Harley knocked on Professor Crane's office door at seven o'clock sharp. She had the luxury of being on time because she'd ditched the rest of her classes in the afternoon, deciding that it was far more important to go shopping and find some really killer heels. She needed something to go with a skirt that had a daringly high slit up the back, after all, and finding the right shoes could have easily taken six hours. Class could wait. Shoes could not.
After shopping, Harley went back to her dorm room, showered and changed into the most tailored white shirt she owned. She paired it with a pinstripe pencil skirt and silver brocade vest, finishing the ensemble with her new pumps and some candy apple red lipstick. She pulled her hair back in a bun, slipped on her glasses frames and now, here she was, a bottle of champagne concealed in her messenger bag and a million different scenarios playing in her head in which the furniture in Professor Crane's office played a scandalous starring role.
The office door opened and Professor Crane stood before her. Disappointingly, he was wearing his tweed jacket. Oh well. That just gave her an excuse to take it off of him later.
"You're on time," he said. His tone contained a measure of surprise but still managed to have an air of boredom to it. "Come in, Miss Quinzel."
Harley slipped past him, brushing her body against his as she went, and took a seat on the loveseat, arranging herself for maximum aesthetic impact.
"Call me Harley," she said huskily, looking up at him.
One of his eyebrows raised. "I would prefer not to."
At first, Harley was mildly disappointed at his rebuff, but it only lasted a split second. He wanted to call her Miss Quinzel. All the scenarios she'd been imagining began to take on a naughty-student-slash-punishing-professor twist. She was okay with that.
After closing the door behind himself and locking it just as he had the first time she'd assisted him, he crossed to his desk and opened one of the drawers. He produced four small containers with green labels, four syringes, a pen, notepad and a single sheet of crisp white paper.
"Before we begin," he said, "there are a number of things I would like to discuss with you."
"Oh, yes, Professor?"
"Primarily, I am concerned with making certain you know exactly what you're getting yourself into."
Harley smiled a little to herself but nodded, indicating that she wanted him to continue. He had no way of knowing that she suspected what he was trying to do. Best to humor him.
"My experiment is intended to evoke certain emotional responses in the subject. I wish to isolate one specific emotion on the spectrum and enhance it through artificial means. I trust you follow me so far?"
"Yes, Professor," she breathed. "Would you mind if I let my hair down?"
"I…" He blinked at her for a second with confusion. "I beg your pardon?"
"I'm getting a teensy weensy headache," she said with a practiced pout, "and I think that may be why."
Crane sighed. "Very well. If I may continue…"
"Oh, please do," she said, pulling the pins from her hair.
"Miss Quinzel, tonight you will be experiencing an intensity of emotion that I doubt you will have ever been subject to before and I want you to be as prepared for the onslaught as you possibly can be."
"Yes, sir." She began undoing the bun at the nape of her neck, untwisting the hair with her fingers.
"I will also need you to describe your experiences in vivid detail, which requires that I give you a diluted form of the drug so that you may remain lucid. Even still, the results may be…overwhelming for you."
Harley hummed a little and let her hair fall loosely about her shoulders.
"There are four different forms of the drug that I wish to test. One is absorbed through the skin, two are inhalants—a powder and an aerosol—and the last is intended to be injected. We will go through each in turn over a period of several weeks. A short time after the initial exposure, I will give you the antidote and you may have time to recover before we begin with the next form of the drug."
Harley fanned herself a little bit and made a little whew! sound. "My, but it's hot in here. Don't you think it's hot in here?" She slowly unbuttoned the top button of her shirt and tugged at her collar.
"I hadn't noticed." Crane did an admirable job of keeping his eyes from obviously dipping down to her now exposed collarbone, but she caught the little flicker of interest that he couldn't keep hidden.
"Maybe you should take your jacket off, Professor. You don't want to get overheated."
"I am quite all right," he said placidly, continuing his litany despite her effort to distract him. "Once you have been exposed to the drug, you may experience any number of side effects. Anxiety, rapid heartbeat, tingling in your extremities, sensory phenomena…"
"Mhmmmm…" Harley unbuttoned the second button and looked at him with rapt attention. A case of nerves, a pounding heart and some tingles sounded pretty standard for what she had in mind…
"Knowing all this, you are still willing to be my test subject, Miss Quinzel?"
She didn't answer. She was too busy thinking about tingles.
"Miss Quinzel."
"Hmm?" she asked dreamily.
"Do you agree to take part in the trial?"
"Absolutely!"
"Then—after you sign this release—we may begin."
Harley didn't even bother to read it, just scribbled her name, dotted the "i" in "Quinzel" with a heart and handed the paper back to him. He took it, slipped it inside one of his desk drawers and retrieved a pair of latex gloves and a surgical mask from within.
"The skin first, I think," he said, snapping his gloves on. He picked up one of the containers with a green label and spun the cap off, setting it on the desk. Crane then motioned for Harley to move over on the loveseat so that he could take a seat beside her. "Roll up your sleeve, please."
"Oh…" Harley bit her lip and glanced at him. "I…can't."
"You can't."
"Nope," she said it so sadly that it was almost an apology. "My sleeves don't roll up."
"Then I suppose I'll have to settle for—"
Harley's shirt was off before he could finish his sentence. He seemed to completely lose his train of thought before it even hit the floor. He didn't turn away in the gentlemanly fashion she almost expected him to, but he did stubbornly refuse to look anywhere near her cleavage. Though the full slip she wore did a decent job of keeping her from looking immodest, nothing could conceal the fact that she was wearing a push-up bra underneath it.
Crane cleared his throat. "As I was saying, placing a few drops on one of your legs would have been more than sufficient."
Suddenly, Harley's foot was in his lap. "Why didn't you say so?"
He stood up so abruptly that it was as though he'd just sat on a tack. It was something of a miracle he didn't douse himself with the experimental formula in his haste to get her leg off of him.
Almost immediately, Crane regained his composure and looked at her sternly. "As you went to all the trouble of removing your shirt, your arm will do, Miss Quinzel. Please extend it."
"'Kay." Harley held out her arm to him where he stood and waited.
Placing the container on his desk, he knelt down in front of her rather than returning to his place on the loveseat. He took her wrist in one hand and traced the veins running up her forearm with the fingertips of the other, examining the skin there. A shiver traveled down her spine in response.
He took a very deep breath, which was either a means of steadying his nerves or an impossible to hide indication of his excitement, and carefully dipped one gloved finger into the container. Drawing it out again, he slid the digit over the delicate flesh on the inside of her elbow and rubbed the solution into her skin with a series of small circular motions.
When this was done, Crane released her, to Harley's great disappointment. He replaced the cap on the container he held and put it back on the desk, then peeled off his gloves and picked up the notepad and pen.
"Though it may take some time for you to fully feel the effects, please describe any physical sensations that you are experiencing."
Harley closed her eyes and tried to focus on nothing but her body. She felt the suede of the couch under her fingertips, smooth and cool; the lace edge of her slip tickling her collarbone; most of all, she felt the patch of skin where Crane had touched her. It was not unlike the feeling after stepping out of a hot shower without a towel—damp skin rapidly drying in cold air.
"I feel…chilly." Harley giggled a little nervously.
Why was she nervous?
She heard the scratch of a pen on paper. He didn't say anything more.
Harley breathed deeply through her nose and gripped the loveseat cushion beneath her a little tighter. The sensation of cold was beginning to spread outwards from the area where the formula had been rubbed into her skin. It reached her fingertips and then crawled up her arm, over her shoulder and down towards her heart. The feeling settled there and grew colder still, like an icepack was resting on her chest.
"I'm…cold all over," she muttered, drawing another breath. Her lungs felt constricted, the way they might have if she had pneumonia. "My breathing is…" She tried to breathe in again and failed to get as much oxygen as she wanted. "I can't…get a full breath."
Again she heard the sound of pen moving over paper.
The cool sensation grew ever more oppressive, spreading further until she was freezing from the top of her head to the tips of her toes. She shivered. Goosebumps popped up on her arms.
"Continue," he urged.
Harley gasped for air a few times and was slammed with the sudden feeling of being pressed in on from all sides. She wondered if this was what it felt like to be a car getting crushed at a junkyard. Her lungs barely took in any air at all. Her bones ached from the effort of trying to breathe. There was a pounding in her skull that was in time with the beats of her heart.
"Heavy…." Her fingernails dug into the cushion now, her knuckles white. "Can't…claustrophobic…"
The darkness became too much to handle. Harley's eyes snapped open and she clawed at the loveseat, desperate to get away from the pressure that was squeezing her lungs. The room spun in front of her eyes. "Dizzy."
All at once, heat exploded outwards from the inside of her elbow. Her skin started to tingle, then to burn. The sensation raced over her body, chasing away the cold that had been there before. It made her think of sitting too close to a radiator in winter—close enough for her skin to redden.
"Hot," she whispered, curling in on herself without realizing it, letting go of the loveseat and hugging her arms. "It's…hot…"
And then…panic.
It tore up through her, starting in the pit of her stomach and shooting upwards until she felt it inside her skull. It felt like the butterflies she got whenever she met someone she was attracted to, but sharper and multiplied times a thousand.
He hadn't exaggerated: this was just as intense as he'd warned it would be. It wasn't painful but it was certainly uncomfortable and more than a little alarming. Distantly, she wondered how much worse would it have been if the formula had been full strength.
"A…" She gulped air like a fish out of water and slipped from the couch into the floor where Crane still knelt. Her fingers somehow found themselves wrapped around his lapels and she collapsed against his body. The sudden weight forced him to sit on the floor with her practically in his lap.
Harley held on for dear life as she rode out the waves of sensation that rocked her body. The heat began to subside only to be replaced by tingles that made the hair at the back of her neck stand on end. Everything in the room seemed very far away now, like the world itself was drawing away from her.
"A what?" he asked, wrapping his hands around her waist to keep her from convulsing.
Though Harley didn't realize it, she was whimpering. She buried her face in his chest, tears streaming down her cheeks. "Afraid."
The word didn't quite sum up everything she felt, but it was all she could manage in her current condition. Though she clutched Crane's jacket desperately, she could not quite believe he was really there. She felt like the only living thing in the entire universe. Isolated.
No. That wasn't right. She felt…abandoned. By everything.
She tried to say alone but she didn't have the capacity to do so. She sobbed into his shirt, making incoherent muffled little noises.
Harley barely heard the sound of Crane putting on his gloves. Barely felt the injection of the antidote.
She very, very slowly started coming back to herself. The tears stopped. Her breathing came easier. She could feel the carpet under her. Could smell Crane's aftershave. The world came back into focus and the darkness that had been encroaching on her drew back.
She breathed in. She breathed out. She did nothing but focus on keeping that pattern going for a long time.
Harley didn't know how long she lay there, curled up like an animal in its master's lap, but it must have been quite awhile. Eventually, she became aware of Crane's hands on her. One was pressed against the small of her back, keeping her steady, the other stroked her shoulder blade, almost absentmindedly. It was…nice.
"Miss Quinzel," he whispered.
She shook her head against his chest without realizing. The hand on her shoulder blade disappeared. With a small, distressed moan, she mourned its loss.
Gentle fingers slipped beneath her chin, tilting her face up. The lights in the office seemed much too bright for her eyes to handle. Harley suddenly realized that the glasses she'd been wearing were gone. Where they'd gone to and when she'd lost them, she had no idea.
"Miss Quinzel," he repeated, looking directly into her eyes.
Her lip quivered. "Harley."
Crane sighed but relented. "Very well. Harley. Have you recovered?"
"I'm…" She took a breath. "I'm okay."
"I am glad to hear it." His fingertips slipped away from her chin and he withdrew the hand on her back. He gently pulled her hands free of his lapels—she'd been holding them so tightly and for so long the fabric was mashed and bent out of shape—and placed them in her lap. "If you would be so kind as to get off me…?"
Shakily, Harley shifted and struggled to her knees. He stood up, wincing, and offered her his hand. She took it and rose to stand in front of him. She found herself a little unsteady on her feet, but thankfully only swayed for a moment. Whatever he was working on—rather, whatever they'dbeen working on—it certainly wasn't what she'd thought it was. Or if it was, it was the worst aphrodisiac in history.
"If you would like," he said, "I will escort you back to your dormitory."
"That won't be necessary." She smiled wanly and scrubbed at her face to wipe away the tears that had dried on her cheeks. Harley sniffled a few times, but that was the end of that. "Professor…"
"Yes, Miss Quinzel?"
"Which…which emotion are you trying to isolate?"
His icy blue eyes met hers and held her gaze—something they had never done, she realized. She felt dizzy again. "Fear."
"I…" Harley gave a weak little laugh, "I thought it was going to be something else."
"I assumed you…when you read my notes…" Crane's face hardened. He seemed angry with himself. "Had I known you were entering into this so blindly, I never would have allowed it."
"S'okay."
"Are you willing to continue the experiment?"
"Yes."
"Then please come back next Friday evening."
"I will."