Professor Poison

Chapter 2

Rassner College in Templeton needed more liberal students, which I was proud to say I fit the category and label. Funding to the school was slowly starting to diminish because there were more Red students than Blue. Honestly, it didn’t make sense how the school survived because Templeton, which sat next to Lake Erie in Pennsylvania, and its sister towns of Redder, West End, and Camden were all Blue-oriented. How could a small Blue town next to the lake have a hardcore Red school still functioning within its community? Bottom line, the school wasn’t. It needed more Blue students, more Blue-based classes, a Blue curriculum, and more Blue-funding by local and state establishments. Hence, the reason why Rassner opened a variety of liberal classes in the evenings and on the weekends to the public: Feminine Literary Exploration; Political Her-story; Green Environmental Science; Ethics of Gender Equality; Same-s*x Sociology, and lighter topics like Sculpture: The Raw Human Body; Survival of Women/Demise of Men; An In-depth Study of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale; Human Behavior: Rituals of Mating; Girl Power: The Lesbian Woman; Dr. Dirk d**k’s Homosexual Man; Music: Punk and House Rock; Henrietta Ginna’s Study of Herbal Healing; and Mystery Writer: An Exploration in Writing the Mystery.

I learned from an acquaintance of an acquaintance of an acquaintance about Professor Hatchford Daily’s evening class Mystery Writer: An Exploration in Writing the Mystery. A gabby Lillian, the hairdresser of Puff’s on Third Street in downtown Templeton, told Julian Peters, Lillian’s best friend, about the class. Thereafter, Julian told her boyfriend of seven years (he was never going to ask her to marry him because rumor had it that he liked d***s more than Janes), Aiden Pillsner. Aiden loved to gossip and eventually told his best friend (and a possible jack-buddy at the time), Caden Missle, who in turn told Ben Sinclair (I knew for a fact that Ben had f****d around with Aiden Pillsner on a daily basis) down at the coffee/donut shop Dunk, a place I frequented almost every other day. In the end, adorable Ben Sinclair with his twenty-three-year-old face and batting blue eyes explained Mystery Writer to me in detail: taught by Professor Hatchford “Hatch” Daily every Tuesday and Thursday evenings from six to nine at Rassner College; Darwin Hall; Room 213; Daily will walk his students through the basic mystery format; writing is a must; and the history/study of great mysteries and their writers will be shared in-depth.

Of course, I was intrigued. How couldn’t I be when I had always wanted to try my hand at creating a cozy? As Ben passed me my black coffee (no milk, no sugar, nothing spectacular, simply black as black could be) I asked him, “How much is the class?”

“I heard one hundred and sixty dollars.”

“And how many classes?”

“Twelve classes. Six weeks.”

“And when does the class start?”

“Next week. Tuesday.”

“Do you think I can still get in?”

He winked and shared a beaming smile. “I don’t see why not, Niall.”

I confess here and now that I had had an awkward relationship with Ben Sinclair. The blue-eyed blond wanted me, into daddies. He knew such an arrangement impossible, though. I was almost twice his age, thirty-nine. Although single, and particularly horny on some lonely nights in my duplex, I had told him regularly that I didn’t like the company of men under thirty. That didn’t stop the pup from yapping at me, attempting to gain my affections, wanting my d**k. The young prince liked a man with graying temples, scruff on his cheeks and chin, chocolaty brown eyes, and a football player’s build, and one who kept in shape such as me. Daddy material. Not only did he want to bed me, claiming to be Ben the Perfect Bottom, he wanted to share a long-term relationship with me: boyfriendhood, living together, marriage in the future. And habitually, perhaps relentlessly, I had snapped at him, “Find someone young to be with, around your own age. You can be Ben the Perfect Bottom with him. Our relationship is only based on you serving me black coffee. Nothing else.”

“But I could serve you more, Niall Reed,” he often persisted.

“You can’t and won’t. I forbid you.”

Yes, I could have taken the pup-thing up on his offer and blasted his perfect bottom with bolt after bolt of pain, on a regular basis. Of course, the heated s*x would have been a grand and sweaty time between us. And honestly, I wouldn’t have minded tossing his jock-build over a bed and having my naked way with all his meaty muscles, releasing pent load after pent load over his spine and shoulders, even in his hair. But Ben was not what I truly desired in a man, and certainly wasn’t my style. I wanted a man near forty who looked like Chris Hemsworth and smelled like masculine sweat. I wanted a certain male companion who liked to run, enjoy three-day jaunts to surrounding cities (Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Buffalo, Indianapolis, and even Chicago), eat Tai, and to read mysteries with. Ben the Perfect Bottom had none of those checks on my man-list. Maybe he did run, which I assumed he did because of his mighty build, but only after men to bed and f**k around with, no doubt.

“We are not meant to be together,” I explained numerous times to him.

“You don’t know that until we try.”

“Trust me, pup. There will be no trying.”