Writer's Note: Thank you for all your reviews! I'm glad you're enjoying the story so far. I'm growing increasingly anxious with each chapter I post, but I'm hoping you'll stick with it.

Warning: I'm upping the rating for this chapter to M due to sexual content. (Also, there's a good chance that section reads like a game of Twister meets a set of Ikea assembly instructions. I apologise.)

He missed her in December

"Who's the girl?"

Henry blinked and jerked his head around, one way and then the other, only to find his mother sat right in front of him, on the opposite side of the kitchen table. The glare of the overhead lights reflected off the blackened window behind her, and in the background, the discordant chatter of his father and siblings competed with the jaunty clamour of the 'Magnum, P.I.' theme tune that crackled through the old black and white television in the lounge. (According to his father, watching programmes in colour like the rest of the country was an unnecessary extravagance.)

Henry frowned at her. "What girl?"

"You're brooding," she announced, "have been all week. You're staring into space. You're sitting around in here like you did when you were little and you had something you were working up to telling me." She took a long slurp of tea and then lowered the mug to the table, her gaze never once leaving him. "So…who is she?"

He gave a mix between a shrug and a shake of the head. "There's no girl."

She raised her eyebrows at him and gave him a look like she were staring at him over the rims of her glasses, though she rarely ever wore her glasses—only when darning, or filling out the housekeeping ledger, or muttering about a dropped stitch in her knitting.

"What…?" A defensive edge sharpened his tone. "There's no girl."

"There better not be a girl." His father strode into the kitchen, past the table, and straight over to the refrigerator that stood by the back door. He tugged open the refrigerator door, causing the milk bottles inside to jangle against one another and letting out a flood of yellow-white light, and he grabbed a beer from the top shelf. "Don't want you turning up here with one of those types, all prim and prissy."

"Oh, leave him alone, Pat," his mother chided softly, casting the words over her shoulder. Then she slid her hand across the table and gave Henry's hand a squeeze. "Don't listen to him."

"You know what the problem is?" His father twisted off the bottle cap and chucked it into the collection that gathered in the old ice cream tub next to the sink so that it hit the heap with a clink. Then he leant back against the counter and stared at Henry. "The whole college system."

He paused for effect, perhaps hoping to get a rise out of Henry.

Then he swept one hand towards the window. "It's rigged against the little man. Never done an honest day's work in their lives, and they send their kids there so they never have to do an honest day's work either."

"Henry got in, didn't he?"

His father's voice shot up. "On some handout, a charity case." This time he swept his hand towards Henry, so forcefully that beer sloshed from the bottle and splashed onto the tiles, where it died away in fizzles. "Throw the poor kid a bone every now and again just so they can feel better about themselves, call themselves philanthropists, as though they aren't the ones oppressing the working class."

Henry prayed his mother wouldn't point out that technically he was paying his own way by joining ROTC, seeing as it would inevitably lead to another rant about the military, bringing the total for the week to five, maybe six.

Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, his father prevented his mother from saying anything at all by continuing with his rant about 'the elite'.

The words washed over Henry. He let them. He'd heard them enough times before, could probably recite the whole tirade along with his father if he so wished. Lazy…work-shy…exploitative…arrogant…silver spoons…social inequality… Meanwhile, his thoughts drifted into the foreground as they found their way back to Elizabeth.

It had been nearly three weeks since he had last spoken to her properly, what with classes finishing early for exams. He'd hoped to catch her before she left for Christmas vacation, but when he did catch her on the very last day of the semester—after he'd spent an entire morning and half an afternoon staking out the library—it was only briefly. She was just there to collect a couple of books and then she needed to hurry back to her dorm to pack.

"Heading home?" he'd asked, not willing to let the conversation end so quickly.

"To the Hamptons, actually." She smiled—half pleased, half awkward. "Josh invited me."

Disappointment settled on his chest, and though it made his next breath feel like wading through waterlogged sand, he tried to keep it from his expression. "Meeting the parents? That's a step."

The ratio of awkward to pleased shifted, very much in favour of awkward. "Well, not exactly."

He frowned. What did she mean?

"His family aren't arriving until Christmas Eve, so I'll be gone before they get there."

His frown deepened. "I see."

He didn't question whose idea that had been.

She fidgeted with the books in her hands, her fingers flexing and fumbling where they wrapped around the spines, while her smile strained. Awkward eclipsed pleased. "Anyway, I'd better get going. I haven't even made a start on packing, and Josh doesn't like it when I keep him waiting."

"Sure." He flashed a taut smile of his own. "Well, have a good Christmas."

"You, too. I'll see you in January."

Back in the kitchen of his parents' house, he couldn't help but wonder where she was now, the day before Christmas Eve. Had she gone home to her family, or had Josh's reluctance to include her once again left her with no choice but to weather out the holiday alone in her dorm? She'd mentioned her brother a few times, usually in the form of a complaint, but she'd never said anything about her parents, apart from the fact they were away on business. Maybe she wasn't close to them, especially if she hadn't been around them much growing up. He'd never understood why someone would have children only to farm them out to a boarding school. Then again, maybe he'd just been raised with different values. Money might be nice, but what mattered was family.

"…and it starts when they're young." His father's voice resurfaced through his thoughts, the rant yet to cease. "Send them to private schools, pay for their grades…"

College was supposed to be a way of escaping his father, to get away from this life, to find something better, something bigger than the small town and small ideas he'd been raised in. But maybe he would always carry pieces of his father with him—these ideas, these understandings, these 'class prejudices' as Elizabeth would call them—the words imprinted on and curving along the coils of his mind.

Listening to his father now, it was no wonder Elizabeth had challenged him.

But it was difficult.

Everything his father said, everything he himself believed, applied to the likes of Josh Carmichael and his cronies. Elizabeth was just… Different. The exception.

Or maybe he didn't want to see her as the same, because if she were the same, how could he reconcile those beliefs with how much he liked her? Whenever he thought about her over the past week, a gnawing sensation like hunger but not hunger gripped the pit of his stomach. He knew he shouldn't be thinking about her—he was supposed to be getting over his attraction to her, and the separation over Christmas vacation should have been ideal—but the truth was: he missed her.

But you could miss someone you only liked casually, surely?

oOoOo

That night, he dreamt about her. Not for the first time. But certainly the most vivid.

They were in the classroom where he held the weekly seminar. The session had finished. The other students had already fled. Elizabeth walked over to the door as though to leave as well, but rather than stepping out into the hallway as he expected, she pushed the door to with a soft click and then turned back to face him. Her eyes were alight, their glint not so much teasing as predatory, and as the hazy sunlight that shone through the window behind her unspooled around her and haloed at her edges, she bit down on her bottom lip. She looked sinfully angelic.

His breath hitched.

With her gaze fixed on him, the blue of her eyes almost hypnotic, she sauntered towards where he stood next to his desk. Her hips sashayed in a way that emphasised her every curve, and his gaze darted over her—eyes, hips, breasts, eyes, hips, breasts.

He swallowed, his mouth dry. He needed to say something, to do something, he needed to put a stop to this. But his whole body had frozen, and as his mind succumbed to a fog, all thought lost beneath the throb of his pulse, he found himself unable to summon a single reason why he ought to put a stop to it.

She came to a halt in front of him, so close that her warmth lapped his skin. Every hair on his body prickled with her presence, primed for her touch.

"What…" He fumbled the word, cleared his throat, and tried again. "What are you do—?"

"Shhhh." She pressed one finger to his lips.

He stared down at her, transfixed.

When he held to his silence—Though, really, what else could he do when she looked at him like that?—she reached up onto tiptoe and leant in, pressing her breasts to his chest. A hot puff of breath ruffled over his cheek. "I want this, Henry." Her whisper unfurled in the shell of his ear. "I want you."

At her words, his eyes slipped shut and a shudder rippled up his spine, causing the top of his neck to tense. He sank back against the desk, his fingers wrapping over the edge—if it weren't for that desk, he felt pretty sure his legs would have given way beneath him.

She kissed the angle of his jaw, gentle at first, as though testing him, tasting him, and then she trailed a series hot, open-mouthed kisses down to his collarbone, where she alternated grazing her teeth over and laving her tongue against his skin.

His grip on the desk tightened.

It tightened further still when she skimmed one hand down his chest, down his abdomen, down to where he throbbed against his jeans. She brushed her fingertips over him through the denim, still kissing and nibbling at his collarbone, and then her fingers found their way to the zip.

At the sound of the zip opening and the feeling of release that came as she popped the button of his jeans, the thought flashed through his mind once again that he ought to stop her, to bat her fingers away. She was his student, they were in a classroom, there were windows, an unlocked door, anyone could walk in and see. But then she slipped her hand beneath the waistband of his boxers, took him in her palm and grazed her thumb over his tip, and all thought fled him.

His fingernails embedded themselves into the oak desk, and he was vaguely aware of her kissing her way down his body while she pumped him. Then, out of nowhere, her lips were on him.

"Fuck." The word escaped in a gritted hiss of breath.

Her lips curved against him in response to the cuss, and when he forced his eyes open and stared down at her, he found her looking back at him, all but grinning while her lips wrapped around him. He reached out to thread his fingers through her hair, wanting to guide her, wanting to feel the silky strands slipping against his skin. But then she did something with her tongue that left no doubt in his mind that she possessed whichever gene variant was responsible for tongue-rolling, and that combined with the look she gave him would have been enough to make him come right there and then.

He pushed her off him—fast—then pulled her up and shoved her against the blackboard, her back to his chest. Someone could walk in, for all he cared. Someone could expel him. He fumbled with the hem of her skirt, hiked up the denim so that it rucked at her waist, and then went to hook his thumbs beneath her underwear. Only…she wasn't wearing any.

He let out a deep groan and rested his forehead to the back of her head. God, she was going to kill him.

He took a deep breath—focus, just focus. Then he rubbed himself through her folds, so warm and slick, while his lips grazed the shell of her ear. "You want this?"

She turned her chin to her shoulder and gave a nod, that playful smirk still quirking her lips.

He guided himself to her entrance, paused for a moment, his breath stilled, his heart hammering, and then, when she gave an impatient wiggle of the hips, he pushed in.

She groaned. Her spine arched and her head fell back to rest against his shoulder, exposing the front of her neck. He kissed and nipped at that creamy tract of skin, marking her as his, while he thrust into her, setting a brisk, jutting rhythm. It felt so good. She felt so good. He wanted it to never end. But the pressure was already building in his lower abdomen.

It was when she reached back, threaded her fingers through his hair, both tugging at the strands and holding him against her as he suckled at the pulse point of her neck, and she let out a guttural moan—"Oh, God, Henry…"—that she brought about his undoing.

He came on a cry. His legs shook; his muscles twitched; each contraction released another spurt of come, hot and sticky on his skin. The blue-black shadows of his bedroom pulsed against the edges of his vision as wave upon wave of warm energy rippled through him.

The pleasure faded as rapidly as the semen cooled. But his heartbeat didn't slow; instead, it continued to thunder against the walls of his chest.

Had someone heard him? With a silence so deep that it echoed and a cry that loud, how could they not have heard him?

He held his breath and waited. His ears strained for any sound: any flick of a light switch, any rustle of the covers from one of the adjacent bedrooms, any creak on the landing.

Please let them still be asleep. Please let no one have heard him.

Hours could have passed in that wasteland of silence.

Then, when he felt sure no one else had awoken, he rolled onto his side, pushed back the covers and eased out of bed. Both his boxers and tee were uncomfortably damp and clung to his skin, eliciting a shiver in the chill December air. He peeled them off, cleaned himself up as best he could using the bundled up tee, and then found a clean set to wear from the kit bag that sat on the wooden stool in front of his old desk.

Once dressed, he smoothed his hand over the bedsheet and found that at least that had been spared—the last thing he needed was to be caught sneaking along the landing, past his parents' bedroom, to the linen closet at the end. Then he slumped back into bed.

Sleep didn't follow.

Maybe he didn't want it to though, lest the same thing happened again. The last time he'd had a wet dream was… Well, he couldn't remember. Regular masturbation kept them at bay. The occurrence that night was probably his own fault due to the stint of celibacy he'd subjected himself to recently, after Elizabeth started featuring frequently (but always unbidden) in his fantasies. He tried to think about other faces, even resorted to a magazine to keep his mind on track, but the moment his eyes slipped shut, she would reappear: her lips, her tongue, her neck—he wanted nothing more than to nuzzle, nip and kiss that neck as he rocked into her over and over again. It felt wrong to think about her while he touched himself, to imagine her knelt before him or bent over his couch or desk, and when he came, the waves of pleasure were never quite enough to distract from the undertow of guilt. That's where the abstinence came in.

Though, clearly, his mind and body had gotten the better of him.

How was he supposed to stop thinking about her when his subconscious refused to let him?

oOoOo

The following morning, he got up early. Darkness pressed in through the chink in the curtains, and silence thickened the air. The rest of his family tended not to be early risers, especially on holidays or weekends, so he reckoned he had half an hour or so before anyone else awoke.

He tiptoed across the landing, taking care to avoid the creaky floorboard two paces outside his door, and he slipped into the washroom, his soiled boxers and tee in hand. He rinsed off the clothes in the sink, beneath a stream of water so cold that it stung his fingers and turned the backs of his hands numb, and then he wrung them out, ready to sneak them into the washing machine with the next load, just like he'd done when he was thirteen and the only thing more mortifying than telling his mother what had happened would be having to tell his dad. All the while, he kept as quiet as he could, not wanting to wake anyone and for them to see him and realise what he was doing.

And he succeeded.

Or at least he thought he did.

But when he stepped out into the corridor and stole across the landing towards the top of the staircase, he found his father lying in wait for him, his shoulder leant into the wall, his arms folded loosely across his chest.

Henry froze.

His father's gaze drifted down to the bundle in Henry's hand before it returned to him.

"Oh, there's a girl all right." His face contorted into a smug grin. "And looks like she's not putting out."