Created By

irwinwe

Rate this Story

Embed

Professor Kane was not given to direct actions.  He approached things with conviction only after having thought them over with great detail.  But even after his convictions came to him, he usually maintained a certain level of elusive distance that was interpreted by most as cynical aloofness, or if he was really distant, as apathy.  If he was cynical and aloof, it meant he was guarding his heart from you.  If he was apathetic, he sensed his heart was in no great danger of being hurt by you.  His actions this night had been inspired by conviction, but he still kissed with that elusiveness.  It was not the cynical elusiveness or the apathetic elusiveness, but a new one based on a duel of raw passion and moral conscience.  In moments when his passion for me overwhelmed him, his heart took over his mind and I felt him completely free-falling with me.  But the branch was always in sight, because at the select intervals when he would realize how "forbidden" we were, his mind would tip the scales, and I could feel his heart shift away from the stability of his conviction.  Because my personality was by nature indecisive and balance-seeking, I could sense what side of the paradox his seesaw favored at any given point.  And because he felt my understanding of his changeable tendencies, he consequently gave more of himself to me than he had to anyone.  It was a rare gift between us, as if we could speak without words, by sifting souls.  Thus, it was a powerful, evil dance we played.  It was wrong, but it was so right.  It killed us one second, but it set us free when we bombarded the impounding frontiers.  We feared it, but our desire often wildly overcame that fear.  When our mystified minds caught up with our ardent souls, the fear would always return.  This fear had another name, however.  It had many intangible names.  Hope.  Desire.  Epiphany.  And something else.  Something more than these other names, and the most frightening thing to admit for either of us.  That conviction, however, was not ready to become verbally manifest.  

The pressure of his hand was firm and warm on the small of my back, and it molded me closely against the hardness of his torso.  His fingertips spoke fire as they traveled from my face to my neck, and his mouth plundered mine wildly and softly and wildly again.  His large hands were all-encompassing, and I felt wonderfully and willingly small because of it, helpless to all but the breathtaking power of being claimed by him.  Delirium sang to me, and I sank deeper and deeper into something I had never felt before.  His fingertips traveled from my neck to my chest, leaving fire in their wake, and my chalcedony stone was not loud enough to be heard.  There was no pause.  His hand settled over my breast, and then he grasped me hungrily, in the same moment that he deepened the kiss.  

My eyelids fluttered open.  "Dr. MacAllister" i gasped against his mouth, chalcedony glittering just once through my passion delirium, warning me of my impure desires.

"Doona call me tha'," he returned fervently against mine, "I amna' your teacher so much as I am your equal.  Call me by my name."

"Kane" I whispered again against his lips, suddenly catapulted back into the passion delirium completely, oblivious to everything else.

"Yes" he gasped back against mine, and his mouth resumed its sweet assault on my persona.  

My body responded to his ardent aura and I ran my trembling fingers down his chest until I came to the place where his shirt was still buttoned.  In a moment of animalistic craving I tore it apart and pushed his shirt off of his shoulders and down his arms.  His arms only left my body for a moment, but his lips did not leave mine at all, plundering them in animalistic rejoinder.  I ran my hand up his hard abdomen, my fingertips lightly grazing his nipples right before I grasped the hair on his chest and pulled it as encouragement for him to plunder my harder.  And he did.  With a gasping growl his arm around my back pulled me against hiim so that my head tilted back, and his other hand was inside my shirt, grasping.  His hot tongue tattooed my neck, and then my collarbone, until my legs were more like cooked spaghetti noodles than flesh and bone.

We fell deeper and deeper into a haze of seduction, so deep that if he had been a man of any other character, he would not have stoped us before we committed the biggest act of all.  Not only did he have a soul, which despite its shattered state was more pure than most, but he also was entering another one of his moments of moral conscience, and thus he was able to miraculously save us from our thoughtless passion in his forced respite.   

Without warning, he groaned, and then suddenly he removed his arms from my body and placed his palms flat against the door.  His head was the only thing touching me now, and it was resting on my shoulder.  He brought his eyes up to meet mine, and with a pained look and a rasping voice, he acknowledged his return to reality, the return of his moral conscience, and the jaded way of his conviction.  His fear had returned. 

"Go" he said reluctantly, but cogently, "ye must."

 "I can't" i protested, my hand sliding up his chest.  He stopped its travels as he trapped it against him.

"Ye must go, Ellen, before I canna stop myself and I do something we'll both regret tomorrow."

I pulled him closer to me, and we looked at each other intensely.  It was noble that he had stopped us, but I hadn't wanted him to stop us because he thought he might regret it.  "Would you really regret this?" I voiced my thoughts. 

He looked down and exhaled painfully, anxiously, "I doona know."

"Do you regret what has happened until now?" I asked him, determined he wouldn't grow cold on me as I feared was very possible since he'd already made himself so vulnerable tonight.  He wasn't the tpe that gave up his heart completely in one place and time.  His was given up in intervals.  Perhaps he'd had all the vulnerability he could stand tonight. 

He looked away, avoiding my question.

"Answer me" I said beseechingly.

"Go" he whispered again, coming closer to my lips despite his efforts not to.  "Please, Ellen."   

And then, when our lips nearly touched, I watched his eyes loose any notion of coldness they had tried to adopt.  They ignited, but then he closed them,  denying them what they still wanted.  His jaw muscle worked furiously.  

It is time now, I told myself.  His eyes had been passion-filled, and if I turned around and left now, that is how I would remember them.  I brought my arms down from his neck, and slowly turned so that my back was facing him.  His body heat got closer as i felt him lean into me, and I reluctantly, and shakily, reached for the door handle.  I felt the heat of his hand as he fleetingly, half-heartedly, tried to pull me back against him, awareness of what he should do nearly overpowering what he desperately wanted to do.  I didn't have to lean back much further to feel the evidence of his need for me.  I understood then why he had been so desperate, and desperate to let him be relieved, I grabbed the door handle and tried to open the door.  It opened, but then his hands slammed it shut from behind me as he leaned forward harder into my body.  

"Kane?" I asked him, breathless, hoping he would change his mind about making me go.  

"I'm sorry" he whispered back against my neck, his body hard now against my back as he trapped me against the door.  The hairs up and down my spine pricked.  "My own body is treacherous to my mind.  It canna seem to resist you, though my mind knows it should."  His breath was pained and labored against my skin.  

I reached up to his palms that were splayed upon the wooden door, and I touched them with my own hands, interweaving our fingers, coaxing them off the door and around my waist.  We stood embracing like that for moment that were not nearly long enough.  My head leaned back against his broad chest, and his head was bent so that it rested against my hair.  When I heard him smell it, I arched my neck, and was silently heartbroken at his pure longing.  

"And I fear" I heard him whisper, more to himself than to me, "tha' I willna ever regret touching you, and I willna ever forget you.  Not tonight, not tomorrow, not in weeks or months.  God help me, I will taste you on my mouth even as I lay dying.  I just had to let ye know."

I was rendered speechless by the raw openness of his heart, and the power of his simple words.

"Now, go" he said harshly as he quickly pushed himself away from me.

I blinked as I felt the cold air hit my back where his warmth had been, and my jaw dropped as low as my brows rose high. 

"How could you say something like that and then tell me to leave?"  I turned to face him, catching him as he shoved his fingers into his hair with frustration.  "It's as if you are telling my goodbye or something.  What, did you have a sudden attack of conscience?  I thought we'd decided we weren't going to care what the university thought!  Am I nothing but a one-night scandal to you now?  You're being just as cold as you ever were!"

His persona was deathly still except for his breathing, as if he couldn't trust himself to move.  I could feel him growing colder, like he was trying to close me off.  This isn't how I wanted it.  I was not an undersized, unworthy fish to be reeled in and thrown back with an insensitive splash, or a book to be read and then sold again.

"This is not goodbye, Kane MacAllister.  Or would you rather me call you Professor again?  Hmm?  You can't just shut me out like that.  Not after all you said" I said as my voice caught.  I was trying desperately to hold back my inane, but genuine, tears, but little good it was doing me.  "That's not how it works" I finished on a frail breath, my eyes blurring.

He moved then, but it was not towards me.  He took another step back, his eyes closed and his head lowered, jaw muscles twitching furiously.  I reached out desperately to touch him, but when his eyes opened, I was stopped dead in my tracks.  Unworthy fish, I was.  Replacing the fire was an ice, and though his heart had been so visible in their depths just the moment before, it was not gone, as if it had never been there to start with.  Barely able to hold back my cry of disappointment, I turned again and opene the door, successfully this time, and left him with empty arms.  I waited until the door slammed, and then I leaned back against it, breathing hard.  How could he? I was asking myself as a tear ran down my face.  How could he be so on fire for me one minute, professing his undying passion for me, and a promise for our possible future together, and then in the next be so cold, denying with his eyes that he'd ever said anything?  

Suddenly I heard him groan from the other side, and the closed door shifted with his weight as he leaned against it.   For a moment I was immobilized, as if I could feel his presence still before me, sifting beyond the door.  And then I closed my eyes at the sound, understanding.  He still wanted me.  It was not his heart that had told me to go, hardened through all that passion.  It was his mind, the guard of the stone wall around his heart.  He had adopted a counterfeit coldness, hard as it was for him to do, because it was the only way that he could trust himself to let me go.  But why had he let me go?  Had his decision still been based upon University standards?  Was he a religious man, and perhaps he felt as if he hadn't been respecting me by submitting to lust, which very different from love?  My fingers subconsciously dug into the door until their tips were numb, and I fought to hold in my surmounting emotions.  I couldn't, so I ran.  

I ran down the hallway, into my apartment, and all the way to my room.  I stood there in the dark, mind reeling, chest heaving, lower abdomen still doing flip-flops.  Then my eyes settled on my bed, and my imagination suddenly sparked to life.  I began stripping off my clothes frantically, which were misted lightly with passion exertion and thus sticking obnoxiously to my body.  I tore at them.  Once naked, I walked pointedly to my bed.  He was not the only one who would have to relieve himself behind closed doors this night.  Half-shamefully, half-madly, I lowered my hand to somewhere unseen above the covers.  If it could not be real, then I would dream it.  And when dream it I did, it did not take long.  It also did not take me long, afterwards, to realize that I needed to attend church as soon as possible.  

I looked at my hand to seek guidance of my chalcedony stone.  But I soon noticed, it was no longer there.  The ring had disappeared.