This is my first piece of fiction in many years. This story and anything that follows, such as it is, has grown out of a lot of thinking about what I do and don't value in erotic storytelling, especially in the Erotic Couplings and Group Sex categories on this site. Working on this has occupied a place for me somewhere between critical analysis and therapy, and I've enjoyed it a lot. Thanks to Anabelle Hawthorne for her time and kindness in answering my questions.
At some point, I promise, there'll be sex, but it's not going to happen in this chapter. I intend to jump around quite a bit between categories, if I ever get that far.
After struggling for a minute with the sticky latch, I got the cabin door open and saw what to that point was the most perfect ass I'd ever seen. Its owner was bent at the waist with her slim legs straight, doing something with a backpack or a purse – I wasn't sure. I didn't have enough eyes for anything but that butt and the legs attached to it. Then, without straightening up, she looked back around her calf at me, her black ponytail brushing the floor, caught my eyes, and winked.
I did what any clean-cut young American boy would do and turned bright red. Damn.
That's how I met Emily.
**
"Dafydd Williams," I said to the guard. "I'm, uh, here for my first day with Reach Out. I'm, ah, I'm summer staff for the camp."
Dav-ith
, I pronounced it, emphasis on the first syllable, no aspiration on the last consonants, and hoped it wasn't written on a list. After a short lifetime, I was tired of explaining it.
I'm not always nervous. I'm not usually nervous. But then I'm not usually working somewhere that has a guardhouse – not that this was a prison. Far from it. It was the campus of the Haverford School, the kind of boarding school that has its own horse barn so the students whose fathers bought them ponies didn't have to endure the separation, and besides, riding lessons were mandatory. The girls, I'd later learn, were encouraged to pursue dressage, and the boys polo. Eventually they'd get internships, guaranteed by the school, with people who could help get them into Brown or Cornell or, if they really screwed up, Vassar. It was that kind of school.
And through some location-sharing agreement, it was also the location of a little outdoor company called Reach Out. It had a ropes course and a pond where they took kids canoeing sometimes, I heard, and most importantly it had a job that wasn't in front of a computer. They needed unskilled bodies to help out at Camp Ridgeway, a summer camp run by the school. A summer job wasn't what I wanted, really, but it'd get my parents off my back and stop me wallowing. I'd spend my days keeping kids from hurting themselves and my evenings sitting in rush hour traffic, and by the time I got home I'd be too tired to do anything but sleep. Sounded great, at least for a while.
The guard wouldn't open the gate until he'd written down the license plate on my Jeep and done a walk-around.
"Through the gate, first parking lot on your right. You know where the cabin is?" He had a New England accent, surprising in Virginia, a nose like the blade of a shovel, and a nametag that read SANDERS in little black letters.
I didn't.
"Just walk along this road about ten minutes. It's on the lawn across from the athletics building. You can't miss it. If the road forks you've gone too far."
The parking lot Mr. Sanders (or was he Officer Sanders?) had directed me to was mostly empty. It was a long drive through shitty traffic, even if a series of traffic lights had been replaced by overpasses over the last decade, and the little village I'd driven through to get to the school had backed up something fierce. Starting at 9:00 on my first day put me right in the heart of rush hour, and I'd left myself a very healthy cushion. The only other car in the lot was a little Subaru coupe, sensibly parked in the corner closest to the road. Idly wondering about the driver, I parked a few spots down, grabbed my backpack, put in some earbuds and headed down the road. It was 8:15, Monday morning.
The road I was following curved over a gentle rise, and it wasn't long before I could see the gym on the left. It was a serious building, two stories tall as it faced the road and built into the hillside as it fell away, making it three or maybe even four stories in all. On the right, an oblong lawn sloped down to the edge of the forest. A little cabin with a wraparound porch sat on the back of the lawn. The doors and windows were shut and the lawn was empty. Just past the cabin, the road forked and ran off into a little residential neighborhood of the kind you'd see in a vacation town, maybe in the mountains. Later I'd learn that was faculty housing, but just then it reinforced the feeling in me that this place was a little too fancy for me. A little water spigot sat in front of the cabin, a cherry tree loomed behind, and a path wound down away down the hillside, into the shadows under the trees, and I watched all these things as I stepped onto the porch.
**
Ten days earlier
"You need to treat finding a job like a full-time job. You're twenty-four years old. You can't just lounge around the house."
It was my mother's constant refrain, and she was right, I suppose, though I'd only been unemployed for a few weeks. I did need a job. Though how she could tell I was lounging around a house in Virginia from Colorado Springs I wasn't sure. Parental intuition, I suppose.
I'd gone to college and majored in Classics and History, with a specific concentration in Roman history. All four years I'd planned to go to graduate school, get a teaching position and eventually my Ph.D. and be Dr. Williams, fully licensed to bore you to death with facts about the Roman Republic. Then in my senior year I'd sat on a faculty search committee as the student representative and interviewed a bunch of gentlemen thirty years or more my senior for a one-year non-tenure fellowship in the Classics department. And I realized that my competition wasn't going to be other students, it was going to be formerly tenured professors who'd been let go in wholesale purges of their departments; and I didn't have enough Latin or any Greek; and it looked like the bottom was falling out of the industry I wanted to be in anyway.
It's not like my bottom would be indispensable, so I pivoted too, towards a lot of stuff that mostly added up to enough money but not enough emotion. I'd done two years as a part-time AV producer, recording old guys talking about concrete repair and wood decay factors and the kind of math that either described the behavior of saturated soils during seismically-induced liquefaction or possibly time travel. God knows I couldn't really tell. The balance of my time had been contract work proofreading documents and writing alt-text for PowerPoint slide decks.
Filling for the bank account and unfulfilling for the soul, both had come to an end within a week of each other in the spring. The documents work dried up when the woman I'd been working for closed her practice. And despite two years of promises that there'd be a full-time job for me at the firm as soon as they found the budget, there wasn't. The new manager decided that paying a contractor a premium to do high-quality work for their library wasn't worth the added costs when shitty work sold just as well.
I found the ad on Craigslist, which wasn't the best place to look for a real job.
