Sophia and I sat together at the downtown Burger King, enjoying a meal together away from campus. It was nearly dark out, nasty, cold, and wet. Frozen rain pelted the windows. As I looked out on Campus Drive, the window acted as a mirror. I looked at my pasty, pale, freckled skin and my bright red, curly, unruly hair that was way overdue for a trim. Then I looked across the table at Sophia: strikingly beautiful with short-cropped, thick dark brown hair, olive-toned skin, high cheek bones, and the largest, most gorgeous brown eyes I had ever seen.
Clearly we didn't belong together. And we weren't together, at least not in that way. We lived in the same dorm, and had been very good friends since the middle of last semester, when Sophia was feeling overwhelmed by school and needed someone to talk to. She grabbed my arm one afternoon, and we went to the student union, talking through her anxieties over a large bowl of Dairy Sciences Ice Cream. Since then, whenever one of us felt the weight of life had gotten too great, we could count on the other to drop everything and be available.
"It's Valentine's Day," I said. "How come you're not having dinner with Damien?" Damien was Sophia's boyfriend: Six-foot-four, half-Chilean, with chiseled facial features and an equally chiseled physique. He was the classic tall, dark, and handsome man, and everything I wasn't.
"He's in the lab. Again," she said with a sigh.
"Well, that's how grad school is," I said. "Indentured servitude. How many patents has his lab team now produced for the university?"
"Just the one."
"Still," I said, "they really push those research assistants. It's like a 100-hour-per-week job and they get, what, twenty grand a year?"
"Plus free tuition and fees," Sophia pointed out. "Anyway, he can't be with me now, but he'll make it up to me tonight," she said with a smile.
I felt a little bit embarrassed and had to fight not to blush.
Sophia looked a bit distant, like she was focusing on some point two miles behind my shoulder. "He makes me feel... so secure. So protected. When he holds me, and just towers above me, I feel like nothing in the world can hurt me. It's... I don't know if you understand, as a man, what that's like."
After a brief, uncomfortable silence, I said, "Maybe, when I was little and got hurt and my parents would be there for me... I'm sorry, that was a really stupid comparison. Forget I said anything... just... stupid."
I looked away from Sophia, back into the window getting pounded with sleet, feeling dejected. Sophia reached across the table and placed one of her hands over mine. "No, Phil," she said. "That isn't a bad comparison at all. Your parents made you feel safe and warm and loved, and that's how Damien makes me feel. At least..." and her voice trailed off.
I looked at Sophia and she had that distant look in her eyes again. I didn't know what to make of it, so I didn't press the issue. If she was having problems with her boyfriend, she'd talk to me about it, wouldn't she? I mean, we were friends and all. Everything she had said about him told me they had a great relationship.
Sophia sighed heavily. "Anyway... We should get back to the dorm. I know you've got that programming assignment to work on, and I have some... stuff to do before I meet Damien tonight."
We walked out of Burger King into the driving sleet. It was frigid and wet and ugly out. Sophia latched onto my arm, staying close to me for warmth and balance as we walked. I couldn't help but be excited; I knew I didn't have a chance in hell with her, especially with that perfect boyfriend of hers, but that didn't mean I wasn't wildly attracted to her. In fact, I hoped she didn't notice the shift in the way I walked as I immediately hardened in response to her closeness.
Fifteen icy minutes later, we were back at our dorm. Built in the 1920s, it was an all-stone exterior with a courtyard in the middle. The courtyard had a gate; I guess back when it was built they locked the students in at night. It was an upperclassmen dorm, and all of the rooms were single. That was something I was glad for after two years of having a roommate. Sophia and I lived on opposite ends of the courtyard from one another. We walked through the entrance to my part of the dorm and up to my room. Sophia walked in with me.
"Oh, Phil, you were going to show me that video, you know, the one on Xtube?"
Ah, one thing I didn't mention, a fascinating little aspect of our relationship, is we would watch porn together. One day last December we were walking downtown to do some Christmas shopping together, and Sophia just asked, out of nowhere,
"Phil, do you watch porn?"
Of course were this any other woman on earth, I would have denied it. But I knew I could be honest with Sophia and she wouldn't shun me. Besides, it was no great secret what guys did online when the door was closed.
"Well, yeah, of course I do."
This started a long conversation about the oddities of the art form. It turned out Sophia was fascinated with porn, seemingly to me more as an intellectual interest than an erotic one. After that, we would regularly find whatever strange or unusual videos that we could online. To humor her one time, I even sat through a ten-minute gay love scene with her. It was the most uncomfortable 600 seconds of my life.
"Aren't you the least bit interested in how the other team plays?" she asked.
"No, can't say that I really am. Sorry."
This evening's feature was an amateur webcam video I found. Sophia threw her soaking wet coat and her backpack in my closet and sat down on the bed, while I sat in front of my computer and called up the video. It was very low quality and badly lit, but we could clearly make out the setting: it was in someone's living room, with a couch right in front of the camera. A short, pixie-haired woman and a tall, skinny man entered the frame. She was dressed in frilly lingerie, while he was dressed in ordinary street clothes. Both of them stood, their sides facing the camera.
After a brief amount of kissing, the woman unbuckled the man's pants and pushed them down. Then she extracted from his boxers what had to be the most ridiculously huge member either of us had ever seen. She got down on her knees and began to make love to this man's mammoth dick. She kissed it and licked it, and got as much of it in her mouth as she could, which wasn't much.
"Ouch!" Sophia said. "How could you possibly... with that?"
"That's not why I showed you this one. Check out the cat."
On the back of the couch, clearly in the grainy video, there sat a cat, calmly cleaning itself, paying no attention to the petite woman going down on the human tripod.
"Oh my God, that's hysterical!" Sophia said.
After a few more minutes of head, the scene changed. Now they were both naked. He sat on the couch while she, facing forward, lowered herself on his coke-can-thick phallus and slowly began moving up and down. And right next to them, on the arm of the couch, apparently fast asleep, was the cat. The couple went on fucking for several minutes while the cat happily slept, paying no mind at all to the mating pair next to it.
We both were in hysterics by the end of the video.
"Thanks for showing me that, Phil. I don't know what I can find to top that one." Then she looked at her watch. "Oh, crap, I have to run and get ready. Catchya later!"
Sophia ran off to her side of the dorm, and I got to work on my programming assignment. It wasn't all that bad: mainly an exercise in how an OS might translate virtual memory addresses. Not that that's going to mean a lot to anyone reading right now. I mean, I have a tendency to talk about my work like it's interesting to other people when I know it's not, and end up just rambling and boring people.
Sorry.
Anyway, after about 45 minutes of work, I noticed Sophia left her backpack in my closet. Figuring she would want that back ASAP, I grabbed it and ran across the courtyard to her wing. I knocked on her door.
"Just a minute... almost ready..."
I didn't know what she needed to be ready for. But then she opened the door.
Sophia stood wearing a giant red bow. And not much else. The bow hid her breasts, and the ribbons fell down to her waist, mostly obscuring what looked to be an extremely skimpy pair of red lace panties. She wore red stockings that came up to mid-thigh, and a pair of black high-heeled shoes. Her face was dramatically made up, with a red heart drawn on each cheek. I stood gaping at my friend for what seemed to be minutes, but in reality was a fraction of a second.
Sophia yelped and slammed the door in my face. Then she opened it, just a crack.
"Oh crap, oh crap, Phil, I'm sooooo sorry! I thought you were Damien. Pleeeeease, can you forget you saw this?"
I'm not sure which of us was more embarrassed. I was embarrassed and turned on, though.
"I'll just... I'll just go back to my room," I said. "I'm really, really sorry."
I headed back to my room, still carrying Sophia's bag with me. I tried to get back to my assignment, but the image of my friend's sexy outfit had burned itself into my brain, and I couldn't think of anything else. I tried taking a cold shower. That didn't help, so I switched to a hot shower and jerked off. That helped a little bit.
Calmed down a bit, I started some reading I had to do for a poli sci course I was taking. I got most of the way through it when my phone rang. I picked it up and at first all I could hear was sobbing on the other end. Then,
"Phil?" It was Sophia.
"Sophia? What happened? Are you ok?" I asked.
"No, I'm NOT," she said between sniffs. "I re...really n...need someone over here right now. Can you pl...please come over?"
"Right away," I said softly, hanging up the phone. I threw on some clothes, grabbed her bag once more, and ran down the stairs, out the door, across the courtyard, and up the stairs to her door. I knocked.
"Who is it?" she asked.
