People say that life is a learning experience. That was one saying that Daniel Hopper could readily agree with. It seemed that he had never stopped learning, not from the day he started kindergarten right up to this morning when he rolled out of bed. So far, his twenty-four years on Planet Earth had provided plenty of life lessons but the one he found when he sat on the side of his bed was the one of the most unexpected. The bimbo shack job he had spent the night with had sneaked out during the early morning hours with his wristwatch and the fifty dollars that was in the open wallet laying by his feet.
"The skinny-assed bitch wasn't even a good fuck!" Dan muttered out-loud as he padded into his kitchen to charge the coffee pot and begin another day. "Lesson learned, Danny-boy! Lesson learned!" Inside, though, he knew that he was really pissed. The money was gone and that was bad enough, but the wristwatch had been a touchstone to his now dead father and could never be replaced. "I should've stayed in Yuma. Hope the bitch rots in hell!" he said to himself as looked down at the coffeepot, waiting for it to start brewing. As he stood there, idly fingering his semi-hard dick, he realized there was enough time for a shower before it would be ready.
A half hour later, freshly scrubbed with enough time left over for a quick morning tug at his manhood, he emerged from the shower drying his curly brown hair with a clean towel. He walked back into the kitchen still as butt naked as the day he was born and poured the precious first cup of coffee. He knew he was far from being a baby though. Standing five foot-ten and a solid one hundred seventy pounds, he knew only his mother would still call him a baby. But, of course, over the last six years he had been called many far worse things. His Marine Corps drill sergeants had invented a couple that he could never forget, with the most innocent being a "fucking looser!" Yeah, that had been a real education!
But the Corps was behind him. He'd been out for a while now, had started his college degree and, thanks to the credits he earned while in service and had transferred over to the university, was about to graduate. "Just get through the day!" He told himself as he dressed. "And no more picking up loose bimbos!" Finally, with two cups of coffee down and dressed in tee-shirt, khaki shorts and loafers, he was out the apartment and heading for his car in the complex parking lot.
He passed by the door of his neighboring apartment just as it opened and its occupant, Tracy Waters, came out wearing a blue tube top molded to her ample and braless chest and carrying her bookbag over a bare shoulder. "Hey, Dan! Good morning!" She said with a smile under her tan baseball cap.
Dan stopped and watched her as she locked her apartment door. "Morning, Tracy. How are you?"
"I'm not as good as you must be this morning!" She replied with a wicked smirk on her face.
"What do ya mean?"
"Just that you'll have to get the apartment manager to repair that wall separating our bedrooms." She said as she shoved her keys into her bookbag. "I heard far too much out of your apartment last night. A girl's gotta sleep, you know?"
"Sorry!" Dan said with an embarrassed expression that came from the heart. "I'll move my bed away from the wall."
"Oh, don't get up-tight about it. I was just kidding!" She laughed as they started walking toward the outside stairs and down to the parking lot. "I gotta say, I think you can do better than that skank you hooked up with last night!"
"No argument there!" Dan admitted. "The bitch cleaned me out before she took off sometime in the night. I'm just lucky she didn't know where I keep my money. As it is, the bitch hit me for fifty bucks and my father's watch!"
"Ouch!" She exclaimed as we reached the ground floor. "You are going to report that to the police, right?"
"And tell them what? That some bimbo named Susie Smith ripped me off for a few bucks and a watch? At least that's what she said her name was. She was just some broad that I met at Bogarts last night!" Dan shook my head. "I tell 'em that and they'd laugh me out of their station."
"Yeah! Well, I'm sorry your good time didn't turn out so good!" She said as they reached his car. "I gotta go to class. Hope you have better luck next time!"
He unlocked the car and turned to her. "If I'd have been with you, I would have had better luck!" He said with a smile as a joke. What she didn't know was that she had caught Dan's attention months ago when she and her roommate moved into the apartment next to his. Tracy's roommate, Julie, was a fine-looking foreign exchange student from Japan with a smaller, lighter build and a dainty oriental manner of walking that he found sexy as hell! Still, she was not nearly as attractive to him as Tracy. Both girls were about the same height, but Tracy was the more athletically built and slightly heavier. Her light brown hair was nearly waist long and today was flowing out of the sizing strap on the back of her hat, her chest was in the 34C range, her hips and buttocks were a little more pronounced, something he attributed to her soccer scholarship.
"That's true!" She said with the same smirk of a few moments ago. The expression on her pixy face was 'poor dumb schmuck!' "All you had to do is ask!" Then she turned away and began sauntering off with a playful swaying of hips under her tight walking shorts.
"Tootles!" She called out without turning around.
"Hey, Tracy! I'm asking!" Dan called after her.
"Later, dude!" She called without looking back. All he could do was watch her walk away.
The rest of his day was filled with pre-graduation things like trying to return books to the campus bookstore, getting something for lunch and borrowing a graduation robe from a graduate friend who didn't need it anymore! The mortar-board hat didn't have the correct colored tassel, so he had to go back to the bookstore to get the right one. All the way back there he was thinking that he should have just used the old one cause no one else would know the difference but, knowing his Marine Corps training wouldn't let him carry out the deception, he bought the damn thing and went to the assembly point for the graduation procession.
The college graduation ceremony is supposed to be another one of those "rights-of-passage" educational moments but honestly, to Dan, graduation from Marine Corps boot camp in San Diego meant more. At least then he had his father and mother in the stands to watch the review. That had meant a lot to his dad. The old marine vet's face had absolutely beamed with pride.
But his father and mother were now dead, and no one would be there to watch him cross the stadium stage this time. There would no burst of happiness from his sister either. There would not be anyone there to see him reach for the roll of blank typing paper being substituted for the diploma that he knew would be mailed to him in the next few days. His sister was in class at the naval academy in Maryland and couldn't get away. No congratulatory slap on the back or kiss on the cheek from a grandparent nor even a celebratory beer waved in his direction by an old buddy. Those days were gone and, when the Dean of What-the-Fuck College finished talking and the ceremony was over, he simply took off the hot robe and its asinine-looking hat and walked to his car. The robe and hat went into the backseat, the tassel was hung from the rear-view mirror and Dan settled into the drive seat with a sense of emptiness. There he sat in a blazing hot car, considering what he would do next. A few minutes later he decided that, since graduate school was still a couple of weeks away and it was too late in the day to go job hunting, going to his apartment was the only thing left to do. The trip back to the complex only took little more than ten minutes and he was soon in the complex parking lot, taking the robe and hat from the back seat and locking the car.
