The Student Who Taught Me to Desire a Woman

My name is Elena Mora. Forty-one years old, married since I was twenty-seven, Literature teacher at the Instituto Cervantes for fourteen years. If someone had described to me in January what I was going to live through before summer, I would have thought they had the wrong woman.

I’m brunette, with long hair I almost always wear pulled back in a tight bun, and black-framed glasses for reading and for the board. I have wide hips, big breasts, the figure of someone who stopped fighting her own body a long time ago. I dress well within what a civil servant’s salary allows: pencil skirts to the knee, silk blouses, the occasional dark blazer. I like being looked at. I admit that without too much guilt.

In the classroom I’m strict. I don’t hand out easy passes in my classes, and what the syllabus asks for, the syllabus asks for. My students know it from the first day of term. Their parents know it too, the ones who have come in to complain and left with the same grades they came in with. I don’t give in. Or I didn’t give in. That distinction matters.

The June heat that year arrived early and eager. On the last Friday of term, with the records almost closed, I stayed in the office until late organizing the documents for the evaluation board the following Monday. Most of the students had already collected their things. The corridors were almost silent. I had the fan pointed at my chair and a pile of exams on the desk that never seemed to end.

Nadia arrived without warning.

***

Nadia Cortés was twenty years old and had been in my class for two years. She had repeated the first year of sixth form the previous year, for reasons I never fully found out. She wasn’t a troublesome student in the usual sense: she didn’t interrupt, she arrived on time, she didn’t cause problems. But she was intermittent. Weeks when she took careful notes and did the reading, followed by whole weeks when she seemed to be somewhere else entirely, looking out the window with that calm, slightly detached expression she had.

She was tall and thin, with dark hair cut very short, almost shaved at the sides and a little longer on top. Her features were sharp, her jaw defined, her eyes dark and direct. She moved slowly, with a confidence in herself that wasn’t swagger but something harder to describe, something that at times I found disconcerting for someone her age. That day she was wearing dark jeans and a short-sleeved white T-shirt. She didn’t have a backpack. Only her keys in her hand.

She knocked twice with her knuckles and poked her head in.

—May I come in, Miss Mora?

—Come in.

She sat in the chair opposite my desk and looked at me without beating around the bush. There was no trace of the nerves I usually saw in students coming to argue about grades.

—I saw the four. I think there’s been a mistake.

I moved aside the documents I was reviewing and took her exam out of the stack.

—There’s no mistake, Nadia. The poem analysis is incomplete. I asked for metrical structure, literary devices, and historical context. You developed the devices quite competently, that’s true, but the rest you left in two lines. And the essay question has serious cohesion problems. —I turned the sheet toward her—. You can see for yourself.

She looked at the paper for a few seconds. She wasn’t taking her eyes off the exam, but I had the impression she wasn’t reading it.

—I froze —she said at last—. I froze during the exam. I know it, but that day I froze.

—That may be. But the exam evaluates what’s on the paper, not what’s behind it.

—If I fail, my parents will pull me out of the school. I’ll start working and I won’t finish sixth form.

—If you want, I can talk to them. Explain that the problem is isolated, that you’ve improved over the rest of the year.

—That wouldn’t change anything. —A short pause—. Isn’t there anything you can do directly?

The question hung in the air. It was direct, unadorned, and we both knew what it implied. I put the exam back on the desk and looked at her.

—My grades reflect the student’s work. Nothing else. I’m sorry, Nadia.

She nodded very slowly, as if she were processing something she had already expected. She stood up from the chair.

I thought she was leaving. I was wrong.

***

Instead of heading for the door, she came around the desk calmly. I turned my chair to follow her with my eyes, not understanding what was happening.

—What are you doing?

—Your shoulders are completely knotted —she said, with a calm that unsettled me—. I noticed the moment I came in.

Before I could answer, she put her hands on my shoulders and started pressing with her thumbs on both sides of my neck. She found the knot I had under the nape of my neck with a precision I hadn’t expected. The relief was immediate, physical, completely treacherous.

—Nadia, this isn’t appropriate.

—Just for a moment —she said, without taking her hands away.

Her fingers worked slowly, with calculated pressure that followed the muscles from my neck to my trapezius. I stared at the dark screen of the computer and tried to hold myself together, but something in me was beginning to give way without my having decided it.

—You’ve been carrying too much tension —she murmured—. When was the last time someone touched you without asking anything in return?

I didn’t answer. It was a strange question, and the honest answer wasn’t a good one. It had been months since my husband and I had fucked. Maybe a year. I hadn’t counted and I didn’t want to count. I felt heat at the nape of my neck when I realized I had thought the word fuck inside my own office, with a student behind me pressing my shoulders.

—Take off your blouse —she said in a low voice—. That way I can reach your shoulder blades better.

The sentence should have ended with a firm no and with her out of my office. But I stayed still for a few too-long seconds, and in those seconds something was decided for me, or I decided without fully recognizing it. I unbuttoned my blouse button by button and laid it on the desk. I stayed in my bra and looked forward again.

Nadia’s hands returned to my shoulders, now directly on my skin. Warmer than I’d expected. Her thumbs traced the edge of my shoulder blades and moved down the sides of my back with deliberate slowness. I was starting to loosen despite myself, despite everything.

When her fingers reached the back clasp of my bra and unhooked it with one clean, decisive gesture, I said nothing. I could have said it. I didn’t.

***

She stood in front of me. I looked at her.

She had dark eyes and a calm expression, with no urgency. She wasn’t smiling. My breasts were exposed and I made no move to cover myself, which told me something about myself I preferred not to process at that moment. My nipples had gone hard on their own, without permission, and she looked at them like someone recognizing work already in progress.

She pulled off her T-shirt with a quick, casual movement, like someone who had been doing it all her life. Smooth torso, small breasts with dark erect nipples, a fine tattoo on her right collarbone I had never noticed before. No hurry. No theatrics. She also undid the button on her jeans, leaving the zipper halfway down, and that small gesture tightened something inside me.

She leaned toward me.

—Stop —I said. I said it quietly and without conviction.

Her mouth barely brushed mine, without pressure. She waited. And then I was the one who closed the distance.

The kiss was long and silent and then stopped being silent. Her tongue entered my mouth slowly and I received it, sought it, bit it a little. Her hands held my face for a moment, then moved down to my neck and then to my tits. She took them fully in her hands, palms open, weighing them, and gave a low appreciative sound with her mouth still against mine.

—Fuck, what amazing tits you have —she murmured—. I’ve been imagining them for two years.

She pinched my nipples between her fingers, first gently and then harder, rolling them between thumb and forefinger until a short moan escaped me. Mine were wide and dark, and she looked at them as if they were food. She lowered her mouth, sealed her lips around one and sucked hard, with tongue, setting a rhythm I felt directly between my legs. She switched to the other without letting go of the first, flattening it between her fingers while she sucked it.

—Do you want me to stop? —she asked, her mouth still close.

—No —I said.

She sucked my tits for a long time, alternating between the two nipples, biting them gently and then licking them to soothe the bite. My panties were soaked already; I could feel it sticky against the seat, and she knew it perfectly well. Her hands kept moving, exploring the curve of my sides, my waist, the small of my back. She slipped one hand under my skirt, moved up the inside of my thigh and when she reached the edge of my panties, she laughed softly.

—You’re dripping, Elena.

It was the first time she had called me by my name. And she said it with two fingers pressing over the wet fabric, finding the shape of my clit through the cotton. I closed my eyes and spread my legs a little more without being able to help it. I had stopped thinking about the exam, the records, the board meeting on Monday. Only the heat of her mouth on my nipples existed, her fingers rubbing my cunt over my panties, and the dull hum of the fan in the corner.

—You’re gorgeous, you know that? —she said in a low voice, almost to herself—. And you’re dying to be fucked. It shows all over you.

I didn’t answer. But I pulled her toward me and kissed her again, biting her lower lip, and I took her hand inside the elastic of my panties until her fingers touched me directly, skin against skin. She let out a sigh when she found how wet I was.

***

She took off my skirt and stockings, kneeling to pull them down slowly, without haste. My panties went the same way, sticky, and she lifted them for a moment up to her face before letting them fall to the floor, watching me as she did it. I blushed all the way to the nape of my neck. The cold leather of the chair against the back of my thighs was the only thing anchoring me to the office, to the school, to the concrete reality of what was happening. I looked down at her while she looked up at me, and in that instant I understood I had no control over any of it, and that didn’t frighten me nearly as much as it should have.

She opened my knees with her hands and started kissing the inside of my right thigh. Slow. Very slow. Then the left, tracing lines with her tongue that crept upward by centimeters, never quite reaching the target, making me push my hips slightly forward without realizing it. When she was one finger away from my cunt, she pulled back and started again from the knee. She did it three times. The third time a frustrated moan escaped me and she laughed.

—Ask for it.

—Nadia, please.

—Ask properly.

I closed my eyes. I was embarrassed and turned on like crazy at the same time.

—Lick my cunt. Please.

I was gripping the edge of the chair with both hands.

When her tongue got where it was supposed to get, I closed my eyes and let out a long gasp that sounded far too loud in the empty office. Nadia parted my lips with two fingers and ran her whole tongue, flat, from bottom to clit, very slowly. She repeated the motion three, four times, until I was lifting my pelvis to find her mouth with no attempt at subtlety whatsoever.

Nadia wasn’t in a hurry and knew exactly what she was doing. She alternated direct pressure on the clit with side-to-side movements, pulling back when I started to lose control and coming back when my pulse calmed a little. She pushed her tongue inside, hard and agile, then withdrew it to suck my clit with her lips closed around it, tugging gently. One of my hands had gone to the backrest and the other had somehow found her nape, pressing her face against me with absolutely no decorum.

—Like that —I told her in a low voice, not recognizing myself—. Right there, don’t stop.

She laughed with her mouth pressed to my cunt and the vibration went through me completely. She slipped in a finger. Then two. Curved upward, seeking the exact spot inside and finding it on the first try. She moved them slowly, pulling them almost all the way out and then thrusting them back in deep, while continuing to suck my clit above. My thighs started trembling.

It wasn’t the first time someone had touched me like that, but it was the first time someone had done it with that total concentration, as if there were nothing more important in the world than that office and that moment. As if eating my cunt were something she had been planning for years and was personally enjoying every second of.

Outside, in the corridor, someone walked by talking on the phone. The sound came muffled, distant, belonging to another plane of existence. I bit my lip so I wouldn’t make noise and covered my mouth with my free hand. Nadia looked up at me without stopping licking me, and that image, her dark eyes on me from below, her mouth shining, the fingers going in and out, took me to the edge.

—Please —I asked at some point. I didn’t care about the tone or who I was in that chair—. Please, harder, make me come.

She sped up, added a third finger and started pumping hard, her palm slapping my mound with each thrust, while she sucked my clit with more pressure. The orgasm arrived without warning: long, deep, with the kind of intensity that leaves no possibility of pretending or fully holding back. A muffled cry escaped me and I had to clamp my hand hard over my mouth so I wouldn’t be heard in the middle of the corridor. My cunt clenched around her fingers in waves and I felt myself soaking everything, how I was dripping down the insides of my thighs to the seat. My body kept trembling for several seconds after everything calmed down.

She didn’t pull her fingers out until I stopped shaking. She withdrew them slowly, shiny, and brought them to her mouth without taking her eyes off me. She sucked them one by one, down to the knuckle, cleaning them.

—You taste fucking amazing —she said.

It took me a long while to be able to speak. My chest was rising and falling, my hair stuck to my temple with sweat, and I was unable to close my legs fully. She was still between them, sitting on her heels, looking at me like someone who had finished a job well done.

Before I could say anything, she stood up, pulled her jeans zipper all the way down, and took my hand. She led it inside her pants, inside her panties, until my fingers touched how wet she was too. She was soaked. Burning hot.

—Touch me —she said—. Your turn now.

I looked at her from the chair, still breathless, and sank two fingers into her without warning. She gasped, gripped the edge of my desk with one hand and spread her legs. I started moving them inside, seeking the same angle she had sought in me, with my thumb pressing circles on her clit. She was coming all over my hand in less than a minute, eyes closed and mouth open against my shoulder, biting me slowly so she wouldn’t scream. When she stopped trembling, she leaned against me for a moment, breathing hard against my neck.

—Fuck —she murmured—. I’d been waiting for this for two years.

***

Nadia finally stepped away, picked up the T-shirt from the floor and put it on. She fastened her jeans calmly, ran her hand through her short hair to set it in place, wiped with the back of her wrist the sheen still around her mouth. I was still in the chair, half undressed, my head against the backrest and my eyes still closed.

—I think we should leave it here for today —she said.

I opened my eyes.

—The grade, Elena. —She said my first name with a naturalness that surprised me—. A fair pass. Nothing more. I don’t want anyone suspecting anything.

It took me a second to understand what she had just said. Then I understood everything at once: the latch on the door I hadn’t seen her close, the blinds that someone had lowered without my noticing, the way she had escalated everything step by step, patiently, never forcing a single moment, until I no longer had anywhere to retreat.

And that I had let it happen. With every blouse button undone, with every second of silence when I should have said no, with every time I had spread my legs wider instead of closing them, I had let it happen.

—You’ll get your pass —I said.

Nadia nodded. She picked up the keys from the corner of the desk and headed for the door. Before leaving, she turned back for a moment.

—By the way. I’ve wanted you from the first day I walked into your class. All year thinking about how good you’d look with your skirt hiked up to your waist. But you already knew that.

She closed the door softly.

I was left alone. The fan buzzed in the corner. Outside, the June sun came in through the edges of the blinds and drew lines of light across the floor. I could still feel the wetness between my thighs and the smell of both of us in the air. It took me several minutes to put my blouse back on, straighten my skirt, adjust my glasses, and become Miss Mora again.

I put a five on Nadia’s record. A fair pass, as she had asked. No one asked anything at the Monday meeting.

What I didn’t put in any record is what I learned that afternoon: that what a woman believes about desire is, sometimes, much narrower than real life. That there are things a Literature teacher should have understood much earlier, reading between the lines of the texts she had spent years explaining. That the most important chapters aren’t read. They are lived.