Honing The Talent
B Pascal
Chapter 37
It wasn’t a long nap, since Larry came bounding in thirty minutes later, but I felt marginally better.
“C’mon, Carter, let’s get some dinner, then it’s party time. There’s gotta be something going on tonight to blot out the gloom of impending finals, you in?”
“I dunno, Larry, I’ve been fighting off a headache for the past hour. Loud music and alcohol may not be conducive to a cure.”
“Au contraire, mon ami, it could be exactly what you need. You know what they say about wine, women and song.“
“I remember the quote from Lord Byron: ’Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter... sermons and soda-water the day after.’ I need my head in good shape for tomorrow.“
“You’re a tool, Carter. Let’s get some dinner and I’ll convince you by dessert.”
But, as it turned out, by dessert time Larry had been collared by some of his party buddies to discuss the evening’s options and where their best bets were. I piled both of our dishes onto one tray and bused them. I was zipping my jacket at the door when Con Doherty came out of a side door.
“Carter, how’s it hangin’? Where are you off to tonight?”
“Maybe nowhere, Con. I’m trying to get rid of a headache. I might lie down for awhile.”
“Heresy! I’ll not hear of it! You need to party, Carter. Exams are coming up and we could be screwed. Better enjoy college life while it lasts.”
“I don’t think I’m in the mood tonight, Con. Alcohol isn’t going to do my headache any good.”
“So don’t drink! Nobody’s forcing you. Just find a place with some fun people and some laughter, it’ll fix you right up. Listen, there’s another party at Kappa house tonight. Join me. You had fun last time, right?”
I remembered the girl Alicia and her sorority sisters from Forbes University at the last Kappa party I’d been at. I’d wound up DP’ing her with some other guy I’d never been introduced to in front of a crowd. I had to admit it was an experience to remember. But there had been a lot of alcohol, and it was loud there. Con could see me thinking about it.
“Look, what’s the worst that could happen? Too many drunk people, too much loud music, you grab your coat and walk back to the dorm. On the other hand, you might find a crew to hang out with, have some laughs, forget books for awhile. Whaddya say?”
“What time are you going over?”
“I think around nine-ish. It’ll be slow till then.”
“Knock on my door. I’m going to take a nap, but I’ll see how I feel about it then, okay?”
“Deal.” And he walked off. To my amazement, I heard him reciting Edgar Allan Poe as he went down the path: While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
Doherty sometimes surprised me. I went back to the dorm and closed my eyes on the bed, trying to push conscious thought away with only partial success. But I think I did sleep for a short time, because I was startled awake by the knock on the door.
“Oh, Car-ter, it’s your nine o’clock wake-up call.“
I told him to come in while I sat up on the bed.
“So? Are you made whole again? Ready for some laughs?”
I thought about it. I felt around for the headache and mostly it seemed to be gone. I didn’t think I could do any more reading tonight, certainly nothing as intense as this afternoon. I mentally shrugged. He was right. I didn’t have to drink, and if it was too loud and too rowdy, I could just leave.
“Okay, Con, I’ll see how it goes. Lemme grab my jacket.”
We went off towards the frat house, and he started a monologue about basketball and how weird the coach could be and fine points of the last game they’d played. I had to smile at sports guys. If they were into it, they were all in, no reservations.
He was still talking when we got to Kappa house. The house was hopping, you could see people through the windows in every room, all of them holding drinks.
As usual, Con just walked in, well known here. We tossed our jackets on top of the pile in the little space that served as a cloak room. Behind me I heard, “Doherty! You made bail! We were so worried.”
“And screw you, too, Ahern. Why are you still sober? You remember Carter?”
“The famous Carter of story and legend? Of course. Welcome back, Carter. Wait, wasn’t that a TV show?”
“Time for another beer, Bobsy. I’m gonna wander around, Carter, see who’s here. Make yourself at home.”
Easy for him to say, it wasn’t his home, but Ahern didn’t seem to mind. He wandered off, too, after raising his glass in salute.
I didn’t feel like beer or anything harder, and it took some time before I found where they had the soda used for mixers, where I got ginger ale in a plastic cup. Everyone would assume I was holding a mixed drink. I rambled around, somewhat familiar with the layout after my first visit here.
There were frat guys standing in a circle seeing who could get drunkest first, frat guys in ones and twos trying to put the moves on whatever girls were in attendance, and even some packs of girls huddled together in groups, giggling, while they fended off the frat boys.
I checked upstairs, just for the hell of it. I saw a mixed group in someone’s room, sitting on the floor passing a joint around and laughing at something. There were a couple of closed doors, and at the end of the hall the same group of guys from last time arguing loudly about sports.
Boring. I went back down and not much had changed on the first floor, but I remembered where the basement door was and descended to the frat’s party room.
Which was crowded, but surprisingly sedate. There were plenty of people, some of them already drunk, but not loud. Is this just end-of-term depression rearing its ugly head, or had the party just not gotten under way yet?
I peeked into the little alcove where I had spent some quality time performing for the crowd with Alicia and her other partner and now saw only some folks sitting on the couch laughing while they drank.
I felt a finger tapping my shoulder. “Hey, aren’t you that guy, Carter was it? I recognize you, you helped us decide whether Brianna had passed her initiation, remember? I’m Allie.”
“I do remember. You’re in a sorority at Forbes, right? How come you’re always here? Don’t you sorority girls throw parties?”
“I’m a Delta Lambda. Yeah, we have parties, but our houses are on campus and they keep a pretty tight rein on the kind of parties we can throw. It’s easier to just come here, and the Kappas always like to have extra girls at their blowouts. Plus, we don’t have to clean up afterwards.”
“Good point. Well, it’s nice to be wanted.”
“Yes, plus there’s free booze.”
Just then, several girls, also Deltas I assumed, came up to Allie and told her, “We’re bored. I thought you said there was gonna be a band. All they’ve got is someone’s boom box. Maybe we should go somewhere else.”
“Patience is a virtue, Bonnie. Andy told me that the band called and said they’re running late.
Flat tire or something. They’ll be here. Why don’t you go tease some frat boy or something?”
“They’re so boring. I wanna dance. To a band. They just wanna do the horizontal dance.”
“You’re just discovering this now?”
“C’mon, Allie, how much longer?”
“I dunno, maybe 30 minutes. Can’t you amuse yourselves for thirty minutes? What am I, your activity director?”
They stood in a tight group and looked sour, and I think Allie saw her entourage wavering and planning a retreat. In desperation, she said, “Okay, how ’bout we come up with something fun to do for 30 minutes? Have some drinks and a few laughs. How ’bout ’Never Have I Ever’? The big girls version.”
The group looked at each other and shrugged.
“Go fill your drink cups and come back here. We’ll commandeer this room with the couches.
See if anyone else wants to play. Maybe a couple of frat boys? How ’bout you, Carter, you want in?”
“I guess I could find worse things to do for 30 minutes.”
“That’s the spirit! You got a drink?”
My ginger ale was mostly still full, and no need to tell them it wasn’t alcohol, so I nodded.
In a few minutes, the other girls trickled back down with a couple of frat boys in tow. Allie asked in a loud voice if anyone else downstairs wanted to participate and got a few takers.
We settled in, either in chairs or standing or sitting against the walls. Whether she wanted to or not, Allie was the activity director.
“Okay, you know how this goes. You say something out loud that you have never done, in the form ’Never have I ever...’. If anyone in the group has done that thing they have to take a drink. And... they have to give details about how it happened. If no one has done the thing, then the person who said it has to drink. And this is the adult version of the game. So none of those cheap ’Never have I ever visited Washington D.C.’ things. Personal stuff, got it? I’ll start.“
She thought for a moment. “Okay. Never have I ever fucked a teacher.”
Everyone looked around the group. No one moved. Finally one guy, looking guilty, lifted his cup and took a swig. The crowd erupted with catcalls. “Details, Rob, details!”
“I hoped no one would ever find out. Okay. Senior year, high school. New math teacher, really just out of college, I think. Kinda hot. The guys started calling her Legs Halliday behind her back.
Nice legs, long. I messed up a quiz, ’cause I hadn’t studied, and she made me stay after school to go over the things I’d missed.
“It took me a while to realize that she was coming on to me, brushing up against me, putting her hand on my shoulder. I don’t want to drag this out. Bottom line, she got me to come over to her apartment, ostensibly to help her put up some book shelves, but twenty minutes after I got there we were screwing on the rug. I think I wasn’t the only one, too. I wonder if she’s still teaching there.”
“Okay, good start. Deb, you’re up next.”
Deb, who was seated to Allie’s right, said, “Hmmm, okay, never have I ever used a household item as a dildo.”
I thought that ruled out most of the guys, or at least they’d never admit to it, but surprisingly almost all the girls took a drink.
Allie said, “Whoa! Too many for details, we’ll be here all night. All right, those who have, just say what the implement you used was.”
Around the circle they went, everyone looking just a little embarrassed. “Hair brush handle”.
“Shampoo bottle”. “Electric toothbrush—the handle part”. “Cucumber”. “Candle”. “Top of a wine bottle”.
Allie said, “That was inspiring. Umm, Gina, you’re up.”
She thought about it, then proclaimed, “Never have I ever used the wrong person’s name when having sex.”
Everybody laughed, but several, male and female, took a drink. Allie pointed at the first one on her left, a guy.
“Oh, Christ, I’m still hitting myself for this one. Gorgeous woman I finally talked into bed, we’re humping away, and I had to tell her how hot she was, but without thinking I used my ex’s name. I said, ’Barb, your body gets me so hard!’ She froze and stared at me, then said, ’My name is Amy.’ She threw me off her, grabbed her clothes, and walked out, me behind her trying to explain. It was no use.”
Everyone—well, mostly the men—groaned. Allie nodded at the next guilty party.
“Basically same story,” she said. “Hot guy I’d had my eye on for awhile, till he finally made his move. We’re back at my place, and he’s really good, knows just what to do, getting me really wound up doing me from behind and he’s got me really close and I’m rambling, ’cause I’m a talker when I screw, and without thinking I tell him, ’Just a little slower, Eddie, almost there.’
“Except his name wasn’t Eddie, but I’d blanked on it for a moment. He stopped in mid-thrust. And the whole mood changed. He started pounding into me and slapping my butt, which I’d told him I didn’t like, kinda angry, just fucking so he could get off. He was done in another thirty seconds, then he grabbed his clothes and left. I really liked the guy but he wouldn’t look at me after that.”
The women made commiserating noises in understanding. There were two others, who told similar stories. When they were done, Allie said, “Guy in the red shirt, sorry, don’t know your name. You’re next.”
He stared at the ceiling, then said, “Okay, never have I ever had a threesome after being high.”
There was some hesitation, but a couple of guys and three women raised their cups to their lips. There were some calls of “This I gotta hear”, and “C’mon, spill, details.”
Allie pointed to the closest guy who had drunk.
“Actually, it was a foursome, my buddy and his girl, and this other girl who I’d only met a couple of times. He’d just scored some weed and was in a sharing mood. After the second joint we were feeling very mellow and friendly, like we were in a safe place, so we were comfortable touching and hugging. And my buddy’s girl started kissing me, while he and this other girl were talking about something, and when he saw his girl with her tongue down my throat, he started in on the new girl.
“Before we knew it we were naked, and his girl was going down on me, and my buddy was fucking the new girl while she was bent over the end of the couch. Later we traded partners again.
I wondered if it had made things awkward between my buddy and his girlfriend. I never asked.”
“Very kinky,” said Allie. “Francie, I think I saw you drink. Speak.”
“Oh, man, this feels weird,” Francie said, looking a little guilty. “Like I’m telling a secret about someone. “Okay, me and my boyfriend had had a joint or two and ordered out for pizza. Just after it was delivered, my girlfriend, Marcy, dropped by unannounced. She and I’ve been friends forever, and she’d confided to me when I first started going out with Bill that she thought he was hot, so I could see she was a bit nervous to find him there when she showed up. I couldn’t throw her out, so I asked if she wanted to join us for pizza.
“What was surprising was that I noticed that he was attracted to her, paying attention to her, complimenting her, while he still had his hands all over me. In between bites of pizza, that is. We got down to the last slice of pizza and we were all still a bit hungry, so he joked and said, ’I’ll wrestle you for it, best two falls out of three, you two against me.’ And Marcy, the bitch, said ’Okay,’ and jumped him. I couldn’t just stand there and watch, so I jumped in, too.
“Well, it didn’t take too long before we were half naked, all of us, and it wasn’t much later till the three of us were in my bed. I hadn’t known that Marcy swung both ways before that. Anyway, it was surprisingly hot.” She took another sip of her drink.
“And now I’m hot,” said Allie. We heard from the other guy: Girl at a party with too many drinks in her, who he didn’t know but happened to be standing next to, said conversationally to him, ’I wonder why alcohol always makes me horny? Now I’m drunk and I’m really horny.’ He offered, in a neighborly gesture, to help her out. She grabbed another guy by the hand on her way to the nearest bedroom, and she got spit-roasted till she fell asleep.
Allie commented, “And they say romance is dead. Uh, Kathy, didn’t you take a drink, too?”
Kathy looked like she wanted to sink into the floor. “I think this may be my last party game. This is embarrassing. Actually, I’m not sure this really counts as a threesome. I was at a party, drowning my sorrows after really messing up an exam, so I was pretty wasted. Met a cute guy and before long we had our tongues down each other’s throats and I was kinda liking the feel of his tongue in my mouth.
“I don’t remember the argument he used to convince me, but I found myself on my knees with his dick in my mouth, enjoying it, but my mind was wandering. Then I looked and saw a dick waving in front of me and I said to myself, ’Wait, aren’t I already sucking his cock? I guess not, since it’s right here in front of me.’ So I grabbed it and wrapped my mouth around it.
“Then I saw a dick to my left, and the light slowly dawned, that there were now two dicks. So I alternated between handjob and blowjob, until they finally both shot their wads at nearly the same time. All over me. Cum everywhere. Oh, and there was applause, too. Not my finest moment.”
“We’ve all been there,” said Allie. “Okay, you, Carter, you’re up next. Whaddya got?”
I’d been half-thinking about what I was going to say when it was my turn and had narrowed it down to a couple of choices. I picked one at random. “All right, never have I ever woken up next to a stranger.”
There was a moment’s pause, then more than half the people in the group raised their cups. Everyone burst out laughing.
“You sluts,” cried Allie. “The guys, too! You’re shameless. Okay, you, you start,” she said, pointing.
The girl, who Allie may not have known since she didn’t call her by name, said, “The Cliff’s Notes version. Party. Way too much alcohol. Vague memories of kissing. Woke up in a bed next morning between two guys I didn’t know. Sticky all over, with a major hangover.”
Allie just smiled, then said, “Brenda. Confession time.”
Brenda said, “Have you all noticed the common theme here? Too many drinks, if you’re taking notes. I went out clubbing with my girlfriends, and guys were buying us drinks—surprise, surprise!—and I was dancing like crazy, with a bunch of different guys, enjoying the attention. That’s the last thing I really remember.
“I woke up the next morning in some dude’s bed, and all I remember about it was sniffing and thinking, wow, it’s been a really long time since he changed these sheets. I looked at the guy, sleeping, for the longest time, but I couldn’t remember dancing with him or talking to him. I’m sure he told me his name, but it was lost in the alcohol fog. I sneaked out before he woke up and asked for round two.”
“Hear ya, sister,” said Allie. “Uh, you, yellow tee-shirt, don’t know your name, you’re up.”
“Sorta like the last one. Out at a bar with my buddies, some dancing, maybe meet some girls. Beer’s my thing, and we were going through the pitchers pretty fast. Finally met a girl after we’d been there a couple of hours, nice smile, good dancer, fun. Don’t recall a lot of the details, except the music pounding and us sweating while we danced.
“The next morning when I woke up, I was afraid to move too fast because I might toss my cookies before I got to the bathroom. I got there and peed for what seemed like five minutes straight. I felt better after I brushed my teeth. I crawled back to the bedroom and I stood there staring for a minute, trying to remember who the hell she was. You know the phrase ’beer goggles’? That’s what came to mind as I looked at the bed.
“I’m trying to be sensitive and respectful here, but she was nothing like my usual type. She was still out cold, but it was clear that she didn’t take care of herself, her hair was unwashed, and she was... larger than my usual idea of a hot woman.
“She chose that moment to wake up and saw me standing there, and said, “Well, hi there, handsome. Did we have a good time or what?” Repeat that sentence to yourself using the voice of Fran Drescher. That’s her.
“I apologized to her, but said I had to leave because I had basketball practice, or something, I can’t remember. She gave me her number as she left. The paper was sticky.”
The guys all appeared to shiver before they regained their composure, perhaps recalling similar morning-afters.
Allie continued around the room, all the stories pretty much alike, too much alcohol or weed, bad choices of partners, and much self-recrimination the next morning.
“That’s everyone? Okay, there’s a lesson there, alcohol is not always your friend.” She paused to take a swig from her cup. “Eddie, I think you’re next. What’s your secret shame?”
Eddie flipped Allie a dexterous middle finger. “Right, so, never have I ever purchased a sex toy.”
The guys laughed. Nearly all the women and one guy took a drink. The guy called Rob, who had testified earlier, said, “Let’s hear it. Leave nothing out.”
Allie started to her left. “Marnie. You’re first.”
“Why do guys find this so titillating?” she asked. “Everyone uses something to get themselves off, even if it’s just your hand. Sometimes toys are just faster. Right, so my first was in high school, and I was a little embarrassed ’cause it was my first time. We had this little sex shop on a side street in our town. It had a back entrance, too, in case you didn’t want your neighbors to see you going in.
“So I was nervous, ’cause I was kinda new to this, and I didn’t know what this place was going to look like, maybe dark, badly lit, sticky floor and an odd smell, some sketchy guy in a soiled overcoat leering. So I go in the back door, not even sure what I was looking for, and it looked like the neighborhood CVS store, brightly lit, with several aisles and stuff displayed on the walls. And it was actually kinda busy, mostly women. I even recognized someone I knew vaguely who worked at the bank.
“I started looking at the stuff on the racks, picking them up to examine them, trying to imagine how they were used. This woman I didn’t know was standing nearby and she said to me, ’Looking for something new, honey?’ All I could do was nod, and she came over and pulled something off the shelf and said, ’Let me suggest this. I got one recently and it’s my new best friend.’
“I mumbled thanks, and took it to the register, ’cause I wanted to get out of there as soon as I could because I was sure that one of the nuns from parochial school was going to burst through the door at any moment, recognize me, and call my parents to tell on me. Though what a nun would be doing in a sex shop I don’t know.
“Anyway, I took it home, and damned if the woman wasn’t right! It was my new best friend, ’cause my boyfriends didn’t know the first thing about getting women off. So I became a regular customer.”
Allie said, “Truth, girl. You, guy, what’s your name? You’re next.”
This was the only guy to have taken a drink. There may have been other guys, but at least he was honest about it.
“I’m Tony. And I went because my girlfriend at the time and I had been walking that awkward line about trying some new things sex-wise. She was both curious about and afraid of anal sex, at the same time, and she wasn’t ready to have a dick in there yet. She kinda got off on my finger, but it wasn’t quite enough. Someone, one of my buddies, mentioned butt plugs, ’cause his girlfriend was into them, so I asked around, quietly, and somebody suggested this place downtown.
“So, like Marnie, I was a little nervous about going in, ’cause it was my first time and I didn’t know what to ask for. And I felt a little out of place because, like Marnie’s shop, it was mostly women there and I was the odd man out. But the female clerk apparently recognized the signs, and she asked me if she could help me find something.
“It was an awkward conversation, but she was patient, and as soon as I said ’butt play’, she said,
’Over here.’ And there was a wall full of stuff to go in your butt. She asked a couple of questions about whether my girl had done this before, and when I said no, she said, ’You want this one.’ It was a set of butt plugs, ranging from small to better than medium, all enclosed in a shrink-wrapped cardboard display package. She also suggested a small one with a vibrator. And some lube.
“It was more than I’d wanted to pay, but it turned out to be a good choice and after a couple of weeks my girlfriend found she really liked the feeling, so I eventually got to put my dick there. And she really liked the butt plug with the vibrator. She’d have that humming away while I fucked her pussy and she’d go off like gangbusters.”
Allie was about to move on to the next woman who’d drunk, when from upstairs we heard the drummer playing riffs on his tom-tom, getting it properly placed.
One of the girls who’d been whining to Allie before we started this game said, “Finally! It’s about time. I’m gonna dance. Who’s in?” She got up and moved toward the stairs and several others followed. I’d kinda been getting involved in the game and was a little sad to see it break up.
As people wandered off, I said to Allie, “I admired the way you organized this thing and moderated it, all on the spur of the moment.”
“Yeah, if only I could make a living at this. I’ve gotta go find another drink, Carter. Later.”
I sat there on the couch as the group thinned and went to find other interests. Maybe the party had run its course. The last time I’d been here, the band was way too loud, and I was still too close to my recent headache to deal with that. I’ll finish my soda.
There were a few people still standing around the archway that separated the two rooms. They dispersed and revealed a young woman holding a beer and looking pensive. She caught my eye and I nodded politely. She called across the room, “I got here too late to be part of the group playing. Probably just as well. I’d probably be through my third drink by now. A lot of those hit pretty close to home.”
“Yeah, me, too. But I was adhering to a strict reading of the questions as stated, and convinced myself that they didn’t apply to me. But it was close.”
She’d moved a little closer so she wouldn’t have to yell over the band, which was tuning up upstairs.
“Oh, yeah? Like which ones? You don’t look like the slutty type.”
“Looks can be deceiving. Anyway, who’re you, the neighborhood shrink, come to analyze my twisted desires?”
“I’m Frieda, and you can consider me your analyst if you want. I assure you, nothing you say will ever be discussed outside this room, except possibly with a few professional colleagues, or somebody I happen to meet in a bar, or maybe the girl behind the counter in the convenience store.”
“Well, that’s a relief, then. I’m Tom. You can call me that or Carter, which is what most everybody calls me. And that might or might not be my real name. Just in case you decide to spill the beans.”
By now she was next to the couch I was sitting on, and took a seat to my left. As she got settled, I looked her over. She appeared to be about my height, a strong chin, brown eyes, and a tiny beauty mark on her right cheek. Her hair was brown with highlights of something else. She had a sweater on, so I couldn’t tell much about her muscle tone or her chest, but her backside, what I could make out through her slacks, was nicely shaped.
“So, Carter, if that’s your name, which questions did you split hairs on? Did you lie about using the wrong person’s name? Or the threesome while drunk? Do you have a closet full of sex toys?”
“I can see why you became a professional analyst, Frieda. You ask probing questions. Some people might call it nosiness, but I recognize professional dedication when I see it. So let me know when my fifty minutes are up. For the record, no sex toys, nor have I used the wrong person’s name during sex. Yet.
“I weaseled on the threesome question because I wasn’t high when it happened. I was fully aware, because that happens to be one of my things, making sure everyone consents. Maybe it’s my Boy Scout background.”
“That’s it?” she said. “Just the threesome? I was expecting something more salacious. You said the questions hit close to home.”
“Well, I’ve used sex toys with some of the women I’ve been with, but I didn’t purchase them.
Purchasing was part of the question. Anyway, it wouldn’t have been long before somebody asked a question that had my guilty name written all over it and I’d have had to drink. And tell.”
“Maybe I’m a voyeur. Is that the word? I think that only applies if you’re watching someone have sex, rather than listening to them talk about it. Well, whatever it’s called, I’ve probably got it. Why am I telling you this?” She took another sip of her drink.
I was surprised how often this Viennese psychiatrist persona popped up in a sexual situation.
It started as a joke years ago to set someone at ease. I had this kind of fake-German accent I used, so I put it on.
“Und zo, Fraulein, how often do you find yourself aroused in zis fashion? Und, how duss it make you feel?“
She laughed. “Wait, I thought I was the psychiatrist!”
“Even psychiatrists haf psychiatrists, Fraulein, nein? Now, lie down on zis couch und tell me about your childhood.“
She laughed again. “You sound like my grandfather. Really. Born in Germany. You picked up on the German name, Frieda, right? Anyway, I’ll have to start calling you Dr. Freud with that accent. Wait, you’re not really a psychiatrist, so maybe Dr. Fraud.”
“That sounds about right. But as your fake psychiatrist, my training compels me to ask which of those questions hit too close to home for you? Professional interest only, of course.”
She had a nice laugh. It told me she didn’t take herself too seriously, and was willing to admit her foibles. I wondered what she looked like under that sweater. I channeled a tongue slowly licking her nipples, and a feather brushing her clit.
“Of course. Now I’m a little sorry I brought it up, ’cause this is a bit embarrassing. Sometimes I get too chatty when I’ve had something to drink.”
“Think of it as a social lubricant.”
“Yeah, maybe a little too much lubricant there. Words keep slipping out.”
I had to smile at that. I decided to let the question slide. Instead, I changed the subject and asked her what she did, where she was from. She was a student—surprise!—at Forbes. She didn’t know Allie and the other Delta Lambdas, she’d come with a friend who knew one of the frat guys.
She was from Denver, finishing her second year. She was majoring in economics, the first one of those I’d met. She was looking to blow off some steam before she had to knuckle down to prepare for finals.
“And you, Carter? You have your all-nighters scheduled yet?” she asked. “What’s your plan for preparing for finals? Study groups? A few little white pills to keep you awake? Sacrificing small woodland animals to the study gods? You got a method?”
“Umm, well, I experimented in high school with the usual approaches, and found they mostly sucked. All that cramming the night before the test? It never really worked for me, so I was forced to do what the teachers all said we should be doing. Learn the stuff as it was given to us, rather than trying to cram it all in during a marathon study session.
“Turns out that short term memory doesn’t keep stuff in your head long enough. By the time you’re given the test paper, you’ve forgotten half of what you knew last night. I had to do it the hard way, actually studying during the semester, so as to retain it, understand it better. I found it worked for me, even if it made me look like something of a tool.
“When I got to college, I found I was surrounded by so many smarter people than me that I had to fall back to my known study methods, otherwise I’d fall hopelessly behind. I envy those smart folks who can read a book once, or listen to the lecture, and seem to understand everything. I’ve got to work through it, step by step.”
She snorted. “You’re making the rest of us look bad. Cramming is kind of an accepted practice.
It’s been done so long that everyone believes in it because everyone does it. I do it.”
“How’s it working for you, Frieda?”
“Mixed results. Never seems to quite fulfill my expectations as far as acing the exams goes.
But it’s hard to change your approach when you’ve done it one way for so long.”
“Yeah, that’s what I remember, too. Well, you know what works for you. You’re still enrolled, right, so you must be doing something right.”
“Yeah, I guess. But now I’m thinking about what comes after, the job search, or maybe applying to grad school. Then I’m competing with people who are way better than me. At least if you judge it by grades. Which a lot of employers and grad schools do. So I may have to rethink this whole thing.”
“You’ve got some time,” I said. “Another couple of years to refine your approach. Maybe devise a new study plan before the next semester.”
“I’ll have my secretary compose a memo. Later. For now, I’m sticking with my current plan: Get wasted, do some things I’ll regret, then start studying as penance.”
“There you go. Short and to the point. A goal. Though you seem to be falling behind on the
’get wasted’ part.”
“Yeah, well, it turns out that I don’t have much of an aptitude for alcohol. I don’t much like it, so ’getting wasted’ is more of a ceremonial statement than anything else.”
“No shame in that. Here, smell this.” I passed her my cup.
She sniffed, then squinted while trying to recognize what it was. She gave a little shake of her head when she couldn’t figure out what I was drinking.
“Ginger ale. I have an occasional beer, but I don’t really care for whiskey or vodka, like that.
It doesn’t make me feel good, and I don’t handle hangovers well. So ginger ale, mostly.”
She smiled. “So I’m not alone after all! Jesus, most of my friends go overboard on the weekends, a few of them spend most of Sunday throwing up. I’m afraid to go out with them sometimes because they work at it so hard, and want me to join them in getting hammered.”
“You gotta choose your vices carefully. That’s my advice. So, if you don’t drink, then you must have a plan in place for the ’things you’ll regret’ part.”
“No, not really. Maybe just look for opportunities as they come knocking.”
“I guess you’re in the right place, then. I think Kappa House would present more opportunities for regret than you could shake a stick at. Everybody’s looking for some vice they haven’t yet attempted.”
“Lucky me. I think everyone here is trying just a bit too hard to have a good time. I only came because my girlfriend wanted to hang out with her frat friend, and wanted someone close to watch and rescue her if she got too drunk or something. Plus I was bored.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much why I’m here. I was thinking I was about done here. I’ve been fighting off a headache all day, and the band isn’t going to help it once they start playing.”
“My girlfriend seems to have disappeared with her frat friend, so she may not need any saving, at least until morning.”
“The guy I came with practically lives here, knows everyone on a first name basis, even though he sleeps in the dorms. He likes these parties, they’re an excuse for excess. Monday—he’ll spend Sunday sobering up—he’ll be raving about how awesome it was. The excess doesn’t do much for me.”
She appraised me for a moment while she took another sip from her cup.
“So, Carter, I was thinking. Maybe my opportunity for regrets is right here. How would you feel about taking a walk to my place and sharing a funny cigarette or two? If I pull one out here, everyone’s going to want a hit. It’ll be quieter there, too. The band has the night off.”
I smiled at that. She had a sense of humor. “That sounds promising. It’s too early to go back to my room, and I won’t have to endure the band pounding at my head. Weed doesn’t do much for me other than mellow me out, but I’m not opposed to it. Are you in a dorm?”
“No. Off-campus slum, but a better quality slum. Really. The rats are very considerate and well-mannered.”
“Perhaps you should consider a career in advertising or public relations.”
“I’ll keep it in mind. Are you in?”
“I’m in. Lead the way.”
I followed her up the stairs—yes, definitely a nice butt—and we found our coats in the pile by the front door. I saw her wave to a girl in the next room who was standing with a couple of guys.
She nodded and turned her attention back to the tallest of the guys.
“Was that your friend?”
“Uh-huh. She’s still half-sober, so she’ll be all right. She wasn’t sure if the guy was going to pay attention to her or not, but it looks like he’s on board. They’ll probably be playing tonsil hockey in twenty minutes.”
“I love how the English language is so expressive.”
“I think most languages have their own idioms for the same thing. It’s kind of a universal activity.”
We talked as we walked the six or so blocks to her building, convenient to Forbes but looking like most student housing. I was curious whether she had a goal here or just wanted to see where it led her. I found her link and walked the thread up into her epicenter.
There wasn’t anything specific there. She liked weed, liked how it made her feel, and she liked doing that with other people. There was also a touch of sexual frustration there, as it had been a while—I inferred that she had broken up with her boyfriend recently.
The front door lock worked and she let us in. We walked up two flights. It used to be a tenement, so no elevator.
“This is it,” she told me. She swung the door open and flicked a light switch. It actually looked a lot better than the outside of the building.
“You’ve done this up very nicely. I like it.”
“I can’t take credit. One of my roommates is a design major and she’s got an eye for this stuff.
She sees what cheap furniture will work together, and what colors are best, like that. I saw early
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on that she was good at this, much better than me, so I just let her do what she wanted and helped with the moving and the painting. So that’s my skill. An assistant.”
“I’m sure you’re the best possible assistant.”
“Toss your coat anywhere and have a seat. I’m gonna make some tea ’cause I’m thirsty. I’ll get the weed while the water’s boiling. Be right back.”
The couch looked comfortable, so I sat there and looked at the room. It really did feel like
’home’, made you feel like it was a place for relaxation, nothing in the wrong place, giving a sense of harmony. Whoever her roommate was, she was probably going to do very well at her profession.
It was about five minutes before she came out of the kitchen carrying a steaming teapot in one hand, two mugs in the other, and a plastic baggie in her teeth. She set down the teapot on a magazine and took the baggie out of her mouth.
“I probably should have used a tray, but I was too lazy. So, herb tea, which I’m fond of. Try it, I think you’ll like it. And I’ll light up one of these.” Which she proceeded to do. She took a hit, then passed the joint to me.
We traded back and forth a couple of times without much conversation, and I could see the mellow start to wash over her. She’d taken off her sweater to reveal the T-shirt underneath. This was the first time I’d seen her without the sweater hiding her figure. She had nice muscle tone in her arms, and a noticeable chest.
“So how come you’re doing the frat party circuit with your buddy? Don’t you have a girlfriend that you spend time with?”
“I do have a girlfriend, but she’s a thousand miles away at ————————. I won’t see her again till school’s out.”
“Oh. That must be tough, carrying on a long distance relationship like that. I tried to do that my first year, and my boyfriend from high school didn’t even last the semester before he found a new honey and dumped me. He swore to me before we left that it was forever, but forever only lasted a couple of months apart before he bailed.”
“Yeah, I’m seeing that a lot. You’re not alone.”
“It probably wouldn’t have lasted much longer anyway. I was already starting to see some flaws in him. Nice guy, but maybe not all grown up yet.”
We went back and forth like that for awhile, talking about relationships. She finished the first joint, put the roach on the table, and lit another. I was already feeling a bit too mellow, so I mostly just held on to it when she passed it to me, then passed it back after a reasonable interval. She seemed to have a higher tolerance for weed than I.
I found that she had moved closer to me on the couch, and I hadn’t noticed when it happened.
Now she had one hip settled against mine, as she sipped her tea and inhaled occasionally.
“Do you get introspective when you toke?” she asked me. “I do. I start examining things that have happened to me, or I think about things I should try before I get too old, weird stuff like that.”
“Not so much. I mostly just get mellow and a little sleepy, enjoying where I am and the way I feel. It doesn’t really make me self-analytical.”
I started thinking about Gail as soon as I said that, because that’s what she did, and then I started missing her. Maybe the weed hadn’t been such a good idea after all.
“I guess it’s me, then,” she said. “None of my friends seem to have that happen when they smoke. I must be weird.”
“Nah, not necessarily. I mean, you could be weird, but weed seems to affect people in really different ways. Mostly it’s benign. There’s nothing wrong with being self-analytical. You could learn a lot about yourself that way. So give me an example. What are some of the things that you think you should try before you get old? The stuff that comes up when you get high, I mean.”
“Umm, maybe I shouldn’t have brought that up. Some of them are embarrassing. Some of them are just stupid, like maybe I should visit the Grand Canyon, or go to Disneyland. Nothing wrong with that, I guess, they’re pretty run of the mill. But some others...”
“Ooo, now this is making me speculate about just how embarrassing these things are! Do any of these scenarios involve whips and chains, or industrial-size drums of butter?”
She blushed, then elbowed me in the ribs. “I am not like that, really. It’s... Oh, I shouldn’t have brought it up. Don’t you have things that come from your upbringing that are considered crude or something? Even something like, say, streaking. That’s pretty mundane now, nobody thinks much about it anymore, just people having fun, doing something daring. But I remember how scandalized my mother was when she read about it for the first time. I was little then, but I remember how she was almost afraid to explain it to me.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. It changes from one generation to another, the things that are acceptable, and the ones that are shocking. Your mother was shocked, you accept it even if you don’t choose to do it. Or is that one of the things you want to try?”
She slapped me on the knee. “No! That’s not what I meant. I probably wouldn’t do it, but I could see being talked into it if it was part of a group, maybe. I was talking about more personal stuff.”
“So, do I have to guess? What do I win if I guess correctly?”
“I knew I shouldn’t have mentioned it. Now I’m embarrassed.”
“Okay, Frieda, we’ll let it go. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. We’ll move on. Is there any of that tea left?”
There was, a little, and while she poured, I followed the thread up to her epicenter, curious about what had caused her to clench up like that. There was a lot of stuff floating around there and it took a moment to find it amid the clutter. There were a couple of things, actually. As I saw it I was again surprised at how often this fantasy came up in women.
She saw herself bound to a bed, arms and legs, blindfolded. There was either one man or several around her—it changed back and forth—forcing her to perform acts that she wasn’t fully on board with. She had no control, but she found it highly arousing.
In another she found a man she had never met before in a bar or some other location, and took him to a back room and fucked him until she left him drained. She never asked his name, nor he hers.
In yet another, she was a slave, submissive and compliant, doing every degrading thing that was asked of her, and the submission and humiliation made her cum, time after time.
There were probably a few others floating around there, but those were the ones that were most prominent. I sipped the tea, while she drew the roach down to a tiny ember, and placed it with its brother on the table.
“The other thing that happens when I toke is that my skin gets really sensitive to touch. Some of my other senses, too, like sight and smell, they behave differently. It makes me experience the world in a different way. You?”
“Not so I’ve noticed. Maybe sight a little, but I haven’t noticed the skin thing. Maybe I just haven’t paid attention to it. Try brushing your fingers along my wrist, let me see how it feels.”
She did that. I thought about it, and decided, “No, I don’t think so. It doesn’t make me jump or anything, but now that I think about it, I’m more aware of each of the hairs on my wrist responding.
So perhaps there is a bit of that response. How about you? What do you feel if I do this?”
I took the tips of my fingers and brushed them lightly, slowly and deliberately, up her forearm.
I heard her suck in her breath and close her eyes partway. “Oh, my God, it’s like a thousand tiny electric shocks!”
“Is that good or bad? Is it painful?”
“Oh, no! It makes my body vibrate, it feels really good.”
“Lucky you, if you can get a response like that. Is it just your arms, or elsewhere too?”
“I think everywhere, but I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve always noticed it on my arms.”
“Let’s experiment. Tell me how this feels.” I took my fingertips and started just below her earlobe and brushed my fingers slowly down to her shoulder.
I could almost see her upper torso vibrating. “Jesus,” she gasped. “I’m about ready to jump out of my skin! That’s amazing.”
“Well, it’s fun to watch, to see you respond so dramatically.”
“I think it’s not the same if I do it to myself. It felt different with your fingers on my arm than with mine. Maybe because it’s unexpected or something.”
“That sounds about right. So I could get you crazy just brushing my fingers or my tongue on your bare skin?”
“Christ, yes. I think it would be exquisite torture.”
“I like that image. Do you want some more?”
“I think so. No one’s done that to me before, that thing you do with your fingers. I liked that a lot.”
“Okay. You tell me when you want me to stop.”
I leaned in and nibbled at that place under her earlobe, very lightly, and while I did I linkcast Foundation to her. I wasn’t sure if she really needed it, but let’s see what happens.
As my lips moved slowly down her neck I could hear, far away, a tiny high-pitched whine like a mosquito. It was too early in the season for those, and then I realized it was her making that sound in her throat.
She had placed her hand on my leg above my knee, only because she needed a place to rest it, but as my lips went lower her grip tightened, and I could feel her arm shake.
When I got to the place where her neck joined her shoulder I let my tongue dart out to lick the skin and she sucked in her breath. She was subvocalizing now, so quietly that I couldn’t tell if they were words or not. I started moving back up her neck with my tongue flicking back and forth.
When I got just below her ear, I took her earlobe between my lips and ran my tongue over it.
“Ohmigod! Oh, yesyesyes!”
She lay there, tensed, vibrating, for several seconds while my tongue did its work on her ear, and suddenly, like a wrestler, she threw herself on me, her tongue down my throat and pinning me so hard with her arms that it was almost painful.
She pulled herself apart so quickly that she bruised my lip with her teeth, and ripped at my shirt buttons. “God damn you, Carter, you’ve got me so wound up now, you’d better do me right or you’re going to regret it. Hold still so I can get this button.”
“Frieda, wait, please. Are you sure about this? I just need to make sure that this isn’t the weed or the alcohol making you do something you might regret later. Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure, now shut up and don’t distract me.” She was three buttons down now and pulling my shirt out of my pants. I hadn’t really done anything directly to influence her intent, even if I had gotten her more aroused.
There goes the shirt. She was pushing it down my arms now, so I was kind of trapped by my shirt wrapped around my elbows, but I could reach out enough to get my hands on her butt, enough to confirm my earlier ’nice butt’ observation.
She sat up and in one motion pulled the tee shirt over her head and tossed it onto the floor.
Before I could get a good look, she leaned in and got her lips around one of my nipples and sucked. In the normal course of events it would be me doing that to her.
I shook the shirt off my arms so I had my hands free again. With her head pressed against my chest and her tongue busy I took the opportunity to unhook her bra, which fell loose on her arms.
I took her head in both my hands and pulled her off my chest. I brought her up to my level and got my mouth on hers, attacking her tongue with mine. I got my hands on her tits and squeezed, rolling the nipples between my thumb and forefinger. She grunted and pushed our mouths together even harder. She was actually bruising my lips a little.
Abruptly, she pulled apart, breathing heavily. “I would fuck you right here right now if I wasn’t a little afraid of my roommates walking in on us. Grab your stuff and follow me.” She reached down and grabbed her tee shirt from the floor and started down the hallway, shrugging her bra off as she walked.
A little surprised at her dominant display, which I hadn’t anticipated, it took me a moment to locate my shirt and follow her. She was waiting for me, holding the bedroom door open with one hand. As I walked in, she pushed it closed, then pushed me backwards onto the bed. How come I hadn’t seen any of this in her epicenter? Maybe it was such a normal behavior that she no longer thought about it, didn’t need to catalog it.
She was on her knees now, unlacing my shoes and pulling them off, tossing them into a corner.
She reached up and worked at my belt until it came open, then the button and zipper were done and she was pulling my pants down. “C’mon, Carter, lift your butt, help me.”
She pulled the pants off me and they joined my shoes. She reached up and grabbed the hem of my shorts and tugged. This time I had the presence of mind to lift my butt so I wouldn’t receive a demerit. My dick popped straight up. She gave me a little smile and reached up and stroked my cock with her hand, seeing how it felt under her fingers. It felt pretty good to me.
“You just stay right there for a minute,” she ordered me. She climbed up onto the bed, her tits swaying, and positioned herself at ninety degrees to my body. She leaned down and, taking my cock in her fingers, leaned in and licked up and down. It was like an electric shock, leaving me helpless. Some part of my mind cried out, “Danger, Will Robinson!” and before it was too late I set the Cum Block.
And just in time, because she stationed herself directly above my dick and dropped her lips over the tip, bobbing up and down, just an inch. I must have made a sound, because she looked up at me and asked, “That feel okay?”
“That’s a rhetorical question, right?”
She smiled and returned to what she was doing. She added a little tongue to the mix, and I was thankful I’d gotten the Cum Block set, because this felt wonderful and without it I’d be on the verge of cumming.
I reached under her and cupped her breast in my hand and fondled it, rolling the nipple under my fingers. I heard her make a little sound in her throat. Apparently her nipples were quite sensitive.
She worked on my cock a little longer. I noticed that there was a limit to how much dick she’d take in her mouth. I’d look at that more closely later.
I reached out and put a hand on the side of her head and gently urged her off, pulling her up to me. I got her in a lip lock while I stroked her back and her still-clothed butt.
“My turn now. Lie on your back, Frieda.”
There it was again, that odd feeling that I could see inside her even without being in her epicenter. I wondered if this was an unconscious connection that I’d somehow been able to establish. There was nothing tangible that I could sense, it was just a feeling that there was a connection of some kind. Later, I’ll think about it later.
I worked my way down her shoulder and chest with my lips and tongue, sucking on her nipples until I had her moaning, then continued southward, pausing to explore her navel with my tongue. I fumbled with her belt until it was loose, then found the zipper and pulled it down.
Oh, shoes, right. They were slip-ons, so it was a simple matter to pull them off her heels and drop them on to the floor. I reached up to find the waistband and tugged them downward. With some reluctance, they slid over her hips and down her legs. She had no hesitation about lifting her hips off the bed at the right moment. I pulled the cuffs so they slipped over her feet.
She lay back on the bed on her elbows, watching me. She had pretty good muscle tone, I noticed, good legs, and pink panties hiding what was underneath. I couldn’t tell if I was reading her facial expressions, or if this was yet more of that unconscious link I’d hypothesized, but I was seeing some anticipation mixed with trepidation, wondering what was going to happen next.
I guessed that most guys would just get her panties off and their dicks inside her as quick as they could, based on what previous women had told me. Not much foreplay. So I deliberately lifted up her right leg and started slowly licking my way up from her heel. I heard her catch her breath. Most people’s feet were sensitive, so that was part of it, but I’d also sensitized her with Foundation, so I could feel her tremble as I kissed and licked my way up the inside of her leg.
When I got to her knee she gasped and tensed. I avoided using my mouth there, but I let my fingers brush the back of her knee until I could hear her talking quietly to herself.
The closer I got to her pussy, the more I could feel her vibrate. I stopped just before I got there, looked up until I caught her eye, then pulled her panties down, slowly, all the way until they slipped over her feet, leaving her naked except for her socks.
Apparently she was a little old-fashioned. She wasn’t shaved, but her pubic hair was quite short, and she had puffy labia. She was waiting to see what I was going to do next.
What I did was work my lips up her other leg, pausing every little while to lick or give a tiny bite. I continued that all the way up, over her hip, then towards her middle, pausing just above her pubic hair. I let one thumb brush very lightly against the labia.
I stuck out my tongue and flicked it back and forth, moving downward, very slowly, making it last, until I was just above her clit.
And then moved around it, below her clit, forcing my tongue between her labia. Above me, she moaned, “Oh, shit, ohhh.” She placed both hands on the back of my head, urging me in.
With my thumbs I pulled the labia apart and found the interior, licking and prodding with my tongue. Her breathing had gotten very shallow and rapid, and her grip on my head had gotten much stronger. I forced my way downward, and when I reached her pussy, tried to push my tongue in.
Again, it wouldn’t go far. It was like pushing a rope, but it was far enough, and above me she was telling me just how it felt. “Yes, yes, oh, fuck, yes, do that!” I tongue-fucked a while longer as she slapped the back of my head, then moved my tongue up her slit and replaced the tongue with two fingers in her pussy.
“Oh, Christ, Carter, yes, fuck me with your fingers, make me cum, c’mon.” I hadn’t pegged her for such a demanding partner, but people are not always predictable. She’d get off fast enough.
My tongue continued higher until it was just below her clit. I knew what she wanted, but I felt she needed to be held off a little longer, so instead I gripped her clit between my lips and pulled, letting her clit pop out. She gasped. I did it again, and again, until she was saying, “Oh, please, oh, please, do it now!”
My mouth was getting a little tired anyway, so this time I let my tongue find her button and attack it. She froze for what seemed like seconds, then wailed, “Yesyesyes, don’t stop, I’m cumming, oh, fuck, yes!” She ground her pussy into my face, pushing my head into her with great force.
And as quickly as it started, it ended just as abruptly. She collapsed into the bed, and one hand gave my head a half-hearted push away from her cunt. I rolled off to one side and draped an arm over her.
She was almost motionless for a couple of minutes. I could see her chest rise and fall, but no other movement until her eyes opened and she turned her head towards me.
“Well, that was a pleasant surprise. I don’t usually get off so quickly. I seem to be more sensitive today somehow. Maybe it was the weed. Anyway, your tongue and your fingers made me crazy. That felt really good.”
“I inferred as much from the way you were shouting. That was fun to watch.”
“Perhaps you’d like to participate? It looks like your dick is ready.”
“In due time. The problem with being a guy is that once we get off, it takes a while till we can function again.”
“A girl could develop a complex hearing that a guy doesn’t want to fuck her.”
“You know that’s not what I meant. I like watching women cum, almost as much as I like getting off myself. So maybe I can play with you a bit more, get you off a couple more times, before we get down to some serious screwing. Are you okay with that?”
“Am I okay with that? Hmmm, lemme think about it. Hell, yeah, I’m okay with that. What did you have in mind?”
“I really don’t have a plan. I’d just like to explore your body a little more, see what you might like. Any suggestions?”
I felt her close up. There was nothing in her face or body language that would indicate that, but I knew, with some certainty, that there was something that made her nervous. Was this another example of the unconscious link to someone’s mind I’d speculated about?
“Uh, no,” she said, “everything felt great, so keep doing that. I’ll tell you if it’s not working, okay?”
So I leaned over and started nibbling on her nipples with my lips, using a little tongue. Sometimes I’d grasp them tightly and pull away until they snapped back and she’d make a little sound.
But I wanted to know what it was that had made her close up like that, so I found the link into her epicenter and started exploring while my lips and tongue were busy with her nipples.
I saw much the same thing I’d seen before, her fantasies that she thought were a little kinky and which embarrassed her. But there was a sense of something else, too, something she thought was a little dirty. She was hiding it, which was why it wasn’t really visible to me.
I realized that I hadn’t encountered this reaction before. Other women had secret fantasies that they thought were too embarrassing to share, that they kept private because they were afraid of being judged by their lovers, their friends. But they were usually present in their minds, even if they didn’t talk about them.
Frieda’s were hidden. The fantasies couldn’t be that weird. She seemed like a pretty normal person, so it might be a conditioned response, something that someone had told her early on was wrong. So she hid it, because she was ashamed of it.
So where would it be? How could I find out what it was? What embarrassed her so much that she would push it away in her own mind?
I thought about how I had located specific groups of ideas in my own mind, and in others’ as well. Things like pulling out my knowledge of calculus from where I had stored it, or looking in the TA Ron McCarthy’s mind to find out about stoichiometry. Those were quite specific concepts, and I was able to find them.
Everybody stored their memories, their ideas, in seemingly different places. For some, storage appeared as a Rolodex or a file cabinet. For my English professor it had been bookcases. For others, it might be just simple piles of papers stacked on a counter. I didn’t know what Frieda’s was.
I looked around her epicenter. Hers looked like a normal room, with a chair and a desk, pretty well-ordered. The “walls”, as always, were a bit hazy and vague because it was just a simulacrum of a room. I looked closer and yes, there appeared to be little doors, cubbyholes, in the “wall”. Nothing was marked. She knew where everything was, so no need.
I didn’t know what the embarrassing thing was, so I couldn’t focus on it to make it show itself.
I don’t know. What if I focused on the effect that it manifested in her, embarrassment. I’d never tried it before, but hey, why not?
So I tried to imagine what embarrassment felt like. I had to dredge up an old memory from third or fourth grade, when I cheated on a test in school, something to do with state capitals, I think. I got caught, and the teacher called me out in front of everyone and made me sit at the front of the room so she could watch over me. I was mortified. I tried to recall what that felt like.
It actually wasn’t hard to pull that emotion back. Some things stick with us, and that was the worst thing that had happened to me up till then. So I could remember exactly what I felt like, and even now, this far removed, it was still a surprisingly strong emotion.
I held that feeling in my mind and looked around for something that felt like that. There was none of that ’glowing’ effect that I’d seen in people’s control panels, but as I looked around I was drawn to one of the cubbyholes. There was nothing tangible that would make it stand out, it just felt similar to the embarrassment I had experienced.
I stepped closer to it and poked at it, trying to “feel” what was in there. I moved my virtual hand around in it and something startled me, like an electric shock, and I immediately felt the embarrassment and could put a description to it.
I held it in my virtual hand and examined it. It felt... confusing. I moved it around and understood where the confusion came from. There was a sense of shame here, and also one of titillation, excitement. And suddenly I had a vivid image that was attached to both those feelings.
She was tied down, secured in some unspecified way, and her butt was bright red. I saw a hand spanking her, and felt a surge of pain followed by a secret pleasure. She got a rush from being spanked.
I felt that this was only part of it—I don’t know how I knew—and as I examined this memory I saw it change, and now someone was fucking her ass. She was humiliated and ashamed, but she was also getting a profound rush from the discomfort. It made her feel like a slut! That was it. Someone, sometime, had planted that idea, that certain things were verboten, done only by cheap women.
That’s not the first time I’d encountered that. In high school, I’d tutored a young woman taking college calculus—she hadn’t known I was much younger than she because, as I said early on, I look much older than I am—and after sex we’d wound up talking about things that were nominally “dirty”. She’d been pretty well indoctrinated by her mother on the things that were “proper”. Only after marriage, of course. The “proper” category was pretty slim and it took Greta a while to work through the idea that she was the only one to decide what she liked and did not.
For Frieda, anything to do with butt play was off limits, she’d been told. She was confused because she thought her butt felt pretty good, and she liked when guys played with it. But things in it brought a pretty strong learned reaction, even if it gave her a rush to imagine it.
Okay, now I understand. I hadn’t planned on doing her ass, but it was better to know what she would easily accept and what she was uncomfortable with, especially if she couldn’t articulate it.
I brought my focus back to the here and now. I’d been working on her boob for a while now.
Probably time for something else.
“Why don’t you turn over on your stomach, Frieda? Let me see the rest of you.”
She rolled over and got her arms folded under her chin. I stroked her back while I examined her. She really did have quite a nice butt. No wonder she focused on it. I bet all her boyfriends did, too.
I started at the base of her neck, pushing her hair aside and nibbling at the place where her neck joined her shoulder. She gave a little purr and found a more comfortable position. I started my way down her back, running my fingers over her skin, kissing and licking various places.
The small of her back, where those delicate little hairs are found, turned out to be an erogenous zone for her, and I could hear her humming as I kissed it and at the same time my hands found the cheeks of her ass.
I moved a little lower and started licking the cheek of her ass, occasionally giving it the tiniest nip with my teeth. I could sense the change in her, the fear of what might happen with her butt mixed with the rush she was getting from having her ass played with.
I was really curious to see what would happen next, because I wasn’t sure if anyone had done this to her before. This could go either way, she could love it, or she could get really upset and angry.
I used my thumbs to pull her butt cheeks apart and I ran my tongue down the crack of her ass.
I heard her gasp and felt her tense as my tongue probed the crack.
“Oh, Carter, I don’t... wait...”
In for a dime, in for a dollar. I dropped lower and poked my tongue at her butthole, trying to push it in. “Ohmigod, wait, no...” she said, but her butt was pushing into me.
I didn’t do it long. If she thought about it for too long, she’d convince herself it felt too weird and pull back, so I dropped my tongue lower onto her perineum, where I flicked it back and forth as quickly as I could. “Oh, Jesus, what are you... oh, fuck.”
I stepped back into her epicenter and searched for that thing I called the ’pleasure meter’—I really have to find a better name for it. It’s never in the same place. You’d think evolution would have settled on the optimum location for these things, just like it decided where your heart should live and the fact that we should have two kidneys, but no, it was always in a different location.
At least I’d figured out how to find it, so I did in short order, and saw that she really liked my tongue there. It was somewhere in the seventy percent range, and creeping upward. I kept it up for a minute longer, then got one hand under her hip and urged her onto her back.
I could hear her breathing fast now, getting wound up. I got my hands under her so I could raise her hips off the bed a little, then started stabbing my tongue on her perineum again. Again, I could sense without actually looking at her epicenter a second time that she was tensing with a mix of shame and excitement since my tongue was so close to her asshole.
I extended a thumb to replace my tongue there and began tongue-fucking her pussy again, which set her commentary going. “Oh, fuck, Carter, that feels good, do that, use your tongue, yes, yes!”
I had a plan here, and I hoped it wouldn’t end with me being kicked out and my clothes tossed out the window. I’d dribbled enough saliva from tonguing her perineum that it was running down her butt crack, so while I tried to bury my tongue in her cunt and my thumb was rubbing her perineum like a metronome, I extended my index finger and pressed it into her ass. At the same time I linkcast a Summer Breeze while my finger moved in and out slowly.
She arched her back and froze for a moment, then cried out, “Oh, CHRIST!” Her butt vibrated, I couldn’t tell whether she was trying to push my finger out, or get it in deeper.
She collapsed back onto the bed, ejecting my finger in the process. I didn’t want to give her a chance to think about it, so I moved my tongue higher, heading toward her clit, and felt her respond. Her pussy was wet now, from my saliva and her own juices, and I rubbed my hand on her slick cunt, occasionally sliding a finger in.
As I approached her clit, I sat up on my knees, sliding my hand up and down her damp slit.
She looked up at me, a touch of desperation in her eyes. I didn’t need to look at her pleasure meter to know that she was getting close. She wanted a tongue on her clit, but I thought I might have something better.
When I could feel her pushing into my hand, I hooked my middle two fingers deep into her pussy and searched until I found her G-spot. I knew it immediately because I felt her catch her breath and push her hips into me. I pressed up, hard, and vibrated them, in and out, just an inch.
I could look at her face and see it coming like a freight train bearing down on her. She had nowhere to run and in moments it was on her.
“Ohmigod, ohmigod, yesyes, right there, don’t stop, oh, FUCK!” After that, it was a wail, a cry for help, a cry of pleasure. I was glad her roommates weren’t home to hear it, they’d be worried for her. Her hips were moving into my hand, trying to hold on to it, to keep the orgasm going, but it wound down, as they all do, and finally she pushed my hand away. “No more. Stop, please.”
She lay there, her eyes closed and a hand covering her pussy just in case I tried again. I rolled onto my back and looked around the room. It would be a while before she recovered, so I tried to see her life through her pictures, her books, her clothes.
Lots of books, a bit dry for my tastes, with titles that suggested economic stimulation techniques, monetary policy, stock market trends. There were a surprising number of math titles in the mix. The economics majors parties must be a blast. Oh, well, different strokes and all that.
There were family pictures, ones hanging out with her girlfriends, one that looked like a current or former boyfriend. I wasn’t good at reading people by how they dressed, but I did get the impression that her clothes were better quality things. They had an expensive look to them, though I wouldn’t be able to tell you what details suggested that.
I was interrupted by a hand that flopped onto my chest as she came out of her coma. She rolled her head to the side, eyes still closed.
“I don’t think anyone’s done that to me before,” she said. “I’ve heard about it, but none of my boyfriends knew how to do it right. I could get used to that pretty easy. That felt really good. Extra credit, Carter, for adding that detail onto your exam.
“Look,” she went on, “I think I may need a few more minutes before you surprise me again.
Maybe I’ll play with you for awhile, okay?”
I said okay back. She got up on her knees and thought about it. “Scoot up closer to the headboard,” she said, “and pull your knees back.”
I wondered what she had in mind, but I did what she asked. She moved around so she was below me, facing the headboard, while she formulated her plan of attack. On her knees, she bent forward and took my dick in one hand, then dropped her head between my legs. She stroked my dick, then sucked one ball into her mouth, massaging it with her tongue.
I started to say something but it was lost in the groan. Christ, I couldn’t remember the last time someone had done that to me. She let the testicle pop out and sucked the other in. I could feel something urgent forming there. If I hadn’t set the Cum Block, I probably would have been shooting a cum shower over the both of us. She had some serious tongue skills.
She spent another couple of minutes torturing me, then squirmed in a bit closer and poised herself over my dick. She was careful to look at me and make sure she had my full attention first.
Once she had my eye, she dropped her lips over the head of my dick and bobbed up and down.
This was seriously arousing head, and I could tell that she loved the teasing part of this, bringing me right to the edge.
But I also noticed that she wouldn’t go any deeper than she already was. She’d added a bit of tongue, too, but my dick was only in two inches, at best. Curious, I walked the thread into her epicenter. I was seeing some satisfaction at the control she had over me, making me moan, but there was also a sense of fear.
I had to poke around a bit to figure this out. It was usually something like uncertainty, at what might happen, or perhaps because she wasn’t sure if she was doing it right, or—most likely—anxiety about suddenly choking or, worst case, of vomiting, which would be humiliating.
This was stronger, I sensed, closer to terror. I couldn’t understand why. I didn’t see anything obvious. Whatever it was, she was hiding it. I wondered if I could track it down as I had the embarrassment she felt at things in her butt and that she also found it pleasurable. I had imagined the same emotion and felt around until I came across something in her epicenter that felt similar.
So I tried to remember something that had terrified me, what it felt like. I had to go back a ways before I found a memory of an overnight at my friend Jeffy’s house when I was about seven or eight and he had sneaked in a very scary teen horror movie on VHS tape. We played it very quietly on the TV in his basement rec room, which made it even scarier, because he’d been forbidden to watch anything like it.
But we wanted to do something daring, to prove we weren’t kids. Mistake. There was a masked assailant, chainsaws and machetes, and buckets of gore. We got through it, and reassured each other that it wasn’t scary at all. But when we finally went to bed, I couldn’t sleep at all, and every creak of the house had me staring at the door, waiting for the guy with the bloody axe to sneak in. That was terror.
I pulled as much of that feeling back as I could, and rummaged around the cubbyholes in her epicenter, again trying to locate the things that frightened her. I finally stopped in front of one, because I was recognizing a similar emotion. I reached in and felt around, as I had with the feeling of embarrassment, until I got close to something and it hit me full on. Whatever the specific memory was, it felt like terror.
I got my virtual hands on it, which seemed to put a shape to the memory, and the more I felt around it, the more detail I got. At some point I thought I had the gist of it. It went back quite a long time, because it felt like she was quite young, maybe two or three. Someone, maybe a parent, had been chiding her not to eat so fast, chew your food, take smaller bites, but she wanted to go back to her game, so she wolfed her food.
The parent left the room momentarily for some errand, and Frieda took the last of the food on her plate in one large bite, gulping it down, and jumped up from the table.
She felt it immediately. It was stuck in her throat. She couldn’t call out, because her throat was blocked. She couldn’t breathe. She knew she was in trouble and couldn’t fix it. She fainted, terrified.
The parent, whoever, had come back just in the nick of time and saw what was happening. They’d bent her over a knee and pounded on her back and fortunately had been able to dislodge the food. But it had been close. Ever since, Frieda had had that fear of choking. She knew that it was an overreaction, but the fear was primal and logic wasn’t of much use in addressing it.
Okay, then. Maybe this isn’t a problem I can fix right away, because it’s deeply seated, but maybe I can make it less frightening. I linkcast Boner Bliss and Spitshine to her, so she’d start getting some positive feedback to lessen the fear she felt.
I was already here in her head, so I watched to see how she was reacting. She still wasn’t going deep, but now she was starting to feel something different. She was getting a little buzz of something that felt good. It puzzled her, she hadn’t felt that before. She tossed it around in her head, trying to understand it.
This was taking too long. She was so afraid of things in her mouth that she was struggling with experimentation. I was making responsive noises so she’d know that I liked it, but now I gave a little thrust upward, pushing my dick a half inch further in.
She almost jumped back, but was confused by the little pulse of pleasure that accompanied the thrust. It took a couple more attempts before she didn’t pull away. Now she was finding a little rush as the dick went deeper, even if only a little.
I started giving her some verbal feedback as reinforcement that she was doing it right, and also to help take her mind off the worry that she was going to choke. I thought that it was working because she kept at it, and I thought she went even a little deeper.
But this was too much of an ingrained problem to fix now. It would take multiple encounters and a lot of reinforcement before she was able to deal with that fear, so after a few more minutes I urged her off.
“Stop, Frieda, it’s wonderful but I’ve got to do you right now. You have a preference for positions?”
“Well, no, not really, but I kinda like doggy.”
“Okay, gimme a sec.”
I jumped off the bed and found my pants, digging out a condom from my wallet. She had positioned herself on the bed, resting on her elbows and knees, head turned, watching me. I opened the condom and rolled it on as she stared at it.
I climbed onto the bed behind her. “Christ, look at that beautiful ass,” I said. “It’s perfect. Raise your butt higher, Frieda.”
She lifted it up, offering it to me. I really couldn’t help myself. She had her knees slightly apart for stability, and it spread her butt cheeks a little. I dropped my head down and ran my tongue down the crack again. When my tongue reached her asshole I heard her make a kind of a high-pitched whine and her body vibrated.
I could tell she was balancing on a fence, part of her terrified that I was going to do something more, and another part loving what she was feeling.
I only did it for a short time, but it left her feeling like she would need only a little something to push her over the edge. I knee-walked in closer and rubbed my dick in the crack of her ass. I could hear her talking to herself very quietly, barely a whisper, “Oh, no, no, don’t, oh, fuck!”
But I let it drop lower until it was poised at her pussy and pushed. She was so wet that it just slid right in, and that made me say, “Oh, hell, yes!”
So, slowly, in and out, not very far, while I squeezed her butt cheeks. Without actually walking the thread up into her epicenter, I could feel her getting breathless and a bit desperate. She needed to cum again, this time with a dick inside her, and she was trying to pull an orgasm out of the tiny rushes of pleasure she was feeling.
Some women were better at doing that than others. I wasn’t sure about Frieda, but there was no reason why I couldn’t help her along. I linkcast her a Summer Breeze that made her gasp out,
“Oh, yes, Carter, right there!” She started grinding into me with a purpose. Where there was one orgasm, there was bound to be another.
I noticed that her pussy wasn’t entirely passive now, a receptacle, Instead it was an active participant, squeezing my dick, and I felt a little of that peristalsis that squeezed my cock from bottom to top, like it was stroking it. Not every woman could do that, and it felt wonderful, and I told her.
“C’mon, Carter, a little faster, get me off again, almost there.”
So I raised the tempo a little, and after a minute sent her another Summer Breeze. She gave a long moan and started kneading the bedclothes with her fingers.
These were nice, but they were something that wasn’t quite an orgasm, just quick little bursts of pleasure that left a nice feeling behind. She needed something a bit larger, a bit more definitive.
I moved my right hand a little lower and extended my thumb. She was wet enough that the whole area around her cunt had gotten slick. I dropped my thumb onto her perineum and started rubbing. It was close enough to her asshole that I could almost feel the alarm bells going off inside her. “Oh, no,” she was thinking, “what if he...”
But it also triggered that forbidden pleasure she didn’t want to admit and brought her right to the edge. I linkcast a small wave, visible far off and approaching the beach. She could see it coming, she knew something was going to happen when it got to her.
I kind of had a sense of how long these things took to form, and so, just before it “broke” on the metaphorical beach, I slapped her ass with my other hand, hard.
She raised her head to upbraid me and instead found an orgasm slowly washing over her. “Oh, Jesus, yes! Yes!”
As she wound down, I slowed as well. I said, “That looked nice. That feel good?”
“Yes, but I don’t think I like the slapping.”
“You came right after I did it. I think it’s what got you over the edge.”
“I don’t know, I don’t usually like people to do that. And that other thing you were doing, with your thumb? That feels strange.”
“Is it painful? Uncomfortable?”
“It just feels weird, but it’s also making me very sensitive.”
“I won’t do anything you don’t want. Tell me to stop if it’s too much, okay?”
She didn’t answer, which I took as tacit approval, at least for the moment.
I started fucking her again, going deeper, while squeezing her ass cheeks and sometimes rubbing a thumb over her perineum. She whimpered when I did that, which I took as fear, because it was too close to her asshole.
I was starting to feel a little tired. Maybe it was my fast party life catching up with me. I thought maybe we should finish up soon. Pumping my dick into her, I started linkcasting Mineral Spring to her every few minutes. After the second one, she coughed out, “God damn, Carter! I feel so fucking good right now. Just keep doing that.”
That’s what Mineral Spring does, it’s like pleasure washing over you, leaving you in a state of contentment. It’s similar to the one I’d tried on myself recently, Sunshine, so I kinda knew how she was feeling and I envied her. I sent her one more while I thought about the end game.
“Oh, fuck, yes, like that!” she moaned. Nice to get feedback.
I thought maybe Avalanche for her and, I dunno, something different for me. Which one? I couldn’t decide. It’s like going into a bakery and trying to decide which pastry is going to taste best. They all taste good and making the decision on which one to pick is hard.
Suddenly I realized that never, in all the time I’d been sending myself these metaphorical images, had I ever sent myself a breaking wave. I’d done it lots of times to lots of women and they’d loved it, but never to myself. I suddenly wondered what they felt like. Well, no time like the present, so I imagined a huge surfer’s dream wave forming far offshore, gathering strength and approaching the beach. I’d be able to see it coming, know exactly when it would break, and be helpless before it.
I prepped the two images, linked hers to mine, and linkcast hers to her. I increased the speed I was hammering into her and told her, “I’m so close, Frieda, just a few more seconds, I know it. Cum with me, baby.”
She wouldn’t, of course, not until I did, but better to let her think it was her doing. I released the Cum Block and immediately felt it building in my balls, overwhelming me. And damned if I didn’t get the image of that big wave forming in my head, too! Too late now, it was breaking over me. I could hear myself calling out something, desperately, and under me I heard her shouting a mantra, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” My body felt like it was shaking.
And slowly, the wave receded, washing over me, leaving me motionless on the beach. She was still moaning under me and I realized that her cunt was still in spasms, milking my cock. I couldn’t move, because that would require muscle control I did not yet have.
It was another couple of minutes, neither of us able to move, before I could pull out of her. She gave a little whimper as my dick came out with a little wet pop.
Now what? I had a limp dick and a full condom, barely attached, that was going to slip off soon. Frieda rolled to her side and collapsed on the bed. There’s no help for it, it’s up to me to get rid of it. I asked her, “Where’s the bathroom, Frieda?” She gave me a grunt and a twitch of her shoulder. No help from her.
I didn’t know if her roommates were home yet or not, but I had no energy to put on clothes for the trip, so I took my chances on scandalizing her roommates. I stumbled off the bed and out the door, naked. I took a chance and turned right and happily found the bathroom, where I flushed the condom and washed my hands and face.
A quick naked dash streaking back to her room and I remained undiscovered. I crawled back into bed and collapsed beside her. She barely acknowledged my presence, except for another grunt. I closed my eyes.