Second-Order Desire

My face flushed, my pulse raced as I gasped for air. I'd never felt like this before. No one had ever made me feel this way, and I doubted anyone ever would.

I careened around the corner and burst into the classroom, panting to catch my breath. I was supposed to be here an hour ago for my presentation, and yet here I was. My professor was just wrapping up his lecture on John Stuart Mill when he and the rest of the class all turned to face me.

"Risha," he said, with that casual smirk that I always pictured him with when I thought about him.

Not that I thought about him a lot.

Okay, maybe I thought about him a lot, but that's beside the point.

"So nice of you to join us," he said, with only a little bit of teasing in his voice. "Why don't you go take a seat? I was just wrapping up."

I did the walk of shame over to my chair, still wheezing from my sprint from the bus stop, and plopped down miserably.

"Alright class," he said, addressing the room. "Go ahead and finish the reading by Monday. Next time we're going to cover a few virtue ethicists, so it's really good for us to make sure we have a firm grasp on utilitarianism. You guys can head out. Risha, why don't you stay back a minute?"

My friends in the philosophy class began to trickle out, a few of them stopping to pat me consolingly on the shoulder. I groaned into my hands as I pressed them against my face, unable to believe that I had flunked the one presentation I had actually been looking forward to giving the whole semester.

Professor O wandered over to his desk. He was wearing slacks and a white button-down under an adorable waistcoat that would have come across as try-hard and pretentious if he wasn't a literal philosophy professor. Plus, those slacks made his ass look fantastic, and his rolled-up sleeves revealed strong, well-muscled forearms.

He was everything you think of when you hear that you're going to have a handsome young philosophy professor teach an intro ethics course. I'd been putting it off since it was the most boring part of the major, but this was the last little bit of motivation I needed. Professor O's affable charm (and nice jawline) was a huge part of the appeal.

For at least the first couple of weeks, our only topic of conversation before he walked into the room was how cute he was. He had curly black hair that tumbled around his face, and he frequently had to toss it out of his eyes when he was lecturing. A strong jaw and a short stubble gave him an easy, classic handsomeness that was complemented by what was clearly a tall, athletic body under all of that tweed and slacks.

There was no way he didn't know he was hot--men like that always knew they were hot--but somehow, this sense of arrogance was countered by the fact that he was (and I don't say this lightly) a massive dork. Oh sure, he'd start the semester with a cool, collected speech about classroom policies and syllabus structure, but as soon as we began covering some of the thinkers we were looking at, he devolved into a bright-eyed, eager undergrad version of himself. He was just a boy excited to talk about the thing he loved to talk about most.

As you can imagine, this made him an incredible lecturer. Even my friends just taking this class for a distribution requirement ended up paying attention; his enthusiasm was infectious. It also had the unfortunate effect of making him irresistible to me. Instead of a schooled, professional calm to his demeanor, he was all sweet chuckles and warm smiles.

He had this way of looking at you that I found equal parts disquieting and breathtaking. The first time I had gone in to get feedback on a paper, I found myself squirming even more than I expected in an office alone with him. It wasn't because he was intimidating, but because he looked you dead in the eye when you spoke to him. I know you think most people look you in the eye, but most of us end up needing to look down or glance at other objects, breaks from eye contact. Not him. He stared at you like he was trying to find something he had lost in your eyes, like he was studying you through them. It had the effect of making you feel like you were the only person in the world in that moment... the only person in his world at least.

He loved his job and he loved his students. He was a great professor, a good person, and an ideal target for idle fantasies when I was horny and trying to go to sleep.

"Well," he said, taking a seat behind his desk and leaning over on his elbows. "Why don't you tell me how your morning has been so far?"

I found myself unable to recall the speech I had rehearsed about missing my bus, winter weather road obstructions, malfunctioning alarm clocks, and the fact that I had stayed up all night making sure I nailed this presentation. All of that disappeared as I, to my horror, felt tears prickle in my eyes. I was just so tired, I wanted to do well in this class, and I had worked so hard on this presentation. It just wasn't fair.

What the hell are you doing?I shook my head, blinked the tears away, and channeled that frustration into a fiery, impassioned anger.

"Listen," I said, looking him dead in the eye and meeting his unwavering gaze. "I worked my ass off on this presentation, and factors outside of my control meant that I couldn't present it. That doesn't mean I didn't do the work, and that doesn't mean I don't deserve the credit."

"Risha, listen," he said, raising a hand.

"No, you listen," I said firmly. "I worked so hard on this presentation and you are going to hear it right here, right now. And then? You're going to give me a goddamn A in this class."

"Risha," he started again. "You don't have to..."

I cut him off by standing up and grabbing my notes. I was about to launch into my lecture when he looked up with that goddamn infuriating sense of kind concern in his soft eyes and said, "Risha, it's okay. I get it. Why don't you come by office hours and..."

But at this point, I had made up my mind. I was tired and not entirely all there from the lack of sleep I had gotten, and I was going to follow my stupid plan by any means necessary.

I noticed I had somehow dropped my notes in my frazzled state. As I bent to pick them up, I noticed his eyes linger for just a moment, tracing their way from the floor up the curves of my body before meeting my eyes.Huh...

Okay, fine,I thought to myself.If being angry doesn't work, maybe I can flirt my way through this?I said this to myself with all the confidence of someone who routinely flirts their way through problems with a cool, casual, sexy air.

This was not the case.

Don't get me wrong; I was hot. I was petite and had curves in all the right places, what's not to love? That day, I was wearing a pair of tight jeans and a top that really wasn't meant to be slutty, but with tits like mine, all tops looked a little slutty. I tucked my hair behind my ears and looked up at him with my big, beautiful doll eyes. I was wearing blush (somehow I had remembered to put makeup on before sprinting out of the house) but the cold and the blood flow from having run here meant that I looked even more rosy-cheeked than usual.

No, it's not that I wasn't hot, it's just that I had too much of a goddamn ego to ever bother trying to appeal to some man. I was in college because I worked hard and I was smart and I was going to do big things in my life, and being juicy had nothing to do with my accomplishments. That being said... it didn't hurt. I wasn't blind to the fact that police officers changed their tone of voice at traffic stops when they leaned in to get a look at me, and I had gotten very good at spotting the leering gaze that boys my age (and men twice my age) shot in my direction when they thought I wasn't looking. I was a sexy 21-year-old college girl. If anyone had a chance, it was me.

I brought my elbows together in front of me while looking at the paper in my hand, making sure to squeeze my cleavage a little bit so it poked out of the front of my shirt. "Please Professor," I said, putting on a stupid, saccharine voice that sounded corny even to me. "Why don't you give me a chance to... show you just how good I've been?"

I looked at him, expecting an eye roll or that goddamned, delightful musical chuckle he gave when he made a dumb pun during his lecture. He did raise an eyebrow, but the mask of composure on his face didn't manage to hide the very slight tightening I saw in the corner of his jaw (his perfect, sharp, sculpted, stupid little jaw).

No fucking way, is this actually going to work?

Well... in for a penny...

I began to walk towards him, making sure to sashay and sway my hips and emphasize just how good they looked in these tight jeans. "You see, Professor," I started, maintaining a bit of that sultry voice.

"Look, Risha, I don't know what has gotten into you, but..."

I didn't let him finish.

"Pleasure," I said, glancing down at my notes. "That is the crux of Mill's philosophy. If we are to, in fact, maximize pleasure and minimize pain, then pleasure and its definition become core to how we run society. But I argue that a Millian framework is limited, too simplistic to account for agency and volition."

I let the paper fall out from my fingers again as I walked right up to him. I could tell I had him, both with what I was saying, and what I was doing.

"Instead, Harry Frankfurt proposes a framework that sublimates pleasure into something easier to track. What best indexes pleasure within the life and actions of an individual? Desire. What a person desires and how they pursue it determines their relationship to pleasure and, therefore, value under a utilitarian system."

Despite the little show I was putting on, I was also kind of getting into the philosophy part of it. I had volunteered to cover this topic since I found this particular framework fascinating and was excited to do more research on it. (Fuck, am I a dork too? Ugh, whatever.)

"But there's a problem," I said, stopping in front of his desk and leaning over it, making sure he had a great view straight down my shirt.

He didn't take the bait, of course; he was too much of a gentleman for that. He looked at me the way he always looked at me: with an intense but not unkind directedness that all of a sudden seemed to have a little tinge of something more. He didn't interrupt me, so I continued.

"People's desires are unpredictable and don't always lead us to the best impulses. Sometimes," I said, batting my eyelids a little bit and feeling kind of stupid doing it, "sometimes we desire things that aren't good for us. Our base instincts aren't necessarily good indicators of societal wholeness, and so we must reckon with the fact that pleasure is our metric of success, but desire is a faulty hermeneutic."

Despite the quiet intensity that he had been looking at me with, he did quirk the corner of his lip up in a smile at my use of the word hermeneutic. I stared at that smile, tracing his lips with my eyes.

Fuck,I thought to myself,I'm genuinely, actually horny.

Something about doing this little sexy routine and being so close in a room alone with a man I found objectively attractive meant my body was responding the way bodies tend to: with desire. I didn't let myself think about it too much; I just went with it. I was already in too deep and figured, fuck it, I might as well see what happens. Worst case, this is just an awkward memory for the rest of my life I'll never live down and I'll just not look him in the eyes the whole rest of the semester.

I looked at those eyes now, and something told me that a part of him wanted me to keep going. It wasn't just his regular look of attentiveness. This time, there was a quiet heat in his gaze that was driving me absolutely wild.

"And it is for this reason," I continued, "that Frankfurt proposes his notion of second-order desires. While desires are that which we want, second-order desires are the ways in which we choose to shape those desires--the things we want to want. It is by these means that we attempt to format our conscience."

I was on a roll now and slipped around the side of the desk, now barely a foot away from him. He turned his chair so he was facing me, his legs apart and his posture relaxed despite the tautness in his gaze.

"Sometimes," I said, almost purring the word, "sometimes we want things that we know aren't good for us. Those are our desires."

He swallowed and went through several expressions before exhaling and leaning forward slightly.

I stepped forward and placed both my hands on the arms of his chair. I leaned in so our faces were close to one another. "And sometimes," I said, lowering my hips until I was seated on his knee, "we tell ourselves that we shouldn't want those things."

I began to slide further down his leg, dragging my crotch along his thigh. My pussy had been getting wetter and wetter as I spoke, and the sensation of the fabric seam against my clit was electric. He didn't say anything or move a muscle, just continued staring. "Those are our second-order desires. For instance," I said, continuing to grind up and down, my whole body tingling with heat at the sensation. "There might be something you want--something you want very, very badly."

I reached forward and put a hand on his chest, the heat of his body radiating against me. I unbuttoned a button or two and pulled his shirt down to unveil a well-muscled pectoral and a delicious-looking chest that I was dying to see more of. "But even though we desire it," I said, tracing my fingers against the bare skin of his chest as he twitched and shuddered slightly, "we know that we shouldn't want it. We want to want something else," I said, looking up at him at last.

"Why don't you help me illustrate, Professor? What's something that you desire right now?"

I was elated at the feeling of control I had. The idea of pushing this man to strain against his better impulses and work him up just did something for me. I had always been dominant in the bedroom with my boyfriends, but this was the first time I had ever even done anything like this with someone older, someone in a position of power, someone I didn't know, but so deeply wanted to.

He still didn't answer, so I decided to help him along a little bit.

"Let's say that the thing you desire right now is... me."

On saying the word "me," I brought my hands up and pushed my hair back before pulling my shirt down so that my tits were spilling out of my collar and right into his face. "That would be your desire."

"But do you want to want me?" I said, asking my question with as sultry a voice as I could conjure. "You know it's wrong. You know I'm your student. You know you shouldn't want this."

"No..." he said quietly, his voice a hushed murmur I had to lean forward to hear.

"That's your second-order desire."

Our faces were inches apart at this point, and I could feel the heat of his breath. I couldn't stop looking at his lips; they looked so close, so tempting. I forced myself to look up at his eyes, which seemed to have transformed entirely.

He looked at me with a scorching heat that made me freeze. I jumped as big hands gripped my waist before smiling and resuming grinding even harder as he held me.

"Frankfurt argues that second-order desires and volitions are what endow a being with personhood," I said, picking up the pace. "Without the capacity to shape our desire," I reached up with one hand and traced his jaw, never breaking my rhythm, "we're no better than animals," I said with a thick, lustful sigh.

I was worked up at this point, and the sensation of grinding against him while he gripped me with those gorgeous hands made me let out an involuntary moan of pleasure. The sound seemed to snap him out of a reverie, and he leaned forward a little further and tightened his grip.

"Risha..." he said.

"Please," I whispered, continuing to grind and placing my hands back on his chest. Several emotions flitted across his face before he finally managed to ask, "Risha, what do you want?"

I smiled; this I knew how to answer. "You," I said with a throaty whisper, dragging the end of it out as my breath hitched from the pressure of his hands on my sides.

He paused before speaking again. "And what about your second-order desire?" he asked, his voice so quiet that I would not have been able to hear him were I not so close.

"Do you want... to want me?" he asked, a slight tremble to his voice as if he was straining to hold something back.

I leaned my way all the way in, my lips brushing past his cheek before pressing up against his ear, my breath warm as I whispered for him and no one else:

"Yes."

That was all it took. He pulled my head back by my hair and his mouth crashed into mine. He kissed me with such a sudden, passionate heat that I almost didn't know how to respond.

I let myself melt into the kiss, my body continuing to grind against him as our tongues battled for dominance. Without pausing, he reached down and hooked one strong hand around my knee, pulling my leg up and over him so that I was straddling his hips instead of just one leg. I would be lying if I said I hadn't noticed the bulge growing in his slacks, and I was now positioned such that I was grinding right against it. The feeling of his erection against my needy pussy sent me into new heights of frenzy. I began grinding harder against him, the intensity building rapidly. His hand snaked up my side and wrapped around my breasts, his skilled fingers squeezing and kneading. I wished he'd touch my nipples; they had been rock hard and straining against the fabric of my bra this whole time.

The feeling of his hands on my breasts made me moan into his mouth as we made out. He was using both hands now, working both sides at once. As if detecting my thoughts he tugged the collar of my low-cut top, my breasts finally springing out. I gasped at the feeling of the cool air against them, and then again at his hands on my bare skin. I was grinding at a frantic pace, my hips moving of their own accord as I felt myself approaching a climax.

No fucking way,I thought to myself somewhere in the back of my mind.I'm going to cum like this? I still have all my clothes on. He still has all his clothes on. Holy shit, I can't believe I'm going to...

He reached down and pinched my nipples, rolling and squeezing them between his thumb and index finger as his tongue pushed into my mouth. The combined stimulation was too much for me, and I began to convulse and moan as my climax crashed over me. I dropped my head forward onto his shoulder as I rode out the waves of my orgasm, biting into his neck out of sheer, subconscious, primal desire.

It took me a moment to realize I was moaning. Loudly. Very loudly. I clamped my hand over my mouth but couldn't stop my desperate mewls as the last of my climax abated. I stayed like that for a moment, my body pressed against him, my head in the crook of his shoulder, panting as he held me while I came back down to earth from wherever he had just sent me. I took a few deep breaths before pulling myself back together and leaning back to look at him. I was ready to make a snarky quip about my "presentation," but the look in his eyes stopped me. I suddenly found myself looking into dark, lust-filled pools that seemed to harbor no trace of his trademark softness. He wasn't looking at me like I was his student. He wasn't even looking at me like a man looks at a woman he wants. He was looking at me like a fox looks at a rabbit.

I was paralyzed under the heat of that gaze, his usual intensity dialed up to an unbearable degree. He stood and lifted me with alarming ease before setting me down and running a finger under my chin. I tried to speak, but he ran a slow thumb across my bottom lip.