hurts too much, because…I love you. I’m sorry I never said it like I promised. I love you. And that’s why I had to let you go. I’m not good enough for you.”

She swallowed the last tears for him that he would ever see in her eyes. “Yes you are. And I love you too.”

“You’re so pretty,” he whispered, running his hands up and down her bare arms. She grasped the front of his peacoat.

“There’s so much I haven’t done for you. Or to you…” She cupped his stubbled face in her hands and pressed her lips to his. Keeping his tongue out of her mouth was something he could never do; he gave in quickly, and soon enough his hands found her ass somewhere beneath her baggy black cargo pants as his steely erection pressed through his trousers against her belly. He moved down to her neck, and her pussy began to tingle the way it had the first time their tongues ever touched. But her hunger for him had reached entirely new proportions.

“Do you want to give this up?” she murmured in his ear.

“No. I never want to let you go.”

“Then don’t.”

As they kissed again his hands slid up the sides of her shiny black tank top and over to the small but very perky breasts he loved so much. He kneaded them with desperate abandon, neither lover concerned that a colleague might walk in on them, though his office was anything but private. He was, just for this moment, living in the present. Just for this moment he belonged completely to her.

She dropped to her knees and unfastened his chinos, tugged them and his boxers away from his flushed cock and flicked her tongue over the glistening bead at its head.

“You feel so good,” he moaned. She inched her circled lips down the shaft, then pulled them back, pressing her tongue against him, scraping the edges of her teeth along the sensitive skin. He fondled the spikes of her hair as his hips urged his cock deeper into her, and she obligingly sucked all the harder, burying her face in the thick black bush of hair at his groin. She wanted to taste everything he had never shared with her, the darkest parts of his psyche, the pain, all of it, take it all into her and kill it once and for all.

When he realized that his blood was flowing past her lips his eyes bulged again, but she sucked so fiercely that any scream he might have formed–and he did try, though only a pathetic, strangled screech escaped–was ripped from his lungs long before its birth. She fastened her arms around his waist. Sour bile filled her mouth, but there was always more of his coppery, slightly saline blood to wash it away, pints and pints of it spilling into her and down her chin, down her shirt. Then cum at last, the cum she had never tasted until now, spiced like curry from the Indian food he adored, musky as it washed down her throat. He never even gave her the chance to give him a proper blowjob.

She believed she might even suck the thoughts from his brain, keep his memories of their time together locked away with her own, wedded in her heart the way he had often spoken of a day when they would be married. She sucked as skin began to flake, bones to snap, and eyes to cave into their sockets, remembering how she loved him as she had rarely loved anything.

When she could no longer draw another drop of fluid she spat out the cold, shriveled meat. He was pale; the tender flesh under his eyes had purpled, and his cheeks sank in. His body was little more than a paper sack crumpling forward onto her. Empty, the way he’d left her until now, brittle like the carcass of a dead fly on a windowsill.

“Now you’re mine forever,” she whispered, and patted her belly. She pushed him backward onto the floor before blotting away the blood around his lips and licking it from her fingers. Then she dragged him up into his chair and leaned him over his desk so he appeared to be sleeping, carefully folding his arms beneath his head. He’d never gotten enough sleep.

As quickly as their love had begun and ended, she pulled her jacket on, zipped up to cover the blood stains, and slipped out of the office, just as footsteps with their accompanying voices echoed in the hall behind her.

Copyright 2000 by Jennifer Loring. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced without written permission from the author.