Professor Dream… that was what the students called him between themselves because he was never quite there.
At random points during lectures, his eyes would glaze, and he would just go silent, as if he’d just remembered something so significant that nothing else mattered. He would go somewhere outside of the classroom… a place which would consume him for those moments, for those few seconds. During these episodes, the room would hold its breath, waiting for him to come back. He always did, but not before exposing two hundred students to absolute silence as they watched him, wondering.
No one knew where he went. No one asked.
Dorian Voss was forty-one. He was built like a man who’d been drawn with intention. With a full head of long and dark hair, he had the kind of face that made you look twice and then feel slightly embarrassed about it. He taught Biology at Hartwell University, and he was brilliant. He was published, but above all, respected. He was the kind of academic others referenced with a quiet envy they’d never admit to.
But that wasn’t why the lecture hall filled every Tuesday and Thursday.
It filled because of him. Because of his low, unhurried voice full of certainty when he talked about the body. He talked about desire, response, and the machinery of want. Those who entered his lecture left with a feeling that
was impossible to shake. It was the feeling that he wasn’t just describing biology. He was describing something he knew personally and intimately.
The truth was simple and not flattering. Dorian had been running on three years of unresolved and bone-deep sexual frustration, and he was running out of ways to manage it. A research study in Geneva was the cause. His research partner, a young, brilliant female professor, had left a gap in him which was shaped like everything he’d wanted but never quite had.
Since then, he’d existed at a permanent, simmering heat with nowhere to go. He threw himself into his work… a particular study he’d been developing for two years before Geneva… a controlled examination of response under sustained denial. The subject would be exposed to stimuli designed to make them feel relaxed, and they would be held in that state. The subject would be monitored to measure their response, and just as the relaxed state would be developing, the stimuli would be removed. The cycle would be repeated six times to assess how much the denial affected the subject.
The researcher in Sweden had pushed Dorian to enhance his study and offered herself up as a subject. She requested that Dorian change his stimuli to see what would arouse her… sexually. She wanted to see how strongly the denial would affect her over the six cycles. Dorian’s inquisitive nature made it impossible for him to say no. What Dorian witnessed during those sessions left him addicted. Addicted to the way a woman’s body reacts to certain touches. Just as Dorian was getting to that fine line of professionalism and animalistic need, she left the research program. No warning, no goodbye… just a gap needing to be filled.
Since then, Dorian had been researching obsessively on how to perfect the art of sexual arousal and denial by touch. Partly because he felt his work could help so many different medical and psychological fields of interest, but more necessary was his need to perfect his techniques. But since Geneva, he had not found a subject to test his developed techniques. He had not found a way to see the fruits of his labor on the face of a woman. The irony of a man who couldn’t find his own resolution designing a study around denial was not lost on him.
He continued conducting study sessions in his private lab on the third floor. Small room, no windows, a single purpose-built chair at the centre. He’d run six sessions. All documented and all clean, because these sessions were still based on the original research around relaxation… completely insufficient for what was building in him.
When Iris Calloway walked into his lecture hall one morning, Dorian couldn’t ignore her. She sat in the middle of the third row, which perfectly aligned her eyes with his. Within twenty minutes of the lecture, she was staring… no… gazing at him, as she’d already made a decision.
She was twenty-three. Her red hair, which cascaded down in an untamed manner, demonstrated her lack of care for what people might think of her. Eyes that held their gaze a beat longer than was comfortable, the kind of look you couldn’t pull away from. She’d transferred from Edinburgh as a top-performing student, having topped her cohort. She had already read his research… not the summaries but the actual papers. He knew because she’d called through to his office a couple of days after starting term. Iris quietly identified a contradiction between two of his studies, and he’d spent the next ten minutes imagining what she might look like. Dorian had a thing for intelligent young women, and Iris had proven herself to be one. She asked to join his Friday seminar. He said yes.
Now that she was there in the flesh, Dorian noticed how mysteriously attractive she was also. Intelligence and a sexual aura make a woman incredibly desirable.
At the end of the second seminar, she asked if she could be a subject in his study.
He said yes to that too. He shouldn’t have said yes to that.
He set the ground rules the morning before her first session. Alone in his office, he’d rescheduled two meetings with an efficiency he refused to examine. She sat across from him, and he stood, because sitting felt like a concession.
“The session lasts ninety minutes,” he said. “You’ll be monitored throughout. The protocol involves stimuli designed to elevate the relaxation state. My job is to manage the escalation and prevent complete resolution.”
She looked at him. “Prevent complete resolution,” she repeated.
“Yes,” Dorian replied.
“Meaning you bring me close to what, exactly?”
“To a state of total relaxation, repeatedly,” he said. “That is the study.”
Something moved through her expression. Not nerves.
“And what if I want you to go further… further than just relaxation?”
“Ermmm, I don’t understand what you mean, Iris,” and Dorian turned away, with his back to her. His hands were clenched in tight fists, and he clenched his jaw.
Iris continued, seemingly ignoring what Dorian had said.
“And you’ll be in the room the whole time?”
“I conduct the sessions personally,” he said as he turned around to face Iris. “It requires continuous monitoring and direct management of stimuli.”
This was true. It was also an extremely convenient truth.
“Okay,” she said.
“You understand what you’re consenting to?”
She held his gaze. “Are you asking me or warning me?”
He didn’t answer.
On the day of the study, Iris sent Dorian an email. A short, concise email that had an impact which was anything but short and concise.
Finish off what you started in Sweden. I want to feel what she felt.
Dorian read and reread the email. How many times, he couldn’t remember, but it was enough to sear the words across his mind. Dorian panicked at first. How could she know about Sweden? It was impossible because he had never told anyone about it. What did she know? How much did she know?
I want to feel what SHE felt…
How did she know of her?
He sent back an email demanding an explanation. He denied knowing what she was referring. However, when Dorian reread his email after sending it in a rush, his urgent demands for an explanation clearly left his denial in some doubt. She didn’t reply. He didn’t have any lectures in which she would be present during the day. The wait for a reply left him unable to focus on anything. He canceled his afternoon lectures.
Sometime in the afternoon, his panic and worry eroded away. He accepted the reality that Iris somehow knew. That acceptance was like a mental switch. Somewhere deep inside, Dorian accepted the possibility of how the day might end. He went to work, changing the setup he had in his lab. As he changed the settings on the monitoring equipment and replaced some of the stimuli he was going to use, he had sudden vivid images flashing across his mind. Images of how that session in Sweden should have ended.
The lab was quiet when she arrived at seven pm.
He’d chosen the evening deliberately… building empty, no one wandering past. He had told himself it was about protecting the integrity of the subject’s experience. But now, he realised that fate may have dictated his choice.
She came in wearing a loose shirt, dark jeans, hair down for once. He felt the shift in the room the moment she walked in. The air contracting, every nerve in him tuning to a single frequency.
“I think you owe me an explanation. I have been waiting for you to reply to my email all day,” he said with an immense level of restraint.
“The woman you met in Geneva was my older sister,” and Dorian felt his heart skip a beat. “She never told you, but when you met her, she didn’t have a lot of time left. She was dying. She had a rare form of cancer.” Dorian recalled the sudden manner of her disappearance. “After she died, I came across her diary, and I have been wanting to meet you ever since.”
“I am sorry, Iris,” was all Dorian could muster as a response.
“She described her time with you in such detail, with such clarity that I felt like I lived through those moments myself. She wanted so much more from you, but she knew she couldn’t with her grim future, so she pulled away before she got too deep,” and Iris looked at the room with the set-up and chair. She looked back at Dorian. “I want you to do to me what you did to her,” and she put her handbag down on the side table.
Dorian weighed up the situation. Dorian went through a mental checklist of whether this was the right thing to do. But he had already made up his mind, so the mental evaluation was moot. He wanted this for his own selfish reasons.
“Sit down,” and he pointed to the chair.
She settled into the chair. He attached the wireless sensors with clinical efficiency he used as armor… two fingers against the inside of her wrist to position the heart rate monitor, and even that small contact sent heat up his arm that he filed away and refused to act on.
Her baseline came up on the screen. Heart rate 68, steady. Respiration even. Remarkable considering what she had just told him. Her ability to remain calm during the last few minutes was a reflection of her single-minded intent.
“First stimulus is audio,” he said. “Close your eyes.”
She did.
He cued the track, the one he had perfected for a study of this kind. It was a voice, low and unhurried, describing touch in plain and specific language. Not theatrical. Just honest. Relentless. But the focus of the words in this version were different. The voice proceeded to describe what the touch of a pair of hands could do, and a mouth, and what the weight of that touch felt like on a body wanting to be touched.
Her breathing changed within ninety seconds.
Her lips parted.
Heart rate climbed to 84.
He watched the numbers and watched her and kept his face exactly where it needed to be.
By the end of the first cycle, her heart rate was at 97, and he could see the flush spreading up from her throat. Her thighs had pressed together. Her hands lay open on the armrests in the deliberate way of someone choosing not to grip them.
“Second phase,” he said. “Tactile.”
Her eyes opened.
“Direct contact,” he said before she could ask. “Limited. The purpose is to escalate the physical response before the next denial interval.”
A beat of silence.
“Okay,” she said.
He came around beside her and rested two fingers on the inside of her forearm. He drew them slowly from her wrist to the crook of her elbow, feeling the fine hairs rise under his touch. He heard her almost-suppressed inhale.
He did it again. Slower.
Her heart rate hit 108.
“Look straight ahead,” he said quietly.
She obeyed. He moved behind the chair and settled his fingers against the side of her neck. He felt her warm skin, her pulse quick beneath his fingertips, and drew them slowly upward to her jaw.
“Still okay?” His mouth was close to her ear.
“Yes,” she breathed.
He held the contact a moment longer than required. His thumb was at the curve of her jaw, and he felt her pulse hammering.
Then he stepped back.
“Denial interval. Three minutes. Don’t move,” and he watched her.
She exhaled. Her hands found the armrests.
The three minutes were the longest he could remember. They ran four cycles… lasting what felt like an eternity.
By the third, she was flushed from her throat to her cheekbones, breathing in shallow pulls with her lower lip caught between her teeth. By the fourth, when he came to stand behind her again and she felt him near, she shivered… a full-body thing she didn’t try to hide. Something in him cracked along an old fault line. He had a sudden flashback from Sweden. An anticipation started building in him, but he didn’t want to believe this time would be different.
He put his hands on her shoulders, and he felt her lean back toward him, barely perceptibly.
“Don’t,” he said, trying to maintain a level of control when every fiber in his body wanted anything but.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re leaning,” stated Dorian.
“My mistake,” she said. And didn’t move back.
He stood there with his hands on her shoulders and her warmth beneath his palms. The last half an hour had taken him back to Sweden again and again. Memories of those sessions and how he would leave feeling an ache. He had anticipated he would feel those memories rushing back, but they felt new. Different.
Then she tipped her head back against him, throat exposed, and said – barely above a whisper: “Dorian.”
Not Dr. Voss.
Dorian.
Her voice brought him back to the present. A present that was unknown as he now didn’t have a playbook in his mind for what to do. So he let himself go. He moved around the chair as he felt the chains fall away. She was already turning toward him, and then his hands were in her hair, and his mouth was on hers, and she made a sound against him. The heat and relief from weeks, months, and years of tension broke. She kissed him back with a directness that took out everything that remained of his composure.
He pulled back once. Just once.
“This is not…”
“I know what it isn’t,” she whispered. “Do it anyway.”
He kissed her again. Harder. One hand gripping her hair, the other sliding down her side, and she came up out of the chair and pressed herself against him, and he felt all of her. Her warmth, her wanting, the soft catch of her breath against his jaw, and there was nothing professional left in him.
He walked her backward to the exam table against the wall and sat her on the edge of it.
Stepping back, he looked at her in the low light. Her skin was flushed, her breathing hard, her hair loose, her eyes dark and absolutely certain. The view created a want so specific and so acute it was almost indistinguishable from pain.
“Take the shirt off,” he said. His voice had gone low and quiet and entirely stripped of pretense.
She pulled it over her head.
He looked at her for a long moment without moving, without touching, and she held still under it, and he could see the effort that cost her. Her chest rising and falling, hands gripping the edge of the table. His eyes drinking her sexiness in gulps.
“Dorian?”
“Wait,” he said.
She waited.
He reached out slowly and unclasped her bra and let it fall, and then stood there again just looking at her with an unhurried attention that made her breath go ragged, and she said his name again, lower this time, somewhere between a question and a plea.
“I know,” he said. “I know, but these are my rules.”
He cupped her breasts in both hands with a slow and deliberate movement. His thumbs grazed her nipples. She arched into it immediately, hips tilting forward off the table toward him, and he stepped back out of reach.
“Not yet,” he said.
“Christ,” she breathed.
“Lie back,” he said.
She did, and he reached for her jeans, undid them with the same deliberate, unhurried efficiency he’d used on the sensor equipment earlier and pulled them off along with everything underneath. She was now bare on the table and looking up at him with her chest heaving and her thighs pressed together with an expression that made his cock so hard it was difficult to think straight.
He didn’t let that show.
He placed his hands on her knees and parted them slowly but firmly, overriding the instinct that pressed them together. She let him, and made a sound low in her throat, and he looked at her again. The manner in which he looked at her now caused her to whimper.
“Dorian, please!”
He lowered his head.
He started nowhere near where she needed him.
The inside of her right thigh. Slow, open-mouthed kisses dragged upward at a pace that was genuinely, deliberately cruel. She reached for his hair immediately, and he caught both her wrists and pressed them firmly to the table on either side of her hips.
“Keep them there,” he said against her skin. “Move them, and I stop.”
She made a strangled sound. “Then move,” she gritted out.
He didn’t move faster. He moved more slowly, switching to the left thigh but giving the same treatment. His lips and the flat of his tongue worked upward with a patience that had nothing kind in it. He stopped just short every time her hips tried to angle herself toward him, and pulled back the moment she got close to what she wanted.
“You’re doing this on purpose,” she said breathlessly.
“Yes,” he said.
She made a sound that was half-laugh, half-desperation. “You absolute f…”
Then he moved to her at last, but not where she wanted him. Not yet.
He pressed his lips to her outer lips first, the full soft warmth of them, and just held his mouth there. No movement, no pressure, nothing… and she trembled and bit down on whatever she’d been about to say.
Then he began.
Slow, closed-mouth kisses along the length of her outer lips, left side then right, working with a methodical, unhurried focus as if he had all night. He felt her swell beneath his lips, felt the heat radiating off her, felt the slick warmth he hadn’t yet touched and was not yet going to touch.
She was shaking already.
He moved inward.
His tongue started tracing slow circles just inside the outer lips, unhurried and deliberate. The circles tightened gradually, working inward by degrees that were almost imperceptible, with each pass drawing slightly closer to her inner lips without quite reaching them. She made a sound above him that was genuinely pained, hips rocking, chasing the contact he kept fractionally, maddeningly withdrawing.
“Dorian…”
He didn’t answer. He kept circling. Tighter. Slower. Letting her feel every inch of progress and every inch withheld.
When he finally ran his tongue between her inner lips, she cried out a sharp cry, and he felt her clench around nothing. Iris felt her whole body jolt, and Dorian pressed his forearm firmly across her hips to hold her still. He kept moving, parting her gently, learning her with his tongue, taking his time with her in a way that was thorough and explicit and completely without mercy.
Then he found her clit.
He approached it the same way he’d approached everything else. Circling the hood first, not touching it directly, just letting her feel how close he was, how deliberate, how entirely in control of whether and when she got what she was desperate for. She was making sounds now that she had completely stopped moderating. These sounds were urgent, broken, barely-voiced sounds that came out of her with every breath.
When he finally closed his lips around her clit she nearly came off the table.
He drew back immediately.
“No, no, please, don’t you dare!”
He pressed a single soft kiss to her inner thigh. Let her pulse slow by three beats. Just three. Then he went back.
He circled her clit with his tongue. Slow at first, a wide, unhurried rotation that had her fists clenching uselessly against the table. The circles became tighter, faster, and then deliberately slowed again just as she started climbing. Dorian was reading every hitch in her breathing, every clench of her thighs around his shoulders, with the precise attention of a man who knew exactly what he was doing and was using that knowledge against her.
He brought her right to the edge, feeling it in the tension screaming through her thighs and in the way her breathing stopped altogether for two seconds. Dorian pulled back.
She sobbed. Actually sobbed, a fractured, desperate sound that bounced off the lab walls.
“Please. Please, Dorian, I’ll… I can’t…”
He lifted his head and looked at her.
She was wrecked. Completely undone. Thighs shaking, chest heaving, tears of pure frustrated need at the corners of her eyes, hands white-knuckled against the table. More beautiful than anything he’d ever seen, and he had done this to her, and some dark and honest part of him was savagely satisfied by it.
He went back down.
This time he didn’t tease. He sealed his mouth over her and worked her with his tongue. The movement was now firm, rhythmic, exactly what she needed, not a single thing withheld, and she came within thirty seconds. The orgasm was long, shuddering, helpless. Her thighs locked around his head, and his name poured out of her throat like it had been pulled from somewhere she didn’t usually let anyone reach.
He held her through every second of it.
Then he raised his head and looked at her again, still shaking, still breathing in broken pulls, and she looked back at him with dark, ruined eyes.
And reached for him.
“Dorian.” Her voice cracked on it. “I swear to God. Please, I’ll do anything, just… finish me.”
He raised his head and looked at her. She was wrecked, desperate. Something in him gave way in a final and complete manner.
He stood up whilst she watched him with dark, blown eyes. He undid his belt, his trousers, and then he was over her. His forearms either side of her head, and he looked down at her face and said, in a low rumble… “Look at me.”
She looked.
He pushed his hard cock inside her in one slow, deliberate stroke, and her eyes went wide, her mouth fell open, and she said his name like it had been punched out of her.
He stayed still for a moment, steadying himself.
“Move,” she breathed. “Dorian, fucking move!”
He moved.
There was nothing controlled in the way he moved. Years of wound-up, carefully managed, comprehensively suppressed need coming apart at every joint. His thighs delivered deep, driving strokes that had her grabbing his shoulders and arching up to meet him, her nails in his skin. Her thighs locked around his hips, pulling him closer, harder, and he gave her what she wanted because he was past the point where he had any choice about it.
Her second orgasm hit hard and fast. Her whole body clenched around him, and a sharp, broken cry echoed off the lab walls. He fucked her through it without slowing, without mercy, because now that he’d started, he didn’t know how to stop and didn’t particularly want to.
The third one built more slowly, and she sobbed through it. She pressed her face to his neck, and he felt her shaking and pulled her hard against him as he let himself go. Finally, with a low sound that came from somewhere he didn’t know existed in him, he shot his seed through Iris’ inner landscape like a wild tsunami.
Still. Silence. They could hear and feel each other’s heart beating against each other. The lab continued humming. The monitor beeped quietly. The cool air.
She lay beneath him, both of them breathing.
Then the room came back.
He straightened. Stepped back. The clinical white walls. The monitoring chair. The biometric screen is still logging, still recording. The file still open.
The full weight of what he’d done arrived without announcement and settled across his shoulders like something that he had intended to stay.
Iris sat up slowly. She watched him come back to himself with quiet eyes and didn’t try to stop it. She pulled on her clothes without hurry and said nothing.
“Iris…”
“Don’t apologise,” she said. “It’ll ruin it.”
“This can’t…”
“I know.”
“The study…”
“Dorian.” She said it the same way she had before. He stopped. She looked at him – shirt half-buttoned, flushed, hair everywhere, composed in a way that shouldn’t have been possible. “I’m not asking you for anything. I know what this is and what it can’t be.”
He looked at her for a long moment.
“You should go,” he said.
She finished dressing. Picked up her bag. Walked to the door and paused.
She didn’t say anything this time.
Just looked back at him once with an expression… an expression that read like an ending between chapters.
He sat down heavily in the monitoring chair.
Her data still glowed on the screen. Every spike, every peak. The complete biological record of what had just happened, laid out in clean, dispassionate lines.
He stared at it.
Then he closed the file.
He didn’t save it.
