Her Dirty Teachers - Mika Lane Page 0,4

any easier. Some folks loved teaching Freshman English. All those fresh minds! So much possibility! What a way to impact the college experience!

Yeah, no.

Freshman English was one of the few courses at Wellshire that absolutely every student was required to take. There was no way out of it—no amount of high school AP courses or for that matter, begging, excused anyone.

Which made it one of the most hated classes at the school. I’d estimate that about seventy-five to ninety percent of the students in each class did not actually want to be there.

So did I like teaching a course to people who didn’t want to be taking it? Where the majority of students just dialed it in, did the bare minimum of work, and looked at me every time class met with daggers in their eyes?

Hell no.

And Joanna was right, that teaching the course rotated through the English department. And she was right that it was my turn to step up. But that didn’t mean I wouldn’t complain.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

“So what’d you do over the summer?” I asked.

She gestured toward a photo on her desk where she was nuzzling up to another woman. “Got married,” she said defiantly.

“No fucking way. You and Molly tied the knot?”

She picked up the framed picture and smiled. A softness washed over her face that I didn’t think I’d ever seen.

Wow.

“Sure did. We eloped. The families freaked, but we did what was best for us.”

Was she getting tears in her eyes?

No way. Not Joanna.

I looked at my watch and saw eight a.m. looming large. I popped to my feet. “Well, I’m taking you out to lunch to celebrate. Actually, maybe dinner. Then we can drink with impunity. We are college professors after all. Aren’t we supposed to be drunks?”

“I think you have one up on me in that category. I’m dry now. It was a condition of my marriage. Molly laid down the law, and I said okay.”

Well, I’d be damned. Another drinking buddy bites the dust.

“Hey, Benno, before you go, how was your summer?” she asked.

Before I could answer, she nabbed me on the one thing I was hoping she wouldn’t. But if she knew, that meant everyone at the university knew.

I was screwed.

“Tell me. What’s it like having been voted Sexiest Professor in the West?”

There it was. The moment I’d been waiting for. Of course it was just a matter of time before someone brought up the latest absurdity that was my life.

And it was goddamn humiliating.

I hung my head. “I have no idea what I’m going to do with that one. It’s going to bring me no end of trouble. I can see it now.”

She dropped her head back, laughing. “You thought you already had it bad with the undergrad girls dropping their panties for you.”

Joanna knew just how to push my buttons. Just what you wanted in a ‘work wife.’

I rubbed my temples. It was too early for a headache to be circling my head like a hungry vulture.

“Look at it this way. It will only help your whoring ways.” She knowingly narrowed her eyes at me.

I headed for the door, now late for class. But I didn’t give a shit. Let the students sit for a few minutes.

“Joanna.”

“Yes, Benno?”

“Fuck off.”

I pulled her door shut behind me and jogged to class, Joanna’s unruly laugh fading behind me.

Chapter 5

PROFESSOR BENJAMIN ADLER

“Welcome to Freshman English,” I bellowed as I arrived at the classroom that would be mine for the next, agonizing, sixteen weeks.

Saying the very words made me want to puke.

I threw off my jacket and pulled some items from my satchel while I surveyed the class.

As usual, the front row was full of pretty, young girls with crossed legs under their short skirts. The back was strung with the typical too-cool-for-school kids who were laughing and joking with each other, comparing notes about their fraternities and sororities. The middle section was a mixture of both—the students who were actually interested in Freshman English, and the ones too polite to show that they weren’t.

As I surveyed the motley crew that was mine for the next semester, I noticed some tittering going around the room.

I put my hands up to silently ask the class what’s going on? That’s when one of the girls in the front row pointed at the blackboard behind me.

The blackboard I’d failed to notice when I’d entered the classroom.

“Um, Professor Adler—” she’d started to say as I turned around.

And there it was. Already starting.

Someone had scrawled on the board Sexiest