caught her meaning and laughed. “Oh, right. Sorry. Yes, you should probably avoid strange men with erections who invite you inside for a drink. Good safety plan, Mari.” He lifted his hands and stepped back fully into the doorway, the pronounced outline in his pants gone. “But I promise, you’re all good now. You just caught me at an … unfortunate moment. And now I’m going to bribe you with free soda so that you don’t tell the other grads in the department about what you saw. I keep these late hours and work through holidays to avoid that kind of torture.”
He gave her a tilted smile that made something flutter in her chest. She should probably head straight back to the office she was supposed to be working in. He was older. Kind of her teacher. If he found out she was one of Pax’s students, he’d probably freak out that she’d seen him like this. But the chance to spend a few minutes with him was too tempting to pass up.
Plus, the way he was looking at her settled something inside her. Usually she shut down around guys. Being jerked around from school to school on her mom’s whims hadn’t left her with much time to develop savvy when it came to these things. But something about Donovan made her want to step forward instead of run away. “Yeah, okay. Free is good.”
“Cool.” His face brightened. Maybe he’d been as lonely and bored tonight as she had been. He bent over and picked up the papers he’d thrown into the hallway and then swept a hand in front of him. “Welcome to my personal hell. The fridge is in the back corner.”
Marin stepped in first, finding his office a sharp contrast to the sterile sleep lab. His desk was stacked with photocopied articles and books, a Red Bull sat atop one of the piles, and a microphone was set up in the middle with a line going to the laptop. Along the back wall was a worn couch with a pillow and a blanket. More books were on the floor next to the makeshift napping quarters. Controlled chaos. She carefully made her way to the fridge and grabbed a Dr Pepper.
“Did you want me to get you something?” She peered back over her shoulder.
Donovan was busy gathering a pile of papers off the one other chair in the small office. “No, I’m good. Just opened my third Red Bull. I think my blood has officially been converted to rocket fuel. Don’t light any matches.”
She smiled and stepped back toward the door. “I hear ya. Well, thanks for the drink. I’ll let you get back to—uh, whatever it was you were doing.”
He pointed to the spot he’d cleared. “Or you could stay for a sec and take a break. God knows I need one.”
She hesitated for a moment, knowing she was taking the I’m-a-fellow-grad-student charade too far, but then she thought about the endless boredom awaiting her in the sleep lab. She moved her way around the desk and sat. What could a few more minutes hurt? “Yeah, you sounded kind of pissed off when I walked by.”
He stilled, and she cringed when she realized what she’d revealed.
He lowered himself to the chair behind his desk. “You can hear me in the hallway?”
“I—Sound travels. The hall echoes.” She made some ridiculous swirling motion with her finger—as if he needed a visual interpretation of the word echo. She dropped her hand to her side and tucked it under her thigh to keep it from going rogue again.
“Good to know. So you heard …”
“Enough.”
He laughed, all easy breezy, like they were discussing what they’d had for lunch today instead of X-rated talk and random erections in an institute of higher learning. “Well, then. Guess I should probably explain what I’m doing so I don’t look like a total perv.”
“It’s fine. I mean, whatever.” She wasn’t sure if she sounded nonchalant or like she’d taken a few sucks off a helium tank. She guessed the latter.
He lifted a crumpled paper off his desk. “This is what you heard.”
She leaned forward, trying to read the crinkled handwriting.
“Scripts,” he explained. “I’m doing my dissertation on female sexual arousal in response to auditory stimuli. I’m recording scripts of fantasies that we may use in the study.”
“Your study is about dirty talk?” she asked, surprised that the university was down with that. And if he was the one doing the dirty talking, where did she sign up to volunteer?
He smirked and there was a hint of mischief in that otherwise affable expression. “Yes, I guess that’s one way to put it. If you want to be crass about it, Ms. Sleep Disorders.”
“I’m no expert, but I know what I heard.”
“Fair enough. But yeah, I’m focusing on the effect of scripted erotic talk on women who have arousal disorder. A lot of times, therapists suggest that these clients watch erotic movies to try to increase their libido. But in general, porn is produced for men. So even though that method can be somewhat effective, the films don’t really tap into women’s fantasies. They tap into men’s. Erotic books have worked pretty well. But I want to test out another method to add to the arsenal—audio. It’d be cost effective to make, wouldn’t send more money to the porn industry, and could be customized to a client’s needs. Plus, it’s easy to test in a lab.”
Marin liked that he was talking to her like a peer, and his frankness about the topic saved her some of the weirdness that would normally surface when talking about sex. Academic talk soothed her. Plus, his passion was catching. That’s what she loved about this environment. In high school, everyone acted like they were being forced to learn. She’d always been the odd one for actually enjoying school. Books and all that information had been her escape. Schools changed. The people around her changed. Books were one of the few things that stayed constant. But here at the university there were people like Donovan, people who seemed to be mainlining their education and getting high off what they learned. “So what were you so frustrated about?”
He grabbed his can of Red Bull and took a sip, keeping his eyes on her the whole time. “I’m discovering that women are complicated and that I’m having trouble thinking like one.”
“Ah. And this is shocking news?”
“Well, no. I knew it was going to be tough, but the fantasies are turning out to be harder than I thought. We did a round of romantic ones in a small trial run, and they were a major fail. Women reported enjoying listening to them but the arousal was …” He gave an arcing thumbs-down. “My friend Alexis, one of the other grads working under Pax, told me that I needed to go more primal, tap into the forbidden type of fantasies, that sweet romance makes a girl warm and fuzzy but not necessarily hot and bothered.”
Marin’s neck prickled with awareness, but she tried to keep her expression smooth. “Makes sense.”
“Does it?”
“I—uh, I mean …”
“Never mind. I retract the question.” He leaned back in his chair and ran a hand through his dark hair, making it even messier. “I met you like five minutes ago, and I’m already asking you if taboo fantasies do it for you. Sorry. Hang out in this department too long, and you lose your filter for what is acceptable in normal conversation. I spent lunch yesterday discussing nocturnal penile tumescence with a sixty-five-year-old female professor, and it wasn’t weird. This is my life.”
Marin smiled and played with the tab on the
