May 23rd, 2024

Sofia needed coffee.

Everyone did, really. Thank goodness the camp reeked of it.

Because the drive had gone so awry, in order to stay on schedule, the group’s go time was pushed even earlier than planned. It was just past dawn; birds chirped in a sky still bleary with streaks of orange, the air still damp with morning dew.

Luckily, Professor Artom sat in front of a cast iron pan on hot coals, fully dressed and handing out breakfast items and cups of joe to students. Sofia yawned and shuffled over to him, still in her sleepwear.

“Morning,” he said with a small smile, still turning the previous night around in his mind. He offered her a chicken link on a fork; she balked. “Did you eat?”

“Last thing I wanna do in the morning is eat,” she muttered, her voice edgy. He raised his brow a bit. So she wasn’t a morning person.

“Really? I can’t fathom that. My body starts cannibalizing itself soon as I let it.”

“I run a little more efficiently,” she replied.

“You are gonna need a lot of protein for today.”

“My coffee and inhaler will get me to lunch.”

Professor Artom shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

He poured coffee into a metal cup and handed it to her. She took a sip and immediately made a face.

“What the fuck is this?”

He leaned back slightly in response to her strong reaction.

“Well, excuse me. Folgers Instant.”

“Oh my God,” she grunted. “I’ll kill you, Ben. This is prison shit.”

He chuckled dryly. “Well it’s all I brought, princess, so keep drinking. You’re not gettin’ anything better out here.”

“Like hell I’m not,” she muttered, stomping off to her cabin. To his surprise, she returned with a full-on French press contraption and a large tin of espresso and got to work. His lonely carafe of boiled instant grew cold as students began to crowd around her, thankful for the chance to start their day with real coffee.

Finally, she offered him a cup. He declined, despite the heavenly scent, purely out of principle.

The group left camp still tired, but marginally more refreshed and ready to face the day ahead. As for the professor, he couldn’t help but feel a renewed, familiar anxiety around the little curlyheaded minx by his side—quite literally. She hiked practically glued to him, ogling him, tugging his sleeve to point things out. It was distracting. It was slowing him down.

But he would’ve been lying if he said he minded. Though he did his best to remain present and involved on the journey, giving engaging, impromptu lectures as they trekked, mentally he was still at the previous night’s bonfire. His body against hers, her voice gently whispering him into a warm, inviting sleep, his arms around her…

He winced. It had certainly been a little embarrassing; he shuddered a bit just remembering it. But with the embarrassment came breathtaking skips of his heart. His foundation had cracked. The finish line was too close. Propriety be damned; administration be damned; power dynamics be damned.

His gaze caught on that necklace of hers again. Today, it was particularly distracting.

As the group journeyed through a small but dense wood, a flash of an unmistakable shade of purple some distance away caught Sofia’s eye.

“O, Fortuna,” she muttered to herself, brimming with excitement, her boots scurrying through thickets of greenery underfoot.

“Sofia?” Professor Artom called.

“Be right back!”

In shrubs of vibrant violet, she had indeed found her first bona fide patch of Solanum somnum in the wild. What luck! The damn thing was so rare she hadn’t counted on finding any this early on. She wielded her utility knife and quickly, carefully harvested all she could find. There weren’t many, but just enough to concoct a potion to rival those of Dioscorides.

Jogging back to her waiting tribe up ahead with innocent explanations of mistaken floral identity, Sofia’s brain buzzed with and when she could begin the distillation process. The small kit she’d brought would take a while by fire, but it would have to do.

Their hike concluded when they summited the peak, finished their field notes, and made their way back to camp just as the sun dipped below the horizon. Sofia wolfed down her dinner and, at the risk of appearing asocial, withdrew to her little cabin, all too anxious to prepare the flower she’d only ever seen in a lab.

Late at night, over an hour after the group retired, Sofia snuck out of her cabin with her materials, made a small fire, and packed the miniature still with the plant materials. The entire time she boiled, evaporated, and extracted, her heart raced with anticipation. She sketched out a rough dosage chart based on her notes and data and made sure she had various allergy treatments in her first aid kit—charcoal, hydrocortisone, epinephrine, and the like. If she were going to act irresponsibly, she figured she at least ought to be responsible about it.

Finally, an hour later, the little pot had reduced sufficiently to just under a cup of syrupy, lavender-colored liquid. The air smelled exquisite, lily-like. By the time she cleaned up and extinguished her fire and trudged back to her cabin, the liquid had cooled, but her head hadn’t—Sofia could tell the steam had given her a mild head high. Encouraged by this little preview, she gleefully imbibed a few teaspoons of the sweet, floral syrup before pouring the rest into two vials and corking them.

It was late and she was quite tired, so to keep awake she kept ambulant. She engaged in her nightly ablutions before taking a leisurely walk back to her cabin.

A little over half an hour later, she noticed a little nausea and vertigo. The room began to tip and spin. A wave of strong drowsiness washed over her that differed from the day’s fatigue. Her eyes fluttered; she tipped to the side and stumbled a bit before stabilizing herself against the wall. She set herself down on the bed and started giggling, hard.

What the hell was so funny? She definitely looked like an idiot right now. That was funny. There was a tiny green caterpillar inching across the windowsill. He was funny, too.

Ben Artom was even funnier, intentionally and not. He made jokes that were funny, sure, but the way he sneezed was funny, the way he’d struggled with the projector during that one lecture was funny, and that he seemingly hadn’t even realized how funny it was made it magnitudes funnier.

Funniest of all was that the more she thought of these things, the more she had graphic thoughts of fucking him stupid.

Whoa. She gasped, brought her pillow to her face and bit it, realizing her groin was now wet and pulsing desperately. She blurrily recalled some of her test subjects. The extract had affected everyone differently: some had developed the giggles, some dizziness, and some had indeed mentioned increased sexual arousal.

But this was ludicrous, almost painful. She laid down on her side, scribbling notes in her pad with one hand and stroking herself with the other, trying to sound coherent, praying the words would make sense in the morning. Her loins throbbed heavily, her thoughts growing bolder, intrusively uninhibited.

His office. His desk. His large, callused hands sweeping books and papers to the floor with careless abandon, bending her over and penetrating her like they had a deadline. The university library, her body pressed against his as he stood shoved against a shelf of dusty tomes. Her hand clamped around his mouth, him desperately trying to stay quiet as her finger penetrated him, made him see stars.

The lab. The great outdoors. The back seat of his cramped hatchback. His eyes glass, head air, cock rock. In her mouth. In her pussy. In her ass.

Pencil down. Two hands were better than one. Sofia laid asquirm, her legs trembling, mind revving, fingers beckoning herself into white-hot febrile hell.

Yes, this would do. This would do so very nicely.