Bright fluorescent lights droned overhead as Megan danced down flights of dormitory stairs with nervous electricity flowing through her veins. The ring of her shoes slapping the metal steps filled the concrete stairwell with noise, and her blood pounded in her ears. The thrill of what she had done was intoxicating. It had been, as her mind had begun to phrase it, "a perfect seduction", and she grinned, titillated by the thought of herself as seductress extraordinaire. Her mark had certainly gotten his fair shake, the slight crustiness she felt along her bikini line as she descended each step was testament to that, as was the soreness from deeper between her thighs. Still, she felt she had come out ahead. She had undeniably come.
Mostly, she was proud of herself. Casual, emotionless sex, that formerly masculine domain, had been conquered. "I am woman!", she thought, although her smile twisted wryly as she invoked that feminist slogan. She knew there were others, some of her friends, assuredly her ex-boyfriend, who would think differently about her actions. She knew if they every found out they would whisper the "S" word and point at her from dark corners at the edges of every party she attended. But she resolved not to care, and not to tell them. "S for Sexy, S for Strong." she thought with a snort. "S for Seduction! I am woman!" she tempered her pride with a bit of sarcasm.
By the time Megan reached the bottom of the stairwell, however, her buoyant mood had begun to ebb. The surge of endorphins generated from the morning romp had crested and was now dissipating like a crashed wave leaving a beach. Her weightlessness had faded. Her quads and calves had began to burn. The wispy shroud of marijuana fog too had drifted slowly off of her mind, leaving her uncomfortably sober as the ubiquitous fluorescence seemed to press on her eyes. Her feet grew heavy and slowed. Her stomach rumbled with the reminder that she had consumed nothing since a frozen pizza the night before, except for beer and trace amounts of bodily fluids. "Maybe I should have sucked him off" she thought sardonically, propping herself up with a joke as she trudged down the final set of steps and headed for the glowing red letters of the exit sign, and beyond it her responsibilities.
As she neared it, the door was wrenched open. Tumbling through the frame came two tall, high-fiving, college boys, both bare chested and wearing only shorts and flip flops. They were students about her own age - obviously returning from a game of volleyball, one clutching the immediately recognizable ball, and both sporting a healthy dusting of fine sand across their shoulders. Abs and pecs and biceps filled her view as she stepped back, surprised. Briefly, her eyes were magnetized downward, and she realized now that the shorts were actually bathing suits, and deliciously short ones revealing a quartet of long, smoothly muscled thighs. She blinked and snapped her vision upwards as her face heated. The last time she'd seen a boy in just bottoms, just a minute ago, she'd fished out and tasted his cock, and a tingle of recognition flashed in her loins.
Luckily, they didn't catch her roving eyes and noticed her just in time to avoid a collision. "Woah! Excuse me!" one said, as they arrested their celebratory charge. "Hi, sorry", said the other, lifting his hand in a half-wave, and they stepped aside to pass by her single file. With two pairs of eyes on her she felt herself shrink inwards, remembering for the first time that she was exiting the boys' dorm Saturday morning while wearing clothes that looked and reeked decidedly like a Friday night outfit. "Confidence, girl!", she girded herself, and held herself straighter. She smiled and looked up, and up, and tried to meet their eyes as the rangy pair passed. "They can't tell that you just got fucked" she thought, but wasn't sure if that gave her any confidence or if it was even true. "They can smell it on you!" the devil on her shoulder whispered. Her gaze rose as far as their nipples before she wilted, and instead of making eye contact, she was staring at their sandy, thonged feet and shuffling out the door. She heard the boys continuing their hurrahs several flights up as it closed behind her. "You pussy, Megan!" she chided herself, cursing her failure of fortitude, and stomped towards her car.
The morning sun, which minutes earlier had seemed so welcoming from the safety of a soft mattress, now bore down upon her like a dentist's overhead lamp. She pursed her lips on the right side of her mouth and creased her forehead as she walked. She had felt embarrassed at the thought that someone would know that she had sex, but now fiercely ashamed of that embarrassment. "I should be proud of it", she thought, "I am proud of it!" she said out loud, weakly, and her words were blown away by the breeze. She also felt guilty for her sexual thoughts, both in bed upstairs and more recently in the stairwell. "If I just think about men for their bodies...", it didn't sit well with some of her other ideals about a woman's value. She was frowning fiercely as she slid behind the wheel, slammed the key into the ignition, and cranked the car on.
===
Warring thoughts tumbled like dice through Megan's head as she drove back to her dorm. Cracks had began to appear in her newly adopted world view, the single girl persona she had worn for the last day, and now guilt for what she had done to her relationship with Cole also began to gnaw at her conscience. Last night had been a dream, and she had suppressed the little pangs of unease along the way dismissing them with mantras like "I'm a free, modern woman" and "single and ready to mingle", but with the lucidity of the morning after, her guilty feelings crescendoed, and tears brimmed in her eyes. Her confidence, her exuberance at being a hot commodity, had given way to a panic, and the gears of her mind gnashed at the phrase "slut without a boyfriend". What had made her act so rashly last night? "And again this morning!", she groaned into the steering wheel.
Briefly she blamed it on the alcohol, but she knew she hadn't been too drunk - her lack of hangover was proof enough of that. The alcohol had been more her tool than his, giving her a courtesan's courage. Cheep beer had evolved her prudish personality into a sort of spanish fly and had snagged her a prize winning fish. "And you fucked him again 20 minutes ago with a BAC of 0.0!", she thought with a sob. Of course, she then briefly blamed it on the weed. "It made me too horny!", she wailed to the empty car, but she didn't feel any absolution from that excuse either. She would have done the same thing joint or no, and everything she smoked had been self administered. The truth bubbling up from her subconscious was that she was horny before the joint, with or without the beer, and had gone looking for something new. And she had found it. An image of herself on her back crying out "Fuck me!" swam unbidden into her mind, and a wave of guilt washed over her as she felt the faintest of twinges in her crotch.
A honking car sounded somewhere behind her as tears leaked down her face. It was only a few blocks to her own dorm, just across campus, but she only made it through one stop light before she was forced to pull over onto a patch of gravel siding. Her crying had made driving unsafe, as sobs wracked her body and tears blurred her vision. For about a year prior to last night she had been sure she would end up married to Cole, and she longed for that stability again. "Get it together, Megan!" she growled, smacking the car's dashboard for punctuation. Eventually her cries subsided, and, wiping her tears into her the crook of her elbow, she managed to slow her heaving chest. "In..Two..Three..Four, Hold..Two..Three..Four, Out..Two..Three..Four" she breathed in slow rhythm.
Eventually she managed to release her death grip on the steering wheel, and with a heavy sigh, dropped her hands to her lap and considered her options. Last night, amongst bodies undulating to the deep beat of digitized bass drum, beneath the hazy sea of strobe lights, she knew nobody would have recognized her. Only perhaps her sorority sister Courtney, who had come with her, would have seen her dancing with Mr. Big, and recognized the horny, grinding of her hips into his crotch for the mating ritual that it was. She dug her phone out of her purse and fired off a text to her friend. A plan was loosely forming in her mind.
With a frown, she then started to review the texts from Cole. The most recent texts were of a reformed gentleman, hardly the cocky asshole who had explained to her teary face less than a week ago that he wanted to essentially sow his oats a bit more before settling down. It had been only a few days, and she still felt the devastation and surprise. He had been such a big part of her life, and the split had felt like losing an arm. Reattachment, if it ever occurred, would likely be painful. "What a fucking asshole!", she burst out suddenly, and her sobbing started again for a moment before she could still her diaphragm. She scrolled up through apology after apology, long walls of texts characteristic of an unstable man. Her skin felt a size too tight. Her throat was tight and inflamed from her bawling, as if she had swallowed a crab and it had lodged itself part-way down. Above the apologies were the arguments, her own text bubbles warring with Cole's. How much damage had been done in just a few days?
Soon, without realizing it, Megan had scrolled back weeks into their text history, and up popped a selfie of her and Cole smiling into the sunshine from the prow of a small fishing boat. It had been a perfect trip to her family's beach house. She could still taste the salty spray of the ocean that had whipped through their hair as she held the phone unsteadily. She remembered Cole, strong and confident as he captained her Dad's boat over to the sand bar, where they had spent hours with their lips locked getting turned into lobsters by the sun.
She remembered later that night the way he had slipped the orange straps of her bikini down off of her reddened shoulders to suckle her pale breasts, and how she'd found him, a warm and firm knob of flesh trapped in his cool, damp swimsuit trunks. And she remembered how they had made love in the upstairs bedroom, youthful, needy love, with the windows open and the distant, roaring waves as their soundtrack. She growled, and raised her phone to smash it, imagining Cole's face fragmented and cracked in the shattered glass, but before she could complete the motion, common sense overruled her, and she lowered the phone back down. Stabbing her fingers into the screen she typed, "What's up? We need to talk." and hit send with a sigh. She tossed the phone onto the passenger seat, and yanked the car into drive, wheels chirping and spitting dust as they climbed out of the gravel back onto the pavement.
