Please Harder, Professor

Chapter 50

Sophie’s POV

I stare at Adrian, watching the shadows play across his face as he finishes recounting that night with Vaughn. The pieces click into place with sickening clarity, each detail fitting together like parts of a horrifying puzzle I never wanted to solve.

Vaughn hadn't been Adrian's victim—she'd been his tormentor, manipulating the narrative to paint herself as the injured party while orchestrating his destruction from a hospital bed.

"She played me," I whisper, anger building in my chest like a slow-burning fire. "All those conversations about protecting students, about your supposed 'pattern' of abuse... She was projecting her own obsession onto me."

The realization makes my skin crawl. All those careful warnings, those pointed questions about whether Adrian was respecting my boundaries, the way she'd positioned herself as my protector—it had all been calculated manipulation designed to turn me against him.

"She's a master at selective storytelling," Adrian says quietly, his voice carrying the weight of someone who's learned that lesson the hard way. "Lisette could convince anyone that black was white if it served her purposes."

"How many people believed her story?" I ask, though I'm not sure I want to know the answer.

"Enough," he says simply. "Enough that staying became impossible."

The mention of projection makes me think of another woman, another layer of deception I'm only beginning to understand. "Is that what Lolita did too? Was she—"

"She was the first woman who fucked me," Adrian cuts me off, his voice flat and emotionless in a way that tells me the subject is closed. "Taught me everything I know. End of story."

The brutally clinical way he describes what was clearly his first love tells me more about their relationship than any detailed explanation could.

There's no nostalgia in his tone, no warmth—just the kind of detached summary you'd give about a particularly effective but ultimately damaging educational experience.

We walk in tense silence for several blocks, both lost in our own thoughts. The afternoon light is beginning to fade, casting long shadows across the sidewalk as we navigate around other pedestrians and street vendors setting up their displays.

"Peaches, three dollars a basket!" a vendor calls from across the street, his voice carrying over the traffic noise. "Fresh Georgia peaches!"

"Peaches," I murmur absently, the word slipping out without conscious thought.

I feel Adrian go rigid beside me, his entire body tensing like he's been struck. The word hangs in the air between us, loaded with meaning and memory.

Our safe word. The word that should stop everything, that carries the weight of trust and boundaries and the promise that when I say it, he'll listen.

The charged silence stretches until I realize what I've done, how the innocent repetition of a vendor's call has created this moment of electric tension.

"It's just a word," I say softly, glancing at his profile. "No hidden meaning behind it. I was just... the vendor, you know?"

Adrian nods stiffly, but I can see the way his jaw is clenched, the careful control he's exerting to keep walking normally.

The fact that a single word can affect him so profoundly tells me something important about how seriously he takes the boundaries we've established.

"You stopped," I say suddenly, not looking at him, the words coming out barely above a whisper. "That day at the bookstore, when I said it, you actually stopped."

The memory hits me with unexpected force. I'd been overwhelmed, pushed to a breaking point I didn't know I had, and when I'd whispered our safe word, Adrian had immediately backed off.

No questions, no negotiations, no attempts to push through what he wanted—just immediate, complete cessation of whatever we'd been doing.

"Of course I stopped." His voice carries an edge I recognize—controlled intensity masked as indifference. "No matter how you see me, Sophie, I have principles I follow. I don't overstep other people's boundaries."

The words are meant to sound clinical, professional, but I hear something else underneath them. Pride, maybe. Or hurt that I'd ever doubted he would respect my limits when it mattered most.

"I know," I say quietly. "I'm sorry I ever suggested otherwise."

The apology seems to catch him off guard. He glances at me sideways, like he's not sure he heard me correctly.

"It's just," I continue, struggling to find the right words, "Vaughn made me doubt everything. Every interaction we'd had, every moment of trust—she made it all seem calculated and predatory."

"Maybe it was," Adrian says, his voice carefully neutral. "Maybe she wasn't entirely wrong about my motivations."

The self-doubt in his tone makes my chest tighten. "No," I say firmly. "Don't let her poison what we had. Whatever your initial motivations were, you never crossed lines I didn't want you to cross."

We're approaching a small park, and on impulse, I reach for his hand, interlacing our fingers before he can pull away.

"Try something with me," I say, surprised by my own boldness. "Just for today."

"What?" His voice is wary, like he's expecting some kind of test or trap.

"Walk with me. Like normal people do."

Adrian stares at our joined hands with something between fascination and distrust, like he's trying to decode what this gesture means, what I'm really asking for. His fingers are longer than mine, rougher, and they feel warm and solid against my palm.

After a moment, his grip tightens slightly, not possessive or controlling but... accepting. Like he's willing to try this strange experiment in normalcy.

We walk several blocks like this, his hold awkward but deliberate. I can tell he's hyper-aware of every point of contact, every shift in pressure, like he's trying to catalog the experience for future analysis.

"This is weird for you," I observe, not making it a question.

"Everything about this is weird for me," he admits, but he doesn't let go. "Holding hands isn't exactly... it's not part of my usual repertoire."

"Not that bad, though, huh?" I ask, swinging our joined hands slightly as we walk.

"Different," he admits grudgingly, and there's something almost vulnerable in the admission. "Not necessarily bad. Just... different."

Maybe we can find a middle ground between the intense power dynamics that defined us before and whatever this new thing between us might become.

"Thank you," I say quietly. "For telling me the truth about Vaughn. For trusting me with it."

"You deserved to know," he says simply. "You deserved to know who you were really protecting yourself from."

We walk in comfortable silence after that, our hands linked like teenagers experiencing their first relationship.

It's innocent and intimate in a way that feels more dangerous than anything we've done in private, because this feels real in a way our other interactions haven't.

This feels like a possibility.