Senior Year: Lily, Carol, and Bob have an interesting modus vivendi: Lily and Carol share an apartment, and Carol and Bob share Lily.
Carol had met Lily at college, where they had been roommates during their senior year. By all appearances, Lily was a typical American co-ed of Asian extraction. With her bright smile and demure bearing, she won many friends among her female peers, and her svelte figure attracted lots of attention from her male classmates. By contrast, Carol was somewhat taciturn and, when she did speak, tended to do so in an acerbic manner. As a consequence, Carol had few friends and more than one enemy. In spite of their differences and to the consternation of people who knew them both, Lily and Carol had become fast friends. Indeed, on most evenings, they would disappear into their room after dinner and only emerge when one or the other visited the bathroom. Once inside their room, requests by others to join them were either ignored or refused. Depending on the predisposition of the speculator, speculations about what transpired behind their closed door ranged from the mundane to the obscene. Both Lily and Carol were earnest students, and so it was reasonable to suppose that they were simply hard at work on their courses. On the other hand, several of their classmates, particularly among those who disliked Carol, suspected that the truth was less innocent. Their suspicions were fueled by some of Lily and Carol's behavior outside their room. Specifically, whenever they were together, it was apparent that Lily deferred to Carol and readily complied to her bidding, and Carol's enemies interpreted such behavior as evidence that Lily and Carol were having a lesbian affair in which Carol played the role of dyke. As it turns out, both groups were right, although the latter group was anticipating a reality which was still evolving but had not yet matured.
The fact is that Lily and Carol did spend most of the time poring over their homework. Nonetheless, when their work was done, their attention turned to each other, and, over time, their conversation and activity centered on their maturing sexuality. At first they had contented themselves with abstract discussions of their sexual desires and the extent to which those desires were being satisfied. Lily always had a stable of boys who were more than willing to oblige, often more willing than she was willing to have them oblige. Carol's concerns were of a entirely different nature. Her stocky frame and brusque manner dampened boy's enthusiasm, enthusiasm that she probably would not shared anyhow. Instead, what became increasingly clear to her was that she enjoyed imagining what boys, given the opportunity, would do with Lily's seductive body. For this reason, Carol frequently asked Lily for detailed descriptions of her experiences with boys. Understandably, Lily was initially embarrassed by Carol's increasingly prying questions about her sex life. However, as she overcame her inhibitions, she discovered that she was actually enjoying her revelations as much as Carol enjoyed hearing them. Further, she learned which aspects of her accounts were of greatest interest to Carol, and so she found herself frequently elaborating on the absolute truth in order to satiate Carol's prurient interests. As she came to realize, what Carol liked most were her descriptions of the ways in which boys would assert their control over her body.
The descriptions which Carol liked most were those involving Lily's boyfriend Bob. Lily started seeing Bob during the spring term, and, after several dates, Bob, who was a gymnast, persuaded Lily to exercise with him. In spite of her splendid physical condition, Lily found the regimen through which he put her extremely demanding. She would meet him at the gym in the late afternoon, when, more often than not, they would be the only ones present. There he would guide her through a routine designed to strengthen and limber her body. At the beginning he was very solicitous and took care not to push her beyond her endurance, but his demands on her rapidly increased. For instance, each session he would require that she do ten more repetitions of each exercise than she had the last time, and, when she had completed her exercises, he would make her assume and hold more and more contorted positions. In addition, he soon took greater liberties with her body, running his hands over her working muscles while she exercised and afterward stretching her limbs while she endeavored to maintain some awkward pose in which he had arranged her. Shocked as she was by Bob's demands and her own acquiescence to them, Lily realized that she was enjoying not only the workouts themselves but the opportunity which they afforded to have her body displayed to a man who was obviously appreciating what he saw. She had no illusions about the extent to which she was revealing herself to him. Indeed, by the time she had completed her exercises, she was bathed in sweat and her scant leotard was plastered to her skin while he stretched and manipulated her body. Thus, she was somewhat prepared, when, after a month, Bob asked that she come to the ensuing sessions wearing nothing under her leotard.
As much as Lily enjoyed her visits to the gym, she enjoyed just as much relating them to Carol, who would sit with rapt attention listening to every detail. Carol would often inquire about Lily's emotional state when her body was being forced to do some extremely stressful exercise or take some particularly compromising position. In fact, she would sometimes ask Lily to assume one of those positions so that she could see for herself the view to which Bob had been treated.
On the evening when Lily announced that, from now on, Bob wanted her to turn up naked under her leotard, Carol did nothing to disguise her excitement at the idea. Instead, she immediately asked Lily to give her a preview. Intimate as her revelations to Carol had been, this was a request for which Lily was not prepared. Telling another woman about her sexual exploits with men was one thing, but involving another woman more deeply in those exploits was quite another. Lily was proud of her body and its ability to attract the opposite sex. She was also aware of and took pride in the jealousy that that attraction provoked in other women. However, she was not at all certain that she wanted to be sexually attractive to other women, and Carol's request was an explicit invitation to find out if she was. Thus, for the first time in their relationship, Lily balked and refused to comply. Without expressing shock or anger, Lily explained to Carol that she would prefer not to give her a private showing, adding that she was also having second thoughts about putting her body so completely at Bob's disposal.
Disappointed but sympathetic, Carol accepted Lily's decision. She was willing to wait, certain that Lily would accede to Bob's wishes and that, after she did, Lily would give her a blow by blow account of her experiences, and Carol was right about both these predictions. For the remainder of their senior year, Lily, wearing only a revealing leotard, continued her twice weekly workouts with Bob, and, in the evening after each workout, Carol would be treated to a complete report, which inevitably included an inventory of those parts of Lily's barely concealed anatomy on which Bob had chosen to concentrate.
A crucial point which intrigued, and secretly pleased, Carol about Lily's relationships to the men in her life was that they seemed to never involve intercourse. They were replete with steamy sex, but, so far as Carol knew, consummation was not included. Indeed, Carol had every reason to think that Lily was still a virgin, albeit one who given hope to a string of men only to leave them thoroughly frustrated. This conjecture was supported both by the absence contraceptive pills or devices from her toiletries and the frequency with which, after a couple of dates, boys would stop calling Lily. In fact, Bob was the only one of Lily's boyfriends who had not quickly dropped her, a fact which did not escape Carol's notice. Sensing that it was off bounds, Carol knew better than to pry into the state of Lily's virginity, but that did not prevent her from spending a good deal of time ruminating about it and wondering what it was about Lily's relationship to Bob that kept him from dropping her the way the others had. In spite of her curiosity, Carol resisted the temptation to broach the topic with Lily and bided her time, knowing that time was on her side and that her patience would be eventually rewarded.