The Grass Is Always Greener

Bright fluorescent lights droned overhead as Megan danced down flights of dormitory stairs with nervous electricity flowing through her veins. The ring of her shoes slapping the metal steps filled the concrete stairwell with noise, and her blood pounded in her ears. The thrill of what she had done was intoxicating. It had been, as her mind had begun to phrase it, "a perfect seduction", and she grinned, titillated by the thought of herself as seductress extraordinaire. Her mark had certainly gotten his fair shake, the slight crustiness she felt along her bikini line as she descended each step was testament to that, as was the soreness from deeper between her thighs. Still, she felt she had come out ahead. She had undeniably come.

Mostly, she was proud of herself. Casual, emotionless sex, that formerly masculine domain, had been conquered. "I am woman!", she thought, although her smile twisted wryly as she invoked that feminist slogan. She knew there were others, some of her friends, assuredly her ex-boyfriend, who would think differently about her actions. She knew if they every found out they would whisper the "S" word and point at her from dark corners at the edges of every party she attended. But she resolved not to care, and not to tell them. "S for Sexy, S for Strong." she thought with a snort. "S for Seduction! I am woman!" she tempered her pride with a bit of sarcasm.

By the time Megan reached the bottom of the stairwell, however, her buoyant mood had begun to ebb. The surge of endorphins generated from the morning romp had crested and was now dissipating like a crashed wave leaving a beach. Her weightlessness had faded. Her quads and calves had began to burn. The wispy shroud of marijuana fog too had drifted slowly off of her mind, leaving her uncomfortably sober as the ubiquitous fluorescence seemed to press on her eyes. Her feet grew heavy and slowed. Her stomach rumbled with the reminder that she had consumed nothing since a frozen pizza the night before, except for beer and trace amounts of bodily fluids. "Maybe I should have sucked him off" she thought sardonically, propping herself up with a joke as she trudged down the final set of steps and headed for the glowing red letters of the exit sign, and beyond it her responsibilities.

As she neared it, the door was wrenched open. Tumbling through the frame came two tall, high-fiving, college boys, both bare chested and wearing only shorts and flip flops. They were students about her own age - obviously returning from a game of volleyball, one clutching the immediately recognizable ball, and both sporting a healthy dusting of fine sand across their shoulders. Abs and pecs and biceps filled her view as she stepped back, surprised. Briefly, her eyes were magnetized downward, and she realized now that the shorts were actually bathing suits, and deliciously short ones revealing a quartet of long, smoothly muscled thighs. She blinked and snapped her vision upwards as her face heated. The last time she'd seen a boy in just bottoms, just a minute ago, she'd fished out and tasted his cock, and a tingle of recognition flashed in her loins.

Luckily, they didn't catch her roving eyes and noticed her just in time to avoid a collision. "Woah! Excuse me!" one said, as they arrested their celebratory charge. "Hi, sorry", said the other, lifting his hand in a half-wave, and they stepped aside to pass by her single file. With two pairs of eyes on her she felt herself shrink inwards, remembering for the first time that she was exiting the boys' dorm Saturday morning while wearing clothes that looked and reeked decidedly like a Friday night outfit. "Confidence, girl!", she girded herself, and held herself straighter. She smiled and looked up, and up, and tried to meet their eyes as the rangy pair passed. "They can't tell that you just got fucked" she thought, but wasn't sure if that gave her any confidence or if it was even true. "They can smell it on you!" the devil on her shoulder whispered. Her gaze rose as far as their nipples before she wilted, and instead of making eye contact, she was staring at their sandy, thonged feet and shuffling out the door. She heard the boys continuing their hurrahs several flights up as it closed behind her. "You pussy, Megan!" she chided herself, cursing her failure of fortitude, and stomped towards her car.

The morning sun, which minutes earlier had seemed so welcoming from the safety of a soft mattress, now bore down upon her like a dentist's overhead lamp. She pursed her lips on the right side of her mouth and creased her forehead as she walked. She had felt embarrassed at the thought that someone would know that she had sex, but now fiercely ashamed of that embarrassment. "I should be proud of it", she thought, "I am proud of it!" she said out loud, weakly, and her words were blown away by the breeze. She also felt guilty for her sexual thoughts, both in bed upstairs and more recently in the stairwell. "If I just think about men for their bodies...", it didn't sit well with some of her other ideals about a woman's value. She was frowning fiercely as she slid behind the wheel, slammed the key into the ignition, and cranked the car on.

===

Warring thoughts tumbled like dice through Megan's head as she drove back to her dorm. Cracks had began to appear in her newly adopted world view, the single girl persona she had worn for the last day, and now guilt for what she had done to her relationship with Cole also began to gnaw at her conscience. Last night had been a dream, and she had suppressed the little pangs of unease along the way dismissing them with mantras like "I'm a free, modern woman" and "single and ready to mingle", but with the lucidity of the morning after, her guilty feelings crescendoed, and tears brimmed in her eyes. Her confidence, her exuberance at being a hot commodity, had given way to a panic, and the gears of her mind gnashed at the phrase "slut without a boyfriend". What had made her act so rashly last night? "And again this morning!", she groaned into the steering wheel.

Briefly she blamed it on the alcohol, but she knew she hadn't been too drunk - her lack of hangover was proof enough of that. The alcohol had been more her tool than his, giving her a courtesan's courage. Cheep beer had evolved her prudish personality into a sort of spanish fly and had snagged her a prize winning fish. "And you fucked him again 20 minutes ago with a BAC of 0.0!", she thought with a sob. Of course, she then briefly blamed it on the weed. "It made me too horny!", she wailed to the empty car, but she didn't feel any absolution from that excuse either. She would have done the same thing joint or no, and everything she smoked had been self administered. The truth bubbling up from her subconscious was that she was horny before the joint, with or without the beer, and had gone looking for something new. And she had found it. An image of herself on her back crying out "Fuck me!" swam unbidden into her mind, and a wave of guilt washed over her as she felt the faintest of twinges in her crotch.

A honking car sounded somewhere behind her as tears leaked down her face. It was only a few blocks to her own dorm, just across campus, but she only made it through one stop light before she was forced to pull over onto a patch of gravel siding. Her crying had made driving unsafe, as sobs wracked her body and tears blurred her vision. For about a year prior to last night she had been sure she would end up married to Cole, and she longed for that stability again. "Get it together, Megan!" she growled, smacking the car's dashboard for punctuation. Eventually her cries subsided, and, wiping her tears into her the crook of her elbow, she managed to slow her heaving chest. "In..Two..Three..Four, Hold..Two..Three..Four, Out..Two..Three..Four" she breathed in slow rhythm.

Eventually she managed to release her death grip on the steering wheel, and with a heavy sigh, dropped her hands to her lap and considered her options. Last night, amongst bodies undulating to the deep beat of digitized bass drum, beneath the hazy sea of strobe lights, she knew nobody would have recognized her. Only perhaps her sorority sister Courtney, who had come with her, would have seen her dancing with Mr. Big, and recognized the horny, grinding of her hips into his crotch for the mating ritual that it was. She dug her phone out of her purse and fired off a text to her friend. A plan was loosely forming in her mind.

With a frown, she then started to review the texts from Cole. The most recent texts were of a reformed gentleman, hardly the cocky asshole who had explained to her teary face less than a week ago that he wanted to essentially sow his oats a bit more before settling down. It had been only a few days, and she still felt the devastation and surprise. He had been such a big part of her life, and the split had felt like losing an arm. Reattachment, if it ever occurred, would likely be painful. "What a fucking asshole!", she burst out suddenly, and her sobbing started again for a moment before she could still her diaphragm. She scrolled up through apology after apology, long walls of texts characteristic of an unstable man. Her skin felt a size too tight. Her throat was tight and inflamed from her bawling, as if she had swallowed a crab and it had lodged itself part-way down. Above the apologies were the arguments, her own text bubbles warring with Cole's. How much damage had been done in just a few days?

Soon, without realizing it, Megan had scrolled back weeks into their text history, and up popped a selfie of her and Cole smiling into the sunshine from the prow of a small fishing boat. It had been a perfect trip to her family's beach house. She could still taste the salty spray of the ocean that had whipped through their hair as she held the phone unsteadily. She remembered Cole, strong and confident as he captained her Dad's boat over to the sand bar, where they had spent hours with their lips locked getting turned into lobsters by the sun.

She remembered later that night the way he had slipped the orange straps of her bikini down off of her reddened shoulders to suckle her pale breasts, and how she'd found him, a warm and firm knob of flesh trapped in his cool, damp swimsuit trunks. And she remembered how they had made love in the upstairs bedroom, youthful, needy love, with the windows open and the distant, roaring waves as their soundtrack. She growled, and raised her phone to smash it, imagining Cole's face fragmented and cracked in the shattered glass, but before she could complete the motion, common sense overruled her, and she lowered the phone back down. Stabbing her fingers into the screen she typed, "What's up? We need to talk." and hit send with a sigh. She tossed the phone onto the passenger seat, and yanked the car into drive, wheels chirping and spitting dust as they climbed out of the gravel back onto the pavement.

Back at her own dorm, a familiar set of stairs greeted her, and she labored up several flights in the fluorescent spire. Peeking around each doorway of her suite to confirm her roommate wasn't in, she managed to complete her walk of shame without further interruption. Her door slammed shut and her shoes smacked against the wall with a pair of thuds as she kicked them off. She twisted her blinds firmly closed to shut out the noon sun, and in the darkness, collapsed upon her bed. Creeping exhaustion from her long night and early morning partying enfolded itself around her, and she allowed it to pull her under, as it had been threatening to do since she left her lover's bed, and she drifted into a fitful sleep.

===

In her dream, Megan was standing on an altar in front of a crowd of her friends and family, all in their Sunday finest dresses and suits. Her own dress, a white confection of clouds, clung to her skin as if by static electricity, and she was paralyzed, muscles tensed and totally still, lest a wisp of the cotton candy be jostled and blown away to reveal her underlying nakedness. She was squeezing with all of her might the pair of hands in front of her, using their steady strength to prop herself up. They were Cole's hands, strong, guiding, and through his arms she felt a flow like electric current that vibrated along her skin and, for now, was barrier enough against the many eyes of the crowd.

She looked up into his face then, and instead of the loving smile she so expected to see there, his lips were pulled back in a snarling, evil smirk. His teeth were sharp and pointed white triangles that should have been in the mouth of a deadly shark. Suddenly, as if her protective bubble burst, she heard the booming laughter of the crowd. They were laughing at her, and she sensed they had been laughing at her this whole time. She felt her cheeks moisten with tears, and her blood pounded in her ears. Cole, holding her eyes, slowly peered down between them, and, although somewhere in the deep corners of her psyche a voice yelled at Megan "Don't look!", her head bent too, as if bowed by some irresistible hand on the nape of her neck. Between her and Cole, a young blonde girl was crouched, incongruously clad in jeans and a t-shirt, and she was sucking Cole's cock!

Megan screamed an endless, howling shriek. The girl stopped her bobbing head and slowly slipped Cole's penis out of her mouth. She turned her head to look up at Megan, and smiled revealing her own set of white razor-blade chompers. Now, Cole started laughing at her too, booming along with the ruckus of the onlookers. Louder and louder came their jeers until until she could not hear her own shrill, squealing voice over the din. She turned as if to run, jerking her hands away from Cole's, and as soon as the contact between their hands was severed, she jolted awake, her moaning yell dying in her throat as she regained consciousness.

===

Megan awoke in a puddle of bedsheets as a buzz from her bedside table stung her ears. Streams of sweat, alongside toxic molecules of cheap beer and various marijuana resins, had oozed out of her skin as she dozed, and her skin was coated with a cool brine. The fever of her dreams, which had burned hot as she tossed and turned, was now extinguished, and with each breath she felt the icy fingers of air conditioning prying away another layer of her warmth. Wrestling with the wet sheets did nothing except smear the moisture deeper into her clothes, which maddeningly she hadn't removed before passing out. "Ohmygod, fuck it!" she moaned, resigned to being forced from her bed. She propped herself up and flung the sheets aside. This orange lines between the slats of her blinds let her know it was nearly sunset, and her nose wrinkled as she identified whiffs of ogre on the refrigerated breeze. The texts could wait, she needed a shower.

She disrobed as she went, top and bottom arcing into the corner of her bedroom as she walked to her door. As she stripped she felt as though she was peeling off a layer of dirty thoughts as well as her clothes. Her shame and the nervous energy of her dream came off of her like the soiled outer layer of an onion, and the irony was not lost on her that her confidence was fortified as she was getting naked. She figured the shower would purify her further. She opened the door, and stepped out.

Briefly scanning the common room for her roommate, she reached back with one hand and unhooked her bra, the clammy cotton straps feeling more like a swimsuit top as they peeled away from her skin. Her other hand briefly clutched the soggy cups to her chest until she reached the privacy of the bathroom, where she let go and the sodden material fell away from her boobs to plop on the tiled floor. Goosepimples rose on her damp, exposed skin, and her nipples stiffened. She shut the door behind her, and twisted the shower knob to hot. The plumbing gnashed and moaned, sputtering out a few weak streams of mineral-scented water into the tub before groaning once more and hissing into full flow.

While she waited for the shower to warm, she turned and caught a glance at herself in the mirror. "Damn, Meg" she said with a chuckle. The girl in the mirror was a hot mess. A scrunchie was lodged deep in the brown bird's nest on her head, the knotted remnants of a pony tail, and several strands of hair yanked free from her scalp as she retrieved it. What little makeup she had been wearing was so thoroughly smeared around her orbits as to be indistinguishable from the eye shadow caused by late nights and meager sleep. She straightened and thrust out her chest to survey herself.

Her boobs were pale orbs outlined by fading pinkish indentations where her bra had dug into her skin. Throughout the agony of high school she had wished them larger, but only once in college had the first few months of unlimited cafeteria access and Bud Light soaked evenings swollen them to a respectable cup size, albeit barely. In part due to her jogging regimen and in part due to genetic luck, her "freshman five" had gone mainly to her tits, and she had been able to ditch all of her padded juvenile undergarments and fill a drawer with adult brassieres - some of which gave her a hint of cleavage. Although she was still jealous of friends with larger busts, after years of self loathing she had mostly come to terms with her body and knew her perky pair matched her svelte frame. "At least they don't sag!", she thought, smiling ruefully at her reflection.

She cocked her head to the side and squinted slightly as her eyes were drawn to a pair of red welts near, one angry splotch at the bottom of each of her boobs. Alone, each small crescent of burst capillaries was hardly noticeable, tucked on the underside of her breast, but as a matched set, to her eyes, they were immediately identifiable as thumbprints. She harrumphed and blew a raspberry out of the side of her mouth, more amused than mad. She lifted her hands to her sides, sliding them up along her ribcage to where her skin remembered his pressing, squeezing grip, and soon her lips curled back into a grin as she reminisced.

She noticed a dark spot beneath her left nipple too. It was a small dash of purple, as if someone had quickly dabbed the tip of a felt marker to her skin. She leaned her left shoulder closer to the mirror to look more closely and carefully poked her fingers into her flesh. The spot itself was not painful to touch, but as her probing fingers rubbed higher, onto the dime of rosy skin of her areola, she felt the throbbing soreness. "Ooo, ouch!" she groaned softly, and then giggled as she realized what it was. It was a bite mark - also a consequence of the rough treatment she had received, a bruise from a tooth while allowing her date to suckle too hard or too long. She cupped her breasts with her hands, and pressed an index finger onto the pink M&M that capped each boob, gently swirling the stinging, aching nipples.

She rolled her eyes and sighed contentedly, glad that she would be able to hide the marks beneath most of her bras. Somewhere within her, quiet alarm bells of embarrassment were ringing, warning her against allowing someone to mark her like this, to use her skin so thoroughly, but she ignored them, hearing only her own excited blood pulsing in her ears and the rush of spray behind her. Clouds of water vapor rose and wrapped warmly around her, and she luxuriated in the pride she felt at having caused such animalistic passion: her body, her "girls", had driven him to such unbridled lust. She turned and chopped a hand through the cone of shower jets, "Juuust right", she thought, and made to climb in.

She hooked her thumbs into her panties, bent, and pulled them over her butt cheeks. The lacy lingerie was damp like the rest of her garments, and as she peeled the sheer triangle stickily away from her pussy like a post-it note, she became aware of the extra moisture between her thighs. "What the fuck!" she cried, as they slid down her legs. The pink scrap of fabric pooled between her feet, and Megan's eyebrows rose as the spied the gusset smeared with an opaque white glue. Her hand smacked between her legs, cupping her mound, and she smiled knowingly as she dipped a finger between her labia and found a sticky well of semen there. Without her panties, the evidence of her coupling earlier that day, drawn by gravity, was now uncorked, and drops of viscous liquid were already dribbling out of her nether lips around her finger to sprinkle silently onto the tiles at her feet. With a laugh and gasp of mock panic she cried, "Oh my god! Oh my god!", and stepped gingerly into the tub, still using her hand as a makeshift maxi pad.