"I have a better way for you to pay me," she said provocatively as we packed our chemistry books away.
We were in one of the private study rooms at our college library, where we met every Tuesday evening for my tutoring lesson, when I realized my wallet was empty.
As a freshman student at a small college, where I was studying on an academic scholarship, my only "job" was to work hard and get good grades. Understandably, money was tough to come by, except for a few dollars my parents sent every couple of weeks, and I was too embarrassed to tell them I had to pay a chemistry tutor five dollars a week just to learn enough to pass the course.
I blame it on the poor excuse of a chemistry professor the college saw fit to provide for their introduction course, an old curmudgeon who should have been put to pasture years ago. I had never struggled with any of my high school classes and was almost in shock when my mid-term grade showed me in jeopardy of failing! The only advice the withered old goat could provide was his suggestion that I should look for a tutor on my own. After all, why should he bother trying to teach me anything?
In our Student Union, I found a small slip of paper tacked to the bulletin board offering weekly chemistry tutoring for five dollars a session, and called the number.
The tutor was a fourth-year nursing student who agreed to meet me in the library every Tuesday evening, and in the first few weeks I learned more about chemistry from her than I had in the previous two months from the miserable relic paying his bills with my scholarship dollars.
Now is probably a good time to mention that I did not have a girlfriend, nor was I looking for one, and I was actually quite shy around the opposite gender. Barbara put me at ease, though, despite her good looks and long legs, which were on full display below the skirts she wore to our sessions. And she always smelled so nice! Sometimes, lying alone in my bed on Tuesday nights after our sessions, the soft scent of her perfume still fresh in my mind, I fantasized about those skirts and legs and the forbidden delights concealed beneath and between them! But our relationship was completely professional, the tutor and the student, and I was certain she never thought about me after our sessions were over.
"I have a better way for you to pay me," Barbara said when I revealed the empty space in my wallet where five dollars should have been, the look on her face the opposite of that on mine.
Still sitting in her chair, she slid her pencil over the edge of the table that separated us, as if accidentally, then smiled sweetly and asked, "Pick that up for me, Hon?"
"Hon?" Short for "Honey?" She never called me anything other than my name.
