Author's Mistake (Jenlisa)

Chapter 3

JENNIE POV:

It was a few weeks into the term and things were progressing at the usual rate. Denim Shorts, who it turned out was called Karina, had been stopping by my office for 'quick chats.'

Always wearing something revealing, always needing my help.

She had written a couple of short stories for my class and both involved tales of being chased by socially awkward teenage boys. She claimed they were fiction but they were obviously thinly veiled accounts of things that had happened to her.

'Write what you know' is tried and true advice, but only when you can bring fresh insight to what you know.

Her stories were too literal, there were no original observations, nothing truly engaging. But if the stories couldn't hold my intellectual interest, the topics were revealing in other ways.

They were telling me that she was a girl who was looking for someone who knew what they were doing. And the small looks I'd caught in our private sessions told me that the gender of that person might not be as important as skill and experience.

I didn't know what karina's orientation was and I didn't care. Not every one of my targets was gay or bisexual, in fact many of them weren't.

Generally, it wasn't much of an obstacle. A female lover in your time at university was practically par for the course when it came to straight girls. That was the cliché. And it had certainly held up in my experience.

Forbidden fruit is sweet to the tongue, no one understands that better than me.

I was in my office, the door open. Karina was due imminently and I was looking forward to sitting in this small space with her, the possibility of something happening would sit between us, layering the meeting with hidden meanings.

We were still at the stage where I was giving her only just enough to keep things interesting, which was to say practically nothing.

A third party in the room would detect no flirtation from my end and very little from hers. But karina would know that maybe there was... something.

And that's all I'd let her know for now. Until the last possible moment I would draw out the tension, teasing it to breaking point.

It was how I kept my girls focused on me enough to do something they knew was wrong.

At first it would be just an idea, nothing they'd ever act on. Perish the thought. But over time, it would grow into desire that became need. When they finally crossed the line with me, it was momentous to them and deeply satisfying, I knew.

Karina would be in the first stages: not yet ready for me, but the idea would be at the edge of her mind. I liked knowing that. It made me tingle with anticipation.

Introduced to the pleasures of younger women. It had been a bad year. I'd just turned thirty and I was struggling with my first novel, which had already been commissioned.

I'd had a few early successes with short stories that had led to the book deal, but when it came time to write, the pressure of expectation blocked me from producing anything significant.