Natalie Plays with Mr Herrick

I was feeling nervous that day; the students walking past me between periods seemed different, almost dangerous. I was afraid to be near them, I realized. I'd never looked at them that way before. I was nervous, strung out, the debris of my classroom reminding me of my shame. Just that morning, I'd gone to write the agenda up on the whiteboard beneath the date; the marker wouldn't write, though, and I knew why. And as I stood there out in the hall with my coffee and two of my teacher friends, waiting for the bell to ring, it came to me: I wasn't afraid to be near my students.

I was only afraid to be near one of them.

And, just as I thought this, she came up the stairs. My stomach dropped toward my feet; uselessly, I looked away down the hall, but of course she was moving toward me anyway. I swallowed in a dry throat as she came closer, and for a second or two everything seemed unreal. Like it wasn't really happening, though of course it was; she was, indeed, sliding toward me, right there in front of two other teachers and dozens of passing students, her messenger bag draped casually across her body with the strap passing tightly between her small breasts.

I forced a smile; hers, in return, was the smirk of a predator. "Good morning, Natalie," I said as naturally as I could.

"Good morning, Scott." Thank God, she said it softly enough that my two colleagues didn't hear.

"Don't call me that," I grated. My eyes darted around; I was certain everyone could hear us, but she plainly didn't feel the same as she rolled her eyes.

"Please," she said flatly, still mercifully soft. "I drank most of your cum yesterday while I shoved my finger up your asshole. So I think I can call you by your first name if I want." And, with a flourish, her narrow ass flowing smoothly from side to side, she headed off toward her AP calculus class, flipping her hair behind her ear with that maddening confidence of hers.

And if I hadn't known I was in trouble before, I certainly knew it then.

* * *

It had started two days before, at our Student Council meeting. Or maybe it had started on the first day of school, or even three years ago; as I thought about it later, there always had been a certain tension between us. She'd been the brightest student in my class twice, first as a junior in US History and now as a senior in AP Euro, and it had always been clear that she thought she was smarter than I was. Her hand was always raised, her essays always perfect; her analysis was at least as good as mine, and nobody could remember a time when she'd been unprepared for class.

And always, that confidence; she had the earliest birthday in her grade ever since kindergarten, and that made her lord it over her classmates with an easy, insolent sense of self-assurance. They'd made her chairperson of the Student Council, and she'd never bothered to let anyone else think they could do the job any better. That meant she'd been working very closely with me this year, and I'd been intimidated from the first moment.

She knew it too, naturally.

She was eighteen by the first week in November. And that gave her even more status among her peers, a certain arrogance based on the fact that she could vote, buy lottery tickets, and smoke cigarettes nearly two months before anyone else. She carried herself differently now too, with an unconscious new swagger that emphasized her slim, firm curves.

And of course I'd noticed; any male teacher, no matter what their age, marital status, or years of experience, who tells you they don't notice their female students' bodies is lying shamelessly. And most of the girls knew it, I figured. But there was a tacit boundary there; I thought of my high school girls like pictures in magazines. Sure they were sexy, but they were somehow unreal, or at least untouchable.

Except that Natalie was quite real. She'd always been something of a close talker, but lately during Student Council executive meetings she'd been more brazen about invading others' space, especially during arguments. I could tell it was making her fellow students uncomfortable, and I could sometimes see them glancing my way, worried, wanting me to do something; as the advisor, I knew I should.

So I had, two days before. The meeting was a morning session of the executive board, with a long and painful discussion about lining up sponsorship for the car wash next month. I'd watched guiltily as Natalie dominated the discussion, nearly forcing the other students into agreeing with her on every major point. She was not exactly a bully, really; she was just smooth, and supremely confident that she knew best. So she'd moved effortlessly through the others like a semi truck through a hayfield, wrapping up the meeting precisely on time with a brisk tap of her gavel.

"That's it, everybody," she said coolly. "Mr Herrick? Got anything to add?" She used the dismissive tone she usually used with me, stopping just short of mockery.

"Actually, Natalie, there was something I wanted to talk to you about just for a few seconds," I blurted. I could see the other students' eyes widen; I was a popular teacher, and most of them liked me, but still it was unusual to make demands of Natalie Cross.

She stared at me for a beat. "Of course, Mr Herrick. That'll do it, folks; see you guys next week, same time, same place." She stared again. "If that's okay, Mr Herrick."

"Sure." There was the usual confusion as the students gathered their bags and papers and fled for their ten minutes' free time before their first class. At last it was just me and Natalie; I sat behind my desk, she perched herself up on a counter. The door was open, students rustling past in the hall. I cleared my throat.

"Awesome meeting, Natalie," I began. "You guys got a lot done."

She stared at me. "Um. Thanks."

"Yeah." She could tell how nervous I was; I was never good at confronting problem students, even in my own classroom. Not directly; I generally just took points off. "Well, you might want to work on letting the others start taking charge of some of these things. You're a senior, after all; one of them will need to take over after you graduate."

"I see." She crossed her legs, the jeans shifting across her firm muscles. "Like, who?"

I blinked. "Who what?"

She smiled in condescension. "Who do you think will take over from me? Because," she paused, "I'm pretty sure nobody can."

"Uh, well, sure," I stammered. "Right. That's because you won't let them show what they can do. Sometimes."

She raised her nose, just so, and looked calmly at me. She was in complete control. "Okay." She spoke slowly and loudly, like she was dealing with a preschooler. "I'm not sure what you're saying. You don't think I'm doing well?"

"No no, you're doing very well. It's not that."

"Because I think you know this Student Council of yours is nothing unless I take charge."

"Sorry?"

"Yes." She stood up and bent from the waist to gather her messenger bag. "Between you and me, Mr Herrick. I'm just being honest, you understand."

"Sure. Sure."

The bag came up off the ground, slipped over her head, the strap finding its spot between her breasts. "Because I think that if I wasn't running this club, it wouldn't really be doing anything. You agree?"

"Well..."

"Right." She moved quickly, surely across the room toward me."I think your club advisor stipend would go away if, you know, the Student Council were to fall apart. Like, disband." Her voice grew lower. "Without someone strong in charge."

By this time, I was just along for her ride. I swallowed in a dry throat.

"Like, I'm strong. And the others aren't." She let that sink in. "They'd let Student Council collapse. I'll be honest, Mr Herrick: I don't think you'd be able to stop it." She sighed. "You do want me to be honest about this, right?"

"Umm, yeah." I scrambled for a teacher cliché. "We don't improve unless we, like, confront our problems."

"Right." She was coming around the side of the desk, her eyes never leaving mine. "The stakes are too high, after all. The Council, your stipend, my resume... leave it all to me, Mr Herrick. Don't you worry yourself about anything." She smiled sweetly, falsely, and leaned further in. I could smell her latte-flavored breath now, see the impeccable purplish lipstick, the tiny nose stud. "I am strong, Mr Herrick, and you know it. Don't you?"

"Of, of course Natalie."

"Yeah." She breathed deeply now, almost kneeling beside my chair. "Strong. Powerful. Tell me that, Mr Herrick."

I was confused. "Tell you what?"

"Tell me how powerful I am. I know these other kids here think I am, but I need to hear a teacher say it. I need that. So say it, Mr Herrick." She paused. "You want to help me achieve my needs, Mr Herrick, don't you?"

"You..." I took a breath. I had a distant awareness that students were still passing quietly in the hall just outside the open door. A vague fear sat in my chest. "You're very powerful, Natalie."

"Hmm." She pursed the scarlet lips; her eyes closed briefly. "Yes. And strong."

"You're very strong, Natalie." By now, I just wanted this to be over; the bell would ring soon, and I was vaguely aware of how this might look to anyone coming in. "You're the strongest student in the school."

"Woman. The strongest woman, Mr Herrick."

"Yes," I agreed. "You're the strongest, most powerful woman in the school." A change had come over Natalie; she was holding her breath now, her eyes wide and solemn, her cheeks flushed. I had no clue what was going on. "You're more powerful than I am."

"Ohh." She gasped, a small gasp, with a faint unplanned smile. For a moment, her clever face looked radiantly beautiful. "So nice of you to say." Her hand moved fluidly, deliberately, toward my face. "That's why you're my favorite teacher." The beauty was gone now, an ironic and mocking look in her eyes. Her nails suddenly, shockingly, drifted down my cheek and danced faintly along my neck.

"We'll talk some more later," she whispered; by this time, her face was close enough that it sounded like a shout. "I'll show you how strong I am, how powerful." She leaned way in now, her lips very close to my ear. "After school today? Or before school tomorrow?"

I had no idea what to say, and I had even less of an idea why I said what I said. "I've got a prep second period today," I said pitifully; I was supposed to have snack-line duty, but at that moment it was somehow the furthest thing from my mind. "How about then?"

"Hmmm." Right in my ear, and all at once I was aware of her closeness, her smell, the touch of her hand on me, of her breath across my ear. "I'll see if I can make it. After all," she said lightly, her lips now touching my earlobe, "I'm a very busy woman."

And then it was over. I felt like I'd been pulled from a warm oven, and there stood Natalie Cross, flipping her hair behind her ear. She peered down at me. "I need a pass to class; I have to go pee on the way to first period."

I nearly knocked over my pencil box in my haste to scrawl a quick note to her physics teacher. She stood over me the entire time, placidly gazing at me. "Your class is coming in soon," she pointed out, perfectly natural, like she was describing the weather. "I'd recommend wiping my lipstick off your ear before they arrive. We wouldn't want people to talk." A smirk fleeted across her face as she headed for the open door. Just as she was about to leave, though, she turned thoughtfully toward me. "Oh, and adjust your pants too. Your penis is hard."

And then she was gone. Of course, she was right; I was so hard it hurt. I flushed with shame, turned my chair away from the door, and hastily adjusted myself as best I could.

* * *

I was not terribly surprised when Natalie did not appear during my second-period prep, though I sat there completely out of my wits the entire time and blew off my duty. I had no idea what had happened, what she'd done to me suddenly, or what I was feeling or thinking; she'd destroyed me, effortlessly, as one would erase a word.

As luck would have it, I didn't have Natalie's class that day; our school's rotating schedule meant that I'd be seeing her first thing the next morning. So, since I didn't see her anymore that day, I had a few opportunities to lose myself in my work. The sophomores came and went, came and went; we studied the early Industrial Revolution, my tongue automatically repeating the same anecdotes and jokes I told every year, trying hard to make the kids care about the enclosure movement and the importance of the seed drill.

In the back of my mind, though, was the painful awareness that something important and dangerous had happened with Natalie. I had no idea how or why she'd done it, but she'd taken me completely under her control, with no effort at all; worse, she wanted me to know it, to think about it, to dwell on it. That's why she didn't come by during second period, nor after school, although I sat there fretting the entire time. I was an experienced teacher, a respected member of the community, a war veteran; there was no way she should have been so easily able to so completely dominate my thoughts.

What made it worse, of course, was that she hadn't actually done anything, really. She'd come close to me and talked to me, but she did that to everyone. She'd leaned over and grazed my ear with her lips; inappropriate, sure, but nothing more than people sometimes did when telling each other secrets. She'd gotten me to say a few things; odd things, sure, but not particularly bad. And then she'd crudely, calmly, pointedly, noticed my erection and told me to deal with it. I can't say I'd ever heard that from any student before, nor indeed from anyone else who wasn't dating me; in fact, I think it was her very matter-of-factness about it that had me so on edge.

The worst part, as she well knew, was that I'd be forced to confront her tomorrow during first period, after a restless and tangled night of strange dreams and a few hours of fitful sleep. And as the warning bell rang and the kids started to shuffle in, I immediately noticed something weird: no Natalie.

This was unusual enough for every kid in the class to notice. Natalie was never absent, and certainly never tardy; I overheard a few kids in the corner wondering quietly where "the ice-bitch" was this morning. But the tardy bell rang, and the Pledge of Allegiance came over the loudspeaker, and as the morning announcements began the door opened and in walked Natalie Cross.

She seemed to have dressed with her usual care, I noticed: pencil skirt, tights, loose buttoned shirt over a white tanktop. Ugg boots, stylishly salt-stained. Her dark hair, normally pulled calmly back, was French braided today, something I'd never seen from her; it seemed to make her beautiful, haughty face even more prominent. And she wasn't wearing her glasses today. "Sorry I'm late, Mr Herrick," she said calmly. "It couldn't be avoided."

There was a sudden expectancy in the room; this was the point, as every kid there knew, where I was supposed to kick Natalie out to go get a late pass from the main office, marking her tardy and earning her a warning from the assistant principal. I'd done that a million times; hell, I was famous for shutting my classroom door as soon as the tardy bell rang and not opening up for anyone without a pass. But Natalie stood there, looking at me with an unmistakable air of challenge, and I hesitated.

"Go ahead and take a seat, Natalie," I said quietly. And, as simply as that, she'd won. She favored me with a small smile, triumphant, then moved toward her seat. She slid between the desks until, just as she was about to put her bag down, she suddenly turned back toward me.

"I'll stay after and explain my tardiness, if you want." The tone of mockery in her voice was very clear to me, and I could only hope the rest of the class wasn't sophisticated enough to notice it.

"You certainly will." I was no good at sounding harsh; the students knew me as someone who rarely yelled and never really got mad, and my usual style was to pass off classroom problems with a bad joke.

"No problem." She smiled oddly at me before digging into her bag for her book, and only then did I remember I had the next period off. That caused a brief sense of unease for some reason, but I did my best to shake it off as I continued the lesson on the Russian Revolution I'd started two days before; a different time, before yesterday's Student Council meeting. This was AP Euro, and I had to be at the top of my game; I lost myself in Trotsky and in the endless intrigues of Kerensky as, for the next 70 minutes, I studiously avoided Natalie Cross' direct, level stare.

But the time passed, and the bell came closer and closer; students around the room began packing their belongings a few minutes before the bell, and I lost myself in the inane questions of Joey Witherspoon, headed rapidly and tiresomely for a 5 on this AP exam just as he'd aced all the others. Today, for some reason, he was asking me what the British and the Americans had been armed with when they'd come to help the Whites. "See, they'd just finished WWI," he insisted. "Seems like their rifle production would have already gone way, way down."

"Sure, Joey," I said, mumbling something about the War Production Board and the importance of the firearms industry. The students were milling by the door now, leaving Natalie in her seat like a lone tooth in an elderly mouth. She lounged there, her long legs stretched out before her, absently bouncing one of her booted feet against the other. Her eyes had settled on me, unblinking, the rest of her face completely neutral. She'd made herself up differently this morning, I suddenly noticed. Heavy on the lipstick, a bold scarlet shade that I didn't remember seeing on her before. Striking dark lashes framed bottomless, intense eyes. I shivered.

Soon enough the bell rang; the students funneled loudly toward the door and spilled into the hall, and I was once again alone with Natalie. She regarded me coolly. "Perhaps you should shut the door, Mr Herrick. I'd be self-conscious if my peers heard you yelling at me."

There it was again, that insolent smirk; as I had the day before, though, there was nothing I could do about it. I found myself moving across the room toward the door without even realizing it, her eyes following me. The door made a strangely ominous sound as it creaked shut.

"You are going to yell at me, I presume," she added, making no effort to move. "You should; I'm not supposed to be tardy."

"No, you're not," I said softly. I had no idea what to do now, or where to go. I just stood by the door, my hand still on the knob, until she once again gave that odd smile and glanced at my desk.

"You should sit down when you yell at me," she pointed out. "Maybe on the edge of your desk, like you're the concerned teacher and I'm the submissive student." She laughed at that, delicately, scoffing at the idea of her begging for anything; still she hadn't moved, but I did exactly as she'd suggested. The edge of the desk came up to my thighs, and my feet dangled as I sat. "There you go," she smiled. Her eyes shifted languidly to the right, then they widened as if she'd just remembered something. "I should ask," she said, her voice dropping, "what happened yesterday. How'd it go?"

"Sorry?" Once again, without even trying, she'd caught me off guard. She rolled her eyes and once again began speaking slowly and clearly.

"Yesterday. Yesterday morning. After I left you with a purple ear. Did the sophomores notice your erection?" She laughed again, delicately, letting me know she wasn't really amused. "Did it go down on its own as soon as I left? I hope so; I'd think it would have been hard to miss."