Just This Once

I would risk my future for that ass. For the last hour, Ms. Lindy has been lecturing on the Big Bang. The wall behind her, all 40 square feet and trillion pixels of it, has been displaying every visual necessary to drive home the beauty and enormity of the Universe. Starting with the bang itself, a Timelapse of the life of universe from birth to death has been captivating my classmates for the better part of an hour while Lindy narrates. Tommy will fill me in on this point later. Right now, all of my Adderall-fueled attention is focused squarely on Ms Lindy’s ass, and to the imagining of indecorous scenarios.

I’m only a junior, but it’s a foregone conclusion that I’ll graduate valedictorian. Because freaks of nature still exist, a few of my classmates have managed to get into The Academy without genetic intervention. Their parents fucked, and got pregnant, and they were born. There was no planning. No geneticist had harvested the mothers eggs and fathers semen. No AI had analyzed the billions of possible permutations and selected the best candidates. Their mothers had nine months to address the fact that, for as well as they knew, they were growing a sociopath inside of them, and they just went with it. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, but while a few fuck-babies might have been able to get into The Academy, they don’t have have a shot of overtaking me. The odds of naturally conceiving a child with the necessary genetic quotient to get into this school are about five million to one. Even through genetic selection the odds are less than one and a thousand. A cake is only as good as what you put into it into it, not every couple has the right ingredients. My parents pantry is stacked. I have the highest genetic quotient of anyone I’ve met. Right after I turned sixteen, I had lawyers serve a cease and desist to a sex doll company to stop the sale of a model that looked exactly like me. He, or It, was based on a generative algorithm optimized to design a doll that would elicit the strongest sexual response across the broadest set of the population. I won. In my 11 years at school, I’ll be that was I’m going to be valedictorian. Valedictorians traditionally work with a mentor on their graduation speech, which brings me to…

SCENARIO 1:

The bell rings and my classmates leave. It’s the lass class of the day and Ms. Lindy is packing up her desk. She pats the the side and back pockets of her painted on pants, and when she’s confident she isn’t forgetting anything, she slings her bag around her shoulder and looks up to leave.

“Michael!” She’s startles then laughs at herself “I didn’t see you there. What’s up?”

I lift my head from the tablet I’d pretended to be looking at. Stressing over. I appear surprised that everyone’s left already. “Sorry” I say standing up. “It’s this speech. Graduation’s a week away and I still don’t have anything down.

“Who’s your mentor?”

“Caleb” I say “He’s been so busy since agreeing to help that I haven’t had a chance to meet with him.” This won’t be true, but I know she won’t check. Caleb Murphy is my psych professor. At thirty three, he’s already published three books on psychology, all of them best sellers, and he’s a nine in the looks and physique department. That he’s stays on as a teacher would be inexplicable if it weren’t for the fact that it’s part of his brand. ‘Handsome, rich, smart, and he teaches?’ I imagine the woman who buy his books think to themselves. He certainly understands the female psyche well enough to have milked a career out of it. Ms. Lindy knows this, because she’s fallen victim to it. A few months ago, was walking down the street and saw the two of them kissing before going into a brownstone. Two weeks later, I was at a rooftop bar downtown on a date of my own when I saw the two of them canoodling at a table nearby. A few weeks after that, I was at the same bar with a new date, and so was Caleb Murphy. It’s possible that she dumped him, but I doubt it.

“Yeah” Ms. Lindy said “He’d got a pretty full schedule these days. I’m surprised he agreed to help.”

“I’m wishing he hadn’t. At this point it’s too late to find someone new…”

You know by now where I’m going with this. She’ll offer to help, I’ll refuse. “No, Ms Lindy. You don’t have to do that…” but she’ll insist. Her first name is Melissa, by the way. I would never call a teacher Mr. Or Ms. Any more than an employee would refer to their boss as Mr. Or Ms. Maybe they still do that in the south, but otherwise it’s first names. But in my fantasy, she’s Ms. Lindy, and she’s insistent that she help me out of the pickle she believes her ex has put me in.

She’ll stay late to help me. I’ll already have the speech written in my head, but I’ll let her think she’s walking me through it.

“Shoot!” She’ll say when it’s time to go. We were in flow state writing, and now that the speech is a polished gem and the high is wearing off, she realizes that we’ve been there for three hours. We pack, walk out together. She’s maybe 110 lbs 5’5”, so even at 5’7” in the heels she’ll be wearing, my 6’5”, 220lb frame will tower over her. I’m built. I have a great face, perfect skin, and I’m smart. If I had any two of those attributes, maybe even three, than affecting an heir of cockiness might add something. A pinch of salt to bring out to bring out the natural flavors. But I don’t need salt. The flavor is already cooked in. Cockiness would seem showy, and insecure…the recipe wouldn’t make sense. Confidence yes. Tempered humility, always. And Chivalry. Chivalry is a must, because when we get to the door to leave and she realizes it’s pouring, I’ll take off my letter jacket and hold it over her as we sprint to her car. “Thanks again for the help!” I’ll say as I shut the door behind her.

My jacket is saturated from its time spent as an umbrella, so I’ll just carry it as I walk through the torrential rain. My white t-shirt is wet, and clinging to my abs, and I might as well be naked. I’m maybe a hundred feet away from her car when I hear her yelling “Michael!” Through the rolled down window, waving for me to come back “Get in” She’ll say “I’ll drop you off” I’ll refuse once, then get in when she insists. I’ll get in, and the car will start driving.

Our seats are facing one another. The car’s noise cancellation accounts for every raindrop falling, so in spite of it being dark, and torrential, you could hear a pin drop as the car merges onto the highway. My chest is a barrel resting on washboard. With my shirt clinging to me, I look obscene, and I know it. I’ll cross my arms to fein humility, but what I’m actually doing is flexing. I let us sit with the awkwardness for just a second, just long enough, before asking how about her plans for the summer. I’ll tell her about my plans for college, and what I want to do with my life. I’ll keep talking, that’s the most important thing. Her car will have automatically routed to her house, and I just need to distract her long enough for it to drive us there without realizing she should be dropping me off first. She might have even realized that already, but part of her wants to pretend she forgot, and in that case my job is to keep talking. Not let her get a word in edgewise so that she can pass it off as an honest mistake.

The car pulls up to her brownstone. It’s the same one I saw she and Caleb go into. It’s sprawling, and almost certainly belongs to Caleb, not Ms. Lindy, but it’s a nice setting for what comes next so I let my mind go with it. Ms. Lindy realizes the mistake. She apologizes, then says she’ll have the car take me home and come back. I refuse, she insists, and I relent again. But It’s pouring harder than ever now, and I insist on using my jacket to give her cover from the rain again as we sprint for her door. Scratch that. I don’t give her the opportunity to say no, I just do it. We’re both laughing as we run, and right as we get to the door, there’s a lightning strike. I can make this scenario work without it, but if I’ve already gotten this far, I have to assume God is pulling for me. What’s a little thunder between friends?

Anyways, We pour into her house, drenched, laughing. How she’s managed to run in heels for this long is a mystery to me, but when they’re finally on polished marble, they slip, and I catch her with my left arm, pulling her into my chest in a motion that’s intended to seem like a natural reflex rather than anything indecorous. But I hold her there, and I look at her, and she looks at me.

This part is the trickiest. After a few seconds that will seem like minutes, I’ll pull back a little, as if to say ’Sorry, I don’t know what came over me.” I won’t break eye contact though. I’ll stare into her eyes, dripping on her floor, panting lightly from the sprint in and from catching her. I’ll give her enough time to acknowledge that I pulled back, tried to do the honorable thing, before I straighten my shoulders, and take a step toward her, my 6’5” frame, looking down into her eyes as water from my hair drips onto her forehead. I need to do this. If I make the first move, then the encounter is on me. She can tell herself that. But she has to have the final say, and so that’s as far as I’ll go. I’ll just stand there, and trust that my stare is penetrating enough to encourage her to throw caution to the wind and make the next move.

She does. Her heels come off, and her tip-toes lift her up, and I bend down the rest of the way. Our lips touch once, then again. Then our tongues meet. As her arms raise up and drape around my neck, my hands find their way to her waist, then her thighs. At the one minute mark, we’ll have reached the event horizon. The point of no return. I lift her up, and her legs wrap around me. Holding her tight to my chest with one arm, I reach over my head and behind my back with the other, pulling my shirt off in a single fluid motion as I kick off my shoes. All of this happens in seconds, and at the same time, I use the hand of the arm that’s effortlessly pinning her against my chest to unfasten her bra. With her legs still clamped around me, she maneuvers herself out of the bra, then the shirt, and pulls her bare torso closer to mine. At some point I stop the action long enough to say something like “We can never tell anyone about this. I’m 18, but this could impact my future. If it got out. This has to be a one time thing, okay? Just this once?” Again, this is for her, not me. She’d the one with everything to lose. If she got it into her head that I might say something, this could end at any time, and we’d both feel stressed. If I make it seem like I’m the one with everything to lose, we’re in it together. No turning back. Event horizon. “Okay?”

“Yes” she’ll pant “Just this once.”

The bell rings. Scenario 2 will have to wait.