My Mouth Before 19

“Ugh, I fucking hate you,” Cleo whined, throwing her head back like she was auditioning for a soap opera death scene. “You never give me any actual details about what Mystery Daddy is doing to you. I just know you got absolutely railed yesterday, but please—I am literally parched over here. Throw me a goddamn crumb!”

I laughed, but it came out nervous and tight. “I did give you details.”

“You said he made you cum,” Cleo said flatly. “That’s not details, that’s a fucking bullet point. Your rose toy makes you cum too, and it doesn’t require emotional investment. I want to know positions. I want angles. I want to live vicariously through your sexual awakening because my dating life is a barren wasteland.”

I was still laughing when a voice cut through our conversation like a scalpel.

“Mystery Daddy?”

We froze. My heart didn’t just drop—it fucking plummeted through the earth’s core as we turned around to find Professor Lewis standing behind us, one eyebrow arched in that way that suggested he was mentally grading our conversation and finding it severely lacking.

“Oh—uhm.” Cleo blinked rapidly, her brain clearly short-circuiting. “Just girl talk. You know. Normal college stuff.”

I could feel my entire existence blushing. Heat crawled up my neck so fast it made my ears ring and my vision blur slightly.

“Is that so?” Lewis said, voice cooler than arctic wind. “How… illuminating. I’ll see you both in class tomorrow.”

He turned and walked away without another word, leaving me standing there wishing for spontaneous combustion.

Cleo elbowed me with a shit-eating grin. “If that was just a coincidence, I’m officially converting to celibacy.”

“I’ll meet you in the cafeteria,” I said quickly, trying to keep my voice from cracking. “I need to ask Professor Lewis something about my paper.”

“Sure you do,” she said, wiggling her eyebrows like some kind of demented fortune teller. “Go get your academic consultation, babe.”

She sauntered off, leaving me to deal with the aftermath of my social apocalypse.

I hurried after Lewis, my boots echoing down the hallway like gunshots. But when I turned the corner, I stopped short. He wasn’t heading toward his office.

Instead, he was disappearing into Dr. Vaughn’s office like some kind of academic moth to a very dangerous flame.

My eyebrows pulled together in confusion. What the actual fuck?

Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back, right? I moved closer to the door, keeping to the side like some kind of discount spy.

It was mostly closed, but not completely. Their voices leaked into the hallway like toxic waste through a cracked container.

“What we had was a long time ago,” Lewis said, his voice low but sharp enough to cut glass. “You need to let it go.”

“Let it go?” Vaughn’s voice came back like a whip crack. “Is that what you’re calling it now? That manipulation you dress up as intimacy? That thing you do where you convince broken girls that surrender is some kind of feminist empowerment?”

My breath caught in my throat like a fish hook.

“You will not find another victim,” she snapped, and I could practically hear her pointing a finger through the door.

“It’s not a victim when they willingly agree,” Lewis growled back, voice dropping to something dangerous. “Just like you did.”

My spine straightened like someone had shoved a steel rod through my vertebrae.

My heart was doing this weird thing where it forgot how to beat normally, and I had no idea why my hands were suddenly shaking.

I shifted closer, pushing the door open just a fraction more because apparently I had a death wish.

What I saw next made my brain completely malfunction.

Dr. Vaughn was standing by her desk, arms crossed, face flushed with the kind of rage that usually preceded academic murder. Lewis stood opposite her, calm and unreadable as always.

But then his voice dropped to that whisper I recognized from darker places. “On your knees.”

And the impossible happened.

She fucking did it.

I blinked hard, convinced I was hallucinating. My brain scrambled to process what I was seeing, but my body had already moved, pulling the door shut with the softest click I could manage.

What the absolute fuck had I just witnessed?

I backed away from the door like it was radioactive, trying not to make a sound while my mind raced at approximately light speed.

My heart was thundering against my ribs so hard I was surprised it wasn’t audible in the next building.

That wasn’t just a normal argument between colleagues. That was something else entirely. Something messy and intimate and toxic and so far beyond my comprehension that I felt like I was drowning in information I couldn’t process.

My stomach twisted into something resembling origami.

Was that what she meant when she warned me? Was that the pattern she was talking about? Was that what he did to women before me?

And why the hell did watching her kneel make me feel like I was the one being stripped naked and examined under a microscope?

I kept walking until I rounded the next corner, then leaned against the wall, breathing hard like I’d just run a marathon through hell.

The pieces were starting to form a picture I didn’t want to see.

Vaughn’s warnings. Her obvious hatred for Lewis. The way she’d looked at me like I was walking toward a cliff with my eyes closed.

She’d been there. She’d been exactly where I was now. And somehow, that realization was more terrifying than anything that had happened in his red room.

Because if Dr. Vaughn—brilliant, intimidating, completely unbreakable Dr. Vaughn—had fallen under his spell, what the fuck did that say about my chances of getting out with my sanity intact?

I was so completely fucked, and not in the fun way.