Totally.

Fucking.

Ruined.

I can’t fucking believe it. I can’t fucking believe Vlada. I’m so fucking angry I could scream—and I do scream a little, with the wind picking up higher and higher, tearing into my face and flinging my tears across the Scandinavian wilderness. They become ice almost instantly, floating in the wind just for seconds before being ripped apart.

This place really fucking hates humans.

It’s like, I know she was just trying to help. I know she saw me horny as fuck and wanted to offer some encouragement—and you know what? Good on her, man.

I’ve been so fucking horny for Professor Slate that just having someone else know it, and to encourage it, felt like crack fucking cocaine as she was talking to me. Plus she’s fucking hot, and clearly has had sex like, eighteen billion times, so it’s easy to take her seriously when she gives advice about attracting men.

It was, no joke, the most camaraderie I’ve felt with other women for years.

And then it was fucking ruined because Miss Mercenary apparently has the situational awareness of a blind-deaf turtle and now Professor Slate knows and that means I’ll never get to suck his beautiful cock, never get to surprise him with how much I adore him, never get to help him realize how easily I can be the one to repair his beautiful heart and let him know that he’s so important and wonderful and handsome…

“Shit!” I scream into the wind, banging the tire iron against the side of the wheels. “Shit, shit, shit!”

And it’s like, that I know Vlada was only trying to help and actually was being helpful only makes it all worse because that means I can’t be mad at her, which is what I really want to do right now.

Fuck!

The wind stopped; I had to stop screaming. I hit the wheels with the tire iron again in frustration, wishing I could take the last two minutes back.

“That must be some new form of auto maintenance I’m not aware of,” says Professor Slate, coming up behind me. “Maybe you could teach me about it?”

I wipe my face, hoping to god I’m not some raccoon-eyed mess. I do a quick check in the car window, pulling my cap down farther around my ears—I look fine. Red-faced but fine. Maybe it’s even attractive—rosy cheeks and all that.

It’s so cold and windy out here that all my tears have been freeze-dried before they got a chance to do any damage to my make up, which was minimal anyway. I mean I had to put on something, I’m stuck in a cabin for a month with the crush of my life, but I’m also not stupid, we were climbing a mountain today, god.

I turn to look at him, arms crossed, struggling not to start bawling. Fuck, he’s handsome. All I want to do, still, is jump his bones.

“You know,” he says, “it was a little ambiguous who was talking about who until you ran out of there.”

He’s smiling, like this is a joke. Like my own personal horror show is just fun for him. I feel a flare of anger building, not really sure where to place it.

“Listen, Alice…”

“Oh, god,” I press my fingers into my nose, hating myself. “Please, don’t do that right now.”

“Don’t do what?”

“The pity thing. The ‘you’re a great girl,’ thing. 'I really appreciate your hard work and ethics.' All of that. Like, if you value my self-esteem at all, please don’t tell me how great you think I am and then proceed not to sleep with me.”

“What makes you think I was going to say that?”

“Weren’t you?”

He laughs. “You’ve got a lot of fire, don’t you? I don’t think you’ve said this much to me since…ever.”

“We talked for like three hours after my interview. About the architecture in ancient Mayan cultures.”

He shakes his head. “No, I talked for three hours. You listened raptly, attentively, and nodded where appropriate and smiled the whole time like I was some rock star.”

I bite my lip. “What are people supposed to do? You’re interesting.”

“I am boring.” He laughed. “Especially talking about architecture.”

“Boring? But you—you’re…you explore unexplored places! You rock climb into untouched worlds! Cave dive into forgotten civilizations!”

“You can keep going, it’s all working for me.”

My heart is hammering so fucking hard. “What?”

“I’m attracted to you, Alice. I really am. You’re a gorgeous teenager with a, frankly, amazing body, who’s made it painfully obvious how much you hero worship me.”

I’m blushing so fucking hard my entire upper body feels feverish, despite the arctic lash of the wind. It’s like every cell has been replaced by a tiny, burning embarrassment generator and, oh god, my cunt is basically a faucet. I don’t even need to look down to know my underwear is a lost cause. My skin is tingling, my heart is jackhammering, and my mind has already launched into the kind of mental porno that would make a sailor blush, if sailors even blushed.

It’s like some bastardized version of a daydream/trauma loop. I imagine him—my professor, the living legend, the man I have wanted since the first moment I saw him—suddenly grabbing me by my parka, spinning me against the side of the car, and kissing me so hard that I forget my own name. His hands are scalding. They tear through my thermal layers, and when he finally gets through the fleece and poly-blends and base layers and gets his fingers on my skin, I shiver so hard I think I might snap in half.

In my fantasy, he doesn’t care that we’re in the middle of a frozen parking lot with two other women inside the cabin less than fifty feet away. He doesn’t care that I’m nineteen and he’s basically a god—or that I’m a blushing, awkward, desperate mess. No, in my fantasy, he grinds me against the snow-dusted steel and yanks my tights down with one hand, and with the other, he pins both my wrists above my head and tells me I’m the prettiest little thing he’s ever seen and he’s going to prove it, right here, right now, and for all time.

And then—then the other two women come outside, drawn by the sound (the sounds, oh god, the sounds I’d be making) and instead of pretending not to see, they just stand there and watch, eyes wide. At first, they’re shocked, but then they smirk and turn to each other and in a weird hottie solidarity pact, they start cheering him on, egging him to pound me harder, to show me what a real man feels like, and to not stop until I can’t walk straight for a week.

It’s like a fever dream: in the fantasy, the other women—Vlada, Professor Habermann, and even the redheaded barista from the campus café (who just happens to show up here with us for some fucking reason, because that’s how these things work in my brain)—they worship him with the same fever I do. Every touch of his hand, every word from his mouth, every micro-expression and moan that escapes his lips is like a benediction.

It’s not competitive, though. Not really. It’s collaborative, a symphony of female effort and devotion, synchronizing our bodies and minds to please him on every possible level.

In this fantasy, we’re all so fucking obsessed with him that we know each other’s schedules by heart, and the only jealousy is the good kind—the kind that makes us try harder, makes us team up to surprise him, makes us spend hours plotting new ways to make him gasp or groan or lose control in a way that he never would in his buttoned-up, academic reality. There’s a silent, mutual understanding: his pleasure is the highest possible good, the organizing principle of our weird little universe.

We are his gaggle, his harem, his trophy wives and intellectual concubines, and none of us are ashamed. We dress up for him even when we’re supposed to be in the middle of nowhere, we giggle and primp and touch each other and compete to see who can get his attention first.

When he’s done with us, we’re left in a dazed, blissed-out pile, half naked and shivering, but so fucking happy it’s like we’ve been let in on the ultimate secret to the universe.

I want to be his. I want to be the reason he can’t concentrate, the thing he has trouble sleeping about, the girl who ruins him for other women. I want to be the best thing that ever happened to him, even if it’s only for a month in Norway.

Is that so pathetic? God, probably, but it doesn’t matter. It’s what I want.

I snap back to reality just in time to realize I’m staring at Professor Slate with my mouth slightly open and my pupils dilated like I’m a cartoon in heat.

He’s still talking. Or maybe he just started again. I missed a few words but that’s fine, because what he says next matters way, way more than anything I could have imagined:

“I’m a professional, Alice, but no man is that professional. I was really lucky you’re so well-qualified for this job, or else I would have felt like a real dick for hiring you as my assistant.”

“What do you mean?”

Everything is so hard to process. His beard is so fucking sexy. I want to live in it.

“I mean you’re really good at this. You have the grades and you topped the classes for the exhibitions the university held for two semesters straight. You’ve put in time at internships at digs all over the country—you know, at home—and wrote essays, three of them, actually, about the how to properly clean ancient bones for identification when no traditional tools are available. It eases my conscience, is all.” His hand takes a hold of mine. “Because if you had been bad at this, and I hired you anyway, then it would have been painfully obvious how much I want to get to know you better.”

He’s being sweet: “get to know you better.”

I know he was being sweet and it was sweet that he was being sweet, but I translated all my lust into my face right then and asked, “What exactly do you mean by ‘get to know me better,’ Professor Slate?”

“Call me Nolan.” He smiles now. “And for starters—”

“Trespassers!”

We both turn, startled by the sudden rough voice carried across the wind. What we see is a strange, completely unexpected sight—a bent-over crone dressed all in rags, her skin mottled and gray, fingernails like claws. She looks like something out of a cartoon, except she’s real, which only makes her all the more terrifying. One big, black eye staring at us, the other stitched shut; teeth mostly gone from the front of her mouth; nose upturned like a pig’s.

“Trespassers!” she calls again. “Be gone from here! Be gone from this place! You do not belong. Get out of here before it is too late.”

Professor Slate—Nolan? Mmph—steps forward, smiling friendly, holding his hands up.

“I’m really sorry if we’ve disturbed you somehow, ma’am,” he says. “But we have a permit to rent here for thirty days, straight from the owner. If you’d like, I can show you the paperwork—”

“There is no paperwork with authority high enough to allow the desecration of holy ground!” the witch roars. Her voice is about three times as big as she is. “You must leave here and never look back! It is unsafe. It is unseemly. The gods are watching even now, and they do not approve; they do not want you here. Turn back, turn away, before—”

A gunshot fires across the mountain. Nolan ducks and pulls me down into the snow with him, on top of me—so protective, I could just fucking die in his arms—and we turn again to see Vlada walking toward us, gun raised high in the air with smoke floating out from the barrel. I take a long moment to inhale his deeply sexy scent. Masculine and earthy, like cedar.

“Stupid old bat,” she says. “We have had issues with her in the past. Always this superstitious bullshit. Pay her no mind.”

Nolan stands back up, dusting himself off, and then helps me up.

“Thank you for the, er...assist, Vlada, but, really, I’d prefer to talk this out with this…lovely woman…”

We turn back toward the crone, but she is gone, utterly disappeared. There are no tracks in the frozen snow—none to say where she has gone, and none either to track where she had come from.