The Professor's Captive Wife novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Under the Desk
Sylvie goes to her husband's office to ask for a divorce, ends up kneeling under his desk while a student offers him anything for a passing grade, and hears him refuse; then he locks the door.
I went to my husband's office to ask him one question, and I asked him for a divorce instead.
"I want a divorce, Eliot."
He didn't look up from the paper he was grading.
The green lamp on his desk was the only light in the room.
It was ten to six on a Tuesday in October, and the third floor of the English building was empty.
"Sit down, Sylvie."
"I don't want to sit down."
"Then stand." He made a small mark in the margin. "But say it again when I can see you."
He capped his pen.
He took off his wire glasses and set them on the stack of essays.
Then he looked at me.
Two years of marriage, and that look still went straight through my coat.
That was the problem.
He only looked at me in the dark.
"I want a divorce," I said.
"Why?"
I had practiced the real reason in the car.
You sleep on the couch in your study. You've never once said you love me. When I ask why you married me, you leave the room.
None of it came out.
"Everyone knows about you and your students," I said instead.
His face went very still.
"Everyone."
"Everyone at the faculty club. Everyone at your department parties. The wives tell me in the bathroom like they're doing me a favor."
"And you believe them."
"You've never given me a reason not to."
He stood up.
Eliot was tall, and his office was small, and the room got smaller.
Footsteps came down the hall outside.
Slow ones.
They stopped at his door.
He crossed the room in three strides, and I thought he was going to kiss me, and I hated how much I wanted him to.
He didn't.
He put his hand on the back of my head, his fingers sliding into my hair.
"Down," he said quietly. "Under the desk."
I laughed.
I couldn't help it.
It was low, and it surprised both of us.
He had said that word to me before, once, in the dark of our own bedroom.
I looked up at him with every dare I had left.
Then I let him press me down, and I folded myself into the space under his big oak desk.
The front panel went all the way to the floor.
It was black under there, and warm, and it smelled like old wood and him.
He sat down in his chair.
His knees closed around my shoulders.
His hand found my hair again and stayed there.
Someone knocked.
"Come in."
The door opened.
"Professor Thaxter? I'm sorry it's late. It's Tori. Tori Ingram, from the Austen seminar."
A girl's voice, young and shaking.
"Ms. Ingram. You've missed every paper this term."
"I know. I know, I work nights, I've been trying." Something slapped onto the desk above me. "That's six hundred dollars. It's everything I have."
"Take it back."
"Please. I need a C. If I don't pass your class I lose my scholarship and I can't graduate."
"Then write the papers."
"I can't, there isn't time." Her voice dropped. "I could do something else."
I heard a button.
Then another one.
My breath stopped.
Eliot's fingers curled tighter in my hair.
Not hard.
Just there.
Holding.
"I'll do anything," Tori said. "Anything you want. Nobody has to know."
I should have been furious.
I was kneeling under a desk while a girl took her shirt off for my husband.
Instead I was listening to every breath he took.
And I was wanting him so badly my thighs ached.
So I did the thing I'd never had the nerve to do in two years.
I put my hand on his knee.
Then I slid it slowly up the inside of his thigh.
His voice didn't change at all.
"Button your shirt, Ms. Ingram."
My hand climbed higher.
"I'm married," he said. "There's one woman I want in this room, and it isn't you."
His fingers tightened in my hair until my scalp tingled.
I bit my lip so I wouldn't make a sound.
"You can retake the paper with another reader. If you offer that to anyone on this faculty again, I'll report it myself."
"You don't understand," Tori said. "I was told you'd say yes."
"You were told wrong."
"You'll be sorry."
She was crying now.
The door slammed hard enough to rattle the window.
Neither of us moved.
The building went quiet again.
Then Eliot's hand left my hair, took my wrist, and pulled me up out of the dark.
I came up between his knees into the green lamplight.
My knot had come down.
My cheeks were burning.
He was breathing like he'd run up the stairs.
"Say it again," he said.
I made my voice steady.
"I want a divorce."
He stood up and walked past me to the door.
The lock clicked.
He came back slowly, taking off his watch and setting it on the bookshelf.
"Then say it," he said, "with my hands on you."
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