The Seducer (3 page)

Michael's dark eyes shifted languorously from underneath their long lashes towards the alarm clock. “8:31 a.m.” it announced in bright red neon, reinforcing his fiancée's message. “Okay,” he relented. He swung his lean, muscular legs out of bed, to gather enough momentum for a quick shower. But then he changed his mind, noticing that Karen had removed her pajamas and was sliding on a pair of underwear. He swiftly grabbed her from behind.

Her spine straightened defensively. “Geesh! You startled me. Aren't you going to shower already?”

“I prefer to spot wash like Chairman Mao.” He had read a recent biography that claimed that the Chinese dictator only “washed” himself in women: a practice that may have been somewhat unhygienic, but that had other health benefits. “You're so sexy in those granny panties. Grrrr, you turn me on, Baby,” Michael growled, simultaneously making light of his own desire and of his fiancée's need to de-eroticize her body.

Stung, Karen clamed up. “Well, if you don't find me attractive, then go take a cold shower!” This time her pride was at stake. But even then, only momentarily. Whenever she felt that Michael eluded her grasp, she became sweet and clingy again. Sometimes he hoped that his fiancée would stay mad at him a bit longer. At least that would give him a few extra hours of fun with other chicks. But no such luck ... Oh well, you can't win them all, he sighed, regretting that he couldn't even flirt with his own fiancée. In the beginning, Karen's seriousness had made him feel like she was more mature than him. But at deflating times like these, he thought that she should loosen up a bit.

The thought of looseness reminded him of Lisa, his student in first period French 102. Lisa was everything that Karen was not and then some. Michael released his fiancée without too much regret. In fact, he was suddenly in a hurry to get to class on time. He looked forward to explaining the distinction between the
imparfait
and the
passé composé
while scoping out Lisa's double D boobs. The way she emphasized her chest in low-cut blouses—those protruding mounds of flesh that lengthened like ripe bananas whenever she leaned down to pick up a pen that she had deliberately dropped on the floor—made him tingle with the desire to scale those natural twin peaks with his hands, tongue and lips.

Karen had had a few moments to recover from his jab. She started to have second thoughts, feeling uncomfortable about letting Michael out of the house in such a dangerous condition. “You don't give up, do you?” she smiled sheepishly at him. “Maybe we have time for a little quickie,” she relented. On the one hand, she'd starve herself the rest of the day to lose those stubborn extra pounds. And, on the other, no matter what Catholic reservations she may have had about premarital sex, Karen considered it her womanly duty to satisfy her man.

But Michael could sense that, in her heart of hearts, she still felt guilty about it. Her pangs of conscience generally coincided with the times she spent with her family and Sunday mornings at church. She even stopped going to confession once she actually had something to confess. But Michael's needs usually swayed her, playing upon her preemptive jealousy. Karen noticed the way other women looked at her fiancé. Why give another woman the opportunity to take care of a problem that she could, when hard-pressed, efficiently handle herself? Karen emboldened herself and firmly grasped his member. Despite his hurry, Michael wasn't one to miss an opportunity. In a race against the clock, he hastily propped Karen up against the sink. He wrapped her legs around his waist, then glided in between her lips, which, despite their intimidating dryness, quickly pushed him to the brink. Michael knew that he could rest easy on that score since, fortunately for him though somewhat less fortunately for her, Karen had been on the pill since the age of twelve to alleviate the symptoms of endometriosis. He then kissed his fiancée quickly on the cheek, said “I love you” and wiped himself clean with a piece of toilet tissue.

“I love you too,” she replied. But the sense of postcoital guilt was already imprinted upon her features. “You're thirty years old. You can decide for yourself and do whatever the hell you want! You don't need a goddamn preacher to tell you what to do,” he'd exclaim whenever she made him lose his temper over what he perceived as her outdated prudishness.

“Please leave my priest out of it. He's got nothing to do it with it.”

Bullshit! Michael thought whenever he became fed up with frustration. “Don't you think it's a bit strange that you still live with your parents at your age?”

Although Karen fell head over heals in love with Michael practically from the moment that she laid eyes on him, she didn't want to rush into a serious relationship. She'd been burned by men before. This time she wanted to play it safe. Yet no matter how much she tried to protect herself, as far as Michael was concerned, Karen's heart led the way far ahead of her head. The only thing she could control was when she actually moved in with him. On this issue alone she put her foot down. Like a good Catholic girl, she told him they'd live together only after they got married. “It would kill my folks,” Karen tried to explain the situation to Michael more diplomatically. She wanted him to understand the disappointment her parents would feel if she openly lived with a man, as opposed to doing what she was doing now: which is to say, sneak into his apartment in the mornings and afternoons and return home in the evenings, feeling ashamed and impure.

But Michael refused to be alone. Though completely untouched by the suffering of others, a sense of painful emptiness overcame him late at night, when he went to sleep without holding a woman—and not just any woman, but
his
woman—in his arms. What the hell! If she won't commit to me, then I won't commit to her either. He made a conscious decision to continue his philandering ways while giving Karen the distinct impression that they were dating exclusively. “You're the woman of my life,” he'd declare looking dreamingly into his fiancée's eyes, right after he had been with one or two women on that day. Which was only fair, Michael thought, savoring the duplicity. Because in his mind, Karen's choice was telling. Her parents and their antiquated morals were far more important to her than he was. In which case, he felt, rationalizing the worst of his behavior for the smallest of her infractions, he was also entitled to pursue other priorities. At the moment, he had three of them to be exact: not counting, that is, the scores of flings and one-night stands.

Michael walked briskly towards the
Department of French and Italian
. Since he was running late, he rushed into his office without stopping to banter, as usual, with fellow graduate students. As soon as he opened the door, Mireille, the officemate who had provided him with pleasant companionship for the past two years, greeted him. She lunged into his arms and plastered her lips upon his.

“I'm late to class!” Michael announced as soon as he managed to regain his breath. “Which, incidentally, starts in about 30 seconds,” he added, glancing at his watch.

At the moment, however, Mireille had a more pressing concern than his class. “Double D dropped by earlier this morning looking for you,” she said with an ambiguous look in her eyes, half-taunting, half-reproachful. “Double D” was their code name for Lisa, his well-endowed student from French 101. Michael preferred to avoid, as much as possible, crossing wires among his women. But Double D came by his office so frequently during the past few weeks that Mireille would have to be blind not to get the picture. Not that he felt that bad about it. After all, Mireille was no saint either. She was engaged to Jack, an all­American blond, tall law school student, through whom she hoped to obtain U.S. citizenship.

“Don't get me wrong, I love my fiancé,” Mireille had said to Michael when she first informed him that she was engaged. But this exchange of factual information didn't prevent either of them from taking every possible opportunity to lock the office door and do whatever it took to make sure the desk would need cleaning up with plenty of
Kleenex
tissues dabbed in
Evian
water afterwards.

Although Michael never erred on the side of caution in his actions, he was usually pretty careful with his words. “That girl's so huge, she's a freak show!” he tried to make Mireille feel more at ease with the whole situation.

Fortunately, Mireille wasn't one to hold a grudge for long. “See you at lunch,” she confirmed. “
Tu me manques
,” she added sweetly in her native tongue.

In moments like these, Michael felt that it might be wrong to lead on the poor girl into believing that he loved her. But what else could a man do when, after having carnal relations with a woman on a regular basis for two years, she whispered
je t'aime
into his ear with such genuine ardor several times a week? Could he afford to say nothing in response? Michael was clever enough to realize that when you mess around with a chick for that long, you've got to have the decency to tell her “I love you” once in awhile.

Besides, truth be told, he was genuinely fond of Mireille. He hated to sound superficial, but what got in the way of a deeper commitment was the gap between her two front teeth and her excessively lanky body, which looked downright skeletal at the shoulders and hips. Which is why he preferred to view her from behind: say, bent over a desk. If he positioned her like a master photographer and the light seeped through the blinds at just the right angle, one could plausibly claim that Mireille looked like a model, at least one of those anorexic, Twiggy types.

Once in class, Michael found it difficult to focus on explaining the difference between
l'imparfait
and
le passé compose
. As usual, Lisa made goo-goo eyes at him from the front row. She occasionally passed her tongue over her lips and snickered into her hand, amused by his frazzled reaction. Though certainly no prude, Michael was somewhat disconcerted by Lisa's behavior. He was quite sure that the other students must have noticed that she received what could be easily misconstrued as “preferential treatment” from the teacher. Of course, in class, Michael tried his best to be friendly and fair to everyone. He joked around and bantered with the boys and was as avuncular as an exceedingly horny twenty-something male could be to barely legal girls.

But Lisa violated the unspoken code by making suggestive comments to him, since part of the thrill of seduction was being acknowledged as the teacher's pet by her classmates. She got it into her head that her main academic goal that semester would be to seduce her male instructors. She selected her courses carefully on the basis of who would be most open to such extracurricular activities. As it turns out, Lisa's judgment proved impeccable: she was 3 for 0. Michael was her favorite instructor, since being with him was not just about the thrill of the chase, but also about the pleasure of the game.

Michael knew the risk he was taking. He realized that if he conveyed favoritism towards one of his students, some of her classmates, particularly the weaker ones who got, God forbid, a B- in a gut course like French, might complain to the department chair about his conduct. Then he could kiss his teaching assistantship goodbye. On the other hand, Michael thought, Lisa's tits were well worth the risk. No matter how much he tried to avoid looking at her ample chest during class, his gaze was magnetically drawn to it. Quite simply, Lisa's boobs had the capacity to hypnotize a man more than a beautiful woman's eyes. Which, when he considered the matter more coolly, right after he had taken care of business, didn't make a lot of sense, because Lisa wasn't even his type.

Aesthetically speaking, Michael preferred medium-sized implants that give the chest the perfect hemispherical look favored by men's magazines. Erotically, he preferred small boobs with tiny sensitive nipples that became instantly erect under his touch. But reason had little to do with his fascination with Lisa's chest. When she came to his office hours for the first time to allegedly complain about her low exam grade—a D+, appropriately enough—he offered to give her a make-up exam which turned out to be the best oral he'd ever had. That morning, Lisa surreptitiously slipped him a note as he walked around the classroom, checking to see if the students had done their conjugation exercises: “
See you at our usual place. I cunt wait!
” Michael read her girlish cursive with a bemused smile. Although a stay-at-home mom well into her thirties, Lisa had the sense of humor of an eighth-grader. A woman after my own taste, he thought approvingly.

Since Mireille usually waited for him in their shared office, the love nest he reserved for Lisa turned out to be even less glamorous. They made out in a handicapped bathroom with a single stall. Michael recalled the first time Lisa unhooked her bra for him. Her ample chest cascaded forward, overflowing into his open hands. He placed his perspiring palms under her breasts gently lifting them up, one at a time. “Double D's?” he estimated with closed eyes.

“How did you guess?” she marveled at his scientific accuracy.

“I'm an expert,” he modestly replied. He then proceeded to prove his point by massaging, licking and sucking those mounds of flesh for the next five minutes, until someone began knocking with a sense of urgency on the bathroom door.

“It must be a deaf person,” Michael whispered, zipping up his pants. He had a look of regret each time Lisa stuffed those awesome mounds of flesh back into her bra, as if putting the genie back into the magic bottle.

When Michael emerged out of the bathroom followed by Lisa, as if by sheer coincidence, Mireille crossed their path, on her way to the Xerox machine.

He noticed her look of wounded dignity. “Hey!” Michael placed his hand on her shoulder, to appease her. “Do you need help with this stuff?” he offered to help her carry the pile of papers.