His Model Student: A Student-Teacher Romance

20. Still wary

[RECAP: Sera has finally posed naked for Mr Marek, and managed to let slip that she's pretty inexperienced with men]

"You told him you were a virgin?!"

Lois couldn't stop laughing.

Sera protested. "No! I didn't tell him anything. I didn't even say anything."

"But you basically let him guess, right? If you say nothing, and just go red, that's obviously what he's going to think." Lois and Sera had gone out for sushi before hitting a few bars. It was the first restaurant in town to have food going round on a conveyor belt, which made it such a novelty that it was always packed.

Lois reached out towards a plate with three exquisitely arranged pieces of rice and seaweed, then hovered over another one with two larger sushi on it. "Which costs more, green plates or red ones? Oh who cares, I'll eat both anyway." She took both plates and picked up her chopsticks again. "Anyway, I told you it was becoming a millstone. You'll be like one of these women that waits and waits and eventually has to join a nunnery because everything has sealed up from lack of use."

Sera ignored her and unscrewed the cap from a tiny plastic fish full of soy sauce. "I'm not holding on to it, necessarily. I just haven't met anyone whom I've been tempted enough to make the leap with."

"Until a certain art teacher unpacked his brushes?"

Once again Sera refused to respond. "It's not like there's any rush. We don't get tested for it at A-levels, do we?"

Lois was silent for a moment, toying with some sliced ginger. "Just imagine that. If we did all get tested. I wonder what would be a pass and what would be a fail? Or imagine if you got sent to a specific university based on the results?"

Sera really didn't want to imagine this. While she wasn't intimately acquainted with most of her classmates' sexual histories, she didn't particularly want to be grouped among the undateables.  Perhaps Lois was right and she should just get rid of it quickly.

A group of guys entered and took seats further long the bench. They immediately started giving Lois and Sera a subtle eyeing up. Sera briefly imagined just hooking up with one of them, getting it all over with.

But they just seemed so insubstantial. So much less rugged and virile than... She forced herself to stop thinking about him and tried to focus on her food.

But Lois persisted.

"Honestly, I'd kill to be a fly on the wall," she said. "You lying there in the buff with Mr Marek cracking jokes about your prudishness."

"He didn't crack a joke and I wasn't prudish."

"You said it was really awkward though," Lois pointed out.

"Well it was. You try lying there, stark naked, in front of someone that...."

"...someone that you have a massive crush on?" Lois teased. "Maybe you should get him to give you a bit of extra education. He paid you for the session, didn't he? Maybe you could take payment in kind. Private biology lessons in return for modelling."

The thought of ever putting such an absurd proposition to Mr Marek was so horrifying that Sera couldn't speak.

Horrifying, yet amazingly, amazingly...

"You're actually thinking about it, aren't you?" Lois said. "I'm sure there are worse options. At least he'd know what he was doing. He looks like he's a man of the world, if you know what I mean."

Sera knew exactly what Lois meant.

They had both been impressed with the amount of money Sera had been paid for the session. They'd previously had no idea of what models actually received so Lois had made some inquiries. When Sera finally opened the envelope, they calculated that Mr Marek had paid her about twenty per cent above the average rate for a two hour life class. Pretty generous.

"You still have all that money to spend," Lois reminded her. "And more to come next week, presumably."

The money was burning a hole in Sera's purse. Somehow it felt wrong, as though she hadn't earned it properly. She tried to explain this to Lois, who rolled her eyes.

"You earned every penny. Give it to me if you're so hung up with guilt about it. It's not like you earned it for selling drugs or something, is it? Or on the game?"

The problem was that this latter was very much what it did feel like. Being paid for her body rather than her mind. Except if she were on the game, Mr Marek would expect her to do more than just lie there. And he certainly wouldn't be keeping any professional distance.

Sera shivered. If she was ever going to sell her body, she knew exactly who she would want the buyer to be.