Chapter 3: Nocturnal Curriculum
The dream was a smear of green light and the taste of salt. Lewis thrashed against his sheets, trapped in a half-sleep where chalkdust and musk swirled together. Then a weight, real and immense, settled across his hips, pinning him to the mattress.
His eyes flew open.
Moonlight streamed through the slats of his blinds, painting tiger-stripes of silver across the room. And across her. Professor Rygell filled his narrow vision, a silhouette of dense, curving muscle against the pale wall. The modest glow from a forgotten laptop charger illuminated the side of her face, her black hair falling around shoulders that seemed to absorb the light. She was fully transformed, a monument of emerald power straddling his chest.
The sheer, impossible reality of it—her in his dorm room, on his bed—stole the air from his lungs. He made a choked, incoherent sound.
A green finger, wider than two of his own, pressed gently against his lips. The skin was smooth, warm, radiating a heat he could feel on his face.
“Shhh,” she breathed, her voice a velvet rumble in the quiet room. The familiar scent of ozone clung to her, cutting through the smells of stale laundry and old pizza. Her eyes, dark pools in the dim light, held a glint of wicked amusement. “You didn’t think our lesson ended at the classroom door, did you?”
He tried to speak, but her finger held firm. All he could do was stare, his heart hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs. The posters of Nietzsche and Camus on the wall behind her looked like absurd, paper-thin artifacts from a lost world.
While her left hand kept him silent, her right was already moving. It was shockingly deft for its size. He felt her fingers—incredibly precise, unnervingly strong—slip beneath the elastic waistband of his pajama pants. There was a soft snap of strained fabric, and then the cool air of the room hit his exposed skin. He jerked, a bolt of pure panic shooting through him, but her weight across his thighs was absolute. It was like being pinned by a warm, living statue.
“You’ve been thinking about it,” she stated, her tone conversational, as if discussing a homework assignment. Her gaze traveled down his body, then back to his wide eyes. “I could see it in your seminar today. The way you wouldn’t look at me. The flush on your neck when I said ‘phenomenology.’” A slow smile touched her lips. “It was a rather obvious text, Lewis.”
Her hand wrapped around him. The heat of her grasp was breathtaking, a stark contrast to the cool air. He gasped against her finger, his back arching off the bed.
“See?” she murmured, her thumb moving in a small, devastating circle. “The body doesn’t lie.”
Then she shifted. The immense pressure lifted from his chest as she slid down his body, her green skin gliding over his cotton t-shirt. The movement was fluid, strangely graceful. She settled between his legs, her broad shoulders forcing his knees apart. The moonlight caught the powerful line of her back, the shift of muscle as she leaned forward.
He finally found his voice, a thin whisper. “Professor, I—”
“Rygell,” she interrupted, her breath warm against his thigh. “When we’re like this, you call me Rygell.” She looked up at him, her chin resting on his hip. “Understood?”
He nodded, dumbly.
“Good.”
Then she took him into her mouth.
The sensation was catastrophic. It wasn’t just the wet, engulfing heat, which was overwhelming enough. It was the sight. The formidable, intimidating intellect of his professor, the terrifying green powerhouse who had pinned him to a desk, now here, in his pathetic dorm room, with her lips stretched around him. The cognitive dissonance shattered him. A broken, grateful sob escaped his throat.
She worked with a focused, scholarly intensity. She was studying him. Learning what made him gasp, what made his toes curl into the sheets, what made his hands fist in the cheap comforter. She varied her rhythm, her pressure, her use of tongue, observing his reactions with what he could only interpret as analytical interest. It was devouring and clinical all at once.
“Oh, god,” he choked out.
She pulled off with a soft, wet sound. “Not quite,” she said, her voice husky. She rested her cheek against his stomach, her hand still slowly pumping. “Just me. And you’re thinking too much. I can feel the tension in your abdomen. Stop it.” She delivered the command softly, then took him deep again, swallowing him to the root.
He let his head fall back, a thump against the pillow. The philosopher posters swam in his vision. He was unmoored. The last week had been a blur of confused arousal and obsessive recall—the scent of her, the sound of her cry, the shocking green of her skin under the fluorescent lights. He’d buried himself in books, trying to use logic as a dam against the flood of memory. It had been useless.
And now she was here, making a mockery of his attempts to rationalize. This was beyond reason.
Her free hand came up and gripped his hip, her fingers sinking into his flesh. It wasn’t painful, but it was immovable. An anchor. He focused on that solid point of contact as her mouth brought him closer and closer to the edge. The world narrowed to sensation: the slip of her tongue, the scratch of her wild hair on his thighs, the low, approving hum she made in her throat that vibrated through his entire being.
He was babbling, a stream of half-words and pleas. “Rygell, I’m… I can’t…”
She ignored him, driving him on with relentless, perfect suction. Her other hand slipped lower, cupping him, a touch that tipped him over.
The climax tore through him with a violence that left him shaking. He cried out, a sound that was surely too loud for the thin dorm walls. She took it all, her grip on his hip tightening, holding him steady as he fell apart. She didn’t pull away until the last shudder had passed, until he was lying spent and breathless, utterly hollowed out.
Slowly, she rose back up his body. She loomed over him again, her expression unreadable in the shadows. She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth, a simple, human gesture that seemed absurd on her. The green was fading, leaching from her skin like ink in water. He watched, mesmerized, as the powerful lines of her form softened, shrinking back into the familiar, sharp-cut silhouette of Professor Rygell. The black of her eyes resolved into their normal, piercing darkness. She was just a woman again, kneeling over him in the dark, wearing what looked like simple black running clothes.
The transition was quieter than last time. Less a burst of energy, more a sigh.
She blew out a long breath and smiled, a genuine, tired smile. “Better?”
He could only nod, his body humming with a profound, post-cataclysm limpness.
“Good.” She shifted off him and sat on the edge of the narrow bed, her back to him. She looked around his room, at the piles of books, the scattered notes. “Your thesis on Heidegger,” she said, nodding toward a marked-up draft on his desk. “The third chapter’s premise is flawed. You’re conflating his earlier and later conceptions of ‘care.’ Start over.”
The casual evisceration of his week’s work, delivered in a tone of afterglow small talk, was somehow the most shocking thing that had happened all night. He let out a weak, hysterical laugh.
She glanced over her shoulder, her eyebrow arched. “Something funny?”
“No,” he managed. “No, Professor.”
“Rygell,” she corrected softly. She stood up, stretching like a cat. In her mundane clothes, she looked almost ordinary. Almost. The memory of her scale and power was a ghost-image burned into his vision. “Get some sleep. You look terrible.”
She walked to his dorm room door, silent on her feet. She paused, her hand on the knob, and looked back. The moonlight caught the sharp angle of her cheekbone. “And Lewis?”
“Yes?”
“Lock your door after I leave. This campus isn’t as safe as it seems.” She gave him one last, inscrutable look. “I’ll see you in class.”
Then she was gone, pulling the door shut behind her with a soft click.
He lay there for a long time, staring at the ceiling. The smell of her—ozone and something uniquely hers—lingered in the air, mixing with the ordinary scents of his life. He finally forced himself to get up, legs wobbly, and stumbled to the door. He turned the lock.
As he shuffled back to bed, his body aching in a new and profound way, a sudden, cold thought cut through the haze. His roommate, Jason, was supposed to be coming back from his weekend trip tonight. He was probably crashing on a friend’s couch. But what if he hadn’t?
Lewis stared at the closed door, listening to the empty silence of the hallway. The lock felt flimsy. Insufficient. She hadn’t used it to get in.
He climbed back into the warm indent on the mattress she had left behind, and he didn’t sleep at all.