The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Adjunct Instructor Pet

(Sequel to Professor Kitty)

Dr. Stephens, the Department chair, brought the start-of-the-year faculty meeting to a close by offering a warm welcome to all the new hires. We stood up, myself and another woman, and accepted the friendly greetings of the entire English faculty. I think I was blushing, and, to be honest, I don’t recall if a single phrase I stammered out made the least bit of sense.

As a first-time instructor, even though I was only an adjunct, I felt honored and, if truth be told, a little intimidated. I wouldn’t be defending my dissertation until November, and (fingers-crossed) the PhD wouldn’t be conferred officially until the spring. It had been a mere two weeks since I was first picked up unexpectedly by a whirlwind of pre-semester academic obligations. I tried to appear attentive and capable, but Dr. Stephens covered so much material (policies, procedures, deadlines) that, this being my first real academic job, it was all I could do to get through the meeting without a panic attack.

I knew I was lucky. My dissertation adviser had recommended me for the job. I was aware that the position was an unanticipated, last minute hire—there would be much I’d have to learn on the fly— but it wasn’t until some of us were gathered for a quick round of drinks after the meeting that I began to piece together the first hints about the scandal that had preceded me.

“The entire lacrosse team! I’m surprised she could still walk! I hadn’t heard that that’s where they’d found her.”

“Yes. The parking lot of the freshmen dorms. Not a stitch of clothing on her—well, unless you count the collar and leash and the sign that hung around her neck. I heard she was a mess, completely deranged. Couldn’t stop—you know—touching herself.”

Two professors were talking in the adjoining booth, keeping their voices low, but I could make out most of what they said. Neglected by the rest of the faculty (most of whom were hovering around Dr. Melanie Baum, the other new hire), I scooched my butt back against the seat, trying not to look like I was eavesdropping, but the conversation I was overhearing—what were they talking about?

“So, after entertaining the lacrosse team, she stumbled down Frat House Row—”

“Visting a few more houses along the way, as it turns out. . . .”

“—crossed the length of the quad and continued all the way down the hill to Residence Hub?”

“Apparently so, naked as the day she was born and yowling like a cat in heat. She was trying to get into one of dorms, it appears. You can imagine the scene the next morning. Get away day, parents arriving in their minivans to pick up homesick freshmen, and there she was, vomiting at one end, expelling various fluids at the other, muttering something about being a good kitty.”

“Disgraceful!”

“Quite. Rather a lot of bad business trying to keep it quiet. Impossible. All those young gentlemen have their smart phones now. The pictures were all over. Of course, that’s what exonerated them all in the end.”

“How do you mean?”

“It was all consensual. She was recorded, multiple times, over the course of the evening, articulating quite clearly her desire to be ravished. And she had left clear written statements to the same effect, on her computer, in her blog. There was a prior arrangement, it seems, between herself and those lacrosse boys. She planned the whole thing.”

“Poor woman, I hope now she’s getting the help she needs.”

“I suppose she is. I think she was, you know, put away. A lot of bad business, though, as I was saying, for the Department and University to clean up.”

“Well, here’s to hoping that the next new hire doesn’t turn out to be as unbalanced a slut as Katherine King.”

Ouch! I banged by head hard against the back of the booth.

Katherine King! Oh, my God! She was the professor whose course load I was covering!

One of the two professors in the next booth craned his neck over the partition.

“Oh, ah . . . Ms. Gateau, isn’t it? Didn’t know you were there. And . . . ah, how are you settling in?”

My jaw had literally dropped, so it took a few seconds to get it going again.

“Oh, fine, fine . . .well . . . it is a little overwhelming, what with classes starting so soon.” I was stammering, unable to process what I had just heard.

“Oh, you’ll do alright, you’ll do alright.”

I made an awkward excuse about having to find the bathroom, and they both seemed relieved when I picked up my bag and left.

I could hear them start in again as I passed—“Poor girl, they put her in Katherine’s old office. I hope IT scrubbed the computer she had in there . . .”

I let the water in the shower run really hot before I stepped in, because for some reason I felt dirty, inside and out. What a fool I was. No wonder the job seemed too good to be true.

It all happened so fast—the tip from my professor, the inquiry letter, the interview with the chair, the handshakes with the dean and the provost—I hadn’t had a chance to catch my breath. A few clicks online would have revealed the full story.

I washed my face and tried to erase the images I had seen.

The University had worked diligently to bury the story, but after I followed enough threads, it didn’t take long for accounts to turn up. The information in the write-ups was troubling in itself, if you read between the lines, but they kept certain details discrete. The images, though, when I found the sites that post such things, made me feel violated.

That poor woman! All those men!

I rinsed and lathered up again. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Dr. Katherine King, first-year, tenure-track Professor of English specializing in Victorian Literature, had started the evening after the last day of finals dressed as a cat. At some point she lost most of her costume. Her cat-ears headband fell out of her hair, and her tail . . . well, I saw where that fell out of. Around her neck hung a small sign—“PROFESSOR KITTY NEEDS TO GRADE YOUR COCK.” Why did she do it? All those men!

I couldn’t get enough soap on my body. After seeing that woman and all the places that she let them . . . I scrubbed myself harder, trying to wash every place I felt dirty.

It would be Professor King’s courses that I would be teaching this term. I now understood why Dr. Stephens was so circumspect in her interview. She knew I knew nothing. She wanted me to know nothing.

I had just been so preoccupied with my own work. First week of August, I was wrapping up the final chapter of my dissertation, intensely focused on my writing—when Dr. Stephens offered me the position so quickly I felt I’d earned it.

I was just a cocky graduate student living in her dissertation bubble.

I now see that the English Department must have been in a difficult position. There was a long delay, while the University investigated the troubling and bewildering circumstances. For a time, some even assumed that Professor King would be returning to her position on the faculty. When the full scope of events became clear, there seem to have been issues about timing and funding, and disagreements about how to advertise for a replacement so soon after the scandal broke. They opted for a quiet and cheap hire—me.

First I was exited—a real teaching job, just as I was finishing my dissertation—a perfect start to my career, an academic position which, given my years of graduate work, I assumed I was intellectually more than ready to jump right into. Of course, as an adjunct, it was technically a part-time position—non-tenure-track, temporary, relatively low pay, few benefits from Human Resources, and all for being responsible for a full course-load of classes that I had never taught before. Still, I wanted to pinch myself—what an opportunity! It would look great on my c.v., and, who knows, maybe it could develop into something more permanent?

I should have whispered to myself, “Just keep your socks on, Petria.” I jumped at the offer and now I’m in over my head. Classes start tomorrow, my syllabuses are set, I’ve printed my class rosters—to all appearances I was ready to hold my head up, walk straight into the classroom and begin my lecture. Who was I kidding? I was overwhelmed by the preparation and intimidated by the thought of all those young faces staring at me (well, when they were not looking at their phones), expecting me to teach them all I knew about Christina Rossetti.

And I was well aware of the scuttlebutt concerning the treatment of adjuncts in academia—the veritable bondage of their careers, their low departmental status, the casual humiliations they could expect from tenured faculty and administrative staff alike, serving the institution for little reward, working like dogs, whoring themselves for a measly year-to-year contract.

“Now, don’t get your panties into a bunch, Petria,” as my Mom used to say. I took a deep breath and told myself that all I could do was to try my best. I thought about the introductory lectures I’d planned, but the first thing that slipped into my head was an image of Professor Katherine King being sodomized by a lacrosse stick.

How would I make it through my classes? My classes! These were Professor King’s classes. All the students had enrolled last spring, when she was still the teacher. She ordered the texts (which I was compelled to use—the orders had already been placed with the campus bookstore, and my late August hire meant that I had no choice but to cover the material she had intended).

I told myself the situation wasn’t so bad. Professor King and I were both Victorianists. This was stuff I knew down pat. I was teaching three courses—an Introduction to British Literature survey class, the required Victorian Period class for English Majors, and a small seminar for advanced students on the topic of Nineteenth Century Sexuality and Feminist Theory. While I was forced to use the books that Professor King had assigned, I had the freedom to develop my own syllabus—many of the texts she’d ordered were standard anthologies anyway.

The seminar was the one I was most excited about. The reading focused on theoretical classics—Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick—texts I knew well. What I dreaded was the fact that every student would see me at the front of the classroom, and the first thing on their minds, instead of my lecture, would be what had happened to Professor King. How was I to get over that hurdle, get past those images?

Snuggled in my bathrobe, my skin still flushed from the heat of the shower, I sat on the edge of my bed and contemplated the outfit I had picked for my first day of teaching.

Establishing the proper tone was important. I worried about looking too young. I was thirty. I had nearly earned my doctorate. I didn’t want to be mistaken for a student, however inadvertently. I wanted to project authority but not come across as too prim or pendantic—and, heavens, I certainly wanted to avoid looking frumpy or “schoolmarm-y.”

Classroom appearance for a woman in my position was a trickily delicate act. I knew students posted on RateMyProfessor about how “hot” they think their instructors are. I wouldn’t dare try to look “sexy” in front of my students. Still, I had a body. Sometimes I liked to look pretty. It was a dilemma, and the more I pondered it the more anxious I got.

I stood up, dropped the robe and looked at myself in the mirror. Okay, I was a curvy girl—not fat, just rounded in places. The black stretch jeans were out. I wanted my students to assume I had a butt—I didn’t want them to look at it. So, a pencil skirt and hose? That could work. Keep it professional looking, but stylish.

I eyed my naked body. Yes, I had tits. They were one the rounder parts of my body. The roundness might be a problem. Better keep the cleavage hidden.

I ran my hand over my belly and continued lower down. Maybe I should have shaved down there? I grabbed a pair of panties from the bed and covered up my hairiness. It wouldn’t matter. No one is going to be seeing that part of me anytime soon.

I slipped on my pajamas and surveyed my tiny studio apartment, making one last check to be sure that everything was ready for the morning.

My eyes caught sight of the stack of textbooks on my desk. Better stow what I’ll need for class in my book bag. There’s no excuse for an instructor showing up without the required text.

The books had been in my office when I arrived for today’s faculty meeting. Other than the computer on the desk and a couple chairs, the office had been empty. I was glad of that, now, knowing what I know. Nothing to remind me that it was once Katherine King’s personal space. I’d have to spend some time getting the office set up they way I liked it.

The books were free, instructor copies shipped directly from the publisher. They must have come while Professor King was still on the faculty, for I noted her name penciled in one, along with a scattering of checkmarks on the table of contents page. I grabbed the two thick anthologies, which I’d already thumbed through. When I picked up a book by Nina Auerbach (it wasn’t even the one I wanted—I was just moving it out of the way), I heard something slip from between the pages and fall to the floor.

It took me a moment to understand what I was looking at. When I bent down and realized what it was I shrieked.

At my feet lay a glossy, full-color photo of a woman’s vagina, extremely hirsute, with the labia moist and parted open.

I shrieked again, jumping back and dropping the books I’d been holding.

My first reaction was to kick it away or throw something at it to cover it up. The nearest item to hand was the fresh pair of panties I’d set out to wear in the morning. I tossed them at the photo, like I was trying to hide an embarrassing spill or a dead bug on the floor.

I missed.

My eyes still centered on the offending object, I circled it, fumbling with my arms outstretched, reaching for something else to toss, but not letting the photo out of my sight, as if it would scuttle off if I turned away.

I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

After my initial panic had subsided slightly, I realized I was being silly. After all, it was only a picture. It couldn’t hurt me. It wasn’t like I’d never seen a cunt before.

I bent down to pick it up, intending throw it in the trash (why couldn’t I stop staring at it?), when I found myself moving slower than I had anticipated. For a minute or two (or ten?) I lost track of time.

I blinked.

I realized I was shaking (probably from holding myself frozen in such an awkward position, bent at the waist, hovering over the photo). I needed to sit down.

After a deep breath, I told myself to act like a grownup. Maybe I should think of it as evidence, something I had a responsibility to preserve and report.

With a sudden effort, I touched the photo (Ouch! I got a shock).

Picking it up and holding it gingerly between two fingers of one hand, as if it were some delicate but dangerous relic, I discovered that I had sat myself down on the bed.

The image in the photo mesmerized me. I was fascinated by it. I knew it wasn’t a picture of Professor King’s pussy (how? I don’t know. I just knew it, intuitively, intimately, secretly).

It was a very beautiful cunt. Funny, I felt I could almost smell it.

How long had I been staring at it? My heart was beating deeply, my breathing heavy and dry and slow.

Yes, yes, I could clearly smell a woman’s body, her rich, damp musk. I brought my fingers to my nose and sniffed. With an embarrassed shock, I realized I was smelling my own moist cunt. I had been touching myself with one hand, still gazing at the photo, which I held in the other.

What was I doing?

The woman’s vagina in the picture looked so inviting, almost asking to be touched, to be kissed. It was as if I could hear another woman’s voice begging for release, pleading with me to taste her, telling me that it would be all right, that we both knew that this was what we wanted.

I found that I was touching myself again, one hand thrust down the front of my pajamas, caressing my wet, hairy sex under my panties, my fingers pressing into my most tender place, gently steering my body into a pleasurable trance.

All this time, I continued to stare longingly at the photo, hypnotized by its presence.

Despite feeling an alarming sensation of repugnance, I brought the photo to my mouth and kissed it. Immediately, a burst of keen, ecstatic gratification struck my loins, as if I’d allowed an overwhelming force to penetrate me.

Still shuddering, I pulled my hand from my sodden pussy and found that I’d collapsed across the bed, my legs spread wide. Embarrassingly, I’d soaked through both my underwear and my pajama bottoms with the most overpowering orgasm I’d experienced in years.

What was happening!

I quickly jumped off the bed. My body wasn’t working right. With extreme awkwardness, I managed to strip off my damp clothes. It was difficult using only one hand. Why couldn’t I stop staring at the pussy in the photo? I found that it was impossible to tear my gaze away.

Shaken and perplexed, and with an effort of will I could barely muster, I turned the photograph around to examine the reverse side.

At once I felt the hold on me lessen. But what I saw on the back of the photo chilled me. Inscribed in a feminine hand was a note:

Dear Kitty,

Always Remember Me!

Love,

Bet

With an uncanny sense of foreboding, I turned the picture over again and gazed at the image.

“Bet,” I whispered to myself.

Immediately, my pulse quickened. My body responded with a surge of secret emotion—like a schoolgirl, stricken with the all-encompassing infatuation of puppy love.

It’s funny—I guess I’ve never really been in love. I dated exactly two boys in high school and went through a period of gender fluidity in college and early on in grad school, when I dyed my hair purple and flirted with a Goth and steam-punk aesthetic. I’d kissed a few girls and once danced all night in a club with a short-haired woman, older than I was, who took me home and kept me all the next day—until she said she hated herself and I left. My last few relationships had been with men, but they went nowhere—I decided I needed to focus on my dissertation, on my research. Now what was going on with me?

I fell upon my bed, resting the photo reverently on my nightstand, as if it were an icon in a shrine. Still naked from the waist down, I turned over on my belly and buried my face in my pillow, while burying my hand between my legs. Grinding my pelvis into my hand, I cried hot tears into the pillow and murmured to myself, “Bet, Bet, Bet,” letting a shameful wave of desire carry me off to sleep.

I overslept.

If I hurried, I could still make it to my first class.

Panic overtook me as I dashed around my apartment, grabbing what I needed willy-nilly. Everything was a confused hullabaloo. I couldn’t find my eyeglasses. What would I do with my hair? My pencil skirt, my top, my underwear (where had I thrown my panties!)—I was about to lose control—nothing was where I had put it! I could almost hear the clock ticking—I had to get out the door.

I was in such a state—that’s why it happened. I had to have a cup of coffee—I wouldn’t have been able to think straight for my first lecture (which started in 20 minutes!). I was jumping across the room, nearly ready to go, clutching my coffee mug, when—bang! I tripped over a pile of books on the floor.

The entire cup had spilled down the front of my clothes! I didn’t have time for this! I had to change quick.

Stripping out of my coffee stained outfit, I flew to the closet. I’d only partially unpacked, and there were so few choices. To make things as expedient as possible I took the first item I saw, a vintage, V-neck, fit and flare dress with a bright floral pattern. I always felt fresh and swingy in it. Over my head it went.

As I shook it past my hips (hmm, it’d be nice if the hem on this dress fell a bit lower down my thigh), I discovered to my utter perplexity that I was not wearing underwear. Where did they go? Weren’t they just on my body?

I rapidly made my eyes dart every which way across the floor. No panties to be seen. I really didn’t need this. A look in the dresser—nothing but socks and t-shirts. I’d already disgorged my overnight bag. Could all my underwear really be still in a box? I looked at the stack of boxes I’d lugged up the stairs yesterday, all of them sealed with packing tape and none of them labeled. Where was my head last night? Why couldn’t I have organized things better?

My heart was a time bomb. I needed to be running across the quad and not scrambling for underwear.

I made a decision, slapped on some lipstick, and locked the door behind me. This girl was just going to have to watch out for the wind today.

As things turned out, my first class went better than expected, considering the circumstances. I was out of breath and two minutes late, but the students, a good portion of them freshman, were polite and at least made an effort to look like they were listening. The class was the literary survey course, largely populated with non-English-majors. I stammered a bit, but held my own. I was surprised at how much the students didn’t know.

My first two classes ran back-to-back. It was in the second, the Victorian period course, that a student first mentioned the name Katherine King.

As I thought it was natural to do, I opened the class by introducing myself and then handed out the syllabus.

A boy spoke up.

“I thought Professor King would be teaching this class?”

An awkward silence overpowered the room, a silence that, for many beats of my heart, took over my head as well.

Words failed me. In the quiet of my mind was only an image. I saw her, her costume kitten-ears askew, sticky white splotches dappling her face and hair, her naked backside raised up, her private parts exposed and opened.

In the abrupt hush that followed, I overheard myself stutter and marked a few sharps whispers in the back of the room. I had to make a superhuman effort to escape the image that presented itself to my mind.

“Professor King is not available to teach this term.”

“It’s just, it says on the schedule that I printed out that the instructor is Professor King and when you said your name I thought I was in the wrong class.”

“Well, you’re in the right class. The Electronic Registration System has been updated. Now, as I was saying, our first readings focus on writers that we associate with the Romantic Movement. Who knows in this context what I mean be the word Romantic?”

It’s strange. There’s a very precarious line one has to walk in lecturing. I knew that I was speaking from a position of authority, in part conveyed by the knowledge I had hoarded away during my years of academic study, but in part conveyed also merely by my being named the instructor on their class schedules. Did they at all perceive my inexperience, how I was, more or less, a virgin in front of a class? My nerves were sparking. Panic was only a couple stammers away. If they saw through me, if I lost their respect . . .

I can’t quite explain how I got through it. What helped me was something that, so far, for this entire discombobulating morning, had oddly slipped my mind.

“Bet,” I found myself whispering, silently, inwardly, like a prayer.

Bet—I saw her photo. I saw her cunt—her big, wet, hairy cunt. Remember me. How could I have forgotten?

The image in the photo kept me from straying, kept me from losing it, kept me from sinking back into the disheveled ruin and degradation of Professor King.

My confidence deepened as my lecture progressed. I was warming up to the topic, and I was more than holding my own, expounding material that I discovered had become part of me. It was actually fun, striding back and forth in front them, making my points clearly and engagingly, turning around occasionally to write on the board (I dropped a piece of chalk once but quickly recovered). I was relaxed and empowered. I even sat casually on the desk for some time and acted like I was chatting with them. I was relatable and impassioned, the young instructor who gets her students excited.

Before I knew it, class was done.

I was in my office, licking the spoon from a Starbucks yoghurt and granola parfait, when a woman’s head poked through the door.

“So you’re the new Katherine King!”

I almost gagged myself with the spoon.

It was Dr. Melanie Baum, the other new hire.

“Oh, Dr. Baum, please come in. I was just finishing my lunch. I’m sorry, the office is a mess—I still need to unpack my books.”

“Please, call me Melanie.”

Dr. Baum settled herself pointedly onto a chair. That was the way to wear a pencil skirt! I hope I can get that coffee stain off mine.

“I can only stay a minute. I just wanted to say hi. My office it right across the hall.”

Dr. Melanie Baum had been hired for a tenure-track position last spring. I knew her reputation already—Ivy League, publication in a scholarly journal while still in grad school, MLA conference papers, a book contract based on her dissertation project—she was a bright, rising star in the academic universe whose research was a mash-up of Shakespearean studies and theories of fan fiction. I sensed that she was slightly older than me, and when she spoke her voice carried the trace of an English accent.

As she perched in my office, exuding her wickedly intellectual aura, all New York black, I felt more like a round, heartland dumpling than I had in years. She terrified me.

As usual for me in these situations, I panicked and started to blather.

“I’m so glad you stopped by. You know, I’m using your essay in my dissertation. Your work is brilliant.”

“And which essay would that be?”

“Oh, ah . . . ‘Shakespeare’s Rhetoric of Embodiment: The Textual Eye and the Eye of the Text.’”

“Ah, yes . . .the one in Critical Others. It’s ‘The Textual Gaze and the Eye of the Text,’ actually.”

All I could do was stammer again that her work was brilliant.

“Thank you, petal, you’re so sweet to say that.”

Her very presence intimidated me. She made me feel like a child.

“Well, I should be going . . . Oh, by the way, I think we have a student in common this term. There’s a young woman in my Early Modern Stagecraft and Role-play course, Elizabeth Breck. Keep an eye on her. She’s a smart one. Only starting her second year, but I understand that Professor King gave her special permission to enroll in her seminar without the usual prerequisites.”

Dr. Baum rose from her seat, but hovered for a moment, like a wasp.

“You know, I met Kat King only a handful of times, during my campus visit in the spring. Such a shame. She had promise, I believe.”

Dr. Melanie Baum’s legs and hips swung into action as she pivoted out of the room.

“Feel free to pop into my office anytime, Ms. Gateau. It’s Pet, isn’t it, your first name?”

“Petria, actually.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

She stepped across the hall, heals clicking on the hardwood floor. Well, I thought to myself, Dr. Baum has an ass that could make a girl commit crimes. She’d just walked in and out of my office like a femme fatale and somehow I felt like I deserved to be punished for some transgression I couldn’t understand.

I scooched my butt back in my chair and tried to clear my head. In half an hour my Nineteenth Century Sexuality and Feminist Theory seminar would meet. A small class, but one I needed extra focus to be completely prepared for.

The advanced Sexuality seminar met in the Department conference room. I sat at the head of the rectangular table while my eight students took seats around it. Most were seniors. Elizabeth Breck, the girl that Dr. Baum had told me to watch, wasn’t hard to miss.

Or rather, in most other circumstances, she would be the girl you’d tend to overlook. She was small, mostly quiet and mousey, with glasses and dark hair, yet her moody silence mixed introversion with sullen belligerence. She sat at the table directly to my left, reeking of stale cigarette smoke and other richly bitter, earthy scents. She wore a short skirt and a shapeless top. Her palette seemed to be trying to decide between the colors of mud and rust, and the compromise her style ultimately chose would be a shade called autumnal ditch.

Her hair was bushy and unkempt, and I could clearly see that she made a point of not shaving her legs and underarms. She appeared to be girl still cowering in the shadows of some archaic, 60’s-70’s feminism. She glared at me as I began my introductory remarks.

This was going to be a challenging class, both for me and for the students. The theoretical texts adopted by the departed Professor King where dense and provocative. Some I would not have selected for an undergraduate course.

We would naturally begin with Foucault, a name I was pleased to note at least a couple students had heard before. Before addressing our primary reading from his History of Sexuality, I thought I should mention something about the overall shape of his career. As I was talking out the book Discipline and Punish, I observed that Elizabeth Breck, the surly rodent girl, had pushed her chair back a ways from the table.

I continued my talk, and, as I spoke, students would turn their heads to listen, looking down now and then to write in their notebooks or on their laptops. Elizabeth Breck stared directly at me, continuously, never dropping her eyes.

A slight fidget on her part drew my attention her way. I saw that she had now slouched back in her seat, drawing her knees up so that her feet were resting on the chair. Before I turned away in shock, I did a double take, my gaze momentarily frozen in surprise.

I realized that she was giving me a clear view up her skirt. She wasn’t wearing any underwear.

From the angle of her chair, no one else could see. My first thought was embarrassment. It must be an accidental exposure. She must be preoccupied, oblivious, sitting in such an unladylike manner, allowing her instructor such a view.

They don’t teach you about this stuff in grad school. Dr. Stephens didn’t mention any policies about it in the faculty meeting either. I thought it best to ignore it, to keep my focus on the class discussion. But I was unnerved. In my sudden bewilderment, I don’t recall if a single phrase I stammered out made the least bit of sense.

I tried to stay calm. Someone was asking a question about Foucault. I knew the answer, but words had escaped me. I took a quick drink from my water bottle and babbled some gibberish, stringing together a few theoretical terms. I needed to focus. A spark of panic started to prick my consciousness. There was something that I should be remembering. What was it?

As if compelled by some irresistible force, I found that I was staring again at the exposed personal space between the young woman’s bare thighs. I was looking straight at her cunt. She had spread her legs wider, giving me a better view. It was excessively hairy. I was close enough to see her that her vaginal lips had parted. It seemed as if my senses could almost comprehend what it would be like to press my face close down there between her legs, breathing in her scent, feeling her moist, wiry hairs just starting to tickle my face, the warmth of her body beckoning me, needing me.

I remembered now. Everything was going to be all right.

The rest of the seminar flew by in an ecstatic blur. I was energized, inspired, brilliant. I could sense my students were equally rapt and enchanted, intellectually stimulated and hanging on my every word—except, of course, Elizabeth Breck, who sat back in her seat with her knees spread apart, smoldering . . .

After the seminar I rushed back to my office. God, was I shaking! I had just completed what seemed like the longest day of my life—I was light-headed yet aroused, exhausted yet invigorated—and the day had yet a couple of surprises left.

I had just wanted to tidy up a few things in my office before heading home. The English Department building was quiet—everyone had left for the day. I turned on the office computer to do a last check of my email. I was pleased with myself—apart from a few flashes of panic, I thought that the day had gone well, although, in my euphoria over getting through my first full day of teaching, I suspected that there were moments that could conceivably come back to haunt me, if I allowed my mind to dwell on them.

I rapidly scanned my inbox—mostly routine announcements—except for one message that seemed curiously important.

I opened the message and my world fell apart:

DEAR ADJUNCT INSTRUCTOR PET,

YOU’RE THE ONLY ONE WHO CAN HELP ME NOW. PLEASE, I NEED TO GET A MESSAGE TO BET. I KNOW YOU KNOW HER. PLEASE, YOU MUST TELL HER HOW I AM DOING. I NEED TO SEE HER.

YOU HAVE TO HELP,
KITTY

The email included a link to a website.

I shouldn’t have clicked on the link. The action was automatic. I had no choice. No temptation, no curiosity—simply an instinctive and inevitable act.

I was viewing a page on Tumblr called Professor Kitty’s Litter Box, full of rambling erotic blog posts and pornographic images and videos—hundred of pics and clips all showing the same woman, naked, apart from her costume kitten-ears and, at times, a butt-plug tail, acting out various feline scenarios, sometimes involving objects and guests.

The woman was Dr. Katherine King—Kat—Professor Kitty.

While an animated GIF appeared repeatedly on the screen, showing the woman—Kitty—squatting over her litter box, I realized that another person had walked into the room.

“Good afternoon Dr. Gateau.”

I abruptly closed my browser and, in a state of utter panic, looked up to face my student, Elizabeth Breck, staring at me from the chair on which she had just sat down.

Unable to process what was happening, I stammered out the first thing her address to me had triggered.

“It’s . . . ah . . . it’s only Ms. Gateau, actually—I don’t have my PhD yet.”

“I know,” she said, hiking up her skirt and leaning back in her seat. “I think, between us, we don’t have to be so formal. From now on, I’ll just call you Pet, and you, well, I think you remember my name.”

I whispered it, as if to myself . . . “Bet.”

“Good girl. It’s a whore’s name, you know, from the Nineteenth Century—but you knew that already, didn’t you, Dr. Victorianist.”

“Ms.”

“Maybe ‘Miss’ would be even better. What do you think, Miss Pet?”

“Please,” I said, allowing myself the briefest chance to stand on my own against her, “what is it is that you want?”

“I think you know, don’t you, Pet.”

Anger and frustration surged inside me, and I was struck by a sense of impotent rage.

Fighting against the invisible restraints that were somehow keeping my brain from thinking clearly, I blurted out comments that I instantly regretted.

“Who are you! How dare you expose yourself in my classroom, spreading your hairy, slutty cunt at me, making me pay attention to you and your smug, self-important, whims!”

“Oh, it’s all right, Pet,” she cooed. “You know who I am and what I can do. Your petty tantrums and panic attacks are just adorable. Your cheeks get so flushed. I bet you’re getting wet down there too, aren’t you, Pet?”

She was right. Against my better judgment, and to my extreme shame, I was getting excited. I felt sexy. I felt aroused. I loved to be sitting so close to her, feeling the skin of my bare bottom touch the leather seat of my chair. I wanted desperately to reach down and touch myself.

“You know, Pet, that’s exactly where she sat, every day, working herself to an energetic lather just thinking about me, masturbating in that very chair.”

I wanted to die.

“How . . . How can you be doing this?”

“Oh, Pet, it’s easy. I just spread my legs and you open your heart. I can’t tell you how it works. It just does. I mesmerize people with my cunt. It’s a gift.”

“Why . . . why me? Why are you doing this to me?” I stammered.

“Dear Pet, don’t worry. I’m not here to hurt you. I want to help you.”

She spread her legs even wider. I could only stare. I wanted so much to be able to touch myself. I opened my mouth to speak, but I don’t recall if a single phrase I stammered out made the least bit of sense.

“I know what you want, Pet, and I know what scares you. You’re terrified of Dr. Melanie Baum, and you’re terrified of Dr. Katherine King, terrified about what happened to her, about what she’s become. Don’t worry. I said I’m here to help. I helped you in class, today, didn’t I?”

Yes, she was right. It was Bet who helped me through my lectures. It was my thinking about Bet’s pussy that dispelled the image of Katherine King.

“I should tell you, Pet, you were hot today. Every student was stimulated. And don’t you worry about those posts on RateMyProfessor. You should be flattered by their comments. Did it feel sexy up there, in front of the class, strutting around without any panties, knowing the whole time that they could see up your dress? And when you bent over to pick up that chalk, what a sight that must have been?”

She was right. I must have been putting on a show. Why hadn’t I noticed it?

The hot, unsettling rush of humiliation stirred inside me, making my nerves quiver.

“You have a beautiful body, Pet. Don’t be ashamed of the attention it gets you.”

I didn’t understand the confused admixture of shame and desire that had suddenly taken hold of my body, as if an unseen hand was rewriting the very thoughts in my mind, rage and lust intertwined like snakes in my belly, abject captivation and emboldened release crisscrossing my heart like the teasing lashes of whip. Even my very blood stammered in my veins, as I whispered again her name aloud: “Bet”—the word out of my mouth sounded to my own ears both like a bite and a kiss.

“Why . . .why . . . why?”

“Oh, my Pet, everything will be all right. Just relax and accept it. I can’t apologize for having to break you. Try to understand that from now on your humiliation is also your strength. You’re such a lamb. Everything you want is now so close—a permanent position on the faculty, full tenure, scholarly publications. You may feel low at times, but keep looking up. I’ll always be there. Remember.”

I was shaking. Yes, yes, I was broken. She was right. Part of me felt so low, I wanted to be on the floor. I needed to be closer to something that only she could provide.

“Trust me, Pet. Soon you’ll see that Dr. Baum’s position in this department isn’t as secure as it seems. What a pretty picture that will make, when it happens, that femme fatale body of hers, getting caught in the snares of her own perilous aspirations—like a wasp impaled on her own stinger? And don’t worry about Professor Kitty either. Wouldn’t they’d make a cute couple, the two of them, Melanie and Kat?”

I had no idea what she was talking about. What had any of this to do with me?

“Oh, little Miss Pet, I can see right through you. You’re so vulnerable, so insecure. When you gaze at my cunt your soul is opening up to me. What I see is basically good. I’ve looked into the secret hearts of other women. I know the wickedness that can nest in there, the cruelty that pecks at empathy, until nothing’s left but leather and rust. Why do think Kat King tidies up her own litter box with her mouth? She was always a hurtful creature. Now she’s just broadcasting that truth.”

I was terrified by the power of this mousey, radical introvert, with her brooding glare and her coy sexuality that filled my office with its overpowering scent.

“I’m surprised, Pet, that you could sit in that chair after what Professor King had done on it. I’d think there’d be a stain. I’m sure you can find one, if you looked close enough. I bet it still smells like her cunt. She would sit in it, just like you are now, no underwear on her bottom, rocking back and forth, touching herself, making herself so wet.”

I stared at Bet’s exposed pussy. As she sat in the seat across from me, she gently pushed her pelvis back and forth and slowly lowered her hand down in front of her crotch.

“I know you want to touch yourself, Pet. And you will, as soon as I leave the room.”

The rhythm of her hips became slightly more insistent. Her fingers were finding their place.

“You just need to be trained, Miss Pet. My cunt is powerful, but its magic, if you want to call it that, can only work so far. Much of what will eventually happen has to come from you. It’s a partnership, a relationship—mentor/student, master/slave. I’m your new advisor now, my little Pet.”

She was touching herself in rhythm with my heart. I was so wet, so horny.

“You’re so new to this, such a silly virgin, that all it took was a photo of my pussy to turn you on. In time, though, you’ll discover it’s very much like an addiction. Even as you crave it all the more deeply, all the more intensely, you’ll find that the effect tends to wear off, so soon, so soon, leaving only an indescribable longing, a dark emptiness that you’ll do anything to fill. You’ll need to look directly at my pussy to get even the slightest glimmer of its influence. And without it, you’ll be a stammering ragdoll, barely able to put two words together. Oh, Miss Pet, the things you’ll have to learn!”

My soul was torn by a whirlwind of emotion. My heartbeat was fluttering. I felt like a toy. I needed to be touched—Oh! the shame of that longing!

“One last thing though, Pet, before you climax. I want you to see if your scent has already started to soak into the seat of your chair, just like Professor Kitty’s. Go on. Get down on the floor. Tell me if you can smell both your cunts. I bet you can even taste them.”

On my knees now, in front of my office chair, I bent my face close to the surface on which I had just been sitting, the leather still warm from my bum. With a feeling of disgust that I inexplicably relished, I pressed my nose to the chair and sniffed. Yes. The seat was stained. I could smell myself, my own sexual damp, and I could smell something else, traces of Katherine King’s cunt, those hours she had sat there, bare-bottomed, masturbating, working herself to orgasm after orgasm, permeating the chair with her shameful, lustful scent.

I could feel my own bare bum exposing itself as I knelt, while my own cunt ached for attention. Bringing my lips to the stained leather, I opened my mouth to kiss the residue of our mingled humiliations, letting my tongue slip out to lap up the remains of our overlaid scents. I could taste us both as I licked the sticky surface, Professor Kitty and Miss Pet the adjunct, the sweat between our legs, the feminine taint of our groins and hips.

I raised my ass higher as I pushed my tongue across the seat. Never in my life had I abased myself so. I loved that I was being watched—it was so deliciously abject. My clitoris stammered like a tongue-tied schoolgirl. My soul was a knot. My mind was a net in which a trapped bird thrashed. Something bestial and cunning tore to shreds the last fraying strands of my inhibitions. I moaned aloud, not caring who heard. A powerful gift was promised. I was open to it. I wanted every sign of my humiliation to demonstrate my complete submission. I would be little Miss Pet forever, if only Bet would permit me to gaze upon her in her glory and let me beg at the shrine of her body.

With a start, I realized I was alone in the room. Bet was gone.

How long had I been in this position, performing my supplications, kissing the seat of my chair?

My God! My God! Why did I feel so empty! Wild-eyed, sniffing the air, as if like an animal at the eves of a storm, I was nothing but a hopelessly benighted fool, teetering at the edge of a chasm. One touch—and I’d be swallowed by the abyss.

Devastated by her absence, burdened by the hollowness of my soul, I crawled to the chair on which she had been sitting. I sniffed. I could still smell her. The seat was still warm.

With small tears just starting to dampen my eyes, I kissed the place she had rested her bum, and I let my body tremble with shameful joy. I thought that I could taste her. She had left her scent to aid me in my panicked lust. I licked up the traces of her vanished presence, trying to recall the image of her cunt. And there, at the verge, I moved my hand to touch myself.

As if my body had dropped into a trance, poetry filled my mind and an intense exclamation of pleasure stuttered at my fingertips. I was pinching a delicate flower. Lonely centuries of blossoms shattered their petals in one crowded instant. I shrieked as I felt time let go. I was speaking in tongues. I don’t recall if a single phrase I stammered out made the least bit of sense, but it didn’t matter. Everything was all right. I was brilliant.

The world went topsy-turvy as I collapsed and rolled onto my back, my dress pushed up over my belly, my naked cunt more open than ever in my life. The world was broken and utterly different. I spread my legs wider and let the empty room stare at my nakedness. I had been translated. Only an echo of what I once was remained.

Yes, the world was topsy-turvy, and it was longer my world.

After my heart found its bearings again, I reached for my cellphone. I took a single photo of my exposed cunt, still damp and loose, but now tamed and possessed. With a few clicks, I submitted the image to Professor Kitty’s Tumblr site. I wanted her to know who I was now—Miss Adjunct Instructor Pet. I wanted the whole, perverted world to know, every last haunted crack and corner of it.

A day later, in my departmental mailbox, I discovered a small package, which jingled cheerfully when I picked it up. Inside, I found a pink collar with the cutest little bell. The collar was inscribed with my name—Miss Pet.

I knew that later that night I would be stretched out on my bed, my new collar around my neck, me legs spread wide, my hand at my pussy forcing myself to experience degrees of pleasure that would terrify me, that would shock me into absolute submission, while my eyes gazed lovingly at my bedside shrine to Bet’s cunt.

Until then, I knew what I had to do.

I reached my hand beneath my skirt (of course, I wasn’t wearing panties) and slipped the whole collar up into my perpetually wet vagina. I would spend the rest of the day, teaching classes and meeting with students, with that thing inside me. Once in while, I could even hear the little bell jingle, a tiny muffled, dampened clink, the cutest knell to subtly toll each precise degree of the final abasement of Adjunct Instructor Pet, the lowest whore in the English Department.