passion, need—these things are not quantifiable no matter how we might wish they were. And for all our advances across the centuries, no one has yet figured out how to control them.”
“I don’t believe in that kind of passion,” Margot whispered.
She didn’t. She knew she didn’t and she never had. She had written papers on the subject of passion and the many ways people tried to personify the feeling. Because if it was a kind of person, a being, they could blame it for all manner of things, like a demon of yore. A devil intent on their destruction.
If passion was responsible, the actual person in question need never be.
But there was something about saying it out loud, here, to Thor, that made her gut tighten as if she’d told him a lie.
“Passion is like truth, I am afraid,” Thor told her, almost sorrowfully. “It does not require your belief to exist.”
“You haven’t answered the question.”
He lifted the hand that held that bright white napkin, but the way he waved it between them had nothing to do with surrender. Or, at least, not his surrender. “And you have gone to great lengths to avoid this little bit of cloth, have you not?”
Margot’s heart gave a terrific thump in her chest, or maybe it was in her belly. Or her pussy, where she felt a sharp jolt. It was everywhere. It was all of her.
She felt ripped wide-open. As if he’d wheeled in a giant spotlight and aimed it directly at her, so bright she could feel the heat of the light itself.
“If you are afraid, there is no shame in admitting it,” Thor said in that same surprisingly gentle way she would have said he didn’t have, which somehow made her feelings of exposure worse.
“Do I need to be afraid?”
“I would never dream of telling you what you need—lest I be accused of single-handedly imposing the will of the patriarchy upon you.”
She glared at him, and at that dry way he talked about the things she’d spent years studying and considering and immersing herself in as if they were so much teenaged caterwauling.
“I would suggest that you view this as a test, nothing more.”
Margot didn’t tell him that she had always been excellent at tests. “What am I meant to be testing? How much I trust you?”
“I think the fact that you are here, naked and alone in my rooms, speaks to how much you trust me already.” And there was nothing threatening in the way he said that. It was a simple statement of fact. And still, Margot felt as if he’d dropped a noose around her neck and pulled it tight. “In any case, this is not about me. It is about you.”
“How convenient for you.”
“Professor, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. You never have to do anything you don’t want to do. I thought we covered this already when we experimented with consent in the other room. Repeatedly.”
“I can assure you that I never, ever do a single thing I don’t want to do.”
He didn’t point out, again, that she was naked and alone with him and had already done things she really ought to be ashamed of. But he didn’t need to when Margot was capable of doing it herself, did he?
“What I think is that you do want to do this,” he said instead, with all that maddening, seductive patience. “And more, I think the fact you want to put this gag in your own mouth and see what it teaches you, that the very idea makes you wet and greedy, is what scares you most.”
Her body was on his side, not hers. Her pussy swelled at his words, and she felt her own wet heat on her thighs.
Damn him.
“It amazes me that you think you can know anything about another person on so short an acquaintance,” Margot said loftily, because she didn’t know how to do anything but fight. “We are strangers. A state of undress doesn’t change the fact that you don’t know anything about me.”
Thor smiled. “Here is what I know. You cannot bear to let a challenge go unmet, no matter what it costs you. You will force yourself to do things that make you uncomfortable rather than risk losing face. You concentrate on the task set before you, simply because it has been set before you, rather than look inward to see whether or not you want to do it at all.”
Margot stiffened. He didn’t know her life. He didn’t know all the committees she sat on at the university when she wasn’t on sabbatical, all because she didn’t know how to say no. He didn’t know how many papers she’d agreed to coauthor for the same reasons. He couldn’t possibly know that when she was so stressed out she thought that ache in her shoulders might never go away, she knew full well she had no one to blame but herself and her own stubbornness.
All he knew about her was how to find her clit. Not a bad skill to have. But not exactly psychic powers, either.
“I complete tasks because that’s what adults do, generally speaking,” she said. From between her teeth. “It’s part of not being a coddled child. The alternative is leaving tasks undone, and that leads to chaos, in my experience. Maybe you like having the power turned off because you forgot to take the time to complete the simple task of paying the bill. I don’t.”
“You didn’t have to remove your clothes simply because I asked you to.” Thor was studying her again, that fierce blue gaze of his seeing far too much. “I asked you to prove something to me and you did. But why did you do it? Why should you have to prove anything? You could simply have said what you wanted, enthusiastically and repeatedly. But it made you feel safer to have an adversary, did it not?”
She felt dizzy. He might as well have kicked her, hard, in the solar plexus. It took her a long, desperate moment to catch her breath. “I don’t think that’s true at all.”
“But you do think that wanting to experiment with things that have overtones that humorless people take great pleasure in excavating for evidence of wrongdoing makes you weak, somehow. I saw the expression on your face when I suggested that you turn your mouth off for a while. It intrigues you as much as it terrifies you.” Thor’s smile hurt her. It actually hurt. “You pride yourself on your mind and your mouth, do you not? Who are you if you cannot express yourself exactly as you wish, whenever you wish it? Are you afraid you will cease to exist? I can assure you, my suspicious professor—you will not.”
She felt as if she couldn’t breathe, but she knew that she could. That she was. She could feel her own chest rise and fall too rapidly. She could hear the ragged sound of her own breath, telling him everything he needed to know without her having to form a single word.
Proving him right.
“I don’t think...” she began.
“But that is what we are arguing about. You are not a brain in a jar, Margot. What you think is not independent of your flesh. Your passion. One cannot destroy the other, no matter how hard you try.”
“I don’t understand what you get out of this. Is it simply that you enjoy the act of humbling—” She almost said women, then. But something in the way he watched her kept her from it. “Do you want to humble me? Is that what this is about?”
“I
