Author's note:
This is, in all its seven parts and their many chapters, one very,
very
long story. If long stories bother you, I suggest you read something else.
No part of this story is written so as to stand on its own. I strongly suggest that you start with
the beginning of Part 1
and read sequentially—giving up at any point you choose, of course.
All sexual activity portrayed anywhere in this story involves only people at least eighteen years old.
This entire story is posted only on literotica.com. Any other public posting without my permission in writing is a violation of my copyright.
Pretty much, the schedule imposed by our classes dominated the next few weeks. We got up early to go run. If we had gotten to bed on time the night before and weren't already short on sleep, we usually managed sex at that point, but generally it was fairly brief. After running, in the shower, we often enjoyed a quickie—except that the washing was partly foreplay, and made it more than that.
Elise was always there, waiting for Ellen. I asked, and she said she wasn't waiting long, only a couple of minutes, so I stopped worrying about whether we needed to get there earlier. Since I hadn't managed it over the weekend, I went to her apartment one afternoon with my fairly pitiful tool collection. I wound up not even having to snake out the drain line. I started by pulling the trap off, and found that it was mostly clogged by hair and soap scum and who knows what else. We discussed preventive maintenance, and she provided me with a couple of good rags which I used to push the mess out and clean out the trap. I reinstalled it, tested to make sure it didn't leak, and left her to get back to her own classwork.
I later received an effusive thank-you card and note from her. That slow drain had been driving her crazy for a while, and she'd been afraid she would have to call in a plumber at a cost of a couple of hundred dollars. Theoretically it was the landlord's responsibility, but repeated calls had produced no action.
Kelly was consistently there to run with me, sometimes a little earlier than we got there, usually a couple of minutes later. We kept things on the basis of whoever arrived first just getting started, and that worked for us.
For more than a month, Elise invited us over for breakfast on Saturday. I thought the first time had been to get better acquainted, but I guessed the subsequent times were intended to thank me for clearing the drain.
Kelly regularly got together with Ellen and me Friday—or occasionally Saturday—evenings for what was turning into a Bible study. I enjoyed these a lot. Her questions were mostly things I had settled in my own mind years earlier, and so considering them afresh—trying to bring them down to Kelly's level and also thinking about them in light of changes in my own thinking over those years—brought new interest and occasionally new insights to me. Ellen participated with interest, and really worked to keep me from piling too much on Kelly too quickly. The discipline of doing that was very good for me.
Sometimes Kelly came over to one of our apartments for this, usually mine, but more often she had us come over. We didn't spend a lot of extra time on cooking anything fancy, but eating together that often was something we all found we enjoyed. Kelly and I fairly often discussed the class we shared, as well.
The professor who had assigned my first paper gave me an A on it, but as he handed it to me he asked me to come to his office during his office hours. We discussed when those were—he'd told us the first day of class, but I wasn't sure I remembered right—and set an appointment for that afternoon, in an hour between two of my classes. I warned him that I would need to leave to get to another class, and he said he was sure it wouldn't take the whole period.
It turned out that he had three things to discuss. First, he wanted to tell me that it was probably the best paper he'd ever received from any student. He really appreciated my digging in depth beyond the assignment.
Second, though, it was too long, and too much of it was too far beyond the scope of the assignment. Discussing this took much longer than the first point had. His point was that it was fine to nail down issues that related closely to the assigned topic but which went somewhat beyond it, but that to some degree my main discussion had gotten lost in things that were peripheral. As I thought about it, I realized that this was absolutely correct, and I could tell he saw this. He also said that the length limits were designed more to make sure the students really did dig enough and think enough than to prevent them from saying more—but that they shouldn't simply be discarded without talking to the professor who made the assignment, and getting his OK. Again, I had to agree.
He was direct and to the point, and all that took a little less than twenty minutes. He finished the first two points by saying, "It's hard to believe this is your first paper in a course beyond high school. Without your participation in class, I'd be inclined to wonder whether your paper was plagiarized." He also said that it was good enough to tempt him to ask me to rewrite it in light of what he'd said, and plenty good enough for him to think that wasn't necessary this time.
The third thing he wanted to discuss turned out to be substantive. There were some things I'd argued which were at least controversial, and he grilled me on them, asking me to justify what I had written. I had no idea what his own views on those matters were. He simply gave a fair statement of what someone who disagreed with my position might say to answer my points, and asked me to respond to those things.
If I hadn't had to leave for my next class, I might have been there a couple more hours, I thought. Thinking about it, I saw that in the half hour we talked about all that, he was treating me as a colleague with whom he was discussing issues, not as a student being asked to justify his paper. So when the time came to stop discussing, he might have wished we could talk more, but he didn't want to keep me from being where I had to be, or think he needed to.
In the end, over the rest of the year, I had many interesting and fruitful talks with him during his office hours, discussing issues—and occasionally receiving critiques of one of my papers. He did ask me about my high school, and I explained its academic approach and some of its rationale, without ever, I thought, saying anything the school would have wished to have kept quiet. This particular professor very much served me as mentor and to some extent friend during those two years.
I did not revise that paper, but in writing future ones—for his classes and for other professors as well—I took his critique very much to heart. I had been aware of my own tendency to try to dump all of the fascinating details—of whatever subject—on my hearers or readers, and in fact had recently spoken with Ellen and Kelly about this as a problem for me. And this account as a whole makes it clear that I haven't gotten this under control. Making it a serious effort to begin learning to control it certainly improved my class assignments, in any case.
However, in all my courses I continued to try to make assigned papers into real papers, going beyond the immediate assignment to try to deal more thoroughly with the issues behind it. I did go to each professor to ask for permission to exceed the assigned length. One flatly told me not to, and a couple were clearly somewhat reluctant to say yes. On the second round of papers, however, the reluctant ones gave me blanket permission to do so, at worst warning me not to view this as a license to be loose, sloppy, or verbose.
Ellen was facing somewhat the same difficulty I was, assignments whose purpose seemed to be to make the students do basic thinking they should have been doing anyway. Her approach to dealing with this was a little different. She started by limiting herself to asking questions, in the course of the papers, about issues that seemed to be taken for granted without justification. When she was told, by one professor after another, that if she was going to raise such questions she needed to try to deal with them, she merely pointed out that she couldn't really do so within the prescribed length for the paper. Without exception, her professors told her in no uncertain terms to ignore those limits if she needed to in order to deal with the kind of question she had raised. No asking permission, and they all viewed it as their own idea. But then, she was a psychology major, and I was just a historian.
Things continued much this way for several weeks.
Toward the middle of October, one afternoon I was home by myself. Ellen was off meeting with a professor and another student about a possible experiment. This was the kind of experiment that normally grad students might do, but honors undergrads were occasionally allowed to. Usually only seniors, though.
I was studying, but also getting dinner ready. I had some meat marinating, and I had also gotten some other ingredients mixed and ready. There was a knock at the door, and it was Elise.
"Is Ellen here, Phil?"
"No, she's off in a meeting. Ending time is probably half an hour away, but they sometimes run over. Do you want to come back later? Or shall I have her call you when she gets in?"
"Can I wait for her here?"
"Sure, come on in."
I sat back down at the table, where I was working, and Elise kind of wandered around. She seemed kind of fidgety. She spent a minute looking at Sam's drawing, on the wall. She walked around looking at other things. She looked at the bookcase we'd gotten, which had sections for Ellen's books and mine, and a kind of mixed section of things we'd bought in the past two months, mostly fiction we both liked. She would pull out a book and browse in it for a minute, then put it back. I was finding this kind of uncomfortable, because my back was to the room, and I just tended to feel like I should be paying a little attention to a guest, even one just waiting for Ellen.
I moved my stuff to the end of the table and sat there, so that I could see Elise or speak to her just by turning a little. She brought a book over and started asking me some questions about it, and I pulled my chair back and turned it so I could face her a little more easily.
We talked about the book for a minute or two, and then she suddenly put it down on the table and sat down in my lap, put her arms around me, and kissed me. And just at that moment, the door opened and Ellen came in.
She took one look at us and blew up. She was talking too fast for me to get it all, but the gist of it was something she said three or four times in the course of a brief tirade, in different ways. "You promised me, and I trusted you!" She was crying hard by the time she stormed out of the apartment, slamming the door.
I stood up, spilling Elise out of my lap. I was pretty upset, and the only thing I said to her was, "Out!" as I pointed to the door. She left in a hurry.
