College life had been good to me. Now in my second year, after a titillating affair with a beautiful mature lady in my first year - she taught me in so many ways the nature of woman - I was now surrounded by them.. Most were in their twenties; all of them were extremely intelligent; and some of them actually enjoyed my company.
The truth was that I was studying to be a teacher, and in that year most of the other students were female. Now, I wasn't the only guy in class. Most were taken. Some were single. But I felt like there were enough fish in the sea to satisfy even the most finicky of fishermen.
The class I was now sitting in dealt with pedagogy and psychology (this is the last time I'll use any -ogy terms for a while: I hate'em!). I had turned on the charm from the moment I went to my desk. So there I was: a black turtleneck shirt - sleeves rolled up to my elbows, of course - black cotton slacks, and sandals. No socks, however. My hair was shaved to within a fraction of an inch, and I had a thick, though trimmed, goatee. I scanned the other people in the class, looking for a spark of interest - I had achieved a certain notoriety as a somewhat prolific writer in the English faculty the year before,. I also had something of a feud going on with another writer, but that's a story for another time.
As the class bore on, I realized I was a square peg back at square one. Any newfound confidence I had as a "lady's man" was all in my head, not in my pants. Or maybe it was the other way around. Anyway, it doesn't really matter. All that mattered was that I could only attract a meager glance from the people in the classroom. I suddenly dawned on me that I was just another face in the education crowd. I suddenly felt very self-conscious: the only person dressed in black, the only guy with facial hair. My turtleneck felt way to tight and I wondered if any odors were escaping from between my toes.
I was sure that I came across as some intellectual wannabe who might - or might not - have a toe lint problem. So I kept quiet and to myself as the professor ranted about the how the most difficult thing teens had to deal with was building their self-esteem. When she asked the class about their own teenage self-esteem problems, I wanted to scream that the problems exist even past adolescence.
But I found that I would have time to explore my own insecurities - past and present - as self-esteem, and other teenage angst, would become the subject of the course's term paper.
"All right people," the teacher said. Her name was Ms. Ronofsky, Ph.D. And despite the fact that she looked so old as to have known the Galapagos tortoises when they were young, her voice seemed powerful enough to drown out a Limp Bizkit concert.
"I want you to team up in pairs. After that, I'll pass out to each team a unique case study. Your job is to summarize it, analyze it, find at least two solutions, and write up a scenario for each on how you believe it would play out. You'll find a bibliography of at least ten volumes with each case. And don't worry, we'll be tackling the different aspects of the project as the semester progresses."
Yay, I thought. Even before Ms. Ronofsky had finished giving her instructions, the class was already breaking up into teams. I stood up, kept my hands on my desk, and scanned the room for any lonely souls like mine. After about a minute, I finally noticed a slightly bobbing head right next to me. As she waved up at me, I knew my face was about as red as if I had bobbed for apples in a basin of no-name ketchup.
"Hi," she said, taking a bite from an apple. "Are you looking for a partner?"
"Uh, yeah. Have you been standing there for long? Because if you have, I'm really sorry."
She laughed and tossed her shoulder length brown hair to one side. "That's okay. I'm used to it by now. I'm Karen."
"Jason. So, I guess you're stranded like I am?"
"Mm- I'm the only person here from the History program. I don't know anybody, and they all seem to know each other."
"I'm in the same boat. An English lit. major, and there's not a short story in sight."
Right then, she furrowed her brows, put her books and her apple on my desk and her hands on her hips. "Don't tell me that's a crack about my height."
I paused and looked her up and down. I hadn't noticed, but she was about 5 feet tall at the most. She wore a plaid skirt that stopped about an inch above her knees, and an oversized sweatshirt with a zipper down the front and her faculty logo on its front. The shirt was so large that I couldn't tell anything about what was going on beneath it.
"It's not."
She gave the same up and down look, smiled and took one last crunch from her apple. "Good. So are we partners?"
"That works for me."
And with that, I hoisted my desk over to hers and we got our case study. We both stared at it and sulked: It must have had over 100 photocopied pages. I hadn't noticed that our desk benches opened on opposite sides - when I put them together the openings faced each other; as we both got up to pick up the pages, our heads bumped together, our glasses clinked together, and while I fell on my seat, she fell on my lap.
I slipped an arm around her shoulders to steady her, and I got a wonderful whiff of her very subtle perfume. I also got to look deeply in her eyes: they were this wonderful gray color that seemed almost to shimmer like a kaleidoscope. Even she paused for a second to examine my features more closely. I noticed one of her eyebrows going up before she braced herself on my thigh and my shoulder to slide back in to her seat. While she did so, her ass passed over my crotch and I'm sure she slowed down enough to get the feel for the action that was going down in there. And with the way she slid her chest - which felt ample and firm -- against mine before regaining her seat completely, I had a kegger going on in my pants.
"Sorry," she whispered in my ear. "I can be a klutz. Sometimes."
"My fault," I whispered back. I could feel my face blush and my heartbeat grow quicker, and I was pretty sure she noticed my breathing getting quicker as well. "I'll just move my desk to the other side and we won't have that problem again."
"Don't," she said, putting her arm on mine. "The class is nearly over anyway … and it wasn't that much of a problem."
So we spent the last fifteen minutes going through the pages, our legs pressed together and our heads close enough to tell what we had for breakfast and lunch. Once in awhile I lifted my head and looked around the classroom, only to see the other students - even the teacher - give us disapproving, sometimes envious, glances.
When the class was finally over, we pushed our desks aside before getting up and left the room. She got out before I did and was waiting by the lockers that lined the corridor while I gave Ms. Ronofsky the cash for the photocopies; Karen had already paid for hers. When I slipped my head into the hallway, Karen was leaning up against a locker, listening to a guy who was leaning next to her in "hit-on" mode. When she saw me, she moved around him and headed my way.
I left the classroom, my book satchel by my side, and waited for her to go to the other side. As she slid next to me, I noticed she had pulled the zipper of her sweatshirt partly down, exposing a nice expanse of lightly tanned, soft-looking skin.
As we walked away, we passed the guy that was hitting on her; when we got close enough, she said: "Let's give them something to talk about," and she slipped her arm around mine.
