An Emptied Vessel

"Your subconscious mind is what you make of it," the professor said, pushing up his stylish glasses and thrusting an alabaster hand into his pocket, "how you structure its energy is entirely up to you because it's simply a creative void, a submissive matrix ready to produce and amplify. And if you don't direct it, someone or something else will. Whether through blatant advertising, catchy music, movies, or even a certain professor, something could be planting a virile seed into you at this very moment."

The class laughed and the professor in his mid-thirties tapped his white fingers on the desk in the center of the lecture pit, waiting for the laughter to die before continuing.

"Any number of methods are available, they range from overt to underhanded. The modern world is a war zone of ideas trying to control the finite energy you're born with to further their own goals which, in this lowly plane, usually boils down to making more money which equates directly to more power. It's only a matter of time before something will seed your subconscious. So take control of your mind and curate what's planted within its womb with your own hands or you'll end up spinning in chaotic circles to everyone else's tune until you die realizing you never knew yourself."

The class was quiet and the Professor rapped his fingers on the desk as he scanned the dim darkness of his students.

The shiny-eyed stare deep

in watery black caverns

peeps through your veil

oh moon! My goddess, hail!

On the slippery sail betwixt

your two pale fingers,

pokes, bespoke, my stinger

at your behest, it teaches

the most toxic of lessons.

"Anyway, that's enough for today, I should have your paragraphs back to you all tomorrow."

A flurry of students grabbed their things and began leaving eagerly through noisy metal doors at the top of the stairs. The professor in the lecture pit swiped his dark hair back and scooped a stack of papers into a leather satchel.

Maison was pretending to put her things in her bag as she watched her favorite professor from the front row of the hall. She was wracking her brain for a question to ask him, some way to approach him. But every time he glanced up with his beautiful face, Maison panicked and looked away. She slowly fiddled with her notebook on her desk.

"Maison," The professor said without looking up from his papers, "can I help you with something?"

Maison gazed up at him, burning alive, "uh no I'm fine, Professor Sea."

"Okay, well there's another class coming in soon," Professor Sea said, pressing the snaps on his bag closed, "so don't stay too long."

Maison whirled around and saw she was the last student left in the lecture hall. She quickly slung her bag over her shoulder before silently cursing herself for being such a coward and paced quickly up the stairs for the back door.

"Maison," Professor Sea called out, "don't forget your notebook."

Maison turned and looked down to see her vibrant notebook still splayed out on the grey desk. The white cheeks of the pages spanked pink with her scribbles stared up at her helplessly from the desk. She blushed miserably and rushed back down the stairs to grab her notebook before the professor could, but it was too late and Sea was already there holding it in his creamy hands.

When she saw her girly notebook between her crush's fingers, she nearly tripped on the stairs. The professor folded the book back on its spiral binding and glanced over her notes. Maison stared at him with wide, dark eyes and fumbled over thoughts trying to retrieve the book. She had to get it from him before he could read the back page where she had circled their names in an immature drawing of a looping heart.

"Maison," Professor Sea said, reading her notebook behind glasses reflecting the white and pink of the page, "it seems you don't quite understand my lecture on the subconscious mind."

He looked up and extended the notebook to her. Maison took it quickly and hid the back page against her heaving breasts. Part relieved and part flustered, she looked up into his waiting eyes.

"What don't I understand, professor?" Maison asked, fixing her hair and shifting her feet.

"You wrote in your notebook, 'my mind is an empty void,' that's not what I said at all," Sea explained.

"I'm sorry Professor," Maison said, smiling sheepishly, "the whole lecture went over my head honestly."

Sea studied her intently before swiping his hair back and shoving his hands in his pockets.

"I read the paragraph you submitted and it impressed me with how well you have taken to my teachings so far. You're a smart girl, so I need for you to really get this crucial part about the subconscious, why don't you come to my office hours later, Maison," Sea suggested, gesturing with a hand he took out of his pocket, "I'll demonstrate it for you first hand so you can understand."

Maison's heart pounded watching his hand, "O-okay, that sounds great."

"I'll see you later tonight then," Sea stared at her until Maison turned and left the hall.

Her heart was going to die, it hadn't beat so hard since that time she nearly drowned. Maison glanced down at the hidden spell of their names encircled with a heart on her notes and smiled. She picked up her speed and rushed back to her dorm at MU.

There was a girl swamped in school branded sweats laying in bed with messy, honey-colored hair spread out on the pillow behind her. She was busy reading on her phone and didn't acknowledge Maison as she walked in and dropped her bag off.

Maison showered and stood in front of the giant wardrobe, studying her clothes. She pulled down a checkered skirt, a stretchy black top with long sleeves, and tall grey socks.

"What's going on?" Her dorm mate asked, sitting up in her bed and dropping her phone to her lap.

"What do you mean?" Maison said, closing half her wardrobe and rummaging through her drawer of intimates for the whitest pair of lace she could find.

"Okay, what the hell is happening? Who is he?" Her room mate asked.

"Clarissa," Maison said, dropping her clothes on her bed and undoing her towel, revealing her petite nudeness, "I'm just getting dressed."

Clarissa threw off her squid-patterned blanket, stood up, and plopped down on Maison's bed. She studied her as Maison pulled on a pair of tall dark socks, "oh my god, it's an older man. You slut, look at this school girl outfit you picked out." Clarissa fingered Maison's skirt.

"I don't know what you're talking about," Maison said as she tugged on the pure white lace of her panties.

"Oh my god," Clarissa said, staring into the blank sheet of Maison's cotton triangle, "it's that professor you're always talking about, isn't it!"

Maison smiled and turned, blushing, zipping her skirt around her tiny waist. Clarissa stood from the bed and followed her face around, Maison tried to avoid Clarissa's look as she blushed and smiled.

"It's just a meeting," Maison said, smoothing her skirt, "what are you? Some kind of detective?"

"Just a meeting?" Clarissa said, poking Maison in the breast just next to her left nipple, "then what's with the get up?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," Maison said, pulling on a black shirt with a scooping neckline that clung tight to her chest.

Clarissa plopped back down on Maison's bed and began talking to herself as she fingered her lips, "Mr. Sea, Mr. Sea, I've only had one class with him so far, but he didn't strike me as the type to molest his students. He seemed... a little dark, cold actually." Clarissa shivered.

"He liked the paragraph I submitted and just asked me to see him during office hours," Maison said, looking in a mirror and fixing her silky black hair.

Clarissa stood and stepped behind Maison, making eye contact with her in the mirror as Maison applied some strawberry lip gloss, "you think he'll actually make a move on you?"

"Let's just say," Maison said, smacking her lips and screwing the cap back on her lip gloss, "I wouldn't mind if he did."

She turned, facing Clarissa and they both laughed.

"You're crazy," Clarissa said, "fooling around with a professor? Does it ever end well? You must be insane."

"That's what the meeting is about," Maison said, "he's going to show me how my mind works." She made a screwy face and giggled, "can you believe it?"

"Well for his sake, I hope he's prepared for you," Clarissa said, looking her up and down, "you're straight evil dressing like that."

"This is my chance," Maison said, "I've been fingering myself to this guy since the beginning of the semester."

"Gross," Clarissa said, scrunching her nose, "what's so great about Sea anyway? There's so many guys at MU."

Maison sat on her bed and drew her skirt in around her legs, looking down into the checkered plaid of her pleated skirt, she said, "I don't know..." Maison put her hand on her heart, "it's just the way he looks at me fills me with a sharp thrill and his words make my soul ache." She put her other hand on her womb.

"What?!" Clarissa yelped, crawling back into her own bed, "that sounds insane, you really do need to get your head checked. You're living in a fantasy." Clarissa picked her phone back up, sighing, "I guess I'm just jealous you're about to have some erotic adventure with your professor and I'm stuck here reading some weirdo's short story."

"What do you mean?" Maison asked, back at the mirror fixing her makeup.

"I don't know, we have to read each other's work for class," Clarissa said sighing, "they paired me with that Milly girl, have you met her? She's an English major just like you."

"No, I don't think so," Maison said.

"Well, she's a freshman too, one of those sick gothic types," Clarissa said, "the reclusive kind, the kind I hate."

"Well what about the story, is it any good?" Maison asked.

Clarissa threw her head back on her pillow and rolled her eyes, "I don't know it's okay I guess, it's about some girl named Rain who gets fucked by some vampire in a book. It's kind of hot, a little violent, but Milly's weird like that. I think she has some kind of kinky obsession with vampires."

"Interesting," Maison said, "let me read it when you're done."

"Sure," Clarissa said, returning to her phone.

"By the way," Maison said, taking one last look in the mirror and shutting the tall wardrobe door, "I saw your friend Michelle earlier."

Clarissa perked up and stared at Maison, "and?"

"Aren't you messing around with that guy?" Maison asked, "what was his name..."

"James," Clarissa said, studying Maison intently.

"Yeah James, the one with the scar in his eyebrow..." Maison said, tapping her chin thinking.

"Well what about him?" Clarissa asked with a strain of impatience in her voice.

"I saw Michelle with him, they were eating together at breakfast," Maison said.

Clarissa closed her eyes as if she was in pain and let her head collapse into her pillow.

"What?" Maison asked, "you don't think she?"

"Don't worry about it," Clarissa said and squeezed the bridge of her slender nose, "don't worry about her..." Clarissa returned to her phone and mumbled to herself, "maybe I need to find someone like this Kursor to ward her off..."

Maison raised an eyebrow and went quiet. She wasn't sure about Clarissa and Michelle, they seemed to have a strange friendship that stretched all the way back into their childhood.

Professor Sea's office hours were late into the night and Clarissa was already asleep when Maison latched her black mary janes and crept out the door. She shoved her notebook under her armpit and made her way along the green under rosy-eyed lights that buzzed like angelic voyeurs towards Sea's office in the English department building.

Sea's office was in the basement at the end of a long, drooling red carpet that slithered down dank steps. She knocked twice on a foggy glass door stickered with a black "454" and it opened on golden hinges leading her into a kind of brightly lit waiting room with two benches, a grandfather clock, and another door.

Maison raised her eyebrows as she saw three pretty girls her age, or close to it, waiting on a polished bench of warm rosewood together. A pale nurse with long black nails and matching wild hair was attending to them. The nurse gave off the presence of a panther prowling the wet grooves of some distant jungle in the night. The movements of her slender body betrayed a kind of primal deadliness about her. The pure white of her uniform accentuated the length of her legs and arms, amplifying the sharp edge of her mature femininity. A black, side-ways crescent replaced the usual red cross on the snow whiteness of her little nurse's hat and gave Maison a strange feeling of fear deep down in her guts. Maison closed the door behind her with a click and stood quietly, watching the bizarre scene unfold before her.

"Take your medicine dears," The beautiful nurse said to the young women on the bench.

"Yes, Ma'am," the three meek girls said in unison and took a neon pink gelcap each from the pale palm of the woman's hand.

"Have you three learned your lesson?" The woman asked and held the freckled chin of a red head up, squeezing her small cheeks and shaking her ginger braid.

"Yessh m'm," the girl said through the woman's sharply nailed grip.

"Good, good, my dearest little kittens," the nurse said, licking a shine on her plump lips. The nurse's silver eyes appeared to flood with blackness, rim to rim, as if stained with a dropper of squid ink.

"Maison," Maison heard a man's voice call out and she looked past the nurse to see Professor Sea standing at an open door, "come." He waved her towards the door and she followed him into a dim office.

"Who was that nurse?" Maison asked, "and those girls?" She glanced around at the musky office infested with shelves of books and leather furniture. Maison gripped her notebook.

Sea shut the door behind him and silence flooded into the room, "they're not from here."

Maison sat in a leather chair across from a large desk with a mermaid statue and dropped her notebook on to her lap.

"Over here," Sea called out, pointing to a red chaise on the other side of the room.

Maison stood up, smoothed her skirt and moved to the chaise, sitting on the edge and leaning forward to accentuate the swooping curve of her tight top that ran along the edge of her creamy young cleavage. Maison brought her arms closer to her body and pressed her breasts together coyly. She glanced up at Professor Sea to gauge his reaction, but he was busy rolling up the sleeves of his shirt and unbuttoning the top button of his collar. Molly raised an eyebrow and her heart buzzed in her ears as she studied him up close. Her nose picked up his smell of pine, old books, aloneness, and clean salty man. Maison crossed her legs, bothered suddenly.

"Lay down," Sea said in a calm tone that commanded the universe, "and give me the notebook." He extended a wonderful hand indicating for her to hand over the notebook and she did so hesitantly.

"You're not going to read it are you?" Maison fretted nervously on the edge of the chaise, fussing over her hair and skirt. Was this really happening?

"Lay down," Sea said. He leaned on the desk and placed the book behind him. He crossed his arms and, pushing up his glasses, glared at the bothered Maison. A lock of his slick hair fell forward into his gaze and he swiped it back, waiting.

Maison spun her legs over slowly and laid down across the red velvet chaise, folding her hands with a slight tremble over her chest, "what exactly are we doing here Mr. Sea?" Maison fidgeted, her heart was going crazy and she found it hard to say anything in the thick silence of his presence. She felt like she was skirting the inescapable rim of a super massive black hole in the deceptive shape of a sexy older man. Maison's soul quivered with that intoxicating self-consciousness his look always filled her with and she found her freewill sucked into the strong orbit of his sophisticated terror.

Professor Sea sat down on the edge of the chaise next to her hips and focused on her, he talked low with a deep voice, "what I'm about to do to you isn't exactly ethical, but it's the best way to show you how submissive your mind is."

"W-what are you going to do to me?" Maison asked, gulping and staring up into the sculpted marble of his face. A dark lock of his hair fell forward again as he studied her with piercing eyes. The competing urges of running for her life or spreading her legs for him, tore her apart.

He placed his left hand slightly beneath the brim of her low-cut collar until his bare hand was just on top of her left upper breast. The sudden feeling of his warm touch pressing against the hyper sensitive flesh of her anxious body shocked Maison and she jerked slightly as the light of her dreams solidified into reality. He took the palm of his right hand and placed it over her flat stomach, dipping his finger tips just below the waist band of her skirt. Maison looked at him wildly and to her horror, her nipples stiffened beneath the thin fabric of her top.

"Relax," Sea said with a stern voice that read her mind, "I can feel your heartbeat and the tenseness of your body, I need you to let your stomach muscles loosen and you need to calm your heart rate, can you do that for me?" His green gems probed the obsidian portals of her large, wet eyes.

Maison gave a stilted nod but she felt her heart's screaming double up under the exciting sensation of his firm digits. Her soft body had craved his touch for so long, it wanted to gobble his warm hands up to the wrists. She stared her excitement into his eyes, unable to control her heart rate or the yearning jitters of her muscles.

Sea sensed her struggle, "close your eyes and just breathe, focus on my touch if you have to, but I need you nice and relaxed. Let your muscles loosen into honey and your breath deepen into molasses."

Fluttering her long lashes closed, Maison tried her best to follow his instructions and relaxed her muscles, focusing only on the heat of his touch and the dance of her breath merging with the press of his fingers against her bare flesh. The reassuring presence of the man's strong hands on her body calmed her and soon her heart rate slowed and she was breathing gently through her abdomen. Her arms and legs went limp, her hips decompressed, her ass loosened, her back extended, her shoulders dropped, and her face slackened. She became only the patches of her body where his hands rested, the glowing sliver of space the shape of his touch on her upper breast and lower belly. The room faded away and time looped as her breath became shallow. She sensed her pulse synchronizing with his through the calm throbbing of his flesh.

"Do you feel me?" Sea asked quietly in the silence.

Maison nodded and licked her lips, "yes, I feel you." She placed her right hand over his at her heart and set her left hand atop his hand over her lower belly, "I feel you," Maison said in a distant whisper as she merged her heart rate even further with his.

He shifted the hand on her stomach an inch deeper into her skirt so he was just above her mound and Maison's hand followed. Sea pressed a bit harder and Maison felt the pleasant pressure of his hand sink into her as if he had slipped through her skin and directly entered her womb. Maison let a gasp loose between her glossy lips.

"Do you feel me inside you?" Sea asked in a long, deep whisper.

Maison could only nod, the alien sensation of his hand entering her overtook her rational mind. She could still feel his hand with hers on top of her skin, but the feeling of his fingers beneath her flesh, in her womb, was unmistakable. The rational part of her went quiet and Maison's entire being focused on what Sea was doing to her.

"I'm going to free you, Maison," Sea said in a low, calm voice, "after that, I'm going to give you one last choice to make. Do you understand?"