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eowynstwin · 25 days ago

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professor price

professor price x reader. age gap. older man/younger woman. pining. pre-relationship. jealousy. angst. guilt. voyeurism. mvp alejandro. lightly explicit. - A Christmas gift to my friend @guyfieriii, centered around her own Professor Price au from all the way back in early 2023. I have linked each fic of hers that I reference in this work—highly recommend you check them out.

The first day of class you’re in the front row—center seat.

Old instincts never really retire even if the body leaves the field; a moment’s evaluation opens you like a book. Pencil pouch on your desk, set parallel to the edge. Syllabus in the middle, creased at the stapled corner but otherwise pristine. Water bottle at the corner, solid blue.

You: hair neat. Wearing clean slacks and a knitted sweater like a uniform, ankles crossed, buckled straps of your Mary-Janes intersecting in an obtuse V. Like a flock of birds in formation, flying southwards for the winter. There’s a curated look to you, a careful arrangement of details meant to declare the essence of who you are and what you’re about.

It’s clear immediately; from only a glance.

You’re a good girl.

The eager-to-please kind. The five A-levels kind. The kind who does her bonus assignments because they’re available, not because she needs them. Prim, polished, ironed at the creases.

Straight from a 90s teen drama, or porn of an equal vintage.

You meet his eyes—

And Price knows how it goes.

Boredom and professional stagnancy are the bane of active men. Men with egos. Men who long to fix things. Men who have reached the heights of every achievement now looking for the next peak to summit.

It’s the curse of middle age’s collision with machismo. How does a man prove his masculinity when there’s no proving left to be done? When the panopticon has finally turned its eyes away, satisfied at his self-regulation enough not to constantly surveil it?

Suddenly the performance can end, if he wants it to. Only, if it ends, how does the actor not disappear, when the role is the only identity he’s ever had?

In academia, the answer is—of course—simple:

Fuck a student.

And oh. It’s right there, in those wide, sweet eyes, looking up at him with the reflexive veneration of a star student.

You’re begging to be fucked.

Fucked right. Fucked by someone who knows what he’s doing. Fucked so good that it upends every clean line of you, like breaking furniture, like smashing crystal. Fucked crying, whimpering, groaning beyond recognizable language, sweaty and gross until it’s impossible to tell whether or not his body and yours have begun to fuse.

Fucked the way no snot-nosed twenty-something twat, the age-appropriate kind that sleeps in the back of his lecture hall and then emails him at the end of every semester begging for extra credit to fix his grade, could possibly fuck you.

He holds your gaze for too long. You smile at him, shyly, and he gives you a brusque nod before distracting himself with the papers on his lectern.

You’re too young for him.

Not that it matters.

Price is all about lines. Stark delineations between will and won’t. Before his untimely retirement, the lines had meant everything. They separated the kind of man he was from the kind of man he did not want to be, and they kept those men separate, even when the distance from one to the other narrowed so sharply that the differences between them were a matter of context rather than consequence.

The important one now is the one that splits his lectern off from the rest of the lecture hall. Students are allowed to cross it, of course, or else he would be neglecting his duty to them as their instructor. But they must inevitably leave, and his feet must remain planted squarely on his side of it.

It’s not even a line he drew himself, although he would have if need be. No—professors, at the beginning of their tenure, are warned. Students will construct feelings of intimacy with their teachers, interpreting their passion for academics as passion for the conduit thereof. Close relationships between mentor and mentee, to be sure, can be deeply beneficial for the young scholar’s development—

But they must remain impersonal. The work must be the lens through which student and teacher look at each other. That barrier must never be lifted.

So it doesn’t matter how old you are or aren’t, or that you’re a second-year grad student, or that every time you walk into the classroom Price wants to drag his desk chair over to yours because you’re the only one who seems like she gives a damn about what he teaches.

He may draw his lines, but he never crosses them.

He’s seen it before. Never done it himself. Phillip Graves has a reputation for it.

Of course, as the Americans like to say, innocent until proven guilty, but it’s hard to argue with the pretty girls Graves always seems to have floating around him every semester. Undergrads, even, though to his credit they seem usually to be the older ones.

Price doesn’t think that even Dean Shepherd’s lapdog could get away with fucking freshly legal coeds—mostly because, if Graves tried to pull something like that, Price might actually take matters into his own hands and kill the bastard himself.

As it is, he can’t actually prove that his colleague is sleeping with anyone he shouldn’t be. He’s not in the army anymore; he has no desire to lose sleep over staking out the man’s house.

The only consolation is that no one besides his students and the Dean seem to like Graves—something the man doesn’t seem concerned to rectify, if he even notices. Though Price can’t imagine that he hasn’t noticed. He’s always sitting alone at staff meetings if Shepherd isn’t present, and if he does try to talk to anyone, it’s usually the adjuncts, young women just beginning their careers in higher academia who know the drill by now and merely humor him.

So it shouldn’t surprise Price when, one day, he catches Graves chatting you up.

“Hey, congrats on the election, kid,” he hears him say to you, referencing your recent appointment as president to the student association of his department. Graves smiles, dimpling, all that American charm amped up to the maximum.

And Price sees red.

“Thank you, Professor Graves,” you say politely. You have your arms crossed over your binder, held to your chest, as if a makeshift shield.

“I’d have voted for you if I could’ve,” the other man says. “And hey, I know you Brits like your formalities, but it’s just Phil with me.”

“Erm…”

“There you are,” Price announces from the other end of the hallway.

You turn, and give look you shoot him is so relieved that, almost immediately, it clears the haze from his eyes, like a cool breeze moving through the hottest part of a summer day. Relief of his own floods him, washing the jealousy he’d barely had time to confront completely away.

“Hello, Professor,” you say, “I was just on my way to your office!”

“Good,” says Price, approaching. “Wanted to talk about your last paper. Had some issues with your secondary sources.”

You blanch, and he immediately feels guilty for the lie.

“Ah, go easy on the kid,” says Graves. “I keep telling you, John, no one likes a hardass.”

For some reason, there are two men in the department that Phillip Graves makes a consistent effort to interact with, and Price has the misfortune of being one of them. He’s not sure why—he thinks he’s made his distaste for the man very clear. It’s probably some dick-measuring contest for him; Price’s standing in the department, even despite Shepherd’s favoritism, is secure.

Whether it’s secure enough to withstand this…thing happening between you and him has yet to be seen.

“I hold my students to a higher standard, Graves,” Price says shortly. Then, to you, “Come along, and we’ll talk about it.”

He turns and leaves, and as he hears you hurry after him, an ugly kind of gratification begins purring behind his sternum. The two of you walk for a ways in silence.

“Was it the interviews?” you finally ask him, sounding genuinely upset. “I thought they would be okay, given that they were original transcriptions…”

“Your sources were fine,” Price soothes, unable to take it. “Just needed to give you a good out, didn’t I?”

You falter beside him, but quickly catch up. “Oh no, was I that obvious?”

He looks to you as he walks, catching the anxious expression on your face, and smiles, amused. “Don’t worry, promise you he couldn’t tell.”

Then you laugh. It enter’s Price’s bloodstream and pumps through his veins, all the way to the arteries in his neck. It fills the lobes of his brain, rapidly bringing the world into sharper focus.

“I’ll hold you to that, professor,” you say, and it’s a tether he welcomes, a sting of pleasure as its hook lodges in his ribs.

Price looks over his shoulder, and finds Graves watching the two of you walk away. He doesn’t like the expression on the other man’s face. It’s…knowing. Understanding, in the way of a man having competed for something and lost to the better opponent.

He catches the Graves’ eye, scowling at him; he means for the expression to be disapproving. For Graves to know that Price knows what he’s about, and has no intention of humoring it.

But he knows how it actually comes across.

Back off. She’s mine.

Price’s colleague and friend Alejandro Vargas is the only other man in the department that Graves cares to know, and, luckily for Price, Alejandro shares his dislike.

“He is too young to be acting the way he does,” he says one evening after work. He and Price share a pint at a pub nearby campus on a regular basis.

“Too young?” Price repeats. “What is he, thirty-five? Forty?”

“Who cares,” Alejandro says. “Anyone chasing after his students the way he does should at least be fifty. That way a midlife crisis can at least be a valid excuse.”

Price’s stomach turns. His forty-sixth birthday has already come and gone.

“So you’re sayin’—”

“Man his age can get his ego boost somewhere else,” Alejandro mutters into his tankard. He has a strange way of looking at things, sometimes; as if he were a much older man himself, and not in his prime at thirty-eight. “Don’t they make apps for that nowadays?”

“No excuse for messing with students,” Price agrees, although he tastes the bitter note of hypocrisy in the back of his throat as he thinks of you, and that rainy afternoon.

Driving you home was a mistake, although he can’t think of anything else he would’ve respected himself for doing. He clings to that excuse like a buoy in the ocean—no matter his feelings for you, leaving you on campus to wait until the storm passed, no umbrella, no coat, would have been unforgivable.

He’d played it off as simply doing a favor for his favorite student. A willingness to go beyond his usual responsibilities to you, since you excel beyond what even his high standards demand of you.

Something the two of you should keep between yourselves, for professionalism’s sake, because he has an obligation to treat every student equally.

I can be discreet, you’d said, the tone of your voice playful and also…not.

The way one says something that they mean, while framing it as a joke, just in case it’s taken the wrong way.

Mitigation.

Something he could’ve brushed off, if your hand hadn’t moved toward his.

Good girl. He’d moved his away. Focused on the line. Accepted your apology with grace, determined not to embarrass you for feelings that are only natural—

That are reciprocated, even though they shouldn’t be.

“That is less the problem to me,” Alejandro muses.

“What?” Price exclaims. “Mate, we have a responsibility to these kids. We can’t go treating classrooms like bloody Love Island.”

“It is about the man,” says his colleague. “If a man shows respect in his relationships, then it is not so important where they happen. Graves, he is not a respectful man.”

“No one his age should be with girls that much younger than him,” Price growls.

Alejandro fixes him with an intense look, a serious expression tightening the sharp lines of his face.

“This is what I mean by respect,” he says evenly. Purposefully. “Knowing who is right and wrong to be with. Girls that young? No. They do not know themselves, and Graves will try to tell them who they are. But not every girl is that young.”

Price shifts uncomfortably on his barstool, remembering one late afternoon—when Alejandro had stopped by his office, to find you sitting on the small couch there, studying, as Price finished grading essays.

Innocent, he’d thought. A mentor and his student, sharing space, making room for scholarship to flow between them.

He realizes now, chagrined, that Alejandro has always been too perceptive to accept what he merely observes.

“Mate,” Price says, measured, “It isn’t like that.”

“No,” Alejandro agrees, “it isn’t. That does not mean it can’t be.”

“Alejandro—”

“You are not your father, hermano,” his colleague says, knowing exactly where to strike. “That is the end of what I will say.”

And he sips his beer while leaving Price to seethe.

You’re seeing one of the twats.

Price convinced himself the first couple of times you walked out with him—Will—that you were taking on a charity case. You’re a student leader, after all. Helping a classmate with their ailing grades falls under your purview. You’ve hosted tutoring sessions before, and the pride of it had nestled glowing in his chest so warmly that he couldn’t help bragging about your academic promise to his colleagues.

Even outside of the ache for you that sits in his gut every time he sees you, Price could not be prouder. The students’ Historical Society’s fundraiser last month had gone off beautifully thanks to you, and everyone who had attended was still talking about it: from the brilliant idea for a fifties dress code, to the truly impressive array of antiques you’d convinced donors to contribute to the silent auction.

You’d looked so beautiful in your little red dress, too. The sharp lines of your burgundy lipstick had made your smile so bright all evening that he’d fallen asleep thinking about it.

His student. His protege, really. Of course you’d notice someone struggling, and make an effort to help.

Except, Price has never been very good at fooling himself. The truth is too valuable an asset for him to disregard.

The first time you leave with Will, he feels it clench around something in his gut. He has to remind himself he has no right to feel anything about it at all.

The second time, it starts burrowing deeper. Gnawing a hole in his stomach. The look on the twat’s face, as he follows you out like a lost puppy, is too smitten to allow Price his illusions.

Then one day, you take that twat’s hand in yours at the end of class, slotting your fingers between his.

It descends again. That film of red over his eyes. He stares at the two of you as you make your way to the door—and you throw Price a look, Price, aimed straight for his center.

You’re his. His.

And what has he done about it?

The accusation is in your eyes. It’s honed by everything he’s done—and hasn’t. The late-night chips after fundraiser planning. The cigars between classes, and the scotch in his office he pours every time you stop by to discuss your thesis.

The cufflinks he wears for every single class you’re in, and the box you wrapped them in sitting open on his beside table. Like a conduit for bringing the warmth of your touch into his home.

The same warmth, in his weakest moments, that he imagines wrapped around his cock. As his fingers find the soft give of your cleft. As his tongue meets yours, and tastes the liquor he now only drinks in your company.

Imagines, but never pursues.

Why had he believed you wouldn’t search for the same elsewhere?

The anniversary comes up faster than Price would have liked, despite the fact that the calendar isn’t missing any days.

He goes to the cemetery alone. Bouquet of English roses clutched in the vice of one hand. It feels like a day it should be raining, but the sky betrays him, the gray covering of clouds thin enough to let the dyed sunlight through.

He buried his mother in the plot she’d bought for herself and his father, Price the elder, according to her wishes. He’d buried his father beside her against Price the younger’s own.

It had happened within a year of each other. The chemotherapy hadn’t worked, after years of fighting it, and the last months of Mrs. Price’s life happened far sooner than it was fair. She hadn’t left any regrets behind, she promised in her will, but young John Price knew it for a lie.

He remembers sitting with her in the mornings as a boy, flipping through old issues of National Geographic. His mum would ooh and aah over exotic pictures of the American west—the Russian steppe—colorful bird’s eye shots of the Taj Mahal or Burj Khalifa.

“We’re gonna go there someday,”she would enthuse, squeezing him around his toddler-belly with one arm as he perched in her lap.

Even then he’d known it was a dream, and not a goal. All he had to do was look around at the yellow tint of their kitchen with its laminate countertops, the scuffs on the corners of its scratch-and-dent fridge, the mismatch of cookware hanging on a smoke-stained wall. Peeling wallpaper they didn’t have the right to tear off, because they needed their deposit back very badly when they moved out.

His father was a tradesman—they could barely afford to visit Wales.

And his mother, at the elder Price’s insistence, did not work.

It’s in a nice place, the grave. Far back away from the entrance, where it can’t be trivialized by passing cars or dog walkers. Price can stand at the end of it and reckon with death without having to think of life going inexorably on right behind him.

Except, it’s the years to the right of the dash that he stares at, not the left. Even as a boy, he’d always noticed the disparity between his mother and father. How, before the younger even turned fourteen, grey streaked Price the elder’s temples, scars of age furrowing deep from the corners of his nostrils— while the decades his mum still had left to face radiated from her so brightly that sometimes people took her for his father’s eldest, and not the baby she bounced on her hip.

Decades she never even got to see.

Price rounds to his mother’s side and lays the bouquet beneath her epitaph—Loving Wife and Mother. He’s almost as old now as she was, in her last year, and he feels the epicenter of it sit somewhere between his heart and lungs. It burns, furious, indignant.

“Got tenured this year, Mum,” he murmurs to her. “Probably pay off the house next.”

He hears birdsong in the tree line beyond the border fence. Tries to feel her fingers running through his hair in the breeze, and fails. It’s just wind.

His father—who he sees in the mirror too often lately—he does not address.

He makes the mistake all men eventually do—

He calls his ex.

“Hallo?” Ada says, after picking up on the second ring. She’s one of the few people he knows to keep a house phone these days. She’d explained she enjoys the novelty, and the surprise on the rare occasions it actually rings.

“Hi, darlin,’” says Price.

“John, hi! How you doin’?”

“I’m alright. How’s the new place?”

He hears a shift in the background, like she’s thrown herself at a haphazard angle into a chair. She’s always been like that; she moves through any space she occupies unafraid of what she might bump into.

“Tidy!” she enthuses. “Got a view of the sea down the hill. And there’s a market on Saturdays! I got the loveliest Gruyère from one of the stalls, says he ages it himself. Can’t wait to put it in a sauce.”

“Sounds nice,” Price says, meaning it.

“Yeah, it is,” Ada replies. He pictures her twirling the cord between her fingers. “Heard about your promotion, by the way, congratulations—you earned it, John.”

“Thank you,” he says. “Have you settled in okay there? Students giving you trouble?”

“Not at all! Bit touch and go at the start of the semester, but you know me,” she laughs. “That’s how I thrive.”

“I know.”

A pause. Long enough for Price’s regret over dialing her to make itself a part of the conversation.

She sounds good. She sounds better than good—she sounds great. Happy with where she is in life, and where she’s going.

Nothing like she did when she lived with him.

“So…” Ada trails. “I know you didn’t just call to chat, John. Not that I don’t appreciate it.”

“That obvious, am I?”

He can hear the sympathetic smile in her voice when she replies, “I can look at a calendar too.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I just—just wanted to hear your voice. Hope that’s alright.”

“Yeah, it’s alright,” she says. “Didn’t stop caring just because I left, you know.”

He hears the unsaid: just because you didn’t follow.

“I know,” he replies. He leaves the me neither unsaid as well. “Ada, do you—do you regret it, at all?”

“Regret…what?” The tone of her voice edges toward the defensive.

“Being with me.”

“What? John, of course not!” She laughs, tension evaporating. “We had some bad times, sure, but we had some good ones too. I’m grateful for all of them.”

“Even the bad times?” he asks, frowning.

“Yeah, John, even those. They showed me who you were. And I liked that person, a lot. If you had—”

She cuts herself off from the what if John knows had been coming. The speculation about what their relationship might have looked like, if he’d made a different decision. It would only hurt both of them more to think about it.

“If you’d been a worse man I’d have left a lot sooner,” she amends. “But like I said. No regrets. It’s over now, and I’m sad about that. But I’m glad it happened.”

Something happens behind Price’s ribs—something hard, trying to claw its way upward, that he has to draw his lips between his teeth and sniff hard to foil its escape.

“Thanks, darlin,’” he says, hearing the tremor in his own voice, and, for once, not hating himself for it with her listening. “I feel the same way too.”

He catches you with the twat in the library. It doesn’t surprise him—he hadn’t expected anything else. You hadn’t even looked at him this time as you’d pulled Will out of the lecture hall, nor had you noticed him following at a remove behind.

So when he opens the door to the sound of smacking flesh, it doesn’t shock him in the slightest.

You’re on a reading table with your skirt flipped upward, underwear dangling from one ankle as you curl your legs around the twat’s hips. The boy’s arse quivers and clenches as he jackhammers into you with neither art nor precision.

The look on your face is one of concentration. Focus. Like whatever pleasure you could derive from this is something you must actively keep hold of, otherwise you’ll lose it.

Your eyes land on him then, and for a split second—a fraction of a heartbeat—you seem relieved. Pleasure radiates from you, and you begin to roll your hips as you hold him in your gaze—and then, suddenly, horror overtakes it. Your eyes widen. You raise a hand to grab Will—

Price shakes his head.

You freeze. Your chest heaves. (The twat is oblivious.)

He stares you down. Leans against the bookshelf with his hands in his pockets, unblinking.

His.

The thing about lines is that they can be redrawn.

You run your tongue along your parted lips, hands coming up to rest on the twat’s back. Price looks down at the place Will’s body hides yours from his gaze, then back up.

He inclines his head. Go on, then.

And again, you move. Right as his command. Pull the body between your legs closer, brows creasing together, undulating into each thrust as you let Price’s eyes cage yours. You draw up higher and higher, the pitch of your breath thinning as your climax stretches taut inside you—you beg him with your eyes—

He nods.

You seize on the desk, throwing your head back, jaw dropping open. No sound escapes you—he sees the muscles in your throat work to contain it.

What will you sound like when he gets his hands on you?

By the look on the twat’s face next class, you’ve ended it. Price hardly cares. His phone is hot in his pocket, a grenade with its pin nearly out.

In case your memory fails when you find yourself thinking of me.

And, in the center of the photo, the exact thing the twat’s hips had been hiding away.

You’re there, in the front row. Every time his gaze falls on you, you shiver. The same skirt from before leaves the soft expanses of your thighs bare, for him, this time.

His. You know it now, too. It intersects the line, perfect in its perpendicularity.

You have lessons to learn. You’re already a good student; the despondent expression on Will’s face, even now, as he gazes at you like a lovelorn puppy from the back of the hall, proves it.

But you’re not there yet. You’re only just now catching up, after all. And only Price has the duty—the right—to teach you.

You’re too young for him—

Not that it matters.

a/n: If this seems disjointed or missing context, it's because a few things I reference are no longer available on the internet. Ash, I mourn daily what you have withdrawn from us.

Thank you for reading!

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