This is the second in a long series of stories in which our heroine, Kate, looks back on some of her more memorable sexual adventures as she tries to decide whether she is a slut.
*****
It had been a long day of meetings in Chicago followed by a four hour flight back to San Francisco, so it was late, perhaps 11:00 p.m., when I walked in the door of my home in San Francisco. I had refrained from drinking on the return flight, as I was reading a new piece of fiction that one of the agents I dealt with regularly wanted me to publish. My publishing house was still small enough so that I could read everything we decided to publish. Control of that final decision to accept a property for publication was a prerogative I jealously guarded. I delegated most of the editing these days, but it was my house, and I wanted the final say about what we put our name on.
I set my bag and briefcase down in the kitchen, and I had just barely removed the cork from a nice little bottle of Sonoma Zinfandel when my cell phone rang.
"Hello?"
"Hi lover." It was Henry.
"Oh hi. Didn't expect to hear from you tonight."
"Well, a crisis came up in Palm Beach, and nothing would satisfy the nabobs except for me to get on a plane and go over there to deal with it personally. Honestly, sometimes I think they don't know what telephones are for."
"So you're in Palm Beach tonight?"
"Right-o, and thrilled to be here. Where are you by the way? Cell phones are marvelous toys, but they don't tell you where someone you're talking to is."
"I'm at home. Just got in from Chicago. I was just opening a nice little bottle of Sonoma Zin. I worked on the plane, so I thought I'd earned a drink."
"Exactly," he said. "I worked also, so I'm enjoying one of those tasty little rum concoctions they like to serve up here in Florida. They're one of the few things I like about the place."
"Yes, that and the scantily clad women and the generally raunchy atmosphere of that West Palm Beach neighborhood you like to stay in," I said sarcastically. "I'm surprised you could find time to call."
"Kate, Kate, Kate. You have so little faith in me. I admit there are some distractions here, but I was really hoping to hear another installment of your tales of your former lovers, like the one about the Pool Boy you told me last week."
I ignored his comments about my lack of faith. What I really had faith in was his willingness to fuck anything he came across that he found attractive. However, I was no better, and he knew it. That was a part of our marriage accepted—in fact endorsed—by each of us from the beginning.
"Oh, you liked that story, did you?" I responded.
"Mmm. Very much. You really were being a nasty little slut with him."
"What! He was the grown man who was screwing an 18-year-old girl every week for most of the summer."
"Oh, bullshit, my dear. You seduced him, and you were proud of it."
I laughed in response. "Okay. You're right about that. I seduced him. He really was a remarkably good lover, although I was getting a little tired of the school girl costume by the end of the summer."
"So pour yourself a glass of that Zinfandel and tell me about another of your lovers. Who was next after the Pool Boy?"
I poured a generous glass of wine as I thought about the question. "Next, after the Pool Boy probably wouldn't be that interesting. There were a number of guys my own age who I slept with during my first couple of years of college, but they were far from memorable—better than doing without, mind you, but there was nothing with any of them that you would find particularly arousing or entertaining. In fact, while I remember them as a group, I really can't remember which one was "next' after the Pool Boy. Now that I think about it, "next," might have been two or three of them at once. I did some of that when I was younger."
"So who was your next lover 'of interest'?" he asked. "I certainly don't want to hear about boring sex. By the way," he said digressing before I could respond, "boring sex. Isn't that an oxymoron? I mean if it's sex, how can it be boring?"
"Good sex is always in the eye of the fuckor and the fuckee. You know that. But let's not dwell on that. I want to tell you about Professor Smythe. He was a Brit, like you, and he had a dirty mind, just like you, maybe dirtier even than yours."
"Really? Most women I have known, I mean known in a carnal sense, have said I have the dirtiest mind they have ever known."
"Well, I don't want to be judgmental, but Smythe would have given you a run for your money. Listen and decide for yourself:
It was getting late in the spring quarter of my junior year, and I realized that I hadn't been keeping up with the work in a seminar on 19th century English literature I was taking from Professor Smythe. I had skipped most of the lectures as well. Now, I could have taken a weekend and spent it catching up on the course reading and still possibly squeezed a C out of the class, but my friend Louise had told me about how she improved her grade in a math class from an F to a B by giving the T.A. a blowjob every week for the last five weeks of the quarter. There was no T.A. in this class, so it would have to be old Professor Smythe. I wondered if he even cared about a blowjob at his age? What the hell, I thought. I'll give it a try.
I put on the shortest denim skirt I owned and a worn tied dyed T-shirt, deliberately leaving my bra at home. My tits were bouncing nicely under the soft cloth of the old T-shirt as I walked across Sproul Plaza. Thinking about what I was going to do, that is, if I really had the courage to go through with it, was making me very horny. I looked down and could see that my nipples had stiffened and were very obvious through the thin cloth of the old shirt. I had thought about leaving my panties at home also, but at the last minute decided to wear a nice clean pair of white panties. Maybe Smythe would be like the Pool Boy and be turned on by them.
I sat for a while on a bench at the upper end of Sproul Plaza thinking about what I was about to do. I was unsure if I really had the courage to go through with it. I know I had seduced the Pool Boy, but now I was thinking about seducing a full professor who had formerly held an endowed chair at Oxford. Really, could I do this? But the more I thought about what I was trying to do and how I might go about it, the hornier I got, and the hormones released in my brain soon overcame my misgivings. I didn't really have a plan as to how I was going to go about this, but what the fuck, I would think of something when I got into his office.
Eventually I got up and walked, my tits bouncing under the soft T-shirt, over to that old Victorian pile, Wheeler Hall. I was late for Smythe's office hours by a few minutes, partly because of my indecision and partly because I was late for everything in those days, but I figured I would still catch him, and it would cut down on the risk of some other student walking in on us while I was giving the Professor a blowjob.
The door was closed when I got there, but I knocked firmly.
A distinctly British "Come in," emanated in response, so I pushed the door open and walked in, carefully closing it behind me. Professor Smythe was standing at a bookcase on one sidewall of his office. He was a tall, skinny fellow with awkward limbs and a mass of unkempt fraying hair atop a face dominated by an aquiline nose that had a decided twist to it. He was in his fifties and not at all handsome. As I looked at him I again wondered if someone that old was even interested in sex. Boy, did I have a lot to learn about that.
"Professor Smythe," I said. "I'm Kate O'Riley. I'm taking your seminar on 19th century English literature."
"Yes, yes. I know who you are, but I'm not sure why, given how rarely I see you in class." His tone was clipped and abrupt. Not a propitious start for what I had in mind.
"Well, that's what I wanted to talk to you about." I said, plowing forward, notwithstanding Smythe's apparent bad attitude toward me. As I sat in the armchair facing his desk, I realized that giving some bullshit excuse about my absences was not likely to succeed, so I just decided then and there to abandon the story I had made up about my mother's cancer, and move on to Plan B—sex.
He responded with silence, which easily translated to, "Okay, let's hear your bullshit excuse, so I can say no, then you can leave, and I can I get back to my research."
The silence hung painfully in the air for too long. Finally I realized the ball was still in my court. Lacking the courage to fully plunge ahead, I said, "I was wondering if there was something extra I could do to make up for my absences and my poor mid-term grades?" As I spoke I nervously crossed and re-crossed my legs and let my already short skirt ride further up my thighs.
"Oh. There's a problem with midterm grades is there?" He said. He stepped away from the bookcase and moved toward me, picking up a notebook from his desk. Now he stood in front of the desk, just before me, as he consulted the notebook. He leaned back against the desk, silently flipping pages. "Oh my, yes. I can see we do have a bit of a problem here," he said without looking up. After a moment he flipped the notebook shut with a snap. He looked up at me, tapping the notebook against his palm, and said, "Well, do you have some thoughts as to how we should address this problem?"
"Uhh . . . well . . ." God, I hadn't expected him to be this direct. "Well, I thought maybe I could . . ."
"Come over here and sit on the couch and let's talk about what the problem is," he said as he flipped the notebook back onto the desk.
He walked across the office and reclined in a corner of the couch, his long tweed-clad legs crossed, and stared at me.
I felt frozen in my chair. This was a lot harder than I had imagined. It was nothing like dealing with the Pool Boy.
Smythe patted the seat on the couch and said, "Come on Miss O'Riley. Have a seat and let's discuss the problem."
I arose and walked timidly across the room, taking a seat on the couch as far from Smythe as I could.
