{Song lyrics taken from "Once In A Lifetime" by The Talking Heads, copyright 1980.}
...And you may find yourself in a beautiful house,
With a beautiful wife,
And you may ask yourself, 'Well, how did I get here?'...
The words seeped out of the speakers and across his mind simultaneously.
Laying on the floor of a Claver Hall dorm room while staring up at the ceiling, pants and boxers rolled down below his knees, Oxford shirt and Norwegian sweater still on, he knew he wouldn't last long, it had been over a week since he had jacked off - after a winter break of at least once every twenty-four hours - and she was working him masterfully with only her tongue and he was fully primed, so he glanced to the right and looked at the shelf on the wall above her roommate's bed. Stuffed animals, picture frames, two small trophies, a few ramen packages - then to the left, a bureau - cosmetics, hairbrush, a few more pictures, a wine bottle candle, dried streams of wax thickly coating it, a box of tampons - then a closet door, a ribbon of Hawaiian leis adorning the frame from top to bottom.
He lowered his eyes. The darkened interior wall of the dorm room framed a grayish-white rectangle of light, her head a silhouette within that frame. She was teasing the rim of the crown. He couldn't see her face - a curtain of chestnut hair hid it - but when she lowered her head, she sucked him all the way into her mouth -
...And you may tell yourself, 'This is not my beautiful house,'
And you may tell yourself, 'This is not my beautiful wife'...
-
and he had to concentrate hard not to cum.
He squirmed on the thin carpet, tipping to the side, hoping he might slip out of her mouth so he could last longer and not blow without assistance, that would be
way
embarrassing.
She let him drift out of her mouth. He felt himself quivering, the dorm room air cool on his slickened penis.
"It's jerking all by itself!" she whispered, her face still hidden by hair. "You think," she said mirthfully, "you'll cum without me touching it?", and she reached out and ran a finger lightly up the shaft, which had - thankfully - deflated some and was listing to the side but which twitched alive again at her touch.
"Hope not," he struggled to speak, attempting bravery but only achieving something approximating capitulation.
"Hmmm," she replied softly, lowering her head, "I hope to see that someday."
...Same as it ever was, same as it ever was...
He lowered his head to the floor again, eyes closed. "Hmmm," echoing her.
It was a late January Saturday night, a handful of minutes after midnight. School had been back in session for a week and they had been party-hoping on campus with her roommate and four other girls, his roommate, and his other best friend. They had pre-partied at a dorm across campus, someone in her roommate's chem lab had been celebrating a birthday, and stopped in two other dorms on the way back before slipping into her dorm so the roommate could change coats - the temperature had been dropping all evening. The quick-stopover turned into over an hour - the plan had been to venture up to The Townhouses and roam there. Once in the dorm though, they had rolled into a party that had broken out since they all had departed earlier. People wandered room-to-room, stereos competing, a few rooms serving as makeshift discos, open alcohol openly flaunting regulations for women's dorms.
She and he remained in her room, sequestered on the couch, she on his lap, drinking for sure but not aggressively. Languidly. Which was how they talked - softly, hanging on every word, they were in the glow of a newly affirmed attraction - everything the other says and does infinitely fascinating. People drifted in and out of the room and they sat cocooned, chatting with passersby and laughing at the stories of the goings-on others told. They felt very regal, as if troubadours came into their chambers at regular intervals to entertain them and they would bestow hearty laughter as reward.
It was the beginning days of a very charmed - and charming - coupling, one that had been months in the making.
He had first noticed her in the dining hall, mid-September during a routine lunch. She wore colorful board shorts, a nondescript polo, her just-beyond-the-shoulders length dark hair tied by a ribbon, and it wasn't her body - face or eyes, or even legs or the outline of her breasts - that drew his attention. Not-quite athletic, not-quite wispy, decidedly more flapper than fleshy, hers was petite and symmetrical. She had been walking across the drinks area of the cafeteria and she passed by him on the other side of the salad bar and with a pair of plastic tongs gripping spinach suspended in mid-air, he stared. It was the ribbon. He hadn't seen a girl with a hair ribbon since like, forever? His eyes followed as she approached the plates and flatware, his eyes trailing down to the floor. Chuck's. She wore a pair of black low-top Chuck's.
Board shorts, hair ribbon, Chuck's?
Those...incongruities remained with him throughout the next several weeks and as September waned into October he saw that their lives overlapped each others in elliptical ways - entering and exiting classrooms, campus center, mealtimes, parties. And it was at a Halloween party that his off-again, on-again, off-again attention turned to enchantment. How could it not. She wore a French maid costume, barely, and his heightened interest wasn't only his alone. And it was after this moment and campus slid into November, their orbits grew narrower and narrower, eye contact and nodding hello's occurring more frequently. His Shakespeare Seminar had been reading
Much Ado About Nothing
and his professor had decoded the title as it would have been understood in Elizabethan England - pronounced "noting", as in "remarking" or "noticing". Yes, he had been "noting" Mary - as he had learned her name was - for some time, and days on which their paths intersected rang pleased him.
And she, too had "noted" him, not in mid-September or sometime in October or even November. The end of her first week on campus.
A first year student, she had heard about him from older girls on her dormitory floor. No, he wasn't one of the campus heartthrobs or an athlete or one of the douche-bag guys who plants his flag without discernment. No. His intellect. And politics. His first year he had earned a reputation as being only one of a handful of students who could actually not only respond - as a freshman! - to professors' unfathomable questions but also reply with an equally - and sometimes more! - intelligent response. Faculty talked about him, but he didn't know this at the time of course, he wouldn't know until many years later after he had earned tenure and was talking with a former undergraduate mentor at an academic conference. But his unassuming, retiring personality, though, didn't create friction or jealousy amongst his peers - if anything a quiet respect, head nods from the heartthrobs and athletes, little acknowledgement at all from the douche-bags.
His politics, decidedly liberal on a campus teeming with young and old conservatives, was a bit of a courageous curiosity, amusingly tolerated. Still, no one menacingly called him out, except for the occasional inebriated douche-bag whose flag had been denied unfurling earlier in the evening.
