“What about you, do you come here often?”<br/><br/>The question brought a bit of a smirk to Martin’s lips. If it was asked in the cliched way as a come-on, he didn’t detect that so much as the earnestness with which Lena had posed it. He let his gaze shift from Lena to Paige and then back again as he pondered the statements.<br/><br/>“Well, I’m sure you’ve been acquainting yourself with the city well,” he said, leaving the latter part of the sentence unspoken. It’s not that girls’ work was<em>poor</em>per se. Rather, it reflected what he assumed to be the efforts of two girls who simply had priorities besides maximizing the educational portion of their trips abroad.<br/><br/>The professor took a small sip from his drink before finishing his response. “But yes, I have been here a few times before. It’s a good place to unwind and distract from the day-to-day.” He shrugged, giving off the air that coming to a club with no little notoriety for its racier elements was, if not a regular thing for him, an act with which he felt some comfort.<br/><br/>“As far as the comments on your papers go,” he paused to look at Lena, then Paige, pausing on the curvier of the two to cast a quick look down her figure and back up again, “trust that they’re given in an effort to help you appreciate and reinforce what I hope for you to take away from my class.”<br/><br/>Martin took another sip of his drink, then smiled again, this time as sincerely as he could, “I hope you don’t take the harsher comments personally, girls. I know you’re only here for a short time, and I want all of our students who come from outside the country to get the most that they can from the experience.”<br/>