You're Cute When You Cum
Author's Note
: This story is based on true events from my days as a first-year law student at a large midwestern university in the early 1980s. The names have been changed but many of the events described are as they actually occurred - at least in my hazy memory. Hope you enjoy!
How did it happen? Well, Marlene started it, and I guess I should thank her for that.
It was a Saturday lunch, a little more than two months into the semester. Most of the usual group was there around what we had commandeered as the "graduate student table" at the Parker Hall cafeteria. Parker was an undergrad dormitory and it had the nearest dining hall to the smaller grad student dorm (Shermer Hall) most of us lived in. So there we sat, a "mature" island in a sea of young undergrads, smug in our conviction that the level of conversation at our table was higher of brow.
And yet, at this day and time, we were talking about sex.
Which kinda sucked in a way, since I hadn't actually had sex with anyone other than myself in nearly six months. My last girlfriend and I had split up shortly after college graduation, seeing as fate had conspired to send us in different post graduate directions and we had decided against trying to make long-distance romance work.
Anyway, as I mentioned, Marlene started us down this particular conversational path. She was working toward her PhD in Health Studies and, to help pay her way, taught two sections of an undergraduate course in Human Sexuality. It was an intro course, which meant Marlene taught mostly freshmen, and she was regaling us with stories of how astoundingly ignorant most of her students were about matters of the flesh.
Given our location, Marlene kept looking around periodically to make sure that the subject of any particular tale was not sitting nearby. For similar reasons, she was speaking in a very quiet voice, which required the rest of us to lean in closer to her in order to hear. It probably looked like we were plotting something sinister.
"The questions I get outside of class in office hours are particularly fun," Marlene reported. "One girl asked if she could get pregnant from giving a blow job, and a gay kid was worried that he'd forfeited his status as a 'top' because he'd screwed his new boyfriend from below while sitting in a chair."
There were maybe a dozen of us alleged grownups at the table for this discussion: roughly half of them law students (myself included); Marlene and Liz from Health Studies; Dave the Aggie; Miriam from the School of Music; and Steve the runner, who was studying Sports Science.
After Marlene had finished her tales of the sexual illiteracy of the average freshman, my law school classmate Leanne, a proud born-again Christian, chimed in with her strong view that it was entirely inappropriate to "teach" this sort of thing at all. Naturally, this moved Marlene and Liz to present a spirited defense of sexual pedagogy They argued that it was surely preferable that students learn about the facts of life in classrooms, instead of in dorm rooms and frat houses. Leanne countered with an ode to abstinence and the view that all the necessary lessons could be learned in the eventual marital bed with some sort of vague divine inspiration filling in the details.
That discussion went a few rounds until, for some reason, I felt the need to chime in with words to the effect that I just wished that I could get laid once in a while without it being so damned complicated. To my chagrin, that brought the conversation to an abrupt halt, while everyone turned to look at me. After a beat, Marlene asked: "What do you mean by 'so complicated.'"
Uh oh!
"Ummmm... I guess I mean I wish there didn't have to be so much fuss and emotion and guilt over something that ought to basically be fun and enjoyable," I stammered. "Why can't two people just decide that they'd like to have sex with each other, without there being all the game-playing and delicate negotiations, and then then the drama about who calls whom afterward, and what it meant, and hard feelings, and emotional hoo-hah?"
"So you want to take the 'emotion' out of sex," Jennifer (another law student) asked incredulously? "It's all about emotion for some of us, Kevin. If I choose to have sex with someone, I'm giving them an emotional gift of myself, and I would damn well hope that they take a minute or three to appreciate that and think about what it means. And they better call me the next day too!"
"Well yeah, sure, I can appreciate that," I backpedaled clumsily. "But does it
always
have to be that way? I mean, why can't two people sometimes simply agree up front that it's just going to be, ummm, a good time?"
"So basically, you want a 'fuck buddy,' Miriam virtually snarled at me with her hands making wildly dramatic air quotes. I glanced around at the other guys at the table and got nothing but "you're-on-your-own-man" looks in return.
"Wellll... I mean... I don't love that term, but... uh... yeah. I mean, as long as both parties are upfront about what they want from the, um, encounter... is there anything terribly wrong about 'fuckbuddying,'" I asked in what I desperately hoped was my most sincere of manners - with only very modest air quotes applied?
"So whaddya think ladies? Anybody here want to take Kevin up on his generous offer of 'fuckbuddyhood," Jennifer asked the group? Dead silence and subtle head shakes all around the table.
"Hey guys... look... sorry I brought it up, OK... I just... you know... I mean we're all so buried in school work and under a lot of pressure and... I dunno... sometimes it might be nice to have a little, ummm, release without having to spend a lot of time and effort on the logistics, you know...." I was flailing, and no lifelines were on offer.
"So you don't have time for emotions, huh," Jennifer stayed on the offensive. "You're too busy to care about someone else."
"Oh geez Jen, no... that's not what I mean... of course I care about other people's feelings... it's just.... OK, I give. Ummmm, can we talk about something else? Anything else? I don't suppose I can persuade you all to forget I ever mentioned any of this?"
Fortunately by that point lunch was coming to a close anyway and people were starting to gather up their things. Dave and Steve were the first to start heading away from the table - probably seeking to avoid getting caught in the blowback I'd generated. As if a bell had just rung, everyone else started to follow suit.
I decided to hang back and finish the food on my tray, which I hadn't been able to eat while pathetically trying to defend myself. I also frankly didn't want to give anyone else another shot at me on the walk back to Shermer. So I put my head down and focused on my chewing.
When I dared to look up a couple of minutes later, the grad table was blessedly empty. Well, with one exception: Helen was sitting at the far end, also apparently fully engrossed in her lunch.
Helen was yet another of my fellow law students, and possibly the quietest person in the entire college of law. In fact, I don't think I'd ever heard her say a word beyond hello and goodbye in the whole time she'd been part of the informal dining group. In addition to being extremely quiet in her demeanor, Helen was - to put it bluntly - fairly nondescript in her appearance. Her blandish brown hair curled in an unruly tangle around her head, and today she was sporting the common student "uniform" of loose-fitting sweat clothes. She also wore thick-framed glasses, that gave her a bookworm quality.
It seemed rude not to acknowledge her presence at the table at that point, though, so I served up a greeting.
"Hi Helen."
"Hello," she replied with just a faint hint of a smile in my direction.
"Hey, I'm... um... sorry... I seemed to offend everybody earlier... I really didn't mean..."
"I wasn't offended," Helen interrupted in her low, quiet voice, without actually looking my way.
"Really? Uh... that's good... great... I mean, thanks for saying that. Makes me feel just a tiny bit less idiotic."
"Actually...," she offered, and then stopped short, seemingly thinking better of continuing.
"Actually what," I asked?
"Oh... nothing really," her voice trailed off.
